Quote from: SpikeReally, all one can do is provide advice and hope for the best.

Well, that's sort of my point.  Instead of trying to solve certain problems, particularly GMing problems, with rules, perhaps the approach should be to solve them with how-to advice.  

Quote from: SpikeI'm pretty sure that this entire thread was a firm drift from the thrust of the OP, however...

It's called "challenging your premise".

EDIT::: good timing, as you can see from the post above mine, my premise could not stand up to John Morrow's challenge. He won, and I am killing this thread out of shame.

Definitely "a bunch of." Then if it comes down to it you can shift the argument away from hard facts that might disprove your statement and into semantic debates about "how much is a bunch."

Quote from: SpikeGiven that my premise was not 'probablities and rerolls to prevent failure' but 'mechanics(system) supports Illusion'... more or less...

Yes, and I have trouble with how you think Illusion works and how you think mechanics support it.  In particular, I think one can dispense with the illusion of competent characters simply by giving the players, well, competent characters.  It doesn't require multiple-roll challenges or fudging or elimination of failure.  Characters are competent to deal with challenges that they are likely to be able to overcome, not challenges that they only have a 50/50 chance of overcoming.  Part of this can be a system issue but I think part of it is also a GM understanding issue of when to call for rolls.

One of the problems is related to complaints about rolling and having nothing happen.  That's rolling and having almost no chance of failure.  So instead of giving players very good odds of success, many games give supposedly competent characters fairly high chances of failure, so the rolls mean something.  One way to deal with it is second chances.  Another way of dealing with it is rolling to see if you need to roll.  For example, we can assume a competent naval aviator will land his fighter on the deck of an aircraft carrier, yet every now and then, one fails.  So you roll to see if the circumstances are unusual enough to warrant a roll or series of rolls (e.g., an engine failure while landing) and then start rolling.  Otherwise, the character just succeed.  Yet another option that my group sometimes uses is the DFU (Don't F[oul] Up) roll.  Roll a set of dice that have something like a 1% or less high or low roll (depending on whether it's roll under or roll over)  -- Fudge dice, percentile dice, 2d10, etc. are all good for that -- and something bad only happens is the result is the worst possible roll.  

Funniest DFU situation I ever saw was player whose character was watching the sun set from the roof of a building with a beautiful and powerful woman who liked him.  The woman throws herself at him, "Catch me, you fool!"  The GM asks the player to make a DFU roll.  Double-zero on a percentile roll.  The character misses her and she falls to her death.  The GM asks for another DFU roll.  Another double-zero.  So the character stands there, mouth hanging open, as a crowd gathers below and gets a good look at him, thinking he pushed her off.

Quote from: SpikeI agree that advice is the superior approach, though the sort of advice I'd like to see regarding failure is thin on the ground in my expirence... though I must admit I stopped reading the advice chapters of game books decades ago...:keke:  A certain minimal amount of hard coding can serve as an example/advice, but then you have to figure out when is too much.  And this does nothing in the face of GM's and players just skimming the rules and playing 'off the cuff'.

Well, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.  But given the examples I see online and on mailing lists, a lot of GMs seem to lack even a rudimentary understanding of the idea that if you place a character up against an opponent that's as powerful as the character, they'll have roughly a 50% chance of success, which means that they'll fail half of the time.  Unless the GM is willing to accept that high of a failure rate, that will lead to a lot of fudging.  D&D tries to hard code this problem away with Challenge Ratings, which make a monster of equal CR to the PCs only one quarter as powerful, and an old D&D GM that I played with in college used to estimate monsters as 25% of the HP of the party as a basic rule of balance.  It would be nice if they explained why, too.  And the problem is worse in games without specific monsters to fight, where, say, the PCs are up against other people built on a similar point total.

Quote from: SpikeI suspect that outside of character creation and basic dice mechanics 75% or more of rules are ignored by vast swaths of the RPG crowd... dependent upon the complexity of the rule systems employed.  I know that few, if any, of the D&D groups I've played with on either side of the table ever touched the climate and environment rules in the DMG, most of the people I play with now have to do research if anyone attempts a grapple and so on.

75% seems like hyperbole. 50%? A bunch of? :confused:

It depends on the group and there experiences, so I think this is one of those areas where anecdotal evidence varies so much I'm reluctant to accept any percentage.  You might be right or totally wrong.  On the Fudge mailing list, for example, a lot of people criticized the idea of optional rules because they complained that if rules were there, people would use them.  It's not uncommon to find people having RAW (Rules As Written) arguments on places like ENWorld.  And I've heard more than a few people suggest that the reason why GURPS gets so many complexity complaints is that many people skip the simple combat rules and use all of the bells and whistles of the advanced rules, instead.  So while I'm sure there are groups that strip down the rules (my group tends to do that, at least a little), there are also people who play by the RAW (I've done that) and also groups that will use any rule that they find in the book.

And, ultimately, if people aren't going to actually read the rules or advice, does it really matter what you put in there?

EDIT::: I got nothin'.

Quote from: Spike'The Illusion', unsupported, is storytelling. Even establishing a framework of who gets to speak when starts to add a mechanical framework, but so rudimentary that we can just ignore it for the purpose of game design.

I don't think the core is storytelling.  I think that sometimes it's closer to a "What if?" discussion or "Let's pretend" games.  When I was a kid and played Star Trek, we didn't tell Star Trek stories.  We played Star Trek characters or our own characters in the Star Trek universe.  When little kids have their Lego firefighters fight an imaginary Lego fire or invite their stuffed animals over for a tea party, they aren't telling a story, at least not in any meaningful non-technical sense.  You might be able to tell a story about it but the story is not the point of the play.

For many people, role-playing is an experience.  And that's why it's often boring to listen to other people talk about their characters and games in any detail.  You had to be there to understand why it was so fun and the magic was in doing it, not the quality of the take-away story that one gets from recounting it to others.

In the past, I've compared it to a vacation.  Listening to people talk about their vacations or even showing you pictures of their vacation is boring because the value of a vacation is in doing it, not talking about it to others afterward.

Quote from: SpikeIf we strip the mechanics down to the simplest possible level where we can still call it a game (probability of success. Lets say the characters fail on a 1 on a d6 roll at any task, be it leaping a cavern or slaying a dragon), we now have a framework for failure, an element of risk. It has more entertainment potential than just spinning random yarns in a group, but the single die of success or failure, regardless of where we put the actual failure threshold, means it will grow boring in short order.  Obviously, this is a hypothesis, I have not seen anyone play a game that stripped down.

