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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7585084" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's precisely what I'm getting at. As a GM, whenever the rules for resolving some doubtful proposition don't exist, that for me creates a massive complexity issue.  A complex procedure is to me less complex than no procedure.  When a proposition is made that no existing procedure covers, then for me it's like having an exception thrown in the code that has to be handled gracefully.  I have to stop and decide how it should be handled.  Should I just let it work (say, "Yes")?  Should I just let it fail (say, "No")?  Should I just flip a coin (In D20 this is usually roll a D20 and add a some bonus, on a 15+ you did it)?  Or, do we need some more complex procedure in order to be fair about things?  What are the long term implications for the game of setting this resolution methodology as precedent?  Am I risking creating an absurdity?  Am I risking unbalancing the game?  Am I risking stealing spotlight from a player?  If I extend the methodology to the NPCs, will it rob the players of agency?   Is this going to derail the fun or enhance it?  There are a huge amount of things that normally need to be considered.It's crazy the sort of questions that come up in games once players start doing things like (for example) deforming the terrain.  Propositions come up like, "I'm going to spend an hour chopping on this wall with my magic axe to see how much progress I make." which not only involve questions of endurance and durability but sound production, or questions like, "I'm going to cast 'rock to mud' on the stone outcropping, does this cause the whole outcropping to collapse?" which involves figuring out just how the spell works, how finely the caster can control its shape, what portion of the rock face becomes mud, what happens to that mud, and figuring out whether the resulting damage is enough that the rock can no longer support its own weight.  Or you get into questions in a game like Call of Cthulhu were someone says, "My character is to going to run to the nearest town, how long does it take me to do this?", which involve questions of what is a realistic pace for a person to cover over a long distance and what level of athleticism does the character's stats translate to and to what extent the characters current physical condition should be taken into account.  And if you don't get this at least close to right, or if your answers don't match what the player is expecting, then you have to be able to justify your answers.I suppose you could say I'm over complicating questions like these, in that I could as a GM answer the question with just, "What do I want to happen?", but I'm not the sort of person or the sort of GM that usually knows what I want to have happen, and that question for me is no more trivial than the rest of them (and probably, since it is me, equivalent to the rest of them).These sort of "game stoppers" are annoying - like when the PC's ask for the name of an NPC you've not bothered to name or otherwise ask for details you've not bothered to construct.  Winging it for me is a high complexity situation - much higher complexity than consulting a table or looking up a rule.   Even things like, "Rule of Cool" are fairly high complexity, because now you have this subjective thing where the player might think it is cool, but other players at the table might not, and you might be ambivalent, and you are trying to decide, "Hmmm... is that cool.".  Really what is going on is a sort of table negotiation, and the more players you have and the more varied their tastes the more complex that negotiation actually is.   Sure, it might be obvious some of the time that everyone thinks its cool and you are all, "I'm happy to say "yes" to that." but in practice that rule gets really complex.  Then like the second time it happens, is it cooler or less cool, and ect.  What I find is that the less "game stoppers" come up, the less complex the rules seem to me.  I'd much rather have a game system where when unusual propositions happen, a subsystem exists to handle them, so that at most what you are asked to do is flip to the right page and play a little mini-game to resolve them (and ideally, you the GM already know those rules and simply run the minigame quickly).  A system that has a lot of these minigames is less complex for me in actual practice than one that has none, because I'm never asked to make up the rules for said minigame or consider all the implications of a ruling on the fly.  It might happen that we eventually notice problems in the minigame if we use the rules frequently, and that's a problem, but that's still likely to happen if I smithed out a ruling on the fly (and perhaps more likely to happen).</blockquote>

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