One of the unstated clauses of jumping the chasm is "with all of my stuff making it to the other side with me."
In "Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow," Joe & Polly are running across a tree that spans a vast chasm. What happens? Joe drops his only firearm and it falls into the abyss. And Polly drops her camera and accidently takes a picture of nothing, leaving her with only one picture left. And both characters are very upset about this.
So, Ragnar jumps the chasm to save his friend, and the player rolls badly. "Ragnar makes it to the other side, but he slips a little as he lands, and he drops his battle axe. It tumbles down into the abyss." Now, the character will undoubtedly get another, similar axe later in the game, but for now? He's at a disadvantage, without the character taking any physical damage or losing his life.
Just another way of looking at it.
>
> >From: "Sam Elliot" <sam.elliot1_at_...>
>
> >Josh's devotion one I agree with, sure if there's
> so much invested in it,
> >it can be an automatic success.
>
> I'm going to go off on a bit of a peregrination
> here. This is supposed to be
> one of the upcoming articles for Narrator Advice, so
> perhaps we'll see it
> cleaned up there later. In any case, it's a tad
> torturous, so try to bear
> with it.
>
> Here's the trick with failure and goals. When a
> player states a goal, there
> are unstated clauses that come along with that
> statement. Let's examine the
> chasm thing yet again. The goal will be stated as
> "Get to the other side"
> likely. But understood is the clause, "without
> falling to my death." This is
> the obvious example, however, and so what people
> usually think of in terms
> of the "stakes" of a chasm leap. So when they fail,
> the thought is that you
> must invoke the repercussions of not succeeding with
> both of these clauses.
> Not only does the character not get to the other
> side, but also he falls.
>
> Well, first of all, you don't have to assume the
> "falling" clause is the
> stakes. For example, you can merely do the standard
> example we use in this
> case, and the character runs up, fails to have faith
> that he can make the
> jump, and stops just before leaping. Because you
> only have to prevent the
> actual stated goal from being achieved. But...this
> voids the other rule
> about not causing plot progression to cease, right?
> I mean, now we have this
> situation where the character can't proceed, and
> we've given the player no
> more options. Yes, he can come up with some other
> creative method to get
> over the chasm, and sometimes that's OK to allow.
> But never (OK, maybe
> rarely) allow a third attempt at the same goal,
> because that's asking for
> the game to just become all about getting across
> this one chasm.
>
> So we invoke "No, and" in this case, sorta; the rule
> that says to apply
> other conditions to the defeat to make for new
> conflict. But isn't the "and"
> falling in this case? Well, "without falling" is
> just one option, and if
> it's the clause, and it means character death, then
> it's not a good choice
> for advancing the plot along. Basically, all tasks
> have a general unstated
> clause of "without anything untoward happening to
> the character." Meaning
> that you really can inflict just about anything you
> want on the character.
> Does that mean that you'll make the Major Failure an
> "Inability to Sing"
> because they missed their roll to get over the
> chasm? No, there are lots of
> options that are plausible negative outcomes of the
> leap.
>
> The simplest example is that the character gets
> hurt, "Ragnar hurtles
> himself as hard as he can so as to ensure that he
> crosses the distance, but
> he makes a bad landing, and sprawls on the floor
> bruising himself in several
> places. The neat thing here is that you can pick a
> response that feels like
> it matches the mechanical result. That is, the
> implication with a Minor
> Defeat that causes Ragnar to be wounded is that if
> he'd rolled a Complete
> Defeat, he'd have plummeted to his death. This gives
> the roll outcome that
> "whew, that was close," feel that we want for a
> jump.
>
> Now, this involves a little bit of misdirection if
> you will. That is, you're
> altering the statement of goal to some extent to get
> this to work. You're
> not doing "no, and" really, you're just doing the
> "and" in a way. That is,
> the goal was explicitly stated to get across. So
> from a very technical POV,
> some might claim that we can't allow the character
> to be across at the end.
> What's happening, however, is that you're
> effectively assembling that full,
> unstated goal, "To get across the chasm without
> anything untoward
> happening." The entire thing has to be accomplished
> or it's some sort of
> partial failure. At first glance this might seem to
> be a dodge - you're
> letting the character off "light." But isn't this
> precisely what one would
> do in a "Combat" situation? The stated goal will
> always be something like,
> "I want to kill him." But doesn't that mean "kill
> him without getting hurt
> myself?" Maybe not in all cases, but that's
> generally understood.
>
> Now you say, but, Mike, that's still not parallel.
> If you fail your roll to
> kill the character, unlike the chasm situation, you
> don't kill the opponent.
> Well, maybe you do, and maybe you don't. Even in the
> chasm situation, you
> could decide to say that the character pulls up
> before his leap, and twists
> his ankle. That is, you can decide to do "No, and."
> This is good because now
> the character has something new to worry about than
> just crossing the chasm
> (can he even make it home with the twisted ankle?).
> So, in combat, you can,
> in fact, decide to have the opponent get away
> unscathed, and have the injury
> occur to the defeated character. That's pretty
> standard, actually.
>
> Now, the next objection would be to note that this
> would imply that you can
> kill somebody even with a failure. The logical
> extension is that if you can
> make it across the chasm with the only part of the
> failure being that you're
> injured, then this means that you can kill a target,
> and the defeat only
> means that you're wounded. Well, two notes here.
> First, the chasm doesn't
> really try to stop you. From that rationale, there's
> no goal that it's
> trying to achieve. We theorize that it's trying to
> make you fall, or get
> hurt otherwise, but it's not really actively trying
> to do that. So when it
> gets its Minor Victory over you, we really don't
> have to enforce any such
> goal. Really we don't ask the chasm.
>
> With an opponent, however, he's got the same goals
> as the character
> attacking him, perhaps, "to kill the Hero, and get
> away unscathed." In which
> case, his victory does imply that he should live,
> and the attacking
> character should be wounded (and certainly this is
> what you'd do in a player
> hero vs. player hero contest). This is a rationale
> to some extent, but it
> becomes a necessary one as proven below.
>
> Here's the really interesting thing. The above
> result, the narrator
> character getting a Victory over the player hero, is
> an "and" only result.
> If the character's goal is to kill the player hero,
> then by the rules,
> doesn't that mean that the "no, and" result for the
> character should mean
> that he fails to live through the contest? From
> another perspective, isn't
> it odd that you never get to succeed at killing
> opponents in HQ (barring the
> very rare Complete Victory)?
>
> But I wouldn't do it any other way. I mean, this
> concept is what allows the
> player heroes to go off and be heroes.
>
> But isn't combat, then, an exception to the rule?
> The rule says that the
> victorious character should get his goal, no? But in
> combat, they can't
> usually. Where does this exception come from? Well,
> it comes from the
> impediment results based on the outcome level of
> Victory. Only a Complete
> Victory can result in something as startling as
> death. What does this imply?
> Well, one way to look at it is that some goals
> simply require a higher level
>
=== message truncated ===
--joshua m. neff
www.goblin-cartoons.com
Powered by hypermail