The problem I have with this approach is that I have no point of reference to the "physics" of the game environment. You, me, and everyone else in reality have a good, instinctive handle on reality. If you stand next to a rift in the ground, you can look at it and make a pretty good judgement on what your chances of successfully jumping it are. Even if you aren't good at estimating distances or don't know the actual distance of how far you can jump.
Game mechanics (and the attendant character sheet) serve as a surrogate for the intimate/instinctual familiarity that we have with reality.
> This is how I and my friends run RPG's, and it does much more for
> atmosphere and consentrating on the roleplaying than any storytellin
> system I've seen or can imagine.
I play regularly in a game that has characters with two pages (both sides of a single sheet) of skills for each character, each with a percentile score. We have a LOT of roleplaying. In fact, it's very common for the results of skill rolls to be integrated by people into their actions. In fact, some characters even have artificially low skills to reflect how against their nature it is (one character is honest/naive to a fault and has a Lie skill of 1%).
An Ars Magica campaign (at a gaming club) I'm in was cursed with a mage whose player was almost never there, and as a result was frequently played by a stand-in. And these stand-ins did a DEAD ON job of portraying the character. When asked how they knew how to play him like that, they replied that they just went by his Perks, Flaws, and Personality Traits.
I've played in games where I haven't been allowed to have my character's character sheet, and I've felt very in-the-dark about my character. Yeah, I could get a handle on his personality, but I found myself spending entirely too much time wondering if I could do things, or how well I could do them.
> The players only concentrate on their character, and don't have to
waste
> a single second thinking about game-mechanics.
Personally, I think the whole "character sheets and game mechanics get in the way of roleplaying" is a myth. They only get in the way if people insist on trying to use them to replace roleplaying.
Mike Ryan
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