Re: Prescriptive Rules

From: Mikael Raaterova <ginijji_at_telia.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 10:18:30 +0100


George W Harris:
>A game system is only prescriptive if the GM wants it to be; most GMs take
>the results of the system as suggestions only. It never makes for more
>work for the GM if the system makes detailed, concrete suggestions, and it
>frequently makes for a lot less. The best way to encourage GMs to give
>detailed descriptions is to give them lots of help.

With which i agree completely. What i was complaining about re: the spine-lacking soft-pedalling in the HW draft(s) was that there was a lot of 'narrator determines' without any decent guidelines. It left the impression of uncompleteness; 'we haven't come up with any good rules for this so you'll have to make them up yourself, but due to space restrictions we can't supply any illustrative suggestions'.

The HW rules are enormously elastic, and can be used in various ways. To help the narrator get a grasp of how to implement the rules _lots_ of examples would be needed. Hopefully more examples will be included in the published version, than i've seen in the drafts.

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