I've played a game where the only hard rule was that we rolled a d20 and high rolls were good.  The GM determined what the roll actually meant in th game.  And as I've said, my group uses DFU rolls which are, in essence, exactly what you just described (a raw die roll where only the worst possible result means failure).

Quote from: SpikeNow, how does this alter the Illusion? Simple really, there is a chance that the characters can fail at any given moment. Good no longer triumphs over evil every time.  Of course, since the chance of success or failure is not dependent upon the challenges faced, the 'power level' of the illusion can be anything. Galaxy spanning gods rubbing elbows with street urchins looking for a meal.

In practice, I think this is how many games work when they balance encounters to the party.  It certainly seems to be a design goal of D&D 4th Edition.  It can be very artificial if the balance remains the same no matter how powerful the PCs get.

Quote from: SpikeTo control the Illusion with a social agreement, say that the heroes are all adventurers of the more mortal persuasion, and capable of merely mortal feats of heroism is another rule. It sets the power level, it limits what our heroes can do. It doesn't, however, do a damn thing to their chances of success.  

So: change the social agreement so that the heroes are demigods or superheroes, and dragons aren't the threat, its mad deathgods and demon armies.  Chances of success remain the same, but the power level is ramped up considerably.  The Illusion has significantly changed from our last example, but the mechanics remain.

And that's not what I'm suggesting at all.  What I'm suggesting is that if the heroes are mortals, expect them to die like mortals.  If the heroes are demigods or superheroes, every battle that they fight doesn't have to be against mad deathgods and demon armies.  High-powered heroes vs. low-powered normals gives the sort of odds of success that most GMs seem to really want and achieve by fudging 50/50 encounters.  So rather than having every encounter be a carefully balanced match between balanced opponents, how about more James Bond vs. a half-dozen faceless mooks on motorcycles who aren't nearly as good as he is, at least until he gets to the final showdown where losing in a 50/50 contest might be interesting and satisfying.  

Look at action movies and you'll see that many are structured that way.  Carly Simon sings of James Bond, "Nobody does it better; Makes me feel sad for the rest; Nobody does it half as good as you; Baby you're the best."  In Conan the Barbarian, Conan is depicted as being more than a match for every warrior he faces unless he's horribly outnumbered and taken by surprise.  True Lies?  Star Wars?  Riddick?  Harry Potter?  Incredibles?  All top-notch people and most of the enemies they fight are well below them in ability.  And even with all of that, plenty of people die around James Bond, Riddick, Harry Potter, and so on.

What about a show or movie with more normal heroes like Firefly/Serenity?  Well, you'll notice two things.  First, those heroes do get hurt and die or nearly die quite a bit.  Second, they rarely face their opponents in a fair one-on-one face-to-face battle but sneak around, use deception, and get the jump on people to get an advantage.  They don't fight fair.  Indiana Jones?  Remember the scene with the swordsman and the revolver and he, too, gets beaten up quite a bit and has people die around him.  Spider Man spends a lot of time fighting people as powerful as he is and gets kicked around quite a bit because of it.  He survives because he's incredibly resilient but let's not forget Gwen Stacy.  

Quote from: SpikeIn short: the Illusion is why we play, it is the entertainment portion, the 'shared headspace' or what ever you like.

Accepting that's true for the sake of argument, what people are entertained by in that "shared headspace" can vary significantly from person to person and group to group.

Quote from: SpikeThe Mechanics will alter it, but ultimately that isn't their purpose. The purpose of the Mechanics is to provide a 'chance of failure' that makes the Illusion more interactive, more 'real'. and to do so with sufficent complexity that it doesn't grow boring.

I don't think that's the purpose of all mechanics.  On his message board, for example, Vincent Baker writes:

   "If you're designing a roleplaying game to tell a story, one of the first things you have to do is make winning and losing irrelevant. You have to make it so that even if the player rolls all 1s, or badly flubs the dice tactics, or whatever, the story goes forward in an interesting and good direction. In short, you have to make it a crappy game, like Chess would be if we both won every time no matter what moves we made."

I also don't agree that, "The purpose of the Mechanics is to provide a 'chance of failure' that makes the Illusion more interactive, more 'real'. and to do so with sufficent complexity that it doesn't grow boring."  I think the purpose of the mechanics (at least the physics engine variety) is to tell the players what happens.  What happens, in certain settings or situations, can include an absence of catastrophic failure.

Quote from: SpikeMcMurray argues that tossing more dice, and playing with bigger numbers is crucial to feeling like you are playing with more power. There is a psychological logic to that mentality, but Heroquest, among other systems, provides a strong counterpoint.  It may actually be easier to accomodate a high power Illusion with a simpler system.

I personally find that irrelevant.  I'm spending as much time as I can not thinking about the mechanics in that way when I play.

Quote from: SpikePower, within the Illusion, comes from how you frame your challenges, those things that you might reasonably fail at.  If you continue to allow a failure from purely mortal challenges, you have to bloat your system to mitigate that failure as much as possible so that you don't break your own Illusion. Simply removing that particular point of failure allows the original mortal scale system to be used at higher power levels in support of the new Illusion.

Yet you'll find one of the greatest criticisms of games like D&D that, for example, elevate hit points such that mortal injuries that would kill a normal character become only a scratch at higher levels and that you eventually can't kill a very high level character with a single gunshot wound.  That works great if you want a heroic game where the heroes never fail and never become the guy who grabs his chest and yells, "I've been hit!" (or "I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I..." *crash*) but not so great if you want something a little more plausible and find the idea of characters shaking off wounds from guns a little unbelievable.

EDIT::: One advantage to you, the reader, is that scrolling past the history gets faster, I suppose.

Quote from: SpikeObviously, sitting around a table you aren't playing cowboys and indians, but you are certainly involved with roleplaying, and in a sense using the Illusion in a very pure state. (yeah, yeah... illusion is getting jargonized...:what: ). Of course, now you have something of an implied rule: The action is constrained by physicality... to an extent.

I have players (not all of them but some of them) who do get physical to some degree.  They stand up, bang the table, draw weapons (props or imaginary), express body language, and so on.  I don't think it's so much of a rule that constrains it as the realities of being inside sitting around a table or room.

