On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 03:33:50PM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: >With the advent of Gamehawk (April 1, no foolin'), I'm pretty much ready >to start up Gavilan. I believe the technical term is "Yay!". >On the other hand, I'd rather play freeform in PBeM. Yeah, I wrote a >die-roller into the Phoenyx, but I'm pretty sure I've never actually used >it in a game. Rules, PBeM-wise, are there so everybody has the same >expectations as much as is possible, not to actually be used. In this rant I am ABSOLUTELY NOT telling you what to do in your game. I'm just trying to give my own perspective. I like a fairly heavily structured system, in part because I like to be able to define a character quite closely. Even looking through a system's list of powers and abilities often gives me ideas. That's not too much of a problem - if I write up my character as a 200-pointer in GURPS, say, I have a very good idea of what he can do, and I can probably play him in a purely-narrative system. The descriptive idea that Karen suggests later, though, isn't purely narrative. I'm going to call it instead a "four important things" or "FIT" system, since that seems to be the usual sort of number and matches Karen's "three to five". Another, somewhat more complex, example would be Chad Underkoffler's PDQ system (http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/freebies/di/pdq-core.pdf for the free core rules). The difficulty I have with FIT-like systems is that they leave all that nice juicy detail off the character sheet and in my head, where it may not be accessible at the crucial moment. Let's take Karen's example: when Joshua gets into that barfight, (a) I as his player have to think "aha, TVKMF and so I might have an edge in this fight"; (b) I have to work out on the fly what that edge might be... and then (c) the GM has to adjudicate whether whatever I've just asked for is reasonable. To me, that not only drags things out, it throws me _more_ out of suspension of disbelief than simply rolling the dice would. I as the player am negotiating the reality of the game world with the GM, which kills the immersion; it may just be that I've done an awful lot of wargaming and whatnot, but saying "I'll try to sneak up on him to hit him with a bottle, my Stealth is 11, his Perception is 14, -2 because there's a lot of distraction, (roll) (roll) OK I made it" just doesn't kill the mood for me in the same way. As a secondary problem, this sort of system gives an advantage to glib players, of whom I am usually not one. :-) In the PBEM games I've run, I've usually gone for a fairly complex character generation system (first Dark Conspiracy heavily modified, then later Rolemaster and currently GURPS), because I find a detailed character sheet serves as an aide-memoire. "What can I do in this situation?" (Looks through sheet, spies a skill that he's forgotten about.) "Hey, I'm sure I remember something about lock-picking. Remember when that spy showed me the basics?" That one point in a never-used skill would be such a small part of the character that it would fall through the cracks of a FIT-based description, but rather than the player having to say "oh, um, I have Hangs Out In Low Dives, and maybe I could have learned it there" it's right there on the sheet... I _don't_ necessarily use detailed _play_ mechanics in those PBEM games. I certainly don't set up full GURPS tactical combats. I do make skill rolls for the PCs and generally abide by the random results, but I don't think the stories have been wrecked by unexpected criticals or fumbles. -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
