Personality mechanics and stimuli magnitude
Peter Knutsen
I've given up finding a particularly appropriate spot to jump in and
say this, so I'll start a new thread.
The discussion of personality mechanics seems to focus on pretty
ordinary situations, that is ordinary for adventurers
(prettier-than-average woman hired by the evil mastermind to distract
a key PC, delay him for a day or two)
I'm perhaps not to worried about those. Rather I'm thinking about the
situations where the character is subject to an emotional stimuli of
extreme magnitude, like being propositioned by the One-In-A-Billion
Gorgeous Babe ("My astrologer has just told me I'll turn sterile in
ten months. Please impregnate me...?"), or seeing a dragon.
It seems to me that the anti-PM posters assume all emotional stimuli
are of a rather low magnitude, and neglect to think about the rare
extreme cases.
A pattern wholly inconsistent with what we understand as human nature,
treating attractive NPCs of the appropriate sex exactly the same was
as average appearance NPCs are treated, is of course problematic. But
as long as there is no unrealistic pattern, but some percievable
difference, there is no need for mechanics.
I'm more worried about the extreme cases. I've never been
propositioned by the One-In-A-Billion Gorgeous Babe. I can't know how
I would react. I've never seen a dragon. I've never seen a dragon
knowing that it was looking for me, intending to kill me slowly. I
can't know how I would react. Under such extreme circumstances.
Many roll mechanics give some degree of success grade. Some systems
discern between Normal Success and Critical Success. Storyteller and
FFRE both offer multiple success grades. In those systems, an NPC
trying to seduce a PC, or barter with a PC, or whatever, might make a
very, very, very good roll. Through a combination of high skill and
sheer luck (the more skilled he is, the less extreme his luck needs to
be), the NPC subjects the PC to a very, very well executed
manipulation attempt.
--
Peter Knutsen
Charlton Wilbur
> I'm perhaps not to worried about those. Rather I'm thinking about
> the situations where the character is subject to an emotional
> stimuli of extreme magnitude, like being propositioned by the
> One-In-A-Billion Gorgeous Babe ("My astrologer has just told me I'll
> turn sterile in ten months. Please impregnate me...?"), or seeing a
> dragon.
>
> It seems to me that the anti-PM posters assume all emotional stimuli
> are of a rather low magnitude, and neglect to think about the rare
> extreme cases.
Personality mechanics that are incapable of modeling low-level stimuli
consistently and appropriately are likely going to do an even worse
job in extreme cases. If the rules don't work when sanity-checked
against experiences that most human beings have had, on what
foundation are we basing their handling of experiences that most human
beings have not had? Further, the more important the stimuli, the
less I want to be *told* how my character reacts.
As my two objections to personality mechanics are that they don't
often do a terribly good job, and that I'm *playing the game* in order
to vicariously experience the adventure, I think I can safely say, at
least in my case, that all my objections to personality mechanics are
multiplied a hundredfold when the stakes are higher. This is why I'm
okay with advisory personality mechanics -- because if I don't have a
frame of reference for how my character should act, or if I'm
forgetting something about his personality, then advice is welcome.
But if my sole purpose as a player is to faithfully simulate *someone
else's* model of the character, then there are many, many things I
could do which would be a better use of my time.
Or, to put it bluntly: if the rules and I are at odds when they tell
me my character should notice a pretty face or feel annoyance or
fatigue (things I, the player, and presumably the game designer, do at
least several times a week and perhaps even several times a day), why
should I trust them when they tell me I should feel wonder and awe in
the presence of an ancient dragon? And if you really want the dice or
the rules to dictate how my character reacts when I see a dragon --
because you don't trust my judgment, or because you trust the game
designer's judgment more than mine, then I'll give my character sheet
to the dice and the book, and if you want to know how my character
reacts, *you* can look it up in the table.
Charlton
Russell Wallace
wrote:
>It seems to me that the anti-PM posters assume all emotional stimuli
>are of a rather low magnitude, and neglect to think about the rare
>extreme cases.
Why do you think that? Any time I've mentioned specific cases, I've
deliberately picked extreme ones.
(I also completely agree with Charlton Wilbur's reply, but I'm curious
as to why you think I've been neglecting extreme cases.)
--
"Sore wa himitsu desu."
To reply by email, remove
the small snack from address.
http://www.esatclear.ie/~rwallace
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> It seems to me that the anti-PM posters assume all emotional stimuli
> are of a rather low magnitude, and neglect to think about the rare
> extreme cases.
>
> A pattern wholly inconsistent with what we understand as human nature,
> treating attractive NPCs of the appropriate sex exactly the same was
> as average appearance NPCs are treated, is of course problematic. But
> as long as there is no unrealistic pattern, but some percievable
> difference, there is no need for mechanics.
Agreed. In social contexts, I'm fairly careful about mentioning when
an NPC is more or less attractive than usual. That gives the players a
cue as to how their characters could react. I only resort to mechanics
if the NPC is amazingly beautiful or ugly. The same goes for
charisma/"presence attacks", etc.
> I'm more worried about the extreme cases. I've never been
> propositioned by the One-In-A-Billion Gorgeous Babe. I can't know how
> I would react. I've never seen a dragon. I've never seen a dragon
> knowing that it was looking for me, intending to kill me slowly. I
> can't know how I would react. Under such extreme circumstances.
>
> Many roll mechanics give some degree of success grade. Some systems
> discern between Normal Success and Critical Success. Storyteller and
> FFRE both offer multiple success grades. In those systems, an NPC
> trying to seduce a PC, or barter with a PC, or whatever, might make a
> very, very, very good roll. Through a combination of high skill and
> sheer luck (the more skilled he is, the less extreme his luck needs to
> be), the NPC subjects the PC to a very, very well executed
> manipulation attempt.
If the PCs are able to apply social skills to NPCs, then they should
have to go along with it when turned about. This is no different than
applying the same combat rules to PCs and NPCs. That's really what it
boils down to for me.
If the PCs are supposed to be "special", then that should be reflected
in the mechanics, with luck points or the like.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in
order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond
the stars to eat our brains." -Charlie Stross, _The Concrete Jungle_
Neelakantan Krishnaswami
>
> If the PCs are able to apply social skills to NPCs, then they should
> have to go along with it when turned about. This is no different than
> applying the same combat rules to PCs and NPCs. That's really what it
> boils down to for me.
>
> If the PCs are supposed to be "special", then that should be
> reflected in the mechanics, with luck points or the like.
Why? PCs and NPCs aren't the same in play, even if they are the same
within the game world. PCs are run by players, and NPCs are run by the
GM.
In my Leftover Dudes game, the NPC mechanics made all of their
abilities target numbers for the players. When running the game, I
(the GM) never needed to roll. Since I had farmed out all the die
rolls to the players, gameplay ran much faster.
For example, I could tell each player, "Make two Dodge rolls, diff 3",
rather than rolling 8 attacks one after another. Assuming each die
roll took about 10 seconds to resolve, that shaved a minute off of
each combat round. That's important because the GM is a critical
resource -- play can't usually proceed without GM attention. (I plan
on trying to fix that in a future system, but I haven't yet.)
Furthermore, each player had a customized set of mechanics, to better
reflect the PC they had chosen. This was, again, NOT because the PCs
were extremely special people in the game world (they were actually
pretty much losers). Instead, I figured that I, the GM, needed stream-
lined mechanics to reduce my rules-handling time as much as possible,
but that the players could make use of more mechanical definition.
Since they handled all the work, it didn't bog me down.
An aside:
Mark, you have a pronounced tendency to hurl insults without thinking.
You are not demonstrating tough-minded honesty; you're just playing
the fool. Luckily, playing the fool -- unlike actually being one -- is
a fixable problem. So fix it: if someone says something that doesn't
make a lot of apparent sense, ask them for a clarification before
flaming.
--
Neel Krishnaswami
ne...@alum.mit.edu
Peter Knutsen
Charlton Wilbur wrote:
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> writes:
>
>
>>I'm perhaps not to worried about those. Rather I'm thinking about
>>the situations where the character is subject to an emotional
>>stimuli of extreme magnitude, like being propositioned by the
>>One-In-A-Billion Gorgeous Babe ("My astrologer has just told me I'll
>>turn sterile in ten months. Please impregnate me...?"), or seeing a
>>dragon.
>>
>>It seems to me that the anti-PM posters assume all emotional stimuli
>>are of a rather low magnitude, and neglect to think about the rare
>>extreme cases.
>
>
> Personality mechanics that are incapable of modeling low-level stimuli
> consistently and appropriately are likely going to do an even worse
> job in extreme cases. If the rules don't work when sanity-checked
> against experiences that most human beings have had, on what
> foundation are we basing their handling of experiences that most human
> beings have not had? Further, the more important the stimuli, the
> less I want to be *told* how my character reacts.
But for stimuli of modest magnitude, it's less important that your
character reacts realistically.
If your character sees a 3-4 orc warriors, shouting and charging
towards him, swinging axes and maces, with murder in their eyes...
it's pretty much an either-or situation. If he's got some amount of
combat experience, he might stick around, or flee. Neither causes
problems to the WSoD of the other participants.
But if 25 tons of scaly death is floating silently towards you, eyes
glowing a bright green, looking straight at you, sparks and flames
shooting from the nostrils... Hell, you should run or hide. Coolness
would, unless there is strong justification, disrupt the willing
suspension of disbelief for the other participants.
> As my two objections to personality mechanics are that they don't
> often do a terribly good job, and that I'm *playing the game* in order
Okay, what do you propose using instead?
In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
Including a number in a verbal description is often a problem. So what
else is there to do? Getting specific ("long, curly blonde hair, in a
pony tail") risks running into the personal preferences of the
*player*, which is contraproductive to the assumed universal standards
of beauty posited by all (or at least all that I know of) point-based
RPGs.
How should a GM communicate the result of an NPC's roll for a social
skill?
> to vicariously experience the adventure, I think I can safely say, at
> least in my case, that all my objections to personality mechanics are
> multiplied a hundredfold when the stakes are higher. This is why I'm
> okay with advisory personality mechanics -- because if I don't have a
> frame of reference for how my character should act, or if I'm
So you lack a frame of reference for how to act if a small number of
orcs want your hide, but you're perfectly aware of how you'd react if
a big fucking huge ancient dragon wants you for dinner? That doesn't
make sense, I must have misunderstood you...
> forgetting something about his personality, then advice is welcome.
> But if my sole purpose as a player is to faithfully simulate *someone
> else's* model of the character, then there are many, many things I
> could do which would be a better use of my time.
It's the default assumption in all my points, that the PCs are
designed by the players, usually via a point-based system, thus the
players themselves are responsible for how they have defined the PCs
courage in terms of Will, Combat Experience and similar stats.
> Or, to put it bluntly: if the rules and I are at odds when they tell
> me my character should notice a pretty face or feel annoyance or
> fatigue (things I, the player, and presumably the game designer, do at
> least several times a week and perhaps even several times a day), why
> should I trust them when they tell me I should feel wonder and awe in
> the presence of an ancient dragon? And if you really want the dice or
Fuck wonder and awe, you shouldn't have time for anything except
looking for a place to hide, while trying desperately to avoid soiling
your pants. Dragons are scary creatures.
> the rules to dictate how my character reacts when I see a dragon --
> because you don't trust my judgment, or because you trust the game
If the dice and the rules dictate how you react when seeing a dragon
who is obviously chasing you, they do it in *cooperation* with the
stats of your character, especially Will, possibly aided by Courage
sub-attribute or a "+x Bonus to Will vs Dragon Fear" advantage.
You designed your character. Just as you define how physically durable
your character is, by purchasing a certain level of Health and
Toughness, or Constitution and Hardiness, you also define how
emotionally tough your character is, by purchasing a certain level of
Will.
It's your responsibility. Do not for one second assume that the rules
and the dice treats all characters equally. They *will* take the
relevant particulars of your character into account.
> designer's judgment more than mine, then I'll give my character sheet
> to the dice and the book, and if you want to know how my character
> reacts, *you* can look it up in the table.
So you refuse to be held responsible for the choices you made during
character creation, i.e. the level of Will you decided to buy for your
character when you created him? Or am I misunderstanding you?
> Charlton
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Russell Wallace wrote:
> On Sat, 17 May 2003 17:42:32 +0200, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
> wrote:
>
>
>>It seems to me that the anti-PM posters assume all emotional stimuli
>>are of a rather low magnitude, and neglect to think about the rare
>>extreme cases.
> Why do you think that? Any time I've mentioned specific cases, I've
> deliberately picked extreme ones.