Quote from: SpikeAside from the single die roll aspect that is a measure more complex than what I described. You have an interpreter, an unspecified range of rolls. I assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, you also had character sheets with numbers on them that provided some nebulous guidance.  What I described was a sole, fixed arbitor of fate that remains constant regardless of all other.

The "character sheets" we had weren't as formal as what you describe, and I've also played totally freeform games with no paperwork and a coin as a randomizer.  

Oh, and we also played a game with the d4 combat system (1 = fumble, 2 = miss, 3 = stun opponent, 4 = kill opponent, initiative determined by who can grab the d4 off of the table next when the previous play says they are done -- which can get very interesting with a sharp d4).  Does that count?


More to the point: how long did you play with just the D20 roll? How long did the group keep up at it? Are your DFU's the only mechanic? I doubt it.  

Quote from: SpikeMy point, however, was not that such play was impossible. Far from it. That is what all rule systems essentially boil down to, a chance to succeed or fail at any given task.  The complexity doesn't serve to measurably alter the Illusion.  It serves a purpose, yes.

To the extent that the rules affect what happens in "the Illusion", I do think the way the rules work measurably alter it.  If the rules have no measurable impact on "the Illusion" and the purpose of the game is "the Illusion", then it wouldn't matter whether you used D&D or that d4 combat system to resolve actions.  But it does matter.

Quote from: SpikeD&D allows you to ignore the artificial balance by the mechanism of allowing the characters to go back and trounce opponents that were once a fair match. However, that does not mean that the artificial balance is not there.

What do you mean by "artificial balance"?

Quote from: SpikeWe bring in the role of the GM to determine balance and to keep it from a certain level of sameness of challenge, certainly. D&D's path can be viewed as a triumph of rules over GMing skills, if you like.

A sufficiently complex set of rules can substitute for GM in many cases.  Before I gave up on The Forge, I pointed out (to Hunter Logan, mainly) that the control over what happens in a game can be given to the GM, to the players, to the rules, or to the dice (and rules).  But what's the purpose of the GM or rules?  To decide what happens next in an objective or at least non-partisan (presuming the GM isn't playing favorites) way.

Quote from: SpikeMy point about the necessity of complexity to rules is not to stress that we need to disguise the balanced chance of success, but to deal with a related topic about the boredom threshold of mastered mechanics. I firmly believe that games could be put on a scale between 'light' and 'heavy' mechanics and judged purely on wether or not they leave an admittedly broad grey area in the middle where long term enjoyment can be had without creating frustration.  *snip long digression*

So your whole point is about people getting bored by simple mechanics?  I don't think that happens when the mechanics are not a focus of the game.  Several of the players in my group, including a butt-kicker, are asking to go back to Fudge because they only really use the rules as a physics engine.  They decide what their characters are doing and use the rules to figure it out.  So the rules being simple is a feature because it speeds up the process of finding out how things work.  The reason for any complexity at all (instead of just rolling a d20 and interpreting it raw) is for consistency and to make sure that some of the setting elements of various choices are reflected in the odds of the results of applying the rules.

Quote from: SpikeIn the prototypical 'D6' game I outlined earlier, no rules changes are necessary to diferentiate between James Bond and Malcom Reynolds. At best we get into that nebulous 'Illusionary Rules' I mentioned earlier. Both James AND Mal have the same chance of beating an opponent or a challenge. What seperates them is a matter of what you consider an opponent. James Bond doesn't have to roll against average men, Mal does.  A second 'Illusionary Rule' could be consequences of failure: Mal's failure results in death, James' failures result in just failing: The bad guy gets away, or sets off his doomsday device, but James survives to stop them later.

But I think that's wrong.  I don't think James Bond and Mal Reynolds have the same chance of beating an opponent, in part because James Bond is so much better than Mal Reynolds at most things and in part because the gap between him and his opponents is larger.  Mal Reynolds should fail more, not only because he's not as good as James Bond but because he goes up against people who are closer to his ability than James Bond does.  

Quote from: SpikeIs that actually a Mechanic or is it merely a facet of the Illusion of choice? I could see it either way, but I can definitely get behind calling it mechanic. Of course, I have never tried to say that the mechanics had no impact.

To be honest, I'm not always entirely sure what you are saying because some of your points are lacking in details or examples.

Quote from: SpikeSecondly: you have to realize that, barring several chapters worth of disection and dipping into jargon territory, using 'chance of failure' or 'chance of success' is merely a shortcut for discussing 'what happens when I try X', right?   As the mechanics grow more complex 'chance of failure' can easily become 'randomized outcome'.   Did I really chose all my terms so badly that every post becomes an arguement over semantics? :confused:

Yes.  This is why jargon develops during theory discussions -- no because people are trying to be artsy or academic but because it's often not clear what people mean when they try to express specific ideas using words that can mean several things.  When describing something precise, your language needs to be precise.

Quote from: Spikef you like, treat D&D as a model of the system in action where the mechanics fail at certain aspects of supporting the Illusion. While the ramp up and balancing work very well in many ways (melee combat as abstract, spells, damage output of high CR monsters) it does break down, yes.

What does it mean to you to "support the Illusion"?  Can you be more specific?  Are you talking about working as a physics engine or something else?

Quote from: SpikeOf course, part of the failure falls on the specific Illusion too. High Level D&D characters are still assumed to be mortal men and women, not superheroes or demigods, yet the power level is scaled so that they are comparable to such worthies. Naturally there is a breakdown of logic when mortal men survive hits that are meant to fell lesser gods, much less their interaction with merely mortal threats (swords, guns, whatever).

Which means, in your theory...?

EDIT: This one was long, and the beginning of the end for me. Oh well.

wow, Spike.  All that to say you like Feng Shui?

EDIT::: Yes, deleting all the posts in this thread is boring.

Quote from: SpikeThe imaginary portions of the game include the setting, the character concept, the 'power level', even the monsters we fight and the weapons we use. If a longsword and a battle axe do the same damage in the mechanics, the difference between them is all in the mind. Since they are all in the mind it is possible to use the same mechanics and simply apply different labels, thus changing the imaginary portion of the game. If our 'longsword' does d8 damage and we change the label 'longsword' to 'nerf herder', suddenly our imaginary world is different.

