Re: RE: Re: Re : Tracking

From: Thom Baguley <t.s.baguley_at_...>
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 16:16:31 +0000

   From: "Gareth Martin" <gamartin_at_...>
>Subject: RE: Re: Re : Tracking
>Well, I think this is partly down to how the Gm approaches this problem. I
>think the issue is not that the ratings aare disociated from the symptoms,
>but that the GM should take on the duty of justifying to the
>characters/players why the difficulties are inconsistent. Frex, if
>characters track regularly, and have a good ballpark idea of what tracking
>difficulties should be, and then the GM ups the difficulty radically for
>story-driven reasons at a particular point (say the GM wants an NPC to get
>away and haunt them later) then I feel it is the GMs responsibility to
>justify this change through narrative methods. The GM should not merely
>rule that the difficulty happens to be higher, they should explain why this
>situation is mopre difficult - by description of terrain, circumstance,
>surroundings etc. As people have pointed out, the sequence is rewversed by
>comparison to simulationist styles: instead of looking at the
>circumstanceand judging a difficulty, in HW you decide a difficulty and
>justify it through narration after the fact.

I think it ends up being very similar when writing scenarios for a particular group in mind. You can't put up 5 beginning RQ characters against a party of ZZ Death Lords. You as writer have to work out how to reduce the difficulty or change the nature of the challenge.

Thom

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