Sorry, they didn't seem like that to me. Must be that old difficulty
of communicating magnitude.
> (I also completely agree with Charlton Wilbur's reply, but I'm curious
> as to why you think I've been neglecting extreme cases.)
I must have overlooked those parts in your post.
--
Peter Knutsen
Russell Wallace
wrote:
>Sorry, they didn't seem like that to me. Must be that old difficulty
>of communicating magnitude.
*blink* Did you see the example I gave from the science fiction game?
If that doesn't count as major, what does?
Warren J. Dew
Or, to put it bluntly: if the rules and I are at odds when
they tell me my character should notice a pretty face or feel
annoyance or fatigue (things I, the player, and presumably
the game designer, do at least several times a week and
perhaps even several times a day), why should I trust them
when they tell me I should feel wonder and awe in the
presence of an ancient dragon?
Irrespective of whether they are successful or not, I wonder if part of the
intended purpose of personality mechanics in such cases is to substitute for
the lack of sensory bandwidth that might otherwise allow the character to feel
the relevant amount of wonder and awe?
The substitute normally used, of course, is an attempt by the gamesmaster to
describe the situation with sufficient verbal imagery to permit the player, and
therefore the player character, to appreciate it properly. That's not an easy
task, though, and even good gamesmasters don't succeed all that often - and
some may not want to put in the effort on a regular basis.
Warren J. Dew
Powderhouse Software
Russell Wallace
wrote:
>But if 25 tons of scaly death is floating silently towards you, eyes
>glowing a bright green, looking straight at you, sparks and flames
>shooting from the nostrils... Hell, you should run or hide. Coolness
>would, unless there is strong justification, disrupt the willing
>suspension of disbelief for the other participants.
What if the character is armed with something capable of taking out a
dragon?
>In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
>of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
How do people writing novels do it? They don't get to use numbers
either.
Mary K. Kuhner
Neelakantan Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>In my Leftover Dudes game, the NPC mechanics made all of their
>abilities target numbers for the players. When running the game, I
>(the GM) never needed to roll. Since I had farmed out all the die
>rolls to the players, gameplay ran much faster.
Feng Shui lends itself to this fairly well; it doesn't matter which
of the two sides rolls in a particular contest, so you can arrange
that it's always the player side. When a PC is sneaking he rolls his
Stealth versus the enemy Perception; when an NPC is sneaking past
a PC the PC rolls his Perception versus the enemy Stealth. The
mechanics are such as to produce the same distribution either way,
which is nice.
Interestingly, this sped up play even with one player and one GM.
Apparently the GM is still overloaded.
It's not as clear what to do if the NPC is sneaking past several
PCs, though. The chance that he'll succeed in sneaking past all
of them is considerably higher if he rolls, for most distributions
of PC abilities, than if all of them roll instead.
How do you handle this mechanically?
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
George W. Harris
wrote:
:But for stimuli of modest magnitude, it's less important that your
:character reacts realistically.
Not to me.
--
"The truths of mathematics describe a bright and clear universe,
exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with
which the physical world is turbid and confused."
-Eulogy for G.H.Hardy
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'
Peter Knutsen
Russell Wallace wrote:
> On Sat, 17 May 2003 23:54:06 +0200, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
> wrote:
>
>
>>But if 25 tons of scaly death is floating silently towards you, eyes
>>glowing a bright green, looking straight at you, sparks and flames
>>shooting from the nostrils... Hell, you should run or hide. Coolness
>>would, unless there is strong justification, disrupt the willing
>>suspension of disbelief for the other participants.
>
>
> What if the character is armed with something capable of taking out a
> dragon?
That's strong justification :-)
>>In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
>>of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
>
>
> How do people writing novels do it? They don't get to use numbers
> either.
No, but in novels, all the decisions are made by *one* person.
In a novel, the author first invents how attractive Alice is, then he
decides how Bjarni reacts to Alice's appearance, then he writes a
short text that describes what Alice looks like, so that the reader
has some chance of forming a mental picture of alice.
In no way does the reader decide how Bjarni reacts to Alice, therefore
it is not of essential importance that the reader's mental picture of
Alice's apperance, or the reader's understanding of how rare women
with Alice's particular degree of prettiness is.
But in a roleplaying gmaing campaign, it *damn* well is, because one
person invents Alice and describes her, and then a second person
decides what effect Alice's appearance has.
Big difference.
--
Peter Knutsen
Warren J. Dew
In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the
attractiveness of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly
from the average?
Russell Wallace posts:
How do people writing novels do it? They don't get to use
numbers either.
They use words, but in this particular case, those words are often not very
successful with me. I once read of a study that found that cultural ideals of
facial appearance generally approximated what you got by averaging the features
across the population; perhaps it's difficult to describe a perfectly average
appearance and make the description come across as 'striking'. Verbal
descriptions of ugliness or deformity seem to be much more effective.
On the other hand, I've had some success with pictures. I remember one male
player character in particular who suddenly took a major interest in a female
gamesmaster character only after the (male) player saw a drawing of the female
character.
Neelakantan Krishnaswami
> In article <slrnbcdbjr...@h00045a4799d6.ne.client2.attbi.com>,
> Neelakantan Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> >In my Leftover Dudes game, the NPC mechanics made all of their
> >abilities target numbers for the players. When running the game, I
> >(the GM) never needed to roll. Since I had farmed out all the die
> >rolls to the players, gameplay ran much faster.
>
> Feng Shui lends itself to this fairly well; it doesn't matter which
> of the two sides rolls in a particular contest, so you can arrange
> that it's always the player side. When a PC is sneaking he rolls his
> Stealth versus the enemy Perception; when an NPC is sneaking past
> a PC the PC rolls his Perception versus the enemy Stealth. The
> mechanics are such as to produce the same distribution either way,
> which is nice.
That's one of the two reasons that the space opera game I am starting
is using the Feng Shui rules. (The other reason is that everyone in my
group, myself included, is trained to expect wild, unrestrained action
from a Feng Shui game.)
> It's not as clear what to do if the NPC is sneaking past several
> PCs, though. The chance that he'll succeed in sneaking past all
> of them is considerably higher if he rolls, for most distributions
> of PC abilities, than if all of them roll instead.
Not if the NPC has to roll once for each PC!
> How do you handle this mechanically?
I've never been happy with stealth rules that require one PC to split
up from all of the others. Typical stealth rules mean that a few
people can go ahead, while all the others hang behind. So once the
stealthy character breaks in, the other PCs can't act, even if they
could do useful things if they were present.
In Code Zero, my stealth rules are intended to let the stealth expert
get the whole team past the obstacle and into action. The model I'm
using is caper flicks, where the break-in artist uses his skills to
get the whole team inside the target area.
The player of the PC leading the break-in (usually the PC with the
highest Intrusion skill) will make a single Intrusion roll, at a
penalty equal to the number of people he's bringing along. A tagalong
with a stealth skill of their own can make a check to negate his
contribution to the penalty, due to their superior professionalism.
So an Intrusion 15 ninja bringing in the old professor, the cyborg
cop, and the psychic neo-dolphin needs to make a single roll at a -3
penalty. If the cyborg cop makes his own Intrusion check, then the
penalty is -2.
If the leader fails his stealth roll, then someone in his team screwed
up, and the players get detected at some interesting point. Otherwise
everyone proceeds to the next point the players can make interesting
decisions. Note that since there's only a single roll, fortune dice
have a much bigger impact.
For an NPC trying to sneak up onto the PCs, I'll just let them all
roll. This is asymmetric, but I don't care. One of my guidelines is
that my players should have a chance to spend fortune dice on anything
that his character could do something about. Obviously, this requires
that I only call for rolls when they are important, but that's not a
problem for this game.
--
Neel Krishnaswami
ne...@alum.mit.edu
Russell Wallace
wrote:
>> What if the character is armed with something capable of taking out a
>> dragon?
>
>That's strong justification :-)
Okay :)
Now, what about the cases in real life where people have taken on
tanks or aircraft when _not_ armed with anything capable of taking
them out? Do those cases disrupt your willing suspension of disbelief
in real life?
>In a novel, the author first invents how attractive Alice is, then he
>decides how Bjarni reacts to Alice's appearance, then he writes a
>short text that describes what Alice looks like, so that the reader
>has some chance of forming a mental picture of alice.
Thing is, that also communicates to the reader how attractive Alice
is. Or do you find when you're reading a novel, the author is
completely unable to communicate this to you; the description means
nothing in terms of figuring out how attractive people are?
Erol K. Bayburt
>But if 25 tons of scaly death is floating silently towards you, eyes
>glowing a bright green, looking straight at you, sparks and flames
>shooting from the nostrils... Hell, you should run or hide.
Or freeze in place, or fall down and grovel, or make an unthinking berserk
charge to deny the fear, or...
>In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
>of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
>Including a number in a verbal description is often a problem. So what
>else is there to do? Getting specific ("long, curly blonde hair, in a
>pony tail") risks running into the personal preferences of the
>*player*, which is contraproductive to the assumed universal standards
>of beauty posited by all (or at least all that I know of) point-based
>RPGs.
>
>How should a GM communicate the result of an NPC's roll for a social
>skill?
An *advisory* PM roll would be my answer:
GM: "She looks at you and smiles, and shifts her skirt. You catch a whiff of a
subtle perfume. [rolls d20] 37 on the Seduction roll.
Player: 37? Wow. OK, I reach out to her and...
(Whereas the player would have his PC react differently if the Seduction roll
was a 27, and differently yet if it was a mere 17.)
>Fuck wonder and awe, you shouldn't have time for anything except
>looking for a place to hide, while trying desperately to avoid soiling
>your pants. Dragons are scary creatures.
Barring some sort of magical juju, the dragon has no power to reach into my
character's mind and control his actions. The mere sight of the dragon isn't
enough. What I see has an advisory effect on what I do - not a coersive one.
>
>If the dice and the rules dictate how you react when seeing a dragon
>who is obviously chasing you, they do it in *cooperation* with the
>stats of your character, especially Will, possibly aided by Courage
>sub-attribute or a "+x Bonus to Will vs Dragon Fear" advantage.
I look on my character sheet and see no "Disadvantage: Can be mentally
controlled by visual images" on it. I therefore decline to have the dice and
rules dictate my character's reaction to the visual image of the dragon.
If your rules include "All characters must take the Disadvantage: 'Can be
mentally controlled by visual images'" then I want to know who you are and what
you did to the real Peter Knutsen - to the guy who claims that rules exist to
empower the characters and limit the GM rather than the other way around.
--
Erol K. Bayburt
Ero...@aol.com
Robert Scott Clark
>
>> It's not as clear what to do if the NPC is sneaking past several
>> PCs, though. The chance that he'll succeed in sneaking past all
>> of them is considerably higher if he rolls, for most distributions
>> of PC abilities, than if all of them roll instead.
>
> Not if the NPC has to roll once for each PC!
Actually, yes. Assume all PCs have the same detecting stat, and those
stats are the same as the sneaking stat. This means around a 50% chance of
success if the sneaker is the only one to roll (whether above or below 50%
depends on who wins ties, and I don't remember whoo off-hand) Now, if the
detectors roll, it's (50%)^(number of detectors) chance of successfully
sneaking past them all.
Charlton Wilbur
> > As my two objections to personality mechanics are that they don't
> > often do a terribly good job, and that I'm *playing the game* in order
>
> Okay, what do you propose using instead?
The roleplaying skill of the player. One goal of the game is to
imagine that you're a different character in a different world, and
react to things the way that character would.
> How should a GM communicate the result of an NPC's roll for a social
> skill?
I have never had a problem with an explicit statement, along the lines
of "She's using Fast-Talk on you, and she made her roll by 8."
> So you lack a frame of reference for how to act if a small number of
> orcs want your hide, but you're perfectly aware of how you'd react if
> a big fucking huge ancient dragon wants you for dinner? That doesn't
> make sense, I must have misunderstood you...
No. I don't mind *advice* from mechanics in either case, but I don't
want to be *told* what the character thinks or does.
> > And if you really want the dice or the rules to dictate how my
> > character reacts when I see a dragon -- because you don't trust my
> > judgment, or because you trust the game designer's judgment more
> > than mine, then I'll give my character sheet to the dice and the
> > book, and if you want to know how my character reacts, *you* can
> > look it up in the table.
> If the dice and the rules dictate how you react when seeing a dragon
> who is obviously chasing you, they do it in *cooperation* with the
> stats of your character, especially Will, possibly aided by Courage
> sub-attribute or a "+x Bonus to Will vs Dragon Fear" advantage.