I've been working on this line of thought for years.  Mechanics are much like "The Nothing" in the Neverending Story.  Without the imagination and imagery placed upon them there are no settings, worlds, sandboxes, or conflicts to explore.  Mechanics are nothing more than a framing point.  It's the interpretation of what the mechanics are illustrating to the players that's important.  Sometimes it's the players doing that and sometimes it's the mechanics telling players how to do it.  It becomes an argument of what mechanics provide that level of imagery right for you.  The funny thing is that as players we tie imagery so tightly to mechanics that they become one of the same in our imagination.  The placement of a word, picture, or moment that creates a word or picture means a lot more than a die roll, token, or bid.  Inevitably we create an inseperable association between the two that we believe mean the same thing.  Strip the imagery off and mechanics don't mean shit to people.  Once an association takes place between them, they become extremely important to us.

You didn't want me to respond to this part, did you, hence the goofy quoting.

Quote from: SpikeSorry, I misspoke. Playing Cops and Robbers or what have you may constrain the action based on the need to physicaly perform or mime it. Compare to simply describing it while sitting at a table, where if you can speak it, it goes. Obviously, in some cases the kids playing cops and robbers will simply say 'there is a chasm here' or 'I fly.. woosh!' so it's not a perfect constraint.

I don't think the lines are all that sharp in practice.  There is a lot of "Bang, you're dead!" in cops and robbers and a certain amount of acting out in tabletop games.  And the real point of convergence, in my experience, was playing with things like Legos, action figures, and toy cars which blends into using miniatures and a map board in a role-playing game.

The reason I'm being picky about this is that I remember very well shifting from freeform play with Legos, action figures, and toy cars into role-playing with paper, dice, rules, and maps and I've got a pretty good grasp of why the rules and dice were better than what I was doing before, at least for me.  And I think comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences with other forms of imaginative play is useful, and I think the difference between acting out what your character does, depicting it by moving an action figure or toy car around in a sandbox, depicting it by moving a miniature around on a map board, or just describing what your character does is a difference that isn't all that significant.  It's a difference in form more than function.  It's a way of conveying what's happening to everyone else involved in the game.

Quote from: SpikeAs I said: Extremely simple systems are not impossible or even wrong. As 'game design' goes, they are a failure of sorts. Notice that you have three different 'extremely simple' systems that you have used, which I assume is not the only systems used. Certainly they all count, but the point that such systems do not work in the long term (more valuable to a game designer than to a particular group of friends who just want a game for the evening, say...) due to lack of sustainability, boredom in other words. How many games in a row did you play with the coin flip? With the D4 snatch? Its not a core point to the entire 'Illusion' model, but to illustrate why more complex than simple deterministic probabilities are used. I just cheated btw  I have never used Deterministic Probabilities in a sentance and I'm only 90% certain I used it right... sounded good, though....

I could play again with the coin flip or the d20.  In part, I used multiple coin flips if I wanted more granular odds.The problem I have with those systems wasn't boredom.  It was maintaining consistency, determining how to address character actions not neatly represented by the mechanics, and some other reasons why I find more complex rules desirable.  

I guess the point I should make here is that gamers are like Goldilocks, with some systems being too complex, some systems being too simple, and some systems being just right.  It's useful to not only look at why systems can be too simple but also why they can be too complex, to understand why people find a system to be just right, and why different people have different measures of what just right is (e.g., Papa Bear's chair was too hard for Goldilocks but maybe just right for him).

Ultimately, I don't think the answer has to do with illusion.  I think it has to do with the need to figure out what happens in a way that's consistent and agreeable to everyone at the table, factoring in choices that the players make for their characters and the details of the situation.  The ideal system complexity is such that it doesn't leave the players or GM scrambling to figure out how to resolve something but not so complex that it introduces details that they don't want or need or results that conflict with what they want to do by fiat.

Thus my group has been playing D&D 3.5 and Hero but several of the players are asking to go back to the objective version of Fudge that we use, which is considerably lighter and more subjective.  Why?  Because most of them don't care enough about the benefits that the Hero System or D&D 3.5 provide with respect to character differentiation, situational modifiers, and so on to justify the substantial overhead in system complexity and time spent using the system.  That choice has nothing, as far as I can tell, to do with maintaining any sort of illusion about odds of success.

Quote from: SpikeI have never intended to claim otherwise. I think that we, as potential designers and GMs can, however, use the understanding of the relationship between the two to mitigate or shape the influence in our own benefit. In fact, we can use it to alter existing mechanics to fit Illusions that do not appear to naturally fit, which is what I started out arguing in another thread. I could use Runequest to run In Nomine with the addition of a few lines deliniating the difference between mortals and Divine/Profane. Obviously, if I want all the bells and whistles of In Nomine's setting it would be far easier to just run In Nomine, but if I just wanted to steal the theme of Angels vs Demons in the modern world, and all I had was Runequest's rules, I could do it, and easily.

But would it feel the same as running In Nominae or would it feel different?  You certainly can emulate the feel of one game in a different system, but it can require adjusting the system to work differently than it normally does.  Systems do have feels to them based on a bunch of factors, including the Pace of Decision that Brian Gleichman discussed in his old Elements of Gaming column on RPGnet.  Different games with different paces of decision can feel very different, as can games with or without death spirals and so on.  And at some point, when you change one system to behave like another, it stops feeling like it original did.

Quote from: SpikeIn action: game designers came up with Mook rules and many players saw this as good. Mook rules serve to enhance the Illusion that the characters are Action Heroes or what have you.  This is sort of 'blind chance' design, tossing mechanisms at a wall until something sticks.

Actually, I would argue that mook rules are the result of game designers who gave up trying to square certain genres with verisimilitude and they simply gave up and embraced the differences without trying to justify them in the setting.  I don't think it was "blind chance" so much as an analysis of the problem and a solution that came from that analysis.  But with respect to maintaining an illusion, rules like mook rules and metagame-heavy genre emulation rules make a sort of pact with the Devil.  

Coming from wargame simulation roots, there was always a strong tendency for games to try to rationalize genre through setting, so that genre tropes would make sense in the setting.  The problem is that stories and reality don't follow the same rules and can't coexist.  So the pact with the Devil, so to speak, was to throw verisimilitude (that is, in setting and in character justifications for system elements) under the bus in order to get stronger story-oriented genre emulation where the heroes never run out of bullets, never die, and can fight off thousands of goons without breaking a sweat.  And while they achieve that goal, they lose the people who care more about verisimilitude than about genre emulation.

In fact, we're currently going down the same path that led to the creation of the GDS model on rec.games.frp.advocacy.  It's the inevitable result of people trying to explain why certain mechanics are undesirable for the sort of game that they enjoy.

