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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6809018" data-attributes="member: 87792">It's not like Brian to burn treasure like a spellbook. Which means they must have for once been playing CoC rather than Hackmaster - and burning what might be Mythos summoning tomes that will blast your sanity strikes me as a perfectly sensible thing for a seasoned investigator! Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten, cackling at the moon and taking extreme precautions.Then either the DM took it straight out of the MM or it's just the baseline example. In the first case then the legends are accurate. In the second you have incomplete information.And this I'd call sheer nonsense. The Alexandrian started using the term "associated mechanics" as the first blast of the edition war trumpets quite literally because he couldn't understand why when a demonic leader pointed at a PC and told its minions to get them that they might gain bonusses for this.Process Sim mechanics do not in any way prevent metagaming (using your own definitions above, how exactly would they prevent Brian burning the book?) What they do is to say "These are the only factors that are important" - and more to the point what they do is reduce the world to the level of versimilitude lampooned in Order of the Stick because what the approach says is "We only put values on things we can directly measure - and what we can't directly measure is not important". The alternative - an outcome sim - accepts that if you want a world that fits the game category then there are too many details and factors to work in individually without making a game that makes GURPS look like Lasers and Feelings, and so you need to seek to align the macroscopic outcomes and the characters' incentives.To illustrate the difference I'm going to use my standard GURPS/Fate alcoholism example.In GURPS when I play an alcoholic (disadvantage) the very last thing I want is to go somewhere where there is alcohol. If I get drunk (IC) it's in the evenings when it might not affect anything; there is no incentive for me to drink in character. It's a disadvantage I try to get the best out of by no-selling; by making sure it has as little affect on me as possible, and when my character has a drink in game it is only because it's a huge setup or I've failed a roll.In Fate, precisely because the outcomes are disassociated you'll find my alcoholic character propping up a bar, fishing for Fate Points. "Jusht one more. I can *hic* handle it!" The emotional resonance is amazing; my alcoholic character in Fate actually wants to get drunk. But this works elegantly precisely because Fate Points are disassociated and a unit of metagame currency.In both cases I'm arguably metagaming. But you either need a ridiculously detailed psychological model that will bog the game down or active metagame currency to make self-destructive behaviour in character something you want to do.</blockquote>

Verification