Quote from: Pierce InverarityAs for me, to my horror I realize that when it comes to RPGs I'm a very tolerant pinko liberal whose only hard-and-fast rule is that a game should be played as, uh, nature intended. (The games I dislike were obviously not designed by nature, hence shouldn't be played.)

So, if I'm playing T2K I wouldn't mind knowing my guy's encumbrance, the recoil of his G-3, its range and jamming percentage, and the number of feet/sec he will sink as he stupidly hangs on to it while drowning.

In Everway, not so much.

Even playing T2K, I doubt I'd need all that detail most of the time (but I agree that having it sets the tone for game.

Speak to me of Everway, however: I'm not familiar with it; what little I know suggests it's a very non-standard game, especially in terms of mechanical resolution.

Question 1: Does Everway have any drowning or falling rules? (based on what I know of it, I'd guess "no")

Question 2: If there was a drowning or falling situation where the outcome was important to the game and a near-thing, how would Everway handle it (as I understand it, there are 3 resolution options)?

Cheers,
-E.

Sorry, -E, I was on a tear. I had some further choice abuse for my follow-up, but I'll have to put it on tap for the next flamefest.

Kumbaya, my lord, kumbaya....

My point: (perhaps has already been made)

Not all games need rules for modeling the consequences of physical danger.

Many roleplaying games lack physical danger entirely, or lack the consequences, or deal with it another way. Like in Everway- you can have high fantasy and all that that entails, but such things are dealt with using an method.

And thats fine.

What isn't fine is the idea that doing it the traditional way which involves characters reacting to danger through the use of their statistics, skills or abilities (perhaps they have to swim to avoid drowning, or maybe they get a saving throw, or a reflex check to avoid falling, or to avoid death by falling) is "socially destructive".

"Socially Destructive" is a direct quote from the forge. There's a whole library of moronic quotes that the chin waggers agree to over there, but this one was a big one.

Quote from: CalithenaSorry, -E, I was on a tear. I had some further choice abuse for my follow-up, but I'll have to put it on tap for the next flamefest.

Kumbaya, my lord, kumbaya....

No harm, no foul.

Quote from:  Abyssal MawMy point: (perhaps has already been made)
Not all games need rules for modeling the consequences of physical danger.
Many roleplaying games lack physical danger entirely, or lack the consequences, or deal with it another way.
And thats fine.
What isn't fine is the idea that doing it the traditional way is "socially destructive".

Agreed -- no one's jumped up and said drowning and falling rules are socially destructive *here* (the search function in other places seems to be down, so I'm not sure if folks have said it elsewhere).

But, since I'm not familiar with Everway, I'm not really clear on what the workable alternative to the traditional method is.

At a minimum, I think a resolution system should (caveat: at desired abstraction level)

• Account for the level of difficulty of the task
• Account for the level of ability of the attempter
• Specify a chance success or failure based on 1 & 2
• Align that chance with genre expectations / real-life
• Provide a resolution mechanism to determine if the character succeeded or failed

Does Everway not do some or all of these?  Does it do it in a way that's satisfying?

I think Risus meets these standards because of its ultra-high abstraction level... it relies almost completely on the GM to align the chance of success -- which I see as a weakness, but within the spirit of the game.

Maybe Everway's such a different animal all of the criteria above and the assumptions they're based on are out the window.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: some fucking cultistProceduralist
The rules explicitly organize the interactions of the people, with little reference to the fictional stuff. Examples: Primetime Adventures, Universalis, The Nighttime Animals Save the World.

Technical Simulationist
The rules work on the pretense that they directly represent the fictional stuff. They leave organization of the players' interaction strictly unspoken. (Of course they do organize interaction, but indirectly and often without consideration. I consider this pretense socially destructive.) Examples: GURPS, Vampire: the Masquerade, Ars Magica.

Effectivist
The rules refer extensively to the fictional stuff but don't pretend to represent it directly. They organize the players' interactions explicitly, but based on the fictional stuff. Examples: Dogs in the Vineyard, Over the Edge, The Mountain Witch. "

Notice the 'correct' RPGs and how they differ from the 'incorrect' ones.

Quote from: -E.No harm, no foul.



Agreed -- no one's jumped up and said drowning and falling rules are socially destructive *here* (the search function in other places seems to be down, so I'm not sure if folks have said it elsewhere).

But, since I'm not familiar with Everway, I'm not really clear on what the workable alternative to the traditional method is.

At a minimum, I think a resolution system should (caveat: at desired abstraction level)

• Account for the level of difficulty of the task
• Account for the level of ability of the attempter
• Specify a chance success or failure based on 1 & 2
• Align that chance with genre expectations / real-life
• Provide a resolution mechanism to determine if the character succeeded or failed

Does Everway not do some or all of these?  Does it do it in a way that's satisfying?

The assumptions of Everway start to get weird at the third point. And then 4th and 5th don't actually apply. The outcome would be handled in what I would call a "negotiated resolution" between GM and players.

My other point I want to make has a bit to do with irony.

If you have rules for such things, you don't have to suddenly focus on them, counter to the prevailing idea that if you have such rules, thats what your game "must therefore" be about. In fact it's the opposite. And the evidence is the most popular game in the world:

No, not D&D.

... I'm actually talking about World of Warcraft.

Ok, World of Warcraft has rules for environmental dangers, including drowning, falling, climbing, getting burned by lava, and all of that. The reason why, is obvious. By having that set up as a constant, they don't have to focus on it. If you try and swim across the ocean, there's no GM that has to suddenly appear and make a bunch of ad hoc decision about whether or not it can be done. There's no complaints from players who think they 'should' be able to swim across the ocean, or stay underwater long enough to mine for 10 loads of ore or whatever. No GM appears. You just accept the idea that "when my character goes underwater, I have until the little blue bar runs out. Then my character start to drown. "

But let's say the character wants to stay underwater anyway?