Back then, it started as a discussion about why people didn't like the story-oriented metagame focus of Theatrix and why they didn't like things like mook rules and guns that never run out of bullets.  That evolved into a dichotomy between making world-oriented decisions that make sense within the setting and to the characters in it and story-oriented play where story-oriented genre rules and cliches that aren't very realistic but that are common in stories are in full play.  Maybe you don't believe that play styles matter but that's exactly why they do.  

Quote from: SpikeWhat failures of design existed to provide this action hero style prior to mook rules? Well, D&D's inflating hit points, which is still with us is one.

It's important to note that hit points, the lack of realism in hit points, and hit point inflation, are one of the most complained about elements of D&D (along with Armor Class).  And the mistake that 4e is making is that they want to keep every level interesting when a big part of the reason why D&D has a sweet spot has to do with hit point escalation, and the way to fix it is to fix hit points.

Quote from: SpikeMook rules are arguably far more elegant ways of dealing with gross power differences than simple leveling or vast gulfs of points.

They are both more elegant and less elegant.  The mook rule hits human beings on the head with a magic wand and says, "You're not really human.  You're just a monster for the hero to kill, even though the hero is human, too."  It goes even a step further than D&D, which provides sub-human evil monsters as killable bad guys and transforms a whole class of humans, like the gaming equivalent of a Dr. Moreau, into subhuman killable bad guys.

Quote from: SpikeNow, had we had this discussion twenty years ago, maybe Mook rules would have occured through understanding the innate need to provide that illusion, and trying to model the vast power scale through brute force might never have happened. That's the ideal, anyway, and perhaps with enough refinement, other more elegant solutions might present themselves.

But mook rules don't really support an illusion, since they put a huge strain on suspension of disbelief.  They're a heavy-handed and clumbsy way way for a designer to say, "I don't want the hero to be in any real danger fighting these bad guys so rather than making the hero tougher, I'm going to make these bad guys pushovers.  I'm going to take out the Sharpie and write 'Mook 1', 'Mook 2', etc. on their forehead so the hero can gun them down without risk like silhouettes at a target range.

Quote from: SpikeOn that: Some people don't like mook rules. They provide a number of reasons for it, but I suspect we could boil them all down to what Illusion they prefer. This can be the 'we are all common men in a cold cruel world'. I do wonder if some of the 'anti-mook' D&D crowd ever play much beyond tenth level, and if they do how often they face crowds of 1 hit die monsters?

The reason I hate mook rules boil down to the fact that they don't make any sense in the setting or to the character.  I makes me feel like my character is the kid in the Last Action Hero, stuck in a bad action movie where none of the genre rules should make any sense to any of the characters.  

As for facing crowds of 1 hit-die monsters as a powerful character, I actually enjoy those encounters and enjoy Champions battles against normals with guns.  A lot of the post-10th level action in my D&D game was the PCs kicking butt and taking names of large numbers of guards and so on less powerful than they were.  What's the difference between an officially anointed mook and a 1st level commoner in a D&D game to a 10th level PC?  The commoner, in theory, could always gain levels and still seems like someone that's where the PC once was or maybe someone the PC grew up with and maybe knew as a kid.  The mook is simply a target to kill.  They are purposely designed to never be fully human like the PCs.

Quote from: SpikeGiven that you used the term earlier, I'm puzzled. I understood it to mean that if the player, at level 1, has to fight four rounds to kill a goblin, at 20th level he should fight four rounds to kill a greater demon. In other words the fact that the 'challenge' doesn't change between starting power levels and ending power levels in the system of choice (D&D used for convienence of common frame of reference), thus the balance is artificially maintained. I agree that such a balance is artificial, and in D&D's method, it is well concealed. After all that 20th level hero could chose not to worry about the Demon at all and go find orcs to slaughter, secure in the knowledge that he will win even against numberless odds.

OK.  Now I understand what you meant.  The problem with mook rules is that a mook is designed to never be a challenge to anyone.  Their job is to fall down and die, but only after the hero yells, "Bang!' at them.

I suppose I should point out that I like playing the competent hero and I don't mind the PCs being at the top of the food chain.  And I find it incredibly refreshing when a plan works out and the PCs trounce their opponents easily.  Again, this is a style issue that we can't really discuss unless you acknowledge style differences.  

For example, years ago, there was a thread on "GM Biases", which are things GMs do because they think it makes the game better, more interesting, or more fun but they actually ruin the game for many players.  Here is a condensed version of the things people threw out that I put together for a different conversation:

   In 1996, rec.games.frp.advocacy came up with a list of GM biases that might be useful to think about, with regard to Steven Marsh's article:

• "Fair Play" - If the PCs try hard, then things will work out.
• "Creativity Rewards" - More inventive solutions are more likely to succeed.
• "Favorite NPC's" - The GM protects favored NPCs from the players.
• "Interesting Times" - Things are never easy or go as planned for PCs.
• "No Free Lunch" - The PCs have to earn or pay for anything good.
• "Appropriate Challenge" - All opponents are challenging but defeatable.
• "Speed is Life" -  The PCs are not given time to plan.
• "Cruel to be Kind" - Struggling and abused PCs entertain players.
• "He Who Lives By The Sword..." - PCs are punished for using violence.
• "Nice Guys Finish Last" - No act of kindness goes unpunished.
• "Comedy Is King" - Comedy everywhere entertains the players.
• "Adversarial" - Every challenge should nearly or actually kill the PCs.

Sources:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=546691%24h6m%40apakabar.cc.columbia.edu&output=gplain

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=546o9h%24mbh%40nntp5.u.washington.edu&output=gplain

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=54pjao%24ddu%40nadine.teleport.com

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=54g6ba%243fs_010%40mighty-jack.superspies.tpc&output=gplain[/i]

Every time I've posted that list since, someone has said, "Hey, some of those are actually good GMing techniques and I use them all the time!"  If people are bothering to read this, I suspect I'll see some of that here.  But these were posted by people who felt that they ruined games for them.  And almost all of them, like mook rules too, are about trying to force the game to work the way stories, movies, board games, or whatever work instead of putting the focus on making sense in the setting and in character.  They are attempts to borrow techniques using in fiction writing and overtly port them into a role-playing game, where they don't always work because, unlike a story where the author has control over how the characters react, the players can notice the man behind the curtain and have the game spoiled by it.  It breaks the Illusion, so to speak.

