Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6838939" data-attributes="member: 6775031">It also works the other way, though - too much ambiguity can squeeze consistency out of existence, and there's no way to know if that's happening unless you have a central authority keeping track of everything.I've briefly looked through 13th Age, at least enough to learn that I could never play it, and one of the things that immediately jumped out at me was an example of this point. Forgive me for getting the details fuzzy, since it's been a while, but the gist of it was that the game uses a lot of abstraction in some of its power resolutions, which can lead to unresolvable situations. I think it was something like a Fireball spell, which said you could hit X% of the enemies if you aimed it conservatively, but that you could get Y% of the enemies if you were reckless and also hit Z% of your allies. Just reading it, we can all visualize what's going on in this scenario - where everyone is positioned, based on who needs to be sacrificed in order to hit which other enemies - because we've probably seen something like it before in old D&D. And that's fine. But then someone else goes, and they use some other power which would require some number of those people to be in some specified relative locations in order to work, and even if we account for off-turn movement (which is perfectly fine in an abstract combat round), we don't know that it's possible to reconcile the new positions with the old ones unless we have some central authority that's responsible for tracking everything (either the DM does it in their head, for a theater-of-the-mind style, or you put it all out on a map for everyone to see).I know we were talking about laws of physics and social conventions and that sort of thing, but it's the same point - without one central authority, consistency is threatened. Some people may not care about that, based on how they prioritize things, but it's kind of a big deal to certain playstyles.</blockquote>

Verification