Good for y'all. I personally find plenty of boredom and cheesiness in hearing my fellow players say things like "now I roll 16%, that's almost a special, so that's only 2d6 of damage and does he fall down?" with the GM responding "so that's 8 points to the um ... 13 ... chest ... so that takes him negative so he falls down, there's two more and one rolls ...."
That's *not roleplaying*. It's rolling dice and talking about numbers, and if you listen carefully it seems like the players are playing characters who roll dice to decide the outcome of their lives.
In terms of roleplaying vs. wargaming, I think we need a system which can achieve the _appearance_ of being "numbers-lite" while at the same time providing an objective mechanism for determining realistic outcomes of actions. That's not an easy challenge to meet. Arguably, no-one has done it so far. Until such a system exists, the lazier players and less-skilled GMs will always find themselves talking about dice, rather than what characters "actually" see and do. Meanwhile the more imaginative or more talented gamers may have a hard time seeing the pleasure or point to sitting around rolling dice and debating the artificialities of strike ranks and skill splitting; they will try to shift Steve's paradigm to something more like
"My character's a damn' good swordsman, he's been training for years, but this guy hasn't left an opening yet and he's retaliating pretty hard. There's some kind of spell-caster backing up my character's opponent, the rock over there just came flying past my head. My character has always been kinda vulnerable to magic. Would it be better to launch an all-out attack, to surrender, or to just run away?"
I like wargames and probably play chess or WarCraft better than I roleplay under any rules-system. I agree that the outcome of character actions should be deterministic (even if it's in a random fashion) because otherwise, there's no basis for the _character_ to behave rationally. I can further agree that the current rules-systems serve as a way to map the character's ideas of what is possible onto the player's decision-making process. But I would dissent from Steve's focus on the player above the character; role-playing games are after all supposed to be about the characters, as much or more than the people playing them. We have plenty of time in the real world to be ourselves and to make our decisions based on more complex data than "85% to hit, 4 SR". Around the table we should strive to base our direction of the characters on data like
"Harald is a fairly good spearman. He faces a Babeester Gor cultist with a glowing, shimmering axe. Over her right shoulder he can see a man in brightly-colored clothing; the man's right arm is covered with crawling fires and his right hand seems to be reaching behind the mountain some miles distant. Harald cannot see the two cultists approaching from behind him, but he can feel their running footsteps and hear their breathing."
This (to me at least) is way more interesting than a lot of numbers. The numbers need to be there so that things are resolved in a sensible fashion; but dammitall, why focus on the _skeleton_ of the game when the flesh makes the beauty?
I'm not sure whether this rant really helps anything, but I'm comforted by the fact that it can always be ignored.
Al Harrison
geocities.com/Paris/Tower/9143
harrisona_at_asme.org
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