>
> You designed your character. Just as you define how physically durable
> your character is, by purchasing a certain level of Health and
> Toughness, or Constitution and Hardiness, you also define how
> emotionally tough your character is, by purchasing a certain level of
> Will.
>
> It's your responsibility. Do not for one second assume that the rules
> and the dice treats all characters equally. They *will* take the
> relevant particulars of your character into account.
Well, then, I'll *design* the character, and let you and the dice play
him, because there's nothing of interest in that activity for me.
> So you refuse to be held responsible for the choices you made during
> character creation, i.e. the level of Will you decided to buy for your
> character when you created him? Or am I misunderstanding you?
You are willfully misunderstanding me, but I'm used to it.
I am not interested in playing a game where the reactions of my
character are dictated by rules. It is *my job*, as the player, to
determine my character's reactions. In a best-case scenario -- where
the dice and rules determine the exact same thing that I would -- this
makes my role as player irrelevant. If the dice and rules are at odds
with what I think the character would do, then on top of me being
irrelevant to the process after it begins, it's a frustrating
experience to boot. If I *were* to play in a game with compulsory
personality mechanics, I would consent to be held responsible for the
choices I made at character creation; but I wouldn't play in such a
game to begin with, so implying that I'm a Bad Person for "refus[ing]
to be held responsible" is a little bit over the top.
Your concerns about 'suspension of disbelief' are valid ones, and yes,
it does break suspension of disbelief to have characters who are as
blase about seeing a dragon for the first time as they are about
killing their thousandth orc. Your personality mechanics probably
*do* produce results that are consistent and believable in the
abstract. But they would have to be an order of magnitude better than
any other personality mechanics I have ever seen to be consistent and
believable in the specific case of one character; and even granting
that they might be that good, well, if they are that good they remove
any need for the player's involvement after character creation.
Why can't you just *trust* the players to play in such a way that
suspension of disbelief continues? You seem to have the notion that
all players want to do is run around with game-pieces, collecting
plot-tokens, being invincible, and occasionally rolling dice, and that
the only way to get them to play real characters is to force them to,
through the use of mechanics. This strikes me as the setup for an
absolutely miserable game, where the players want to do one thing and
the GM wants them to do another.
Turn the question around, Peter. Suppose you're a player, in a game
with coercive personality mechanics. What is your role? Once you've
created a character, what is there left to do? Sit and listen to the
story -- or the sequence of events -- that the GM and the dice relate
to you?
Charlton
Robert Scott Clark
>
> Turn the question around, Peter. Suppose you're a player, in a game
> with coercive personality mechanics. What is your role? Once you've
> created a character, what is there left to do? Sit and listen to the
> story -- or the sequence of events -- that the GM and the dice relate
> to you?
What does this tired strawman always get dragged out?
Using PMs for one, or a small set, of situations does not require that they
totally dictate all PC action any more than using a particular mechanic for
magic mean you must also use the exact same mechanic for repairing a
computer.
Can't people make actual arguments instead of trying to reduce everything
to an absurdity.
Charlton Wilbur
> > Turn the question around, Peter. Suppose you're a player, in a game
> > with coercive personality mechanics. What is your role? Once you've
> > created a character, what is there left to do? Sit and listen to the
> > story -- or the sequence of events -- that the GM and the dice relate
> > to you?
>
> What does this tired strawman always get dragged out?
Because it still hasn't been answered. If the primary responsibilty
for modeling the character's mental state and reactions falls to
mechanics, what is there left for the player to do that makes the
effort worthwhile?
> Using PMs for one, or a small set, of situations does not require
> that they totally dictate all PC action any more than using a
> particular mechanic for magic mean you must also use the exact same
> mechanic for repairing a computer.
Yes -- so the dice determine that I succumb to the seduction attempt,
or dive screaming for cover when I see a dragon, but I still get to
determine what words I use. That's pretty cold comfort.
The thing you are missing is that *deciding what my character does*
and *deciding how my character responds* are a large part of why I
play roleplaying games. If you take the responsibility for doing that
from me and assign it to dice and mechanics, then you take away a
large part of the reason I bother to invest effort in roleplaying
games at all.
In essence, what you are saying is that you do not trust the players
to accurately model their own characters' mental states *even when the
players want to*, and as a result you resort to creating mechanics
which tell the players how their characters are to react. If your
distrust of players is that deep, why do you bother playing
roleplaying games instead of just writing a novel? And if you really
do trust the players, why do you need coercive personality mechanics?
Charlton
Chris J. Whitcomb
"Charlton Wilbur" <cwi...@mithril.chromatico.net> wrote in message
news:87llx51...@mithril.chromatico.net...
If you created the character and you picked out personality facets you
wanted, then if there is a conflict between what you want the character to
feel and what the personality says he should feel, then I'd consider that a
faulty character design.
---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.473 / Virus Database: 271 - Release Date: 04/17/03
Neelakantan Krishnaswami
That's exactly what I said; if the NPC has to roll once for each
PC, then his chance is (50%)^(number of detectors).
--
Neel Krishnaswami
ne...@alum.mit.edu
Russell Wallace
<rek...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>If you created the character and you picked out personality facets you
>wanted, then if there is a conflict between what you want the character to
>feel and what the personality says he should feel, then I'd consider that a
>faulty character design.
I agree if the system permits the correct design (e.g. it only
requires Will rolls if you've voluntarily taken mental disadvantages,
and the points allocation is such that you don't have to take those to
get a playable character).
In cases where the system makes it impossible or impractical to create
a character whose actions are not determined by dice, though, the
fault is in the system not in the character design. (Other than for
joining that campaign in the first place - and most systems at least
can be interpreted as having personality mechanics if the GM so
chooses, though most GMs don't so choose; so in practice there often
isn't much option except to go ahead and join, then quit if the GM
starts using personality mechanics.)
Robert Scott Clark
>
>> > Turn the question around, Peter. Suppose you're a player, in a
>> > game with coercive personality mechanics. What is your role? Once
>> > you've created a character, what is there left to do? Sit and
>> > listen to the story -- or the sequence of events -- that the GM and
>> > the dice relate to you?
>>
>> What does this tired strawman always get dragged out?
>
> Because it still hasn't been answered. If the primary responsibilty
> for modeling the character's mental state and reactions falls to
> mechanics, what is there left for the player to do that makes the
> effort worthwhile?
You misuse the word "primary".
>
>> Using PMs for one, or a small set, of situations does not require
>> that they totally dictate all PC action any more than using a
>> particular mechanic for magic mean you must also use the exact same
>> mechanic for repairing a computer.
>
> Yes -- so the dice determine that I succumb to the seduction attempt,
> or dive screaming for cover when I see a dragon, but I still get to
> determine what words I use. That's pretty cold comfort.
That, and the half-million other things you also decide.
>
> The thing you are missing is that *deciding what my character does*
> and *deciding how my character responds* are a large part of why I
> play roleplaying games. If you take the responsibility for doing that
> from me and assign it to dice and mechanics,
It isn't an all or nothing proposition. There are already plenty of
things depending very largely on character personality that you do not
get to decide (fatigue, wound penalties for pain) in many games.
Slightly moving where this line is drawn doesn't require going all the
way to either extreme.
> then you take away a
> large part of the reason I bother to invest effort in roleplaying
> games at all.
Then PMs aren't for you. Just stop falsely characterizing them as
something that rips all power from the hands of players.
>
> In essence, what you are saying is that you do not trust the players
> to accurately model their own characters' mental states *even when the
> players want to*,
No, I am saying that PMs produce many desirable effects during the game,
both in the occurences in the gameworld and in the effect using the
mechanics have on the experience of the players and the effect it has on
their creative processes. It has little to do with what I believe about
their "accuracy", as accuracy is not my primary concern.
> and as a result you resort to creating mechanics
> which tell the players how their characters are to react. If your
> distrust of players is that deep, why do you bother playing
> roleplaying games instead of just writing a novel? And if you really
> do trust the players, why do you need coercive personality mechanics?
To play a slightly different type of game, where players make a slightly
different set of decisions and exert control over a slightly different
subset of game elements.
>
> Charlton
>
Robert Scott Clark
news:slrnbceqpo...@h00045a4799d6.ne.client2.attbi.com:
Now I'm confused.
Mary said it was easier to sneak with one roll being made than multiple
rolls being made.
You say that is not true. 50% > (50%)^(number of detectors) for all
values of "number of detectors"
Then I respond, and say Mary was correct.
Then you answer and say that, yes, now it is true that it's harder to
succeed at sneaking.
Now, either one of us is misreading the other, or you believe that 50%
< (50%)^(number of detectors), and I don't know which is the case.
Robert Scott Clark
news:Xns937F5E6311FBBcl...@65.82.44.187:
> Neelakantan Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote in
> news:slrnbceqpo...@h00045a4799d6.ne.client2.attbi.com:
>
>> Robert Scott Clark <cla...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> >
>>> >> It's not as clear what to do if the NPC is sneaking past several
>>> >> PCs, though. The chance that he'll succeed in sneaking past all
>>> >> of them is considerably higher if he rolls, for most
>>> >> distributions of PC abilities, than if all of them roll instead.
>>> >
>>> > Not if the NPC has to roll once for each PC!
>>>
>>> Actually, yes. Assume all PCs have the same detecting stat, and
>>> those stats are the same as the sneaking stat. This means around a
>>> 50% chance of success if the sneaker is the only one to roll
>>> (whether above or below 50% depends on who wins ties, and I don't
>>> remember whoo off-hand) Now, if the detectors roll, it's
>>> (50%)^(number of detectors) chance of successfully sneaking past
>>> them all.
>>
>> That's exactly what I said; if the NPC has to roll once for each
>> PC, then his chance is (50%)^(number of detectors).
>>
>
> Now I'm confused.
>
> Mary said it was easier to sneak with one roll being made than
> multiple rolls being made.
>
> You say that is not true. 50% > (50%)^(number of detectors) for all
> values of "number of detectors"
>
> Then I respond, and say Mary was correct.
Damnit, that equation was supposed to be here, not where it is.
corrected, it should read...
> You say that is not true.
> Then I respond, and say Mary was correct. 50% > (50%)^(number of
> detectors) for all values of "number of detectors"
>
Neelakantan Krishnaswami
> Neelakantan Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote in
> news:slrnbceqpo...@h00045a4799d6.ne.client2.attbi.com:
>
> > Robert Scott Clark <cla...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> >
> >> >> It's not as clear what to do if the NPC is sneaking past several
> >> >> PCs, though. The chance that he'll succeed in sneaking past all
> >> >> of them is considerably higher if he rolls, for most distributions
> >> >> of PC abilities, than if all of them roll instead.
> >> >
> >> > Not if the NPC has to roll once for each PC!
> >>
> >> Actually, yes. Assume all PCs have the same detecting stat, and
> >> those stats are the same as the sneaking stat. This means around a
> >> 50% chance of success if the sneaker is the only one to roll
> >> (whether above or below 50% depends on who wins ties, and I don't
> >> remember whoo off-hand) Now, if the detectors roll, it's
> >> (50%)^(number of detectors) chance of successfully sneaking past
> >> them all.
> >
> > That's exactly what I said; if the NPC has to roll once for each
> > PC, then his chance is (50%)^(number of detectors).
>
> Now I'm confused.
>
> Mary said it was easier to sneak with one roll being made than multiple
> rolls being made.
Correct so far.
> You say that is not true. 50% > (50%)^(number of detectors) for all
> values of "number of detectors"
I didn't say this. I said, "Not if the NPC has to roll once for each
PC!", which is another way of saying that you can get the same
probability as having each PC roll, if you require the NPC to roll
once for each PC.
> Now, either one of us is misreading the other, or you believe that 50%
> < (50%)^(number of detectors), and I don't know which is the case.
You were misreading me.
--
Neel Krishnaswami
ne...@alum.mit.edu
Robert Scott Clark
> PC!", which is another way of saying that you can get the same
> probability as having each PC roll, if you require the NPC to roll
> once for each PC.
Got it.
You were not disagreeing with the one roll vs many rolls part, but only who
was doing the rolls.
Makes more sense now, ignore that other post.
Wayne Shaw
>Charlton Wilbur posts, in part:
>
> Or, to put it bluntly: if the rules and I are at odds when
> they tell me my character should notice a pretty face or feel
> annoyance or fatigue (things I, the player, and presumably
> the game designer, do at least several times a week and
> perhaps even several times a day), why should I trust them
> when they tell me I should feel wonder and awe in the
> presence of an ancient dragon?