Quote from: SpikeBut: to me, the GM has a purpose that is quite clear. If you are going to give his role to the rules, then you might as well play a video game. The dice also serve a purpose aside from just randomization. I am increasingly of the opinion that one major purpose of using dice for random outcomes is to provide a social lubricant to prevent friction within the group from failure and 'bad outcomes'. That, however, is neither here nor there in this discussion. Not Germaine.

I agree that's one purpose of dice.  But they work because they are an objective arbiter.  And many groups trust GMs to do a great many things dicelessly and by fiat so long as they believe that the GM is an objective arbiter.  And the rules serve as an objective arbiter as well.  But the dice also serve as a source of surprise for everyone at the table.  If I order lunch off of a menu, I'm not going to be surprised when it comes.  If I tell the waiter to surprise me, then I can be surprised when it comes.  Dice provide a non-decision source of surprise in the game and many people find surprise desirable.  In fact, that's one of the reasons why I fund the unpredictability of the heroes never dying that I not only don't like absolute script immunity in RPGs.  And, to be honest, I find it a liability in most fiction, which is why I have less and less of a use for fiction as time goes on.

Quote from: SpikeBUT: in the boiled down d6 game, or even in mechanic's free 'open mic' storytelling, the GM doesn't really need to be there. The GM is part of the mechanics, just as the dice rolls are. It doesn't need to be complex, nor does complexity or simplicity eliminate the functional elements of a GM.

The biggest role for the GM, in my opinion, is to play the NPCs.  And if that makes the GM a part of the mechanics, then the other players are part of the mechanics, too.  That's not necessarily a bad way of looking at the game, either.  My point was that with a sufficiently large pool of players and a sufficiently complex (computer managed) setting that operated like a real place, you wouldn't necessarily need a GM to do most of the things a GM does.

Quote from: SpikeThat isn't even a point, its merely an explanation about why we tend to gravitate to more complex rule systems for long term use. There is a point to that, certainly, but not to this particular discussion. That's one reason I've been trying to point out that we keep leaving the OP, getting caught up in arguements that are not actually important.

But, see, I don't thing the trend it to gravitate toward more complex rule systems for long term use.  Barring, for the sake of argument, long term freeform play (which does happen), in my experience, it's a Goldilocks issue.  Each group (or even each person) has their "just right" and that's what they need for long term use.  And the further they get from that, to the light or heavy, the more the system will grate on them and that grating will get worse over time.

I ran a D&D 3.5 campaign over a year ago and would likely not do it again because it was too heavy.  I'm finding Hero too heavy, too.  And the players keep asking to go back to Fudge.  And we played a campaign just as long as those Hero and D&D campaigns using Fudge.  But the version of Fudge we use is more objective and crunchy than what some people use.  

For years, my group didn't really use published systems.  We used a series of homebrews, sometimes variants of the previous homebrew and sometimes we'd make substantial changes.  So I'm very familiar with what it was like trying to find the "just right" for my group, and that being too simple or too complex is a problem.  How do I know that D&D 3.5 and Hero are too complex for us beyond the length of time it takes to do certain things and the players asking to go back to Fudge?  I know because we ignore a lot of rules.  I almost never worried about flat-footed AC when I ran D&D.  I tried playing Hero a few years ago with someone who had played with experts in the system and I realized just how much we skip or do wrong.  Combat actually runs fast for us in D&D and Champions because there is a lot we don't do or ignore.  That's the sign of the flip-side of your argument -- a system being too heavy.  Similarly, tacking house rules on to a light system to codify certain things that come up again and again suggests that the system is too light.  But the bottom line here is that it's not necessarily a one way street toward heavy for long term games.  It's about finding that magical Goldilocks point where everything is "just right".

Quote from: SpikeYes, you can reduce the game down to very very simple mechanics. Yes it works. So why don't all games use very simple mechanics? Why don't they provide a single D6 roll and a chance of success or failure?

Do you want me to answer that?

• Verisimilitude: People want the results produce by the rules and how they interact with the dice to produce outcomes that seem sensible and plausible.  If the rules are insufficiently complex to mechanically represent the details of a situation and consider the factors at play, then the results will not feel right.  Note that, as per your GM being part of the rules comment above, that GMs often pick up the slack in this regard when using light systems.
  
• Consistency: When you determine how to resolve similar situations from scratch every time, you can introduce inconsistencies in how things are resolved.  It's also faster to do the same thing you did the last time you figured it out than trying to figure it out all over again.
  
• Record Keeping: Rules and standard ability lists provide a convenient and compact way to record characters and reference the recorded information quickly and accurately.  The abilities recorded need to interact with the rules as per the verisimilitude point above.
  
• Surprise: People need the dice mechanics to be rich enough to produce verisimilitude but also allow for surprise.  At the one end, wildly random results destroy verisimilitude.  At the other end, insufficiently random or rich results are predictable and destroy surprise (and can also damage verisimilitude if the predictability is implausible).
  
• Common Frame of Reference: By acting as a proxy for the settings physics and avoiding subjectivity in areas where the players and GM have assumption clash problems, the rules can act as a common frame of reference through which everyone can independently assess the situation and the odds of success or failure without arguing over whose perspective is more valid.  This is the first part of the social lubricant function.  But note that the less assumption class a group suffers from (some groups are very much of like mind about almost everything), the less the rules need to serve this function, and it's long been my feeling that groups that happily play long-term games with very light rules systems (or none at all) seem to not have assumption clash problems, either because they are all of like mind or the players are willing to defer to the GM's vision of the setting and how it works.
  
• Ideas: By providing lists of abilities, options, and modifiers, the rules can actually give the players ideas and guidance about what they should do or what choices they should make.  For example, seeing disarming rules in a system might give the player the idea to disarm an enemy instead of just hitting them.
  
• Blame: By having the dice determine success or failure and degree of success or failure means that nobody is responsible for deciding when a character fails.  But in order to accept the dice in this role, players need the ability to manipulate the odds, which can be done through modifiers and rules.  This is the second part of the social lubricant function and, as with the others, the less of a problem the group has with this concern, the less the rules need to pick up this function.

I'm sure there is other stuff I'm missing, but those should be the key points.

