On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:43:44PM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: >On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Roger Burton West wrote: >RBW>think that's a key difference between RPGs and statically-presented >RBW>fiction: the tension comes from a _genuine_ absence of knowledge about >RBW>how the story's going to turn out. I think you that to do otherwise you >I'm not sure which you mean... in an RPG the players (at least) have a >genuine absence of knowledge, and in fiction the reader/viewer does too. In _some_ fiction, though not I think in quite a lot of it. Have you seen _Armageddon_? Were you in the slightest doubt about whether the Earth would be saved? Have you read any romance novels? The tension there is all about _how_ things will turn out right, not _whether_ they will. >Or do you mean in the RPG there's an absence of knowledge about whether >the story's going to turn out well or badly? If the latter, I don't like >that tension, because it's not real if there's no chance of failure, and >if there's a chance of failure some of your games are going to, well, >fail. Which lets you tell an interesting story about the failure. I rate that tension as more important than avoiding the occasional unhappy ending. Now, there are some situations in which I as GM will just rule "it works, no need to roll". The conveyor operations in the I-Cops game, for example, which basically serve as the bookends on a single scenario - I may well write up a "conveyor goes horribly wrong" scenario at some point, but I'm unlikely to run it based on a die roll. >I dunno about that, at least if it could be made to work right. >Basically, the notion is just to eliminate story-breaking rolls. I don't >want to remove the risk of things going (badly) wrong, I just want to >channel it into *interesting* ways things can go wrong. I think I see what you're getting at, but I think it's potentially a very heavy mechanical structure to deal with something that I'd approach as a matter for normal GM fudging. -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