>
>Irrespective of whether they are successful or not, I wonder if part of the
>intended purpose of personality mechanics in such cases is to substitute for
>the lack of sensory bandwidth that might otherwise allow the character to feel
>the relevant amount of wonder and awe?
>
I think that's the function of a suprising amount of mechanics and die
rolls, actually.
Robert Scott Clark
news:d1ffd242bff3491b...@news.nntpserver.com:
> On 17 May 2003 22:13:22 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Warren J. Dew) wrote:
>
>>Charlton Wilbur posts, in part:
>>
>> Or, to put it bluntly: if the rules and I are at odds when
>> they tell me my character should notice a pretty face or feel
>> annoyance or fatigue (things I, the player, and presumably
>> the game designer, do at least several times a week and
>> perhaps even several times a day), why should I trust them
>> when they tell me I should feel wonder and awe in the
>> presence of an ancient dragon?
>>
>>Irrespective of whether they are successful or not, I wonder if part
>>of the intended purpose of personality mechanics in such cases is to
>>substitute for the lack of sensory bandwidth that might otherwise
>>allow the character to feel the relevant amount of wonder and awe?
>>
I don't know how I missed this post, but what Warren said is so obvious
it's one of those things I'm suprised needs to be said.
Leszek Karlik
[...]
> But if 25 tons of scaly death is floating silently towards you, eyes
> glowing a bright green, looking straight at you, sparks and flames
> shooting from the nostrils... Hell, you should run or hide. Coolness
> would, unless there is strong justification, disrupt the willing
> suspension of disbelief for the other participants.
Actually, since I know the wide range of possible reactions due to
adrenaline rush, cold coolness would seem quite plausibile to me. In
highly stressful situations, the possible human reactions are very
varied.
If the dragons have a magical "fear attack", that's quite a different
thing, but then you're not talking about a personality mechanic, but
about a "make a save vs spell effect" type mechanic.
[...]
> In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
> of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
By saing that the NPC is attractive.
> Including a number in a verbal description is often a problem. So what
> else is there to do? Getting specific ("long, curly blonde hair, in a
> pony tail") risks running into the personal preferences of the
> *player*, which is contraproductive to the assumed universal standards
> of beauty posited by all (or at least all that I know of) point-based
> RPGs.
Universal standard of beauty are pretty bland - symmetry of features
and signs of health. But they're also NOT VERY SIGNIFICANT. Yes,
pretty people have it easier in social situations, but being pretty is
not a magic wand you can wave at somebody and get them to hop into bed
with you, and then perform various favours.
If you think it is, you should get out more.
I think your arguments for the use of Personality Mechanics would
highly benefit if you'd stop using the oh-so-stereotypical and yet so
adolescentingly unrealistic Lascivious-Irrestible-Bimbo-From-Hell.
For exampe, I don't sleep with people I don't know, trust and
like. How would you reflect this in FFRE? Not with Vows of Chastity or
Devotion to Significant Other, or anything like this, because I'm
polyamorous. There are a few women that could seduce me by simply
telling me to come over for the night, but it's not due to their high
appearance bonus, but because they're really important to me. At the
same time, I do know some pretty gorgeous women with whom I would't
spend a night even if they paid me a fortune - I simply won't trust
them.
Of course, a high-Seduction skill person could still use it on me
successfully, I guess - but it would require a many-months long
approach. Can you model this?
Appearance is overrated when it comes to seduction, IME. Here, the
personality of the person you're trying to seduce is paramount. In
case of NPCs, it's not possible to model it for every one of them, so
a die roll can supplement this. In case of PCs, the player has
frequently got a detailed mental model of the character, and a simple
"she's extremely gorgeous and you've failed your will roll" statement
may break the WSoD much worse than failing to run from a screaming
ancient dragon.
[...]
> Fuck wonder and awe, you shouldn't have time for anything except
> looking for a place to hide, while trying desperately to avoid soiling
> your pants. Dragons are scary creatures.
No, they're not, they're cute and cuddly, so there. [Hint: you're
talking about _fictional_ creatures. You can't exactly point out at a
real dragon and say "here, see, people do always run from them".]
Not every VieCong fighter is going to run and hide when a combat
chopper is flying at him, and firing rockets and guns.
I think you mechanicize human reactions too much.
[...]
> You designed your character. Just as you define how physically durable
> your character is, by purchasing a certain level of Health and
> Toughness, or Constitution and Hardiness, you also define how
> emotionally tough your character is, by purchasing a certain level of
> Will.
Yep. If the system has a Will attribute. Some people may prefer to
play systems without a Willpower attribute, simple as that. Or may
play systems were the Willpower attribute serves only to determine the
pain resistance and magical power of the character, or whatever.
[...]
> Peter Knutsen
Leslie
--
Leszek 'Leslie' Karlik; Drone, Offensive, Special Circumstances, Contact.
GH/L/S/O d- s+:- a24 C++ UL+ P L++ E W-() N+++* K w(---) M- PS+(+++) PE
Y+ PGP++ !t---(++) 5++ X- R+++*>$ !tv b++++ DI+ D--- G-- e>+ h- r% y+*
Jeff Stehman
>
> But for stimuli of modest magnitude, it's less important that your
> character reacts realistically.
Interesting word choice. I think the only things I have at the table
that are real are my emotions and reactions. I roleplay primarily to
exercise those emotions in ways that would otherwise be very unlikely to
occur, there not being many instances of 25 tons of scaly sentient death
left in the world. Consequently, PMs take away that which attracts me to
roleplaying. (Obviously, since different people roleplay for different
reasons, that's not going to be the case for everyone.)
--Jeff Stehman
Robert Scott Clark
news:slrnbcfo50...@fnord.ideefixe.com.pl:
> If the dragons have a magical "fear attack", that's quite a different
> thing, but then you're not talking about a personality mechanic, but
> about a "make a save vs spell effect" type mechanic.
#1 Even if it's magic, it's still a PM, just one that some people are
more comfortable with.
#2 The difference between magic and not magic are not so tightly defined
in some gameworlds. Is Frodo's mithril shirt magic or not? Is the fear
caused by a dragon magic or not? I can even think of examples from
games... The Veil in W:tA is described as a natural mental defense
mechanism that developed in humans from years of tyrany by the garou, but
it's unclear whether a similar mechanism would have developed towards a
non-magical group of creatures. Similarly in AD&D1e, seeing a nymph
could either blind or even kill a character, but the effect was due to
the extreme beauty of the creature, not to a magical effect it had. But
it wouldn't be possible for a non-magical creature to be that pretty, so
the effect is sort of magical. So, would a slightly less attractive
nymph that only hypnotized people with her beauty be using a magic effect
or not?
Hell, can a martial artist be so fast as to dodge bullets without being
"magic"? Walk on water? Root himself to the ground so as to be
unmovable by a half dozen people?
There are answers in the real world to these questions (although if I
kept listing them, I'm sure I would get some that we wouldn't even all
agree on in the real world), but those answers do not automatically apply
to any game world you might happen to be playing in.
>
> [...]
>> In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
>> of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
>
> By saing that the NPC is attractive.
I don't even get a roll to resist that?
That's already a PM, it's the GM decides mechanic. Whether or not some
character is attractive has as much to do with the viewer as with the
beauty, so a statement that the character is attractive is taking control
of part of the mental processes of the character, even if actual actions
are not forced. Now, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but it's
still a PM.
>
>> Including a number in a verbal description is often a problem. So what
>> else is there to do? Getting specific ("long, curly blonde hair, in a
>> pony tail") risks running into the personal preferences of the
>> *player*, which is contraproductive to the assumed universal standards
>> of beauty posited by all (or at least all that I know of) point-based
>> RPGs.
>
> Universal standard of beauty are pretty bland - symmetry of features
> and signs of health. But they're also NOT VERY SIGNIFICANT. Yes,
> pretty people have it easier in social situations, but being pretty is
> not a magic wand you can wave at somebody and get them to hop into bed
> with you, and then perform various favours.
Maybe you've just not met anyone pretty enough. There are plenty of
skanky hos I say I wouldn't touch, but I don't really know. If Angelina
Jolie walked in right now and wanted to hop on my D, I really don't have
any frame of reference to say what I would do. It's nice to think I
wouldn't, but I don't claim that level of self-reference.
And I'm a nit-picking bastard. You throw some succubus at me who is
perfect by my standards (no mind control, just the ability to look and
behave exactly like my wildest fantasy), and I have no clue what would
happen and I doubt you do either.
And that's just our difference of opinion over ACTUAL human psychology.
It doesn't take much tweaking to make a world where James can seduce
whomever he pleases with the exception of a few mysteriously resistant
individuals. Games don't need to, and tend not to, perfectly model the
real world
> [...]
>> Fuck wonder and awe, you shouldn't have time for anything except
>> looking for a place to hide, while trying desperately to avoid soiling
>> your pants. Dragons are scary creatures.
>
> No, they're not, they're cute and cuddly, so there. [Hint: you're
> talking about _fictional_ creatures. You can't exactly point out at a
> real dragon and say "here, see, people do always run from them".]
>
> Not every VieCong fighter is going to run and hide when a combat
> chopper is flying at him, and firing rockets and guns.
>
> I think you mechanicize human reactions too much.
Humans are machines - really complex ones, but still just machines.
Although, I'm really not sure what this has to do with what is said about
it.
>
> [...]
>> You designed your character. Just as you define how physically durable
>> your character is, by purchasing a certain level of Health and
>> Toughness, or Constitution and Hardiness, you also define how
>> emotionally tough your character is, by purchasing a certain level of
>> Will.
>
> Yep. If the system has a Will attribute. Some people may prefer to
> play systems without a Willpower attribute, simple as that.
And some prefer to play systems with no attribute representing the
physical might of a character. I'm not sure where you are trying to go
with that statement.
> Or may
> play systems were the Willpower attribute serves only to determine the
> pain resistance
There's another PM.
>and magical power of the character, or whatever.
>
> [...]
>
>> Peter Knutsen
> Leslie
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Jeff Stehman
rek...@worldnet.att.net says...
>
> If you created the character and you picked out personality facets you
> wanted, then if there is a conflict between what you want the character to
> feel and what the personality says he should feel, then I'd consider that a
> faulty character design.
That certainly can and does happen. However, I find the problem to be
that no matter how finely crafted the mechanic, it appears clunky when
compared to the nuances of a personality.
--Jeff Stehman
Wayne Shaw
<rek...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>> Or, to put it bluntly: if the rules and I are at odds when they tell
>> me my character should notice a pretty face or feel annoyance or
>> fatigue
>
>If you created the character and you picked out personality facets you
>wanted, then if there is a conflict between what you want the character to
>feel and what the personality says he should feel, then I'd consider that a
>faulty character design.
Perhaps so, but that doesn't say the fault was at the player's end; it
could be at the difference in how the GM reads the definition of the
trait, and how the player does, or in how the two of them view
application to the situation.
Robert Scott Clark
news:MPG.19319ff1e...@news.kendra.com:
I'd say the same about all RPG mechanics.
>
> --Jeff Stehman
>
George W. Harris
<gha...@mundsprung.com> wrote:
:On Sat, 17 May 2003 23:54:06 +0200, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
:wrote:
:
::But for stimuli of modest magnitude, it's less important that your
::character reacts realistically.
:
: Not to me.
Thought I'd expound on that; stimuli of modest
magnitude are much more common, so if the mechanics
give broken results wrt them, then the problems of the
mechanics are much more frequently obtrusive.
--
Never give a loaded gun to a woman in labor.
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
John Kim
>>> I've never been propositioned by the One-In-A-Billion Gorgeous Babe.
>>> I can't know how I would react. I've never seen a dragon. I've never
>>> seen a dragon knowing that it was looking for me, intending to kill
>>> me slowly. I can't know how I would react. Under such extreme
>>>> circumstances.
>>
>> Personality mechanics that are incapable of modeling low-level
>> stimuli consistently and appropriately are likely going to do an
>> even worse job in extreme cases.
>
> If 25 tons of scaly death is floating silently towards you, eyes
> shooting from the nostrils... Hell, you should run or hide. Coolness
> would, unless there is strong justification, disrupt the willing
> suspension of disbelief for the other participants.
Peter, your statements here don't seem to match up. You
at first claimed that you wouldn't know how you would react under
extreme circumstances. I feel the same way. Like everyone else,
I am more familiar with modest stimuli, and thus I know better what
would happen if I (or a PC) encounters them. Thus, to me, what
happens for the modest stimuli is *MORE* important. Since I don't
know have a solid idea what should happen under extreme stimuli,
it is less important for my suspension-of-disbelief.