Quote from: SpikeI disagree. You mention that Bond has a larger gap between himself and his opponents. Not so. Most of the people Bond faces are not opponents, thus his obviously greater odds. In any Bond movie he typically only has one, maybe two people arrayed against him that matter. Against THOSE people, his chances of success are reasonably close to Mal's chances of success. Mal doesn't fight those people. Mal fights the Guys that, in our super-simple system, Bond doesn't even roll against. If Bond DOES roll against them, thats because they outnumber him by enough to count as a threat.

Well, I think you are now folding, bending, spindling, and mutilating plain English here and are drifting well into Forge "special English for story nuts" territory here.  The four goons on black motorcycles that are chasing James Bond are certainly his opponents, even if they have little chance of defeating him.  And to say that they don't matter or those encounters don't matter begs the question of why they are in the movie, then.  Of course those encounters matter.  That's how we get to see how good James Bond is.  As for the one or two people arrayed against him that really matter, even they are rarely a real threat or as good as he is, not counting the last movie.  During the Roger Moore years, it reached it's apex with Jaws being, in essence, a bit of comedy.  And correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Bond caught in a physical trap of some sort more often than not, though he even avoids his share of those, rather than being defeated in single combat?  And even when he is captured, he tends to confidently escape, does he not?

Quote from: SpikeOr are you suggesting that the main villians of a Bond peice are not a challenge to him either? That's so far off track for this discussion that we'd have to kill this line of talk with fire.

In many cases, I think thats true.  Again, that reached its apex during the later Roger Moore years, though there was plenty of it with Brosnan, too.  The other Bonds were a bit more plausible.  But that's fine.  I'm a fan of adventures that end with a "boss" that's a real challenge for the PCs and I'm fine if they do lose during that last encounter, because the game is going to end, anyway.  There is a reason why video games are often structured like that, too.  My problem is with the idea that every encounter should be a boss-level encounters.  It's like making a James Bond movie where he runs into one Man with the Golden Gun after another every 15 minutes or so.  There is a reason why they don't make the movies like that.

Quote from: SpikeBond rolls against the Man with the Golden Gun. Mal rolls against nameless thugs in a bar. Against the appropriate opponent their chances of success are reasonably on par. For the purpose of discussion anyway. Note that I'm not trying to claim a universal 'probability of success'.

And I think that's wrong.  The battle with the Man with the Golden Gun is a climax scene and that translates well into a role-playing scene were the PCs can actually die.  Mal fighting a thug in a bar is not a climax.  In fact, in one case, it was a throwaway joke that opened an episode.  I don't think those two things should have the same chances of success or be on part because that would mean that the throwaway fight with some pro-Alliance thugs in a bar carries the same dramatic weight as a climactic battle against The Man with the Golden Gun.

Quote from: SpikeAs I always say when this sort of thing comes up: sum up what YOU think my points are the way YOU see them and we'll go from there. I am trying my best to illuminate my points and use examples.

Well, it's not my job to sum up for you.

More on the rest of your reply when I can get to it.

Quote from: SpikeThe dice we roll, the rules we use, even the role of GM, are all mechanics used to resolve actions.  These mechanics are almost entirely interchangeable with the imaginary portions of the game.

The thing you seem to be skipping is that the input from the mechanics affect the imaginary portions of the game, thus as the input differs, so does what happens in the imaginary portion of the game and how that feels.

Quote from: SpikeThe imaginary portions of the game include the setting, the character concept, the 'power level', even the monsters we fight and the weapons we use. If a longsword and a battle axe do the same damage in the mechanics, the difference between them is all in the mind. Since they are all in the mind it is possible to use the same mechanics and simply apply different labels, thus changing the imaginary portion of the game. If our 'longsword' does d8 damage and we change the label 'longsword' to 'nerf herder', suddenly our imaginary world is different.

Thus is it possible, even easy, to deal with problems arising from an unpalettable 'setting' or 'power level' if you like the mechanics that underlie them by simply changing labels until the imaginary portions are closer to what is desired.

That doesn't really fix the problem, especially in a long term game, any more than changing the name of "vagrants" and "bums" to "homeless people" made people want to sit next to one on the subway.  And a player can imagine that there is a difference between an axe and a longsword all they want but time and experience will demonstrate that there is no difference.  

Let me explain in more detail, and why this is particularly a problem for players who pay from an in character perspective.

A player's sense of how the game world works is not simply based on their imagination but also on their experiences interacting with that world.  Players experience the setting and interact with it.  They don't simply observe it or imagine it.  Thus a player could test, formally or accidentally, the effectiveness of an axe compared to a longsword simply by looking at how each perform in a long string of combats.  If the setting guide and the player's imagination say they are different but the rules say they are the same, and the incidents that are produced by those rules say that they are the same, that will create a cognitive dissonance between the belief that they are different and the reality, as experience by the player and their character during the game, that they are not.  Who are you going to believe?  The GM and the setting write-up or your own lying eyes and experiences?

Willing suspension of disbelief is the willingness to ignore minor glitches and pretend that he imaginary environment is real.  The more the imaginary environment behaves unbelievably or inconsistently, the harder it becomes for many people to maintain suspension of disbelief.  

Watch the movies Last Action Hero and The Truman Show for really good illustrations for what it feels like to have your experiences conflict with your beliefs in character.  And go back to that GM Biases list and you'll spot a lot of this there, too.

Quote from: SpikeThe imaginary portion does not require mechanics, and to a certain degree the mechanics underlying any given imaginary portion of any given game are interchangeable with some work.

I don't think that's true at all, unless "some work" includes some fairly substantial changes to the systems in question.

Quote from: SpikeHowever, changing the mechanics invariably will have an effect on the imaginary part of the game, though by understanding the relationship between the two the effect can be predicted or mitigated.

This understanding can be used to prevent design errors caused by forcing imaginary changes through purely mechanical means.   Likewise, one does not have to scrap a liked imaginary game due to dislike of the mechanics, though this appears to be intuitively understood by many gamers.

I'm not really sure what you are getting at here.  Like I said, I played a very large percentage (probably greater than 50%) of my games over the years with homebrew rules, so this isn't an experience i"m familiar with.

Quote from: SpikeExample of bad scaling due to forced mechanics: High powered White Wolf (aberrant, Exalted, Scion past the Hero level (by anecdote...)), with vast pools of dice used to garauntee success vs merely mortal threats, the game rapidly grows uplayable due to bulk and systemic errors from pushing a system beyond its means.

Well, I think there are other motives for that.

