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What's Your "Sweet Spot" for a Skill system?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9203131" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I don't care who does or doesn't like things. I do take a modest degree of exception to being told my play is illogical and incoherent.</p><p></p><p>It is not <em>illogical</em> to design a dice-based game so that, if a player loses on their roll, the "game state" changes in a way contrary to what they were hoping for.</p><p></p><p>When the "game state" in question is essentially a shared fiction, which the player is engaging via their control of a particular character (let's call it a <em>PC</em>) then it it not illogical that the change that is contrary to what the player was hoping for be a new state of the fiction that sets back their PC's interests.</p><p></p><p>When the fiction is one of being lost in a swamp near a moathouse populated by bandits, it is not illogical that the new state of the fiction, which sets back the PC's interests, is one in which the PC is discovered by bandits and threatened with capture by them.</p><p></p><p>When the player's action declaration that triggered all this was "I preserve some of the meat of the giant frogs I killed", it is not illogical that the dice roll be structured by reference to the character's skill as a cook.</p><p></p><p>There is no illogicality or incoherence to be found. All there is is the fact that some people do not like a game in which consequences for failed rolls can be matters that fall outside a very narrow domain of the action the character was attempting, that generated the need for the roll. That domain is one of not only causal proximity (after all, if everything else is held equal then spending a long time cooking does increase the likelihood of being found by nearby bandits) but of "proximity of topic" - that is, the preference is one in which the consequence is <em>about</em> the same thing as the action declaration (in this example, the topic in question is the cooking of frog meat).</p><p></p><p>That preference for proximity of both causation and topic is moderately widespread among RPGers, albeit somewhat loosely applied (eg I think at least some of those objecting to the cooking example would not object to a failed roll to hit being narrated as a shield block by the opponent, although that does not satisfy the joint proximity requirement, and has basically the same structure as the cooking example - hence why really serious simulationist RPGing such as RuneQuest introduces a roll to block/parry). But it has not distinctive claim to logic or coherence.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9203131, member: 42582"] I don't care who does or doesn't like things. I do take a modest degree of exception to being told my play is illogical and incoherent. It is not [I]illogical[/I] to design a dice-based game so that, if a player loses on their roll, the "game state" changes in a way contrary to what they were hoping for. When the "game state" in question is essentially a shared fiction, which the player is engaging via their control of a particular character (let's call it a [I]PC[/I]) then it it not illogical that the change that is contrary to what the player was hoping for be a new state of the fiction that sets back their PC's interests. When the fiction is one of being lost in a swamp near a moathouse populated by bandits, it is not illogical that the new state of the fiction, which sets back the PC's interests, is one in which the PC is discovered by bandits and threatened with capture by them. When the player's action declaration that triggered all this was "I preserve some of the meat of the giant frogs I killed", it is not illogical that the dice roll be structured by reference to the character's skill as a cook. There is no illogicality or incoherence to be found. All there is is the fact that some people do not like a game in which consequences for failed rolls can be matters that fall outside a very narrow domain of the action the character was attempting, that generated the need for the roll. That domain is one of not only causal proximity (after all, if everything else is held equal then spending a long time cooking does increase the likelihood of being found by nearby bandits) but of "proximity of topic" - that is, the preference is one in which the consequence is [I]about[/I] the same thing as the action declaration (in this example, the topic in question is the cooking of frog meat). That preference for proximity of both causation and topic is moderately widespread among RPGers, albeit somewhat loosely applied (eg I think at least some of those objecting to the cooking example would not object to a failed roll to hit being narrated as a shield block by the opponent, although that does not satisfy the joint proximity requirement, and has basically the same structure as the cooking example - hence why really serious simulationist RPGing such as RuneQuest introduces a roll to block/parry). But it has not distinctive claim to logic or coherence. [/QUOTE]
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