However, your later statements suggest that you *do* know
how you would react -- that in fact human behavior is deterministic
under such circumstances. If the behavior diverges from your simple
prediction, it breaks your suspension-of-disbelief.
From what I have read of people under extreme circumstances,
I simply don't accept this. When I read about real war experiences,
or the accounts of explorers, I am often struck by how bizarre the
reactions are. People charge into almost certain death, or keep
going despite crippling injuries, etc.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
> In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
> of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
> Including a number in a verbal description is often a problem. So
> what else is there to do? Getting specific ("long, curly blonde hair,
> in a pony tail") risks running into the personal preferences of the
> *player*, which is contraproductive to the assumed universal standards
> of beauty posited by all (or at least all that I know of) point-based
> RPGs.
Well, this is the same as any other situation. You run the
risk of the player ignoring the character's personality in favor of
their own standards. You can always try to avoid this by abstracting
it away -- but that guards against poor role-play by preventing
role-playing in the first place.
There are universal standards of beauty: symetrical
features, clear skin, relatively good health and grooming. However,
they are only one factor in attractiveness to a particular person.
I have always interpretted point systems as still having a place for
personal preferences. i.e. Two people both have Looks 16. That
means they are equivalently beautiful, but it does not mean that a
particular person might not dislike one (based on preferences) and
be attracted to the other.
Thus, I will generally give the beauty number but also give
a description of particular traits. This is important if you want
to allow role-playing. For example, in the Ripper CoC campaign I
played in, my character fell in love with a beautiful woman. The
description of her Egyptian looks was absolutely essential to this,
because it went to the heart of my character background. He had
killed a woman in Egypt years ago, and his love for this woman
expressed his guilt over that.
I also consider this an example of why I would hate to have
personality mechanics. Human behavior is complex, and reducing it
to simple scales has far worse results than physical actions like
shooting a gun. Rook was in love with Miss Sossostrich, but if she
had propositioned him he almost certainly would not have accepted.
He wanted to save her.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
> How should a GM communicate the result of an NPC's roll for a social
> skill?
Er, how about "He succeeded by 8 on his Seduction roll" or
whatever the equivalent is?
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>>
>> And if you really want the dice or the rules to dictate how my
>> character reacts when I see a dragon -- because you don't trust
>> my judgment, or because you trust the game designer's judgment
>> more than mine, then I'll give my character sheet to the dice
>> and the book, and if you want to know how my character reacts,
>> *you* can look it up in the table.
>
> So you refuse to be held responsible for the choices you made during
> character creation, i.e. the level of Will you decided to buy for your
> character when you created him? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Personally speaking, if the system requires that I set
numbers for Willpower and similar stats, I will tend to set them
at my best guess for what my PC would be regarded as having --
but I'm certainly not going to reduce my role-playing to just
expressing those numbers. The result is that those numbers may
not be a great predictor of how she will act. This is inherent
to any well-played character: her behavior can't be reduced to a
simplistic extrapolation from a handful of numbers.
My impression here is that your issue here is a game balance
one. i.e. You consider it unfair if a PC gets to act rationally
when facing a dragon without paying for it. However, situations
where the PC doesn't benefit aren't a problem. Thus, if I spend
a bunch of points on it (i.e. High Will, no mental disads), I can
have the "priviledge" of role-playing my character as I see fit.
Mary K. Kuhner
John Kim <jh...@darkshire.org> wrote:
> From what I have read of people under extreme circumstances,
>I simply don't accept this. When I read about real war experiences,
>or the accounts of explorers, I am often struck by how bizarre the
>reactions are. People charge into almost certain death, or keep
>going despite crippling injuries, etc.
The newspapers tell us that a modern American mountainclimber just
hacked his own arm off with a dull knife to get out from under
a rock that was trapping him. When asked how he did it, he said,
well, I felt pain but I coped. While we are less likely to get
stories about people who reacted the other way (they tend not to
be around to tell them) I'm sure that happens too.
>Peter Knutsen writes:
>> In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
>> of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
>> Including a number in a verbal description is often a problem. So
>> what else is there to do? Getting specific ("long, curly blonde hair,
>> in a pony tail") risks running into the personal preferences of the
>> *player*, which is contraproductive to the assumed universal standards
>> of beauty posited by all (or at least all that I know of) point-based
>> RPGs.
> Well, this is the same as any other situation. You run the
>risk of the player ignoring the character's personality in favor of
>their own standards. You can always try to avoid this by abstracting
>it away -- but that guards against poor role-play by preventing
>role-playing in the first place.
I'd just pitch the universal standard of beauty. While symmetry and
cleanliness are attractive, beyond that it seems to vary a lot--if
it didn't, I'd expect sexual selection to have long ago weeded out
all the non-favored types. And insisting that a given person must be
equally beautiful to everyone, despite ethnic, cultural, or personal
factors, is a pretty major distortion.
When I first met a lot of Asian men (in grad school) I tended to feel
they all looked alike and none of them looked particularly interesting.
A decade later, with more experience, I'd changed my views; they
don't look alike at all, and some of them (in particular the one I
married) are very appealing.
And honestly, if the PC's standards of attractiveness are the same
as the player's, is this a big disaster? As the player demonstrates,
real people have standards of beauty; they don't all like the same
things. So PCs presumably should too. Using the player standard
is a minor esthetic flaw--it can rule out neat situations like the
one John describes--but it seems more realistic than not having a
standard at all.
> My impression here is that your issue here is a game balance
>one. i.e. You consider it unfair if a PC gets to act rationally
>when facing a dragon without paying for it. However, situations
>where the PC doesn't benefit aren't a problem. Thus, if I spend
>a bunch of points on it (i.e. High Will, no mental disads), I can
>have the "priviledge" of role-playing my character as I see fit.
This clashes with the desire to have mechanics which describe
the character well. If the character really doesn't have extremely
high Willpower, but still has preferences and foibles, they can't
be represented under such a system. For example, Markus likes
women to a fault, and has had affairs with several women whom he
would much better have avoided. I would not want to give him
stats that implied he was unseducable; that would be inaccurate.
But he's quite picky--he doesn't like Landinger women, he doesn't
like groupies, he really prefers brunettes to blonds. And he has
a "hands off" category that he's never breached--he doesn't make
passes at crew, and his stepdaughter is also out of the question,
despite being probably the best specific match to his likings that
we've ever seen.
I don't find it at all contradictory that Markus meets one
beautiful woman and never twitches, and meets a different one and
falls for her hard. That's how most real people work, in my
experience.
There's some cute research showing than in both humans and mice,
a potential partner smells "better" if s/he is of an immune
system type different from that of the smeller's mother (and
generally, given genetic correlation, this means that people
of a type different from yours smell better). That's far from
the whole story, of course, but it does cast a lot of question
on "universal standards."
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Leszek Karlik
<cla...@mindspring.com> disseminated foul capitalist propaganda:
[...]
>> If the dragons have a magical "fear attack", that's quite a different
>> thing, but then you're not talking about a personality mechanic, but
>> about a "make a save vs spell effect" type mechanic.
>
> #1 Even if it's magic, it's still a PM, just one that some people are
> more comfortable with.
I would disagree. My definition is that "Personality Mechanics" cover
the rules that govern the character's behaviour due to internal
influence (that is, the character's personality). Magic is an external
influence.
Otherwise, you could say that unarmed combat mechanics are a PM,
because you can grapple somebody, put them in an arm lock and make
them walk towards the exit, infuencing their behaviour. Well, they
aren't, and a "magical arm lock" influence is neither.
> #2 The difference between magic and not magic are not so tightly defined
> in some gameworlds.
This is a better complaint. I guess I should have specified that I'm
referring to "realistic" mechanics in realistic worlds.
> Is Frodo's mithril shirt magic or not? Is the fear caused by a
> dragon magic or not?
Is a courage of an Eldar or Maiar standing up to Balrog magical or
not? :-) Personalities of characters in such words can be really
different from personalities of normal characters, and if somebody
would claim that a "Gorgeous-One-In-A-Million-Hunk" could seduce
Galadriel, well, I'd laugh in his face. And Gandalf does not run from
the Balrog in Moria, he simply says "and I am so weary...".
[...]
> Hell, can a martial artist be so fast as to dodge bullets without being
> "magic"? Walk on water? Root himself to the ground so as to be
> unmovable by a half dozen people?
In realistic games, not really. In cinematic games, sure, but in
cinematic games "realistic" PMs are usually inappropriate - cinematic
action heroes do not fear and hesitate before charging into a hail of
bullets. And genre-convention-enforcement does not require the use of
PMs, but "world law rules" like bulletproof nudity and Stormtrooper
Marksmanship Academy. :->
For example, in my homebrew set of cinematic mechanics, there are no
PMs that prevent a PC from betraying other PCs, killing helpless
enemies and such other non-genre-fitting things. However, there is a
rule that "a character that does not behave like a cinematic hero is
not a cinematic hero". And if the PC stops being a cinematic hero, he
becomes a Bacground Character. In other words, rules start treating
the character as a mook. Which means that he'll die pretty soon, as
most mooks do. :->
> There are answers in the real world to these questions (although if I
> kept listing them, I'm sure I would get some that we wouldn't even all
> agree on in the real world), but those answers do not automatically apply
> to any game world you might happen to be playing in.
Of course. When I play Pendragon, I consider the PM that is there
entirely appropriate. It is a good, genre-enforcing PM.
But it's not realistic, and Peter wants realism for FFRE. I think FFRE
would suck at re-creating a genre-heavy cinematic world, which
shouldn't be surprising for anybody, really. :-)
[...]
>>> In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the attractiveness
>>> of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from the average?
>> By saing that the NPC is attractive.
> I don't even get a roll to resist that?
No, because I'm talking about basic, universal standard of
attractiveness. Maybe it would be better to find another term, because
"attractive" might be considered an implication that my character is
attracted to this NPC, which might not necessarily be true.
However, there are people who are pretty and those who are not - if
somebody has a scar covering half of he's face and has a visible limp,
he will be considered unattractive by people he meets for the first
time, if somebody has a clear skin, symmetrical features and healthy
hair, he will be considered attractive (and treated slightly better).
> That's already a PM, it's the GM decides mechanic. Whether or not some
> character is attractive has as much to do with the viewer as with the
> beauty,
I'd agree when talking about "beauty", but not about basic, low level
"attractiveness".
[...]
>> Universal standard of beauty are pretty bland - symmetry of features
>> and signs of health. But they're also NOT VERY SIGNIFICANT. Yes,
>> pretty people have it easier in social situations, but being pretty is
>> not a magic wand you can wave at somebody and get them to hop into bed
>> with you, and then perform various favours.
>
> Maybe you've just not met anyone pretty enough.
Naah, I simply consider sex an activity which requires a high level of
trust in the other participant. And humans do not have an
overwhelmining, uncontrollable urge to mate.
Well, let me put it bluntly - humans have a "fight or flight"
instinct, but they do not "fuck or flight" instinct. :->
[...]
> And I'm a nit-picking bastard. You throw some succubus at me who is
> perfect by my standards (no mind control, just the ability to look and
> behave exactly like my wildest fantasy), and I have no clue what would
> happen and I doubt you do either.
I'd go into paranoid mode. :-) And most of my characters would, too,
because it's pretty obvious somebody is trying to mess with my mind.
> And that's just our difference of opinion over ACTUAL human psychology.
> It doesn't take much tweaking to make a world where James can seduce
> whomever he pleases with the exception of a few mysteriously resistant
> individuals. Games don't need to, and tend not to, perfectly model the
> real world
Of course. In my cinematic games, characters can have an advantage
called "magnetic personality" which makes them a James-Bond-class
seducers. :-) But that's for cinematic games, not for realistic ones.
[...]
>> Not every VieCong fighter is going to run and hide when a combat
>> chopper is flying at him, and firing rockets and guns.
>> I think you mechanicize human reactions too much.
> Humans are machines - really complex ones, but still just machines.
Yeah. But they're chaotic machines, and chaos is indeterministic.:->
[...]
>>> You designed your character. Just as you define how physically durable
>>> your character is, by purchasing a certain level of Health and
>>> Toughness, or Constitution and Hardiness, you also define how
>>> emotionally tough your character is, by purchasing a certain level of
>>> Will.
>> Yep. If the system has a Will attribute. Some people may prefer to
>> play systems without a Willpower attribute, simple as that.
