[Pitfighter] SBP: is there anything better to roll for than success?
Anders Gabrielsson:
Er, sorry, I was probably doing far too much talking about the games I were in and far too little answering your question. I'll think some more and have another (shorter) go at it, if you're still interested.
contracycle:
Quote from: David Berg on December 08, 2011, 07:30:33 PM
I'm with you. I don't want to minimize "what is going on right now" either. Do you think what I've been exploring here will do that?
What I wish to flag up is that recent discussion has shifted into a framework that essentially sets the system that governs character actions and concerns at right angles to the concerns that govern plot, to stop them coming into conflict. What I'm getting at is that I think for some purposes at least, they do need to coincide. Frex, I may be that I need and want the players to worry about things like whether high ground gives them an advantage, because the plot is going to put them in a position where the high ground makes a plot point work. If the system is directing them away from that as a concern, and towards things like how stylishly they perform or how things impact their psychological state, then the significance of the high ground factor won't carry over, and the (my) goal of a sort of experiential simulation will be defeated.
As before, I don't want to rule out the use of those orthogonal methods by any means, I just wanted to mention that I think there will be some cases where the coincidence needs to be preserved.
David Berg:
Well, if we want experiential simulation (which I like too), we need the high ground to matter in the system, definitely. But I don't think that system needs to be mechanical. If the GM is the means of resolving success/failure, then as long as the GM agrees with you that high ground matters, you're set, right?
I really dislike the attitude that we can only trust each other to treat the fiction as a serious causal entity if we "prove" how everything matters by chopping it up into visible mechanical quantities. That seems particularly unnecessary in SBP, where players have signed up to say that, at least sometimes, force is okay. Am I being unrealistic here?
contracycle:
Hmmm. Not at all sure about that. Take for example the case of something like Honour in LOT5R. For any kind of perception or mindset that is different to ours, I think it needs to be mechanically expressed or it gets washed out by our default expectations. In LOT5R the Honour mechanic does a repectable job of mitigating the "wandering bandits" pattern of many fantasy games, because there is a metric of success and right behaviour other than accumulating GP. As another example, the idea that "money doesn't weigh anything" is quite common in default fantasy games, which has quite far reaching ramifications. If money has mass, then you need a place to store it, and you priobably need flunkies to guard it, who have to be reliable, and all this requires social interactions which are usually absent.
So I do think these things need to be visibly and concretely expressed in ther system, thery need to be there and imposing thermselves on the sorts of actions that players can take. I think the setting must "teach itself", and if the goal is to to construct a context which is to p[rmpt the players to think as thoise people would have thought in a historical context, then a big part of the job IMO is figuring out which mechanics work to represent that.
David Berg:
I agree with you that mechanics may be needed to drive home how the characters' mindset differs from the players, but that doesn't inherently have anything to do with success/failure, does it? I would think that honor would be exactly the kind of thing my proposed approaches ought to draw attention to. It could be a character-development issue (list item #5), or, as in your example, setting-based fictional positioning (list item #2).
And if honor does help determine success/failure, well, the players will learn that pretty damn quick regardless of whether it's tracked by mechanics or just by the GM, right? "Our honorable foes keep beating us when they act with honor, and our dishonorable foes keep beating us when they act with dishonor; maybe we'd better pick one and act accordingly!"
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