[INGENERO] conflict res - tactical crunch players would u like this?
stefoid:
'3,4' , 'northwest corner' or 'planet earth'. '2/10 hitpoints' or 'badly injured' - they can all be valid in their own context. They are all just varying degrees of abstraction - you pick the one most appropriate to your game. Saying one abstraction - '3,4' is more consistent than another - 'n/w corner' doesn't make any sense to me.
Callan S.:
It's absolutely consistant, because if you took one hundred people and told them to put a piece at position 4,3, they would all do the same thing. But if you tell one hundred people to put a piece 'somewhere in the northwest corner', you will find the piece ending up in all sorts of positions across the hundred samples.
If you took a series of narrated actions that gained the play bonus with one GM, then repeated that narrated action to one hundred people and asked them if it'd get the bonus, not all of them would say yes. It's gamble, rather than tactical. If 20% would say no out of the sample, it means that narrated description had a 80% success rate on the gamble (relative to the small number of test samples).
If I had to play chess through an intermediary to whom I could only give vague commands 'Move my rook down a fair bit', 'Move my queen a little bit to the west', I wouldn't call chess tactical, either.
stefoid:
Quote from: Callan S. on May 04, 2011, 04:34:10 PM
It's absolutely consistant, because if you took one hundred people and told them to put a piece at position 4,3, they would all do the same thing. But if you tell one hundred people to put a piece 'somewhere in the northwest corner', you will find the piece ending up in all sorts of positions across the hundred samples.
No, they would all be in the northwest corner. putting it in the southeast corner would be wrong.
a chess board is the wrong context for that abstraction so why bring it up?
Here is the 'board' that makes sense for that level of abstraction
------------------------
| nw | ne |
+----------+---------+
| sw | se |
+----------+---------+
stefoid:
Quote from: Callan S. on May 04, 2011, 04:34:10 PM
If you took a series of narrated actions that gained the play bonus with one GM, then repeated that narrated action to one hundred people and asked them if it'd get the bonus, not all of them would say yes. It's gamble, rather than tactical. If 20% would say no out of the sample, it means that narrated description had a 80% success rate on the gamble (relative to the small number of test samples).
Lets put the location issue to rest, its getting us nowhere.
I would like to discuss the bolded part. One of the things about 'plays' is that include the effect that the character wants to achieve - by their nature, they are conflict resolution stakes. If you say 'climb the crates', the roll to climb the crates, succeed, and the GM has the power to say whether you get a bonus, then yeah, its an arbitrary tactic.
but a play is 'climb the crates in order to get an advantage over the guard' - the stakes are not arbitrary, they are explicit. The thing that is then arbitrary is whether there is any plausible fictional cue from which to leverage an advantage play. That is arbitrary, but not because the crates may or may not exist. If they do or they don't is not an issue -- the player bases his tactics on the situation as it is -- con or sans crates. The issue is the requirement for the GM to be the judge of what is plausible. Is it plausible that the crates could be used in any way at all to gain advantage over the guard?
In my experience, the first situation (task res), where the GM is required to make the call 'does the player get the advantage for being on the crates?' you will get a wide variance in response. You are explicitly leaving the vital outcome to the GMs plausibility meter.
But the second question is different- in my experience, people are happy to 'let the dice decide' when a borderline decision has to be made. The question 'could crates plausibly be used in some way to gain advantage?' is overwhelmingly likely to be answered 'yes', and lets go to the dice to decide if that actually occurs. The GMs responsibility is now not even really a plausibility detector now, its more like a complete bullshit detector. He is happy to let the dice decide unless what the player proposed is complete bullshit. "I want to use this blade of grass as an ambush advantage play!' 'dude, that is complete bullshit.'
stefoid:
Oh, and you could even take the GMs bullshit meter out of the equation completely if you wanted to, like this:
player - "is there anything in the room that would allow me get the drop on the guard"?
GM either "yes, theres these crates" or "no, nothing substantial enough to hide your presence"
that is unequivocal - now deal with the situation as it is.
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