Quote from: Christopher Brady;859800Again, then what's the point of the 'numbers'?  Why not just do what Fudge/FATE does and give a word ranking, Legendary, Great, Good, Mediocre, Fair, Terrible or whatever, and leave it at that.  By using numbers, you're adding a level of detail and precision that frankly, from what I'm being told, is pointless.

It won't matter if someone has a 32 or 132 in a stat and the opponent has a 31 or 1 in whatever stat that's being used to counter, if they can push little levers around to get an advantage to the point of winning.

Then why have even level descriptor stats then by that reasoning?

From the sounds of it. What they are describing is that you can try to outmaneuver someone with any level of skill disparity. But. The levels of those stills inform as to how likely it is to have succeeded?

IE: I have a 10. They have a 50. Im going to have to do some heavy work to match that. Whereas outplanning a 20 would not be so hard.

It's not like you can just pull any old thing out of your ass. It means you have to arrange the situation in your favor in some way for each rank above you that you want to beat.

Quote from: Simlasa;859802Over the weekend I got the chance to play in a game of Stalker... based on the Russian scifi story Roadside Picnic. It's a diceless game, I think the first of that type I'd ever played. Conflicts seemed to be decided by the GM based on a combination of PC attributes, GM narrative-judgement and how well the Player describes/roleplays the action.
All in all though I can't say the end result was any more or less satisfying then if we'd used dice/cards/jenga. All but one of the PCs died... two in PVP... and I've got no gripes.
The only thing I didn't care for was that descriptions by Players effected results of actions... this led to some Players going full-thespian and got pretty silly in a PVP situation where two of them were attempting to outdo each other with florid descriptions. At that point I really wished they'd just roll some dice and be done with it.

That's the sort of thing that worries me about Diceless games. I never studied martial arts, but I've had friends who did and who played games. They could describe all sorts of fancy moves they learned: "I block his X with my Y, then bring my left leg up and around and connect with his weak spot Z..." "The moves he's attempting to make is impossible because of balance and the leg muscles... blah blah blah." "In the real world Style X always defeats Style Y." "No it doesn't!" (Then we get into a long argument comparing style dick sizes.) In a descriptive game one can't compete against such stuff. It takes a very good GM to ignore such florid prose and get on with the game.

In a way it makes me think of the stuff you see in the Marvel comic books and movies. The characters and their powers often come out as a giant array of rock-paper-scissors. Character A can defeat almost anyone, unless confronted by Character Z. etc. Then you can get into those endless argument about "Can this superhero ever defeat that superhero/villain?" "He's smart, he'll find a way to neutralize this advantage..." Just saying it all comes down to comparing two broadly defined numbers seems, I dunno, not right, or cheap, just merely a good place to start.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;859811It's not like you can just pull any old thing out of your ass. It means you have to arrange the situation in your favor in some way for each rank above you that you want to beat.

That is what I was guessing.

Quote from: Doughdee222;859840In a descriptive game one can't compete against such stuff. It takes a very good GM to ignore such florid prose and get on with the game.

None of the guys in our game were drawing from actual technical knowledge of combat... more like referencing tropes from action movies and wuxia films. I think the GM was pretty good... I trust his decisions were fair... I'm just not sure I want to listen to dueling adjectives every time there is conflict... or have things happen because they fit someone's idea of dramatic narrative (non-random).

I read through most of Marvel Universe Role-playing Game and played it once at a convention. It left me feeling very underwhelmed. It took me a while to figure out why. It just felt too meta.
The "resource" management took me out of character and instead made me feel more like someone contributing to the overall story then doing what would make sense for the character. It was also annoying when you saved "energy" to defend yourself or something and you didn't get attacked.
This actually moved the game on par with some "story games" where you play characters at a far more 'meta' level -- the trade off that these have that Marvel Universe Role-playing Game didn't is that you have more overall narrative influence.
This might have worked better if you had "base" abilities that are always at a certain level, but you can push beyond your standard "strength rating" with energy. (I admit I may be miss-remembering mechanics here.)

I feel like there is a continuum of character immersion here (for myself at least).

character immersion
meta/resource management -> heavy dice and minis -> light dice -> Amber style diceless

Character immersion isn't the only kind of immersion of course. I also consider Story/narrative immersion and tactical immersion.
(For the last one, just give me a good boardgame and I'm happiest.)

I ran a game of Amber DRPG about 8 months ago, and it was great. Course it helps that I've probably read all those books like a dozen times.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;859800Which completely invalidates the point of the numbers.

What planet are you from? You seem never to have played the games we play on Earth!

The "valid point" of the numbers is to provide a context for strategy, not to reduce strategy to irrelevance. That's how it has been since before RPGs came along, and how it is in every RPG I've ever seen.