Quote from: SpikeCorrective action: Retaining the WW WoD mortals scale of character design, instead scale back merely mortal threats to negligability or to nuisance levels, rather than scaling up the heroes. For example: mortal opponents are given combat dice pools based on size of group, difficulty penalities are reduced: where a mortal might suffer a -10 dice pool penalty for standing on a tree branch during a hurricane, the hero only suffers a -2.  Doing so allows the system to be used within tolerances while still providing the players with the imaginary power of more than human characters.

Yet what happens if you want to play a mortal game in that setting or want to cross over with another WW game or setting?

Quote from: SpikeExample of Muddled Scaling: D&D. At low levels D&D does a reasonable job of portraying mortal adventurers. At high level D&D's system functions perfectly well at portraying demigods at war.  However, a number of glaring 'issues' come into play when observed critically, particularly at higher levels. Players generally expect their characters to be ordinary mortal beings. However, in regards to the damage their characters can sustain this is obviously not the case. A single arrow can barely scratch a comparative wimp, falls from great height are reduced to annoyances.

I'm not sure that players expect their characters to be ordinary mortal beings at higher levels and, frankly, that's a poor assumption to make given the system.  And if a single arrow can kill a hero with one shot, doesn't that break your low lethality concern?

Bear in mind that in the design notes for Man-to-Man (which became the combat system for GURPS), the designers states that they purposely reduced the lethality from realistic levels to make the game fun.  I would argue that the players who want to be able to fell a 15th level hero with a single arrow do not really want heroic demigods of the sort that D&D offers and that they players who do want that sort of nigh-invincible character are not really interested in having their 15th level hero grab his chest and yell, "I've been hit!" and die.  But then we're back to style differences, aren't we?

Quote from: SpikeCorrective Action: Leaving the basic system intact leaves few options. Obviously environmental damage, falls and the like, could be expressed in terms of percentage of damage.  Rather than scale up damage from combat by multiple attacks, make damage boosting a part of the leveling process, this still allows for a single arrow to change the fight.  While this still does little about the 'longsword to the head, repeat ad nauseum until bored' when facing low level opponents, it makes it easier to express the pitiful damage as simply a difference in skills, the lower level combatants simply lack the ability to meaningfully get past the higher level combatant's defense, except in large numbers.

For a sufficiently magiced and feated up character in D&D 3.5, a single arrow still can change the fight, especially if the GM doesn't make every battle a battle against a single large opponent.  But if you change the pace of decision in D&D substantially, you've changed the feel of the game substantially.  It has a fairly low pace of decision on purpose, even if some people don't like it.

Quote from: SpikeExample of Good Scaling due to clear understanding of desired imaginary power level: Feng Shui. While the basic mechanics are easily scaleable to a fairly broad level of play, the Mook rules firmly place Feng Shui into 'action hero' territory, and elegantly at that.  While not without difficulties, placing the game firmly into a specific 'style' was not one of them.

Corrective Action: None.

No, but it does toss verisimilitude out the window and that's a mighty big baby to be throwing out with the bath water.  Elegant is not the word I'd use to describe it.  Blunt would be more appropriate, I think, like driving a screw into a piece of wood with a hammer.  Yeah, it's in there but you've made a mess of some other things in the process.

Quote from: SpikeUsing Understanding of relationship between mechanics and imagination using Feng Shui: If we wanted to use Feng Shui to play a grittier, lower powered game, we would not have to alter the basic mechanics. However, removal of the mook rules, and the attendant subrules that support the Mook rules would be our primary step. Thus no 'carnival of carnage'.  Depending upon how gritty you wanted to take it, stripping out the Fu rules, the gun attributes and the magic and supernatural chapters still leaves you with a solid dice mechanic and a somewhat dull, but serviceable character creation system.  Presuming that you want to take it this far, the only necessary step would be to add in an expirence system not based on Feng Shui sites.

But once you remove the mook rules, you can't really support the action hero tone any more, can you.  You either need to put the mook rules back or you need to do what other systems do to get it back.  I mean, at some point, if you strip all of the paint off of the Mona Lisa, you aren't dealing with the Mona Lisa anymore.  You are dealing with a blank canvas and painting something else on it.

Quote from: SpikeGoing up in power levels would be a little more involved. For minor differences in power level making mooks easier to kill (a la, carnival of carnage) for everyone is a good scaling mechanic.  Higher level jumps, say to god levels of power are a bit more labor intensive, but mostly consist of changing labels. Guns and other weapons become 'artifacts', ordinary mortals don't even qualify as mooks anymore, and so forth.

So the whole point of your argument is that it's better to adjust a system so that the power level, no matter how heroic, is the norm rather than to increase the characters power level relative to an objective base?  OK.  So what happens if I want to mix or match or run a game with a Jimmy Olsen and Superman?  By turning normal people into ants, are they even playable as a PC?

Quote from: SpikeThis can be done with any reasonably well designed game, particularly if it does not cover a wide range of 'power levels'.  Changing other imaginary parts of the game tend to be even easier, and in many cases already done on a wide basis: For example changing the setting is done with various levels of completeness from D&D's 'we changed the name' to Chaosium's various games using the house system (call of cthuthlu vs elfquest).

The changes to Chaosium's BRP was pretty substantial in some cases.  And I think it's interesting that other companies rejected the basic system retooled for different settings in favor of generic systems with an objective baseline in common with all settings.  And at least part of the reason for that is that GMs and players do like playing crossovers.  When one setting or version of a system isn't compatible, it makes using material from one setting in another or actually moving characters between them difficult.

Early on, when White Wolf was releasing their various games, the rules weren't quite compatible and they tried to maintain the official line that the games weren't compatible with each other, even though lots of groups tried it.  Why?  Because it made sense to be able to move things between the various World of Darkness games.  And that's why the default setting of GURPS is multidimensional.

Quote from: SpikeAddendum: I much prefer having one go to word like Illusion, as long as I explain it adequately in the beginning.

Don't do it.  Insisting on having your argument hinge on once confusing jargon term is a surefire way to make sure people endlessly don't understand the points you are trying to make.  Easy to type?  Sure.  Useful for conveying your meaning?  No.

I suppose the one thing I should add here is have you looked at Scale?  Scale was Steffan O'Sullivan's solution to the problem of trying to write a fairy supplement for GURPS that was normed for normal human scale.  The idea is that there is a sliding set of scales and you can norm the average to any particular encounter or set of tasks to a particular scale that will shift how everything is zero centered.  Is that sort of what you are trying to suggest, Spike?