On January 31, 2007 11:25 am, Sam Elliot wrote:
> LC:
> > I've got to agree with Sam here.
>
> You seem disappointed ;-)
I hate having my view of myself as a maverick rebel so easily destroyed is all. :-)
[snipped origin of pixel-bitch]
That's great! And yeah, that happens in tabletop RPGs as well. I've had games grind to a halt while players tried to figure out what the GM wanted them to do. (I was in an otherwise excellent Orpheus game not long ago where this was the exact problem. We started to realize the GM had one solution in mind for us, and nothing we did that wasn't that was going to get us anywhere interesting. Not even "failing interestingly", which I would have been fine with.)
> One is that you can resolve things, even big things like travelling
> all the way to Zoria and finding the secret, if you are running out
> of time, with simple contests. Just remember to frame the contest
> right - not necessarily do they find the secret which allows them to
> proceed (see pixel bitching above) but do they do it in time to
> avoid the KoW discovering what they are up to.
Oh yes. I have become a big fan of the "it's not did you get the MacGuffin, it's if you got it without causing yourself more problems" approach.
For things like detective work, it's great. Don't make the contest about finding the clues, make the contest about interpreting the clues quickly and accurately enough.
(i.e. - "don't pixel-bitch the clues")
> I´d suggest not to think of it as solving a
> problem (you end up with that "right" answer again) but coming up
> with cool approaches to a problem, to which you can add situational
> modifiers if they seem to have hit the nail on the head / to be
> barking up the wrong tree.
That's always a good way to approach it. That's the mechanical answer I was trying to get at with the idea that some approaches are more effective than others.
> That way, the dice can decide what is
> true or not, even. You then may get some nice surprises. Who knows,
> one of the players may go off on a completely different tack ("My
> character has a huge Genealogy ability - sod all this mirrors stuff,
> I´m going to track down his mother so she can tell him he´s a Very
> Naughty Boy" - GM adds a -20 to the roll as it way out there - won´t
> it be fun when the players rise to that challenge and start to get
> augments together and start to bring that -20 down, then roll well
> and find Mamma? Or fail the roll and, because you´re running out of
> time, come face to face with the bad guy unprepared).
My word. KDoaH facing off with his mom. That's a great image. (Even if, in my view, it probably ends badly for everyone.)
> You´re gonna have to come back and say how it went, you realise...?
Yes, he will. :)
LC
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