On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 09:00:03AM -0500, Karen Cravens wrote: >For some people, this is a feature: it gives the underdog a chance to >win. For others, this is a bug: it gives the dice a chance to have a >"trivial" NPC kick the PC's butt unexpectedly, thereby throwing a >monkey wrench into Story, suspension of disbelief, or fun. I think it's worth considering Amber as an extreme case. In that system, the Great swordsman will win, full stop. What does the Poor swordsman do in that case? Shift the fight into another realm - be sneaky, or persuasive, or whatever, rather than just standing up and getting skewered. So a non-probabilistic system can be made to work, though it's not to everybody's taste. Personally I like the possibility of a random result, because I'm not a narrativist - the story arises from the desires of the PCs, the desires of the NPCs, and pure chance, just as events do in the real world. That may not produce such a "good" story as one with a single author where everything goes the way it needs to go, but it depends on whose benchmarks of "good" you're using; the conventional narrative ones don't necessarily apply. >And yeah, 1 in 150 seems like a long shot... but probabilities aren't >predictable things (imagine that) and it's gonna happen two, three >times almost in a row to some people (especially those cursed with >green pickles), and not happen to others at all (which may explain the >disparity in opinions over yonder). The number of times we roll dice, even in combat-heavy games, is generally far too small a sample to approach the average. And of course the extreme numbers are always memorable; I still remember the night, though it must be more than fifteen years ago, when the Call of Cthulhu GM fumbled for all three of the bad guys in exactly the same way, which was a 10^-10 probability... There certainly do seem to be nights when the dice run a particular way. I've seen far more fumbles with certain characters than the probabilities would indicate... -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