> And some prefer to play systems with no attribute representing the
> physical might of a character. I'm not sure where you are trying to go
> with that statement.
I'm trying to say that Peter is wrong in assuming that all systems
will have a definition of emotional toughness of a character. What
defines the emotional toughness of an Amber character? [No, it is not
Psyche. :->]
And systems with no Willpower or Intelligence are much more common
than systems with no physical-strength-of-the-character attribute,
IME.
[...]
>> Or may play systems were the Willpower attribute serves only to
>> determine the pain resistance
> There's another PM.
I think you use the term "PM" to broadly. I guess you could call
"health" a "PM", too, because if you've got a low health, you can be
incapacitated much easier and this influences your actions.
Not everything that influences the actions and possible actions of a
character is a Personality Mechanic, after all.
[...]
>>> Peter Knutsen
>> Leslie
> aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Yes, indeed. :-)
Russell Wallace
>I would disagree. My definition is that "Personality Mechanics" cover
>the rules that govern the character's behaviour due to internal
>influence (that is, the character's personality). Magic is an external
>influence.
Empirically, the last time one of my characters got charmed by a
vampire I had no objection to going ahead and roleplaying it; and if
you've been reading my posts, you know my opinion of personality
mechanics :) So on that basis, I agree with you.
Robert Scott Clark
news:3eca54d3...@news.eircom.net:
> On 20 May 2003 13:46:08 GMT, Leszek Karlik <les...@hell.pl> wrote:
>
>>I would disagree. My definition is that "Personality Mechanics" cover
>>the rules that govern the character's behaviour due to internal
>>influence (that is, the character's personality). Magic is an external
>>influence.
>
> Empirically, the last time one of my characters got charmed by a
> vampire I had no objection to going ahead and roleplaying it; and if
> you've been reading my posts, you know my opinion of personality
> mechanics :) So on that basis, I agree with you.
>
All that means is that you self-description as disliking PMs is inaccurate,
and what you really dislike is some as-yet-to-be-defined subset of them.
Saying "I dislike X" followed by "the definition of X must not include y,
because I don't dislike y", is a pretty empty statement - it does nothing
to provide a useful definition of PMs.
Russell Wallace
<cla...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>All that means is that you self-description as disliking PMs is inaccurate,
>and what you really dislike is some as-yet-to-be-defined subset of them.
No, what it means is that you're mistaking your failure to understand
a difference for the nonexistence of that difference.
Wayne Shaw
Wallace) wrote:
>On Tue, 20 May 2003 16:31:55 GMT, Robert Scott Clark
><cla...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>>All that means is that you self-description as disliking PMs is inaccurate,
>>and what you really dislike is some as-yet-to-be-defined subset of them.
>
>No, what it means is that you're mistaking your failure to understand
>a difference for the nonexistence of that difference.
Or probably more accurately from watching Robert's reaction to a
similar discussion in the past, an active unwillingness to acknowledge
the possibility of the difference being real and meaningful.
Russell Wallace
>Or probably more accurately from watching Robert's reaction to a
>similar discussion in the past, an active unwillingness to acknowledge
>the possibility of the difference being real and meaningful.
Yes, I suspect you're right there.
Robert Scott Clark
> On Tue, 20 May 2003 16:31:55 GMT, Robert Scott Clark
> <cla...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>>All that means is that you self-description as disliking PMs is
>>inaccurate, and what you really dislike is some as-yet-to-be-defined
>>subset of them.
>
> No, what it means is that you're mistaking your failure to understand
> a difference for the nonexistence of that difference.
>
Things being part of differeing subsets do indeed make them different. I
did not say there was not a difference between those things, only that the
particular difference you are refering to does not lead to it no longer
being part of the larger set.
Robert Scott Clark
Damn, I'm slow on finishing these big ones.
I also wrote jumped around when writing this, so apologies for any part
where I cut off in mid-sentence and never finished.
#1 I'm going to get a little longwinded at the beginning of this post, but
sooner or later I will actually get around to addressing the rest of what
you said.
#2 Before getting too far into a discussion of PMs, I would like to
suggest you take a look at
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~tarim/rpg/pmnotes.htm
While it doesn't go into a lot of the implications and interractions of
PMs, it is a pretty good catalog of differing kinds of PMs, and provides a
decent set of terminology (some of which I will probably use in this post)
As a plus, I think much of the page was formed from parts of discussions
here.
> On Sun, 18 May 2003 21:46:00 GMT, Robert Scott Clark
> <cla...@mindspring.com> disseminated foul capitalist propaganda:
>
> [...]
>>> If the dragons have a magical "fear attack", that's quite a
>>> different thing, but then you're not talking about a personality
>>> mechanic, but about a "make a save vs spell effect" type mechanic.
>>
>> #1 Even if it's magic, it's still a PM, just one that some people
>> are more comfortable with.
>
> I would disagree. My definition is that "Personality Mechanics" cover
> the rules that govern the character's behaviour due to internal
> influence (that is, the character's personality). Magic is an external
> influence.
>
> Otherwise, you could say that unarmed combat mechanics are a PM,
> because you can grapple somebody, put them in an arm lock and make
> them walk towards the exit, infuencing their behaviour. Well, they
> aren't, and a "magical arm lock" influence is neither.
A better comparison than the armlock would be a "strong handshake" contest.
Two characters grasp hands and then squeeze until one gives up. If you
have a mechanic that decides who wins, then it's a PM - the decision for
one character to give up and let go is made by the mechanics instead of by
the player.
If, on the other hand <rdrr>, there were mechanics in the game for doing
damage to a hand by squeezing it - probably by giving increasing chance of
taking penalties on manual dex-based skills - then the decision on when to
let go was left to the player ("ok, either let go now or your chance for
having a -3 penalty for 3 days will jump from 4 or less to 5 or less. Then
again, Bruno looks like he might break soon."), then it would not be a PM,
as there are mechanics that affect the situation, but do not themselves
make the decision.
Influencing a decision is much different than making one, and both are
different than action being forced without the character making any
decision at all.
Now, if your hypothetical armlock could force someone to walk without them
having the option of risking a dislocated/broken arm and fighting back,
then it most certainly would be a PM.
When dealing with magic, whether or not a PM was involved would depend on
whether the magical effect involved direct control of actions, or merely
changed emotions or perceptions.
The classic example is the D&D spell Friendship, which I will present in
two ways, one involving a PM, and the other not involving a PM.
The first version is exactly as it was written in the books (to the limits
of my memory).
The spell causes the target to consider the caster to be a close personal
friend.
That's it.
Taken purely at face value, there's not any personality mechanic here. All
decisions of actual actions are made by the player. A magic spell changes
some thoughts the player has, but the player gets to decide action.
Now, the second version is exactly the same, except than some GMs feel that
they should get to veto player action if they think the player is not
treating his "friend" well enough.
That's a PM. The mechanic is "GM decides" and it certainly has that
mechanic making a decision in place of the player.
Dragon Fear can be looked at in the same way. If the dragon only makes the
character afraid, then there is no PM. If the dragon controls the
character's mind magically making him run away, then there is no PM. If
the dragon, magically or not, makes the character afraid, and then the
character is forced to run away because he is afraid, then that's a PM.
Now, why someone would want to use either of these PMs is a different
question, and the answer I'm going to give is a little elaborate. This
next section is partially a tangent, and partially the main point of this
post, so pay attention, I'll eventually come around to relate it to both
the Friendship example and to the Dragon Fear example.
The type of things that can happen in a RPG and the decisions that make
them come about can be organized in different ways. One way is to organize
the space so that on one side are world effects (like weather patterns) and
on the other side are character personalities. These are not two
independant groups, but instead a spectrum. They meet in the middle and
overlap significantly.
A common practice is to draw a distinct line between personality and world
and then to distribute power within game according to that, with each
player getting the "personality" of the character he controls and the GM
and mechanics dividing everything on the world side of the line. (It is
also possible to divide power without regard to the personality/world line
which produces a much different kind of PM, but that doesn't seem to be
what we are talking about so I'll ignore that type of thing for the rest of
the post and concentrate on power division that seeks to preserve the
personality/world division)
That is normally going to be the position of the anti-PM person. To then a
PM would be something that fell on the personality side of the first line,
which would also mean it should not fall on the GM/mechanics side of the
second line.
But the first line is arbitrary. There is no distict dividing line between
the two. A pro-PM person is likely to have an overlap area in the middle,
a hazy space where there are strong elements of both personality and world.
Maybe they involve the personality's reaction to strong external
influences, maybe they represent biological processes, maybe they are just
so common as to be considered the default for whatever the species of the
character is, but whatever the reason they are a little of both.
Now, someone with that viewpoint would not have the option of having the
power division line overlap perfectly with the personality/world line,
because the p/w line doesn't even exist as a discrete line. But, you still
have to divy up the power somehow, so a line still gets drawn, it's just
that the exact position of it is more variable, and is normally going to be
located somewhere within the ambiguous space.
This is where one thing that happens in these arguments that irritates me
to no end comes from. Anti-PM people often ask for examples of PMs and why
they would be needed, and expect something that is unreasonable to expect.
(again please note that now I am only talking about PMs used in an attempt
to model psychology, not those used for other purposes)
The unreasonable expection is that a good example of a PM will obviously be
both part of the character's personality AND something where it is obvious
that a mechanic should be used. But PMs aren't like that. The very nature
of PMs demand that they not be strongly on either side. If they are too
strongly on the side that demands mechanics, then they will not be
considered personality. If they are too obviously personality, then there
is not enough of a world influence to justify a mechanic.
To a degree PM is a misnomer - or more to the point, it is named by people
who dislike them. From the standpoint of someone who likes and uses them,
"world mechanic with some personality influence". Regardless of what
opponents of PMs claim, the goal of PM supporters is not (for most of us)
to reign in poor roleplayers. The purpose is to represent with mechanics
something that seems to us to be more influenced by world considerations
than by the individual personality of the character. (and for the third
time I will repeat this as I want to make it perfectly and unambiguously
clear, I am talking only about one subset of PMs, there is a different type
(types?) of PM that can be clearly personality, but those are not the
"realistic" type we have been discussing those in this thread)
What these world considerations are vary, but I would say the two main ones
are commonality/definition and chemistry/biology - and truthfully most of
them contain both, as the usual source of commonality is a common bio-
chemistry.
The Charm Person spell from xD&D (in the older versions especially)
provides an example of PM by virtue of commonality/definition. One
possible justification that could be given for the more restrictive reading
(the one that involves a PM) of the spell is that although individuals
might have different definitions of what it means to be a "friend", the
spell doesn't follow individual opinions of what "friend" means, it is
based on one particular definition and makes the target feel a certain way
about the caster, which might be different than the way the target feels
about those who he normally considers his friends. That feeling of
friendship is then defined to be one where certain actions are not valid -
even though you or I or our characters might take those actions against
those we consider our friends. It's that those aren't "real friends" by
the definition the spell uses.
I personally hate this particular PM, but I'm trying to present it as what
it is. There is nothing wrong conceptionally with doing this, I just
consider the definition of "friendship" required to be needlessly extreme.
The dragon fear is an example of a mixture of both biology and commonality.
For a dragon fear effect that is actually fear (and not a "mentally control
character's motor skills and make him run away" effect), the first things
the effect (magical or not) does is produce fear in the character. Whether
this is by jacking up the chemical levels in the character magically, or by
directly causing the character to experience fear, a very similar thing
happens - the emotional state of the character is changed. (note the
difference between emotion affecting PMs and action effecting PMs)
At it's weakest level, the character would feel fear, but not have actions
restricted at all. But imagine, if you will, turning the "volume" up on
the fear effect. Take the fear so high, that no <insert character species>
could possibly ignore it. At that point either through chemical reaction
becoming more influential than personality or because of the definition of
what it means to be <character species>, it seems reasonable to say that
the world has become more important in the situation than personality;
thereby, making using a mechanic for it seem more appropriate.
From here you can lower the "volume" so that some, but few, <character
species> can resist the fear, and then group those who can together in a
special group. Maybe charge them for the priveledge and call it an
"advantage". Or you can keep lowering it further, making another group
that can resist fear level 8, but not 9. Keep doing this and you soon have
a bravery stat. Now most systems like to slap some heavy randomization on
everything in the game, but that doesn't change what's happening at the
most basic level.
Where you happen to set the volume of the dragon's fear magic seems pretty
important to whether a PM is used. At 10, we are hardly talking a PM
anymore, it's part of the world definitions to have the character behave in
a certain way. At the lowest levels, behavior caused by a random mechanic
is going to look random and "unrealistic", but somewhere in the middle this
has to flip from one to the other, and where that happens isn't set in
stone.
