> Now, they want to arm wrestle. They are basically being
>strong against each other -- Magic guy 5W worth of strong and Bull
>guy is 5W2. Magic guy is pumping himself up with his power, maybe
>he's a scrawny little grandpa, maybe he's a big burly guy, but he has
>chose to use his magic, and it's made him 5W worth of strong. Bull
>guy has no useful magic, but he lifted his pet calf every day until
>it became a bull, so he has muscles on his muscles 5W2 worth. So Bull
>guy probably wins, and he deserves it.
"Deserves it". See, there's the problem. In game, it seems that the one who can defeat the rock best should be the stronger, and win. But that's not the case. So "deserves" can only mean in metagame terms. Which is what I've been saying all along - thanks for backing me up.
This doesn't mean, however, that some people don't want to see things in metagame terms, however. And you saying that they should won't change their minds.
> If they decide to have a rock throwing contest, since Magic
>guy is steamed at losing and wants revenge, the Narrator needs to set
>a difficulty -- maybe everyone agrees that "impressively far" has a
>resistance of 10W. Bull guy, with all his muscles, has a level of
>mastery but a few point disadvantage. Let's say Bull guy gets a
>failure and the distance a success. The failure gets bumped, and the
>Narrator decides that Bull guy threw his rock impressively far. Magic
>guy rolls against a 14 again and rolls a success bumped to a critical
>against the distance's success. The Narrator decides this is pretty
>darned far, and Magic guy wins the contest.
Actually, you didn't come up with this idea first, so I'm sorry to pick on you, here. But let's say that both characters get a Minor Success. Who threw the rock farther? If it's a contest, I'm afraid that "about the same" isn't going to cut it. In any case, this use of the rules isn't really supported by the rules, and is problematic, philosophically. One can always reduce the opponent to "the situatioin in which we're jointly engaged". So, in combat, it would be a roll of one character against the situation, and the other character against the tactical situation and compare? But then you could roll for the situation's situation. The system doesn't suggest doing this because there's no good guideline for when it would make sense. In fact, it always makes sense to directly compare, and I'd never use this "third party comparison" method.
Mike
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