World of Warcraft just gives him choices: You can get a spell or item that increases the time you are able to spend underwater. You can be the undead race which can stay underwater a long time. You can increase your stats and use that.  

Is World of Warcraft then accurately described as a game about being underwater?

Quote from: Abyssal MawNotice the 'correct' RPGs and how they differ from the 'incorrect' ones.

Gee, do they make up asinine jargon for everything?

Proceduralist And what game doesn't follow some procedure? You know, roll these dice based off of x and y add/compare/target number,ect and get your result. Hell, even diceless games have some sort of procedure....

Technical Simulationist Your simulating something, but only technically? With him talking about it being done without consideration and this pretense [is] socially destructive, perhaps he just needed something better than Tough Shit.

Effectivist Yes, because the word 'effective' isn't being used with bias here, oh no. No sir. Move along. Nothing to see......

He sure likes the words explicitly and organize. I do not think they mean what he thinks they mean.

Out of all the RPGs on my shelves, Praedor has probably the crunchiest rules for falling and "other perils" (drowning, starvation, burns...), but then again that does fit in with the rather grim and lethal setting of the game. You get to make one Jump check, with the difficulty determined by whether you leap deliberately (2d6), fall accidentally (3d6) or are thrown off (4d6): success not only reduces the damage roll by one die for each five points below the skill rating, but it also allows you to decide which hit location takes the brunt of the blow as you hit the ground. The basic damage is rolled with 1d6 plus another d6 for every two meters of the fall, and all the dice explode. To put that in perspective, an average character has 40 HP and would be killed instantly by, say, a 12-point hit to the head.

Now compare that with Nobilis, in which it's safe to simply assume that when a character falls from a plane, a common mortal would in all likelihood die instantly, an uncommon mortal might be saved by "a tangle in the skein of Fate" but still suffer severe injuries, and a Noble could quite possibly walk away unscathed from the crash site. Basically, if the impact is enough to kill an ordinary human being, it will cause an undefended and unresisting Noble a Deadly Wound unless she has remembered to perform the proper Rites. The various defensive powers modify that result, as usual.

So yes, the appropriate details and grit and crunch very much depend on the game in question.

Quote from: Abyssal MawNotice the 'correct' RPGs and how they differ from the 'incorrect' ones.

That's hilarious -- thanks! Can you post a link?

Man those gamers! Without explicit rules to organize their social interaction, they just can't get it together, can they? Buncha morons... Good thing we have games that recognize that and provide that framework or it'd just be one dysfunctional event after another...

Cheers,
-E.

http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=36

I've been playing RPGs for about 17 years and I reckon the times I've required rules for urinating on demand exceed the times I've required rules for falling, drowning and fire... combined!

So I kinda find it funny when people try and tell me an RPG isn't "complete" if it doesn't have particular rules.  Really?  Complete for whose game?  Yours, or mine?

Quote from: BalbinusOk, firstly disliking falling and drowning rules has nothing to do with being into story games or anything like that, as best I can tell I'm the only person here who dislikes them and I mostly play BRP based games.

For me it's simple, in actual play these things do arise, but not so often that I remember the rules for them off by heart.  In actual play, stopping the action to look up a drowning or falling rule damages pacing and flow, which I view as critical to a fun session.  Therefore, in practice I make a ruling and we roll the dice and move on.

They add no value to my games, they take up space in the book, are often quite lengthy to implement, and are dull.  I never use them, therefore because I feel that ideally the world should cater to my idiosyncracies I'd like to see them left out of all future games.

I am behind this description 100%.

Basically I don't give a crap about any rules that aren't going to be consistently and regularly applied over the normal course of play.

If it isn't, then it's not worth my time to have to look the damn thing up, and I'm more likely to just make something up on the spot based on whatever makes sense in my head, just so I don't have to spend 20 minutes digging through a rulebook.  

I want a concise basic structure that underlines the game so that when these sorts of situations do come up, I can decide a sensible way of resolving them, because the underlying framework supports being bent to just about any direction.

The example given of World of Warcraft is a load of fucking bollocks.  A computer RPG has the advantage of being, well, on a goddamn computer.  Meaning that it can calculate the most superfluous and complex of calculations on the fly without slowing gameplay down.

Take those same calculations that WoW uses for falling or swimming or drowning or swimming and drowning in lava or whatever the fuck, and apply them to a tabletop gaming session and you'll have a bloody mess of Alternate Realities type proportions.

I'm curious about these game sessions where you needed rules for urinating on demand. I've never needed that in a game session. Can we have a description of these sessions?

I believe there was a game session when a player wanted his character to take a giant steaming dump in a rival's helm, but I decided no dice roll was needed for that - you want to do it, you can do it, it's not that important.

Falling rules I've used a few times, PCs tend to fight and climb in high places, so it happens. Drowning? Not so much. As a player, I've had my characters be like me and stay on God's own good green earth, and as a GM... well, drowning is just a fucking lame way for PCs to go, so I wouldn't inflict it on them.

Rules for fire we needed a few times because PCs like setting fire to things, especially enemies.

On the whole I'm comfortable just making up the rules for it on the spot, the only reason you need written rules rather than GM rulings is for consistency, and while the situations do come up, they're not more than once or twice in a campaign. By the time they come up again I've a new game group, so if my ruling is inconsistent with the previous one nobody knows

GrimGent,

What's Praedor like?  I've never seen a copy and it always sounded quite cool.