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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7900388" data-attributes="member: 4937">Now, pertaining to what I just posted, I don't think that it is actually "disingenuous". I hate this term, but the FORGE speak description of a system like FATE is "incoherent". It sets itself up to achieve one goal, but the mechanics of the system undermine the goal it has set for itself. I don't think the FATE designers did this deliberately, and so I don't think "disingenuous" is the right word. I think that they were very well meaning, it is just I think they were also very naive. There is a trap hidden in the design of games that want to be Nar that most Nar games have failed to avoid, and that has to do with the nature of simulating a task. Let's assume that we want to play some sort of "Theater of the Mind" type game just to limit the sort of task resolution options we have available, and lets assume that the goal of the game is to create interactive literature. That is to say, we want to create a story telling medium which allows the participants to feel like that they are active participants in a great story in the way a reader of a novel or the audience of a movie is a passive participant in (what can be) a great story. I think that's a fairly safe description of most RPGs and certainly most RPGs with at least some degree of Narrative aesthetic of play. Every RPG has rules to adjudicate actions within the story, and most players find rules aesthetically pleasing if for a given level of complexity and interruption of the game, those rules help the players concretely imagine the events occurring in the story. In other words, a set of rules is compelling if the results of play encourage the imagination and leave a memory in the player of a story that resembles that created by a reader of a novel (or the audience in the movie, but with much less demand on the imagination). Consider the case of 'combat' which occupies the central place in the rules of most RPG systems. For now, I'm not going to give an explanation why combat typically occupies a central place, but instead I'm going to address combat rules need to be detailed to achieve the above result. The answer is that every bit of granularity you add to combat rules makes it just a bit easier to imagine what is happening in the combat and to simulate those combat actions in a satisfying way. This is why some people are unhappy with abstract systems like HP, where the events of the combat aren't really concretely specified compared to a system with active defenses like Parry and Wound locations and Armor as Damage Mitigation. If the rules systems helps you see the combat in your mind, and creates a plausible set of results, then it will - if you can put up with the bookkeeping - be satisfying. And this is in fact the best we can do to simulate combat in Theater of the Mind.A lot of Nar designers fall into the trap of assuming that every game activity works the same.  So they naively assume that if they want to make a game centered around social interaction and RP, that you'd go about establishing that as a pillar of your game in the same way you'd go about establishing combat as a pillar of the game.   And the problem is that while it's requires a lot of rules to simulate combat in a reified manner in Theater of the Mind and the more rules you add the more like combat the simulation becomes in the mind, conversation is nothing like that.   The most reified manner to have a conversation in Theater of the Mind is to simply have a conversation.   Nothing you can do is more like having a conversation or a social interaction in Theater of the Mind than actually having the conversation.   Nothing is more like an actual conversation than a pretend conversation.   So it turns out that setting up a Pillar of social interaction doesn't look anything like setting up a Pillar for combat.   Where more rules make the combat more reified, the more depth you add to your rules, the less the conversation will be reified.</blockquote>

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