That's the problem with producing a good PM example to use in an argument
with someone on the internet. It has to be personalized. The perfect
example would be one that landed square on top of the person's dividing
line (Or even better 2 very closely related examples, one landing on either
side of their line, as this would hopefully make the person examine exactly
why they place their line where they do. And in the process make them
realize that yes, they are indeed drawing an arbitrary line.)
But, no internet argument remains between two people, and I end up seeing
what I call "tag-team arguments". I try to target in on a good example for
one person, and then someone else, with a totally different dividing line,
chimes in with how bad the example is. The first person fades away, and
I'm then stuck arguing with a new person who wants to fixate on an example
that was never meant for them.
I'm pretty sure there was something else I wanted to say about this, but I
just can't think what it could be.
>
>> #2 The difference between magic and not magic are not so tightly
>> defined in some gameworlds.
>
> This is a better complaint. I guess I should have specified that I'm
> referring to "realistic" mechanics in realistic worlds.
I can truthfull say I have never seen anyone play a RPG with a fully
realistic world. Now, I assume they do exist, but without any doubt on my
part, they are going to be so rare as to be of mostly academic interest.
And, truthfully, "real" psychology impacted by a few extreme world elements
is what most PMs (of the type we are talking about) are there to emulate.
>
>> Is Frodo's mithril shirt magic or not? Is the fear caused by a
>> dragon magic or not?
>
> Is a courage of an Eldar or Maiar standing up to Balrog magical or
> not? :-) Personalities of characters in such words can be really
> different from personalities of normal characters, and if somebody
> would claim that a "Gorgeous-One-In-A-Million-Hunk" could seduce
> Galadriel, well, I'd laugh in his face.
And by that point in power escalation, "one-in-a-million" is really common.
The real question is whether Frodo could turn down Galadriel if she really
tried.
> And Gandalf does not run from
> the Balrog in Moria, he simply says "and I am so weary...".
Well, I do prefer PMs that use resource expenditure or modifiers to those
that have activation rolls. But that doesn't stop them from being PMs.
>
> [...]
>> Hell, can a martial artist be so fast as to dodge bullets without
>> being "magic"? Walk on water? Root himself to the ground so as to
>> be unmovable by a half dozen people?
>
> In realistic games, not really. In cinematic games, sure, but in
> cinematic games "realistic" PMs
I'm not sure what you mean by "realistic PMs".
>are usually inappropriate - cinematic
> action heroes do not fear and hesitate before charging into a hail of
> bullets. And genre-convention-enforcement does not require the use of
> PMs, but "world law rules" like bulletproof nudity and Stormtrooper
> Marksmanship Academy. :->
>
> For example, in my homebrew set of cinematic mechanics, there are no
> PMs that prevent a PC from betraying other PCs, killing helpless
> enemies and such other non-genre-fitting things. However, there is a
> rule that "a character that does not behave like a cinematic hero is
> not a cinematic hero". And if the PC stops being a cinematic hero, he
> becomes a Bacground Character. In other words, rules start treating
> the character as a mook. Which means that he'll die pretty soon, as
> most mooks do. :->
So, "play like I want you to or the character dies"? That attitude is
likely to get you a kick in the nuts in my group. I certainly don't see
this throwing yourself on the mercy of the GM to be better than a
mechanized system that can be agreed to by the players before the game even
starts.
>
>> There are answers in the real world to these questions (although if I
>> kept listing them, I'm sure I would get some that we wouldn't even
>> all agree on in the real world), but those answers do not
>> automatically apply to any game world you might happen to be playing
>> in.
>
> Of course. When I play Pendragon, I consider the PM that is there
> entirely appropriate. It is a good, genre-enforcing PM.
>
> But it's not realistic, and Peter wants realism for FFRE. I think FFRE
> would suck at re-creating a genre-heavy cinematic world, which
> shouldn't be surprising for anybody, really. :-)
Peter's "realism" allows for some extreme situations - even more extreme
than would ever occur in this world.
>
> [...]
>>>> In particular, how can or should a GM communicate the
>>>> attractiveness of an NPC, assuming it diverses significantly from
>>>> the average?
>>> By saing that the NPC is attractive.
>> I don't even get a roll to resist that?
>
> No, because I'm talking about basic, universal standard of
> attractiveness. Maybe it would be better to find another term, because
> "attractive" might be considered an implication that my character is
> attracted to this NPC, which might not necessarily be true.
>
> However, there are people who are pretty and those who are not - if
> somebody has a scar covering half of he's face
My roomate and I saw a woman who had a large, very visible scar running
from her forehead down across her eye, and down her cheek to her jaw. It
was of the type that should have been accompanied by an eyepatch (and she
could have easily had a glass eye for all I know), and both of us had the
exact same reaction. "Damn that's cool". Without it, her appearance would
have been sort of pleasantlty bland, but the scar made her super-spy sexy.
"Universal" standards of beauty are nothing but patterns across a large
number of people and say little about the evaluations by individuals, which
will likely include personal prejudices and assumptions.
> and has a visible limp,
> he will be considered unattractive by people he meets for the first
> time,
Statistically, maybe, but not universally. The only thing I can say about
your belief that there is a universally applied standard of beauty is that
you must lack some significant life experience. If that's offensive, then
sorry, but I don't know how else to put it. I've never met even two people
with the same opinion of what it is to be attractive, nor have I seen even
one single trait that is universal to everyone's taste.
>if somebody has a clear skin, symmetrical features and healthy
> hair, he will be considered attractive (and treated slightly better).
>
>> That's already a PM, it's the GM decides mechanic. Whether or not
>> some character is attractive has as much to do with the viewer as
>> with the beauty,
>
> I'd agree when talking about "beauty", but not about basic, low level
> "attractiveness".
I'd say it's even more pronounced with regard to "attractiveness, as I
don't know of any universals on that level. Hell, there aren't universals
of anything. Sure, you see patterns consistent across cultures that make
beauty closely linked with health, symetry, and - especially in females -
youth, but we all know there is someone out there who thinks the sexiest
thing in the world is a 98-year-old woman with wrinkles, liver spots, and a
pegleg. Me, I'm attracted to women who swear a lot.
What is it that you think is a universal standard for "attractive"?
>
> [...]
>>> Universal standard of beauty are pretty bland - symmetry of features
>>> and signs of health. But they're also NOT VERY SIGNIFICANT. Yes,
>>> pretty people have it easier in social situations, but being pretty
>>> is not a magic wand you can wave at somebody and get them to hop
>>> into bed with you, and then perform various favours.
>>
>> Maybe you've just not met anyone pretty enough.
>
> Naah, I simply consider sex an activity which requires a high level of
> trust in the other participant.
I think you have a much different idea of what happens on a successful
"Seduction" attempt than I do. A seduction doesn't make you do something
you don't want to do, it changes your mind about what it is exactly that
you want to do. It's a subtle, but important distinction.
For someone concerned with diseases, a successful seduction would involve
convincing the "target" of the seducer's clean bill of health. For someone
to whom trust was the main issue, the seduction attempt would have to
involve some way of quickly building faux trust. That's where finding the
person attractive is really important. Sure, an attractive person is
arousing, but the really important part is that people DO react better to
people that they find attractive, they trust them more, and give them more
of a benefit of the doubt. That's why attractiveness assists in a
seduction, not because it makes your dick extra hard.
The way you need to look at a seduction is by asking the question, "what
could occur that would make the character think it was a good idea to
succumb to the seduction" and whether or not the attempt works depends on
whether the seducer figures that answer out and can enact it convincingly.
After all, it is a "seduction" attempt, not a "meet someone nice and screw
them" attempt. It's just a small scale con job relying on hornyness
instead of greed.
Sure that takes a lot more effort than a little ass wagging, but then
picking a lock requires more than 30 seconds and a paperclip.
For a character who had such bizarre requirements or who was observant
enough to always be able to tell genuine trust and affection from
manipulation, I would have no problem charging character points for some
sort of advantage, as I see it as a significant deviation from the human
norm.
More truthfull, I would probably take it as a first indication that our
worldviews differed greatly enough to make playing with someone who
believed that a bad choice.
>And humans do not have an
> overwhelmining, uncontrollable urge to mate.
>
> Well, let me put it bluntly - humans have a "fight or flight"
> instinct, but they do not "fuck or flight" instinct. :->
Are you seriously meaning to imply that humans don't have instincts pushing
them to have sex? Not only does that seem totally bizarre to me from a
evolutionary standpoint, it runs counter to my observations about myself
and virtually everyone I've ever known for any significant period of time.
The only people I've known without a fuck instinct were on Prozac, and
they've been known to get off that shit just to get the instinct back
because they miss it.
>
> [...]
>> And I'm a nit-picking bastard. You throw some succubus at me who is
>> perfect by my standards (no mind control, just the ability to look
>> and behave exactly like my wildest fantasy), and I have no clue what
>> would happen and I doubt you do either.
>
> I'd go into paranoid mode. :-) And most of my characters would, too,
> because it's pretty obvious somebody is trying to mess with my mind.
Then your characters should probably take some form of mental
advantage/disadvantage to represent that, as it seems a pretty extreme
position to take.
>
>> And that's just our difference of opinion over ACTUAL human
>> psychology. It doesn't take much tweaking to make a world where
>> James can seduce whomever he pleases with the exception of a few
>> mysteriously resistant individuals. Games don't need to, and tend
>> not to, perfectly model the real world
>
> Of course. In my cinematic games, characters can have an advantage
> called "magnetic personality" which makes them a James-Bond-class
> seducers. :-) But that's for cinematic games, not for realistic ones.
I don't find the line so easily drawn. People have wildly differing views
of what is realistic. And looking at the rules as presented, very few
games get within a stone's throw of even the most liberal view of reality,
regardless of what the game claims to be doing.
>
> [...]
>>> Not every VieCong fighter is going to run and hide when a combat
>>> chopper is flying at him, and firing rockets and guns.
>>> I think you mechanicize human reactions too much.
>
>> Humans are machines - really complex ones, but still just machines.
>
> Yeah. But they're chaotic machines, and chaos is indeterministic.:->
>
I see the smilie, but then you use those pretty liberally, so I'm going to
respond somewhat seriously to this. Humans are more equilibrium machines
than chaos machines. For a system to be chaotic, a small change at the
present can result in a large difference later, while with humans, small
aberations tend to be assimilated. Biologically, this happens with heat
regulation, blood sugar, and virtually every chemical level in the body.
>>> Yep. If the system has a Will attribute. Some people may prefer to
>>> play systems without a Willpower attribute, simple as that.
>> And some prefer to play systems with no attribute representing the
>> physical might of a character. I'm not sure where you are trying to
>> go with that statement.
>
> I'm trying to say that Peter is wrong in assuming that all systems
> will have a definition of emotional toughness of a character. What
> defines the emotional toughness of an Amber character? [No, it is not
> Psyche. :->]
>
> And systems with no Willpower or Intelligence are much more common
> than systems with no physical-strength-of-the-character attribute,
> IME.
While probably technically true, given that I have only ever seen one
lacking an intelligence attribute, and given that it was TWERPS, I wouldn't
try to draw too many conclusions.
>
> [...]
>>> Or may play systems were the Willpower attribute serves only to
>>> determine the pain resistance
>> There's another PM.
>
> I think you use the term "PM" to broadly. I guess you could call
> "health" a "PM", too, because if you've got a low health, you can be
> incapacitated much easier and this influences your actions.
I can't even think of a definition of PM that would not include resistance
to pain. If you are discussing something that would not include pain
resistance, then I have no clue what definition you are using, but it is
different enough from ANY I have heard for PMs as to make this discussion
pretty pointless.
>
> Not everything that influences the actions and possible actions of a
> character is a Personality Mechanic, after all.
No, only those that involve self-control, and the determination of the
internal mental state of the character with game mechanics - like you get
with a pain resistance mechanic.
The decision of whether or not the character gets to ignore the pain is
made by mechanics and not by the player. Sure, you might say that ignoring
pain is not a decision people get to make, and I would then respond -
exactly, that's why you use a PM for it. That's what makes a PM (usually),
something that is part personality and part normal physical reaction is
deemed to be closer to the later than to the former.
>
> [...]
>>>> Peter Knutsen
>>> Leslie
>> aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
>
> Yes, indeed. :-)
Sorry about that. Stupid newsreader wont let me save a message to respond
to later unless I change something first. Then stupid news typer (me)
forgets to delete the "aaaaaa..." when I finally do get around to
responding.
