On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, Roger Burton West wrote: RBW>In _some_ fiction, though not I think in quite a lot of it. Have you RBW>seen _Armageddon_? Nope. RBW>Were you in the slightest doubt about whether the Earth would be RBW>saved? Have you read any romance novels? The tension there is all RBW>about _how_ things will turn out right, not _whether_ they will. Actually, I was thinking one of the two asteroid movies (_Deep Impact_?) at the time ended up with the Earth not being entirely saved. But I didn't see either one. (I see one or two movies a year, plus one or two more kids' movies. And I don't watch TV, and I hardly even read fiction anymore. So there's a moderate chance I don't know what the heck I'm talking about.) RBW>Which lets you tell an interesting story about the failure. I rate that RBW>tension as more important than avoiding the occasional unhappy ending. Sometimes. Problem is, when the failures happen, it tends to be less than spectacular, and it tends to be the hero's (okay, let's be honest: Carl's character's) *fault*. Which would be okay if it were for a good reason, but "Oops, I missed" doesn't generate the angsty sort of failure that makes good stories. RBW>Now, there are some situations in which I as GM will just rule "it RBW>works, no need to roll". The conveyor operations in the I-Cops game, for RBW>example, which basically serve as the bookends on a single scenario - I RBW>may well write up a "conveyor goes horribly wrong" scenario at some RBW>point, but I'm unlikely to run it based on a die roll. And that's what it comes down to... say you've got a superhero game, and you've got your convenience-store-robbery-gone-wrong with a hostage situation (it'd work for a cop game or whatever too), do you just not roll for the good guy to take out the bad guy? That's where it gets all weird for me... kind of anticlimactic on the one hand, but on the other hand for anything other than a pretty gritty game you're really going to have trouble fitting failure in. RBW>I think I see what you're getting at, but I think it's potentially a RBW>very heavy mechanical structure to deal with something that I'd approach RBW>as a matter for normal GM fudging. See, that's the problem I have with it... I don't really want normal GM fudging, I want good die rolls. But I don't *want* a heavy mechanical structure, and that's what I keep coming up with. Because I'm not a game designer, for one thing. Of course, my complaint about most games *is* the heavy mechanical structure, so maybe that isn't the problem. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