>
> Leslie
And, I'd like to end this post with a special "shout out". This one goes
out to Johnny Depp. Mr "Dreamy", himself, turns 40 today, and my best
wishes go out to him and his peeps.
Peace.
Joachim Schipper
news:Xns9395716E18945cl...@65.82.44.187...
> Leszek Karlik <les...@hell.pl> wrote in
> news:slrnbck378...@fnord.ideefixe.com.pl:
>
> Damn, I'm slow on finishing these big ones.
Damn, I'm slow on reading those big ones ;-) .
<*really* long post>
Thanks Robert. I think I understand - if not necessarily agree with - your
position. You're right that I've little trouble with a pain mechanic (as
long as I get to have some influence - GURPS' Low/High Pain Treshold, for
instance), but that I dislike 'have my PC played by the dice' (every
reaction is determined), and so that I must draw a line somewhere.
Insight is always good.
Thanks!
Joachim
---
My outgoing mail is checked for viruses.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.488 / Virus Database: 287 - Release Date: 5-6-03
Robert Scott Clark
wrote in news:3ee5fc05$0$76761$1b62...@news.wanadoo.nl:
>
> Thanks Robert. I think I understand - if not necessarily agree with -
> your position. You're right that I've little trouble with a pain
> mechanic (as long as I get to have some influence - GURPS' Low/High
> Pain Treshold, for instance), but that I dislike 'have my PC played by
> the dice' (every reaction is determined),
It's really wierd, I see that mentioed a lot, but truthfully, I don't think
anyone likes that.
> and so that I must draw a
> line somewhere.
> Insight is always good.
Hell, I think asking why the line is drawn where it is makes for great
insight.
Joachim Schipper
> "Joachim Schipper" <_remove.this.to.resp...@wanadoo.nl>
> wrote in news:3ee5fc05$0$76761$1b62...@news.wanadoo.nl:
>
> >
> > Thanks Robert. I think I understand - if not necessarily agree with -
> > your position. You're right that I've little trouble with a pain
> > mechanic (as long as I get to have some influence - GURPS' Low/High
> > Pain Treshold, for instance), but that I dislike 'have my PC played by
> > the dice' (every reaction is determined),
>
> It's really wierd, I see that mentioed a lot, but truthfully, I don't
think
> anyone likes that.
Well, I *was* quoting something I read, too, so I think I implicitly agree
with that. It's what you get when you PM-ize *everything*...
> > and so that I must draw a
> > line somewhere.
>
> > Insight is always good.
>
>
> Hell, I think asking why the line is drawn where it is makes for great
> insight.
Well, in my case, I don't mind combat PM like the pain mechanism, because
it's a tactical game, not a 'game of acting', in most combats. In 'games of
acting', though, I think I should be allowed to decide what my PC does, and
PM there bother me a lot. (In fact, all GURPS' PMs that impact 'acting' as
opposed to 'tactical play' are advisory, the way we play it).
In my case, that means there's a distinction between combat and 'acting';
this is not new for me, but it's an interesting angle to look at the thing.
Robert Scott Clark
wrote in news:3ee64567$0$76753$1b62...@news.wanadoo.nl:
>
> In my case, that means there's a distinction between combat and
> 'acting'; this is not new for me, but it's an interesting angle to
> look at the thing.
I don't see the difference usually. The common example of suduction is
something I find is normally a tactical consideration, as are things like
intimidation, lying, and barganing. Also, I tend to see the style of
combat to be very "acting" related and tend to resent it when tactics limit
that - for instance, I hate that in GURPS, every feint is a tactically
chosen move instead of something I can add in an evocative description of
the scene.
Neelakantan Krishnaswami
> wrote in news:3ee5fc05$0$76761$1b62...@news.wanadoo.nl:
> >
> > Thanks Robert. I think I understand - if not necessarily agree
> > with - your position. You're right that I've little trouble with a
> > pain mechanic (as long as I get to have some influence - GURPS'
> > Low/High Pain Treshold, for instance), but that I dislike 'have my
> > PC played by the dice' (every reaction is determined),
>
> It's really wierd, I see that mentioed a lot, but truthfully, I
> don't think anyone likes that.
The _Dying Earth_ rpg has something very close to that, and it has a
fair number of fans.
--
Neel Krishnaswami
ne...@alum.mit.edu
Thomas Lindgren
Neelakantan Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> writes:
While not "every reaction is determined", PENDRAGON emphasizes
personality mechanics. I think it's brilliant.
Best,
Thomas
--
Thomas Lindgren
"It's becoming popular? It must be in decline." -- Isaiah Berlin
Joachim Schipper
Well, that probably tells us quite a bit about you. I only consider actual
combat (with swords, guns, &c) to be a tactical game - being seduced or
trying to seduce someone is mostly roleplaying. Of course, there can be
tactical elements - but those elements are at the PC level to me, not at the
player level.
Whereas when I enter combat, it's more like the player playing to win. Of
course, the PC has his own influence - but far less so than in roleplaying.
This is probably partly because of constricting mechanics, but also
partially because the PC does not have proper time to think and I, as a
player, mostly run his reflexes and instincts, not his 'higher personality'.
I know that you think the player and PC shouldn't be described as two
different things, and of course they are not. But I thought the metaphor was
useful for making my point in this case.
Robert Scott Clark
wrote in news:3ee72282$0$45393$1b62...@news.wanadoo.nl:
>
> I know that you think the player and PC shouldn't be described as two
> different things,
Where do you get that idea? I'm usually adamant about making that
distinction as clear as possible. I have no problem with the player making
character decisions based on player level reasons, but I usually make the
distinction pretty clear.
Joachim Schipper
That's a prompt response, BTW!
Well, I was thinking along the lines of the 'implying pathology is meant as
an offence'-flamewar, in which your point seemed to be that one who says
that 'the PC is a separate entity in my head I cannot control' is ripe for
psychiatric treatment.
Of course, this is a slightly different case - but I thought it better to be
*too* careful when treading on scorched ground. I should have said
'separate', though.
Excuse me for any unclarities (sp?) and thanks!
Warren J. Dew
Whereas when I enter combat, it's more like the player
playing to win. Of course, the PC has his own influence
- but far less so than in roleplaying.
And my players and I roleplay in combat every bit as much as in seductions
scenes - often more so, since seduction is often abstracted. Indeed, one of
the biggest personality differences between the two most powerful player
characters in Laratoa comes out most sharply in combat - one tries to manage
things to ensure that everyone comes through safely, while the other tends to
trust most characters to take care of themselves.
This is probably partly because of constricting mechanics,
but also partially because the PC does not have proper
time to think and I, as a player, mostly run his reflexes
and instincts, not his 'higher personality'.
For most characters, this is probably good roleplaying, as most people even in
the player world do tend to to act on reflex and instinct in combat.
Warren J. Dew
Powderhouse Software
Joachim Schipper
news:20030611131639...@mb-m26.aol.com...
> Joachim Schipper posts, in part:
>
> Whereas when I enter combat, it's more like the player
> playing to win. Of course, the PC has his own influence
> - but far less so than in roleplaying.
>
> And my players and I roleplay in combat every bit as much as in seductions
> scenes - often more so, since seduction is often abstracted. Indeed, one
of
> the biggest personality differences between the two most powerful player
> characters in Laratoa comes out most sharply in combat - one tries to
manage
> things to ensure that everyone comes through safely, while the other tends
to
> trust most characters to take care of themselves.
Umm... I can see your point, but I still think it's mainly 'lower instincts'
that get played out, with fractions of 'higher personality' showing through,
in most cases.
I can understand your point, though. My PC was made leader fairly recently
(which means that he has to think a lot more, and, as a consequence, gets
less actual fighting in - though GURPS does not enforce it, I try to
roleplay it nonetheless), but even before that, parts of his personality
showed through. In particular, the amount of deadly force he uses varies
wildly - he made a habit of going for neck attacks on orcs with his big axe,
especially at the beginning of the game, but he would often just beat
'newbies' with no real skill or equipment senseless, preferably without
really hurting them (seeing that he can often take out or even kill an enemy
in one round if he does not defend, 'not really hurting them' can still be
pretty brutal by normal standards - but hey, they attacked first).
> This is probably partly because of constricting mechanics,
> but also partially because the PC does not have proper
> time to think and I, as a player, mostly run his reflexes
> and instincts, not his 'higher personality'.
>
> For most characters, this is probably good roleplaying, as most people
even in
> the player world do tend to to act on reflex and instinct in combat.
We rewrote the GURPS Combat Reflexes to reflect more realistic quick
reactions - my PC can react more quickly than most people, but my first
action in combat is usually fairly stereotypical (dodge, draw weapon, cover
the party healer).
Robert Scott Clark
news:20030611131639...@mb-m26.aol.com:
>
> And my players and I roleplay in combat every bit as much as in
> seductions scenes - often more so, since seduction is often
> abstracted.
Given that almost everything in a RPG is abstracted to one degree or
another, I'll assume you mean "abstracted away" or "abstracted to a single
roll" or you know, I think it's probably easier to ask what you mean than
try to guess. The only reason I'm curious is that it struck me as quite a
suprise to have you say it was abstracted - I can't nail down exactly why I
found it suprising, but I did.
Robert Scott Clark
wrote in news:3ee725ff$0$45388$1b62...@news.wanadoo.nl:
> "Robert Scott Clark" <cla...@mindspring.com> schreef in bericht
> news:Xns9397587CF6713cl...@65.82.44.187...
>> "Joachim Schipper"
>> <_remove.this.to.resp...@wanadoo.nl> wrote in
>> news:3ee72282$0$45393$1b62...@news.wanadoo.nl:
>>
>>
>> >
>> > I know that you think the player and PC shouldn't be described as
>> > two different things,
>>
>> Where do you get that idea? I'm usually adamant about making that
>> distinction as clear as possible. I have no problem with the player
> making
>> character decisions based on player level reasons, but I usually make
>> the distinction pretty clear.
>>
>>
>> > and of course they are not. But I thought the
>> > metaphor was useful for making my point in this case.
>>
>
> That's a prompt response, BTW!
>
> Well, I was thinking along the lines of the 'implying pathology is
> meant as an offence'-flamewar, in which your point seemed to be that
> one who says that 'the PC is a separate entity in my head I cannot
> control' is ripe for psychiatric treatment.
It's the "cannot control" part I have a problem with. Hell, I get a bit
antsy when I feel people do not differentiate between character and player
strongly enough; although, I've learned to bite my tongue on that one.
Warren J. Dew
seductions:
Given that almost everything in a RPG is abstracted to one
degree or another, I'll assume you mean "abstracted away" or
"abstracted to a single roll" or you know, I think it's
probably easier to ask what you mean than try to guess.
Hm, good point. I guess I feel like there's a dichotomy between things that
are played out in detail and things that are abstracted, but you're right that
there's more of a continuum.
To me, I think of those things that are played out at or slower than real time
as not being abstracted - particularly first person conversations - while
things that are played out significantly faster, including most conversations
that are described in the third person rather than played out word for word,
seem to me abstractions.
In this particular case, seductions often get abstracted to a brief player
level conversation that determines the result, but leaves all the detail off
screen.
Robert Scott Clark
> Robert Scott Clark replies to my comment that my group often abstracts
> seductions:
>
> Given that almost everything in a RPG is abstracted to one
> degree or another, I'll assume you mean "abstracted away" or
> "abstracted to a single roll" or you know, I think it's
> probably easier to ask what you mean than try to guess.
>
> Hm, good point. I guess I feel like there's a dichotomy between
> things that are played out in detail and things that are abstracted,
> but you're right that there's more of a continuum.
>
> To me, I think of those things that are played out at or slower than
> real time as not being abstracted - particularly first person
> conversations - while things that are played out significantly faster,
> including most conversations that are described in the third person
> rather than played out word for word, seem to me abstractions.
Yea, definately not the definition I would use. I agree that first
person conversations are normaly the least abstracted element, I find
combat, with dice rolling replacing sword swinging to be pretty highly
abstracted - detailed, but highly abstract. Maybe a few millisecond-by-
millisecond combat systems that detail every little aspect I might
consider to have low abstraction, but not most of them.
>
> In this particular case, seductions often get abstracted to a brief
> player level conversation that determines the result, but leaves all
> the detail off screen.
I don't think I clearly differentiate between when a conversation is
abstracted and when it's played out. It seems to flow back and forth
from one to the other pretty freely.