thread: 2008-04-14 : Interchangeable?
On 2008-04-14, Vincent wrote:
Z-dog: Here's the kind of thing I think of as an aesthetic, not functional, difference.
When there's a fight in Pendragon, we both roll our d20s and whoever rolls higher-but-not-over-skill hits the other. I roll a 11, you roll a 6, so I roll damage against you.
When there's a fight in Ars Magica, we roll initiative. On my turn I roll d10+attack against your d10+defense, and if I win I roll damage against you. Then on your turn, you roll d10+attack against my d10+defense, and if you win you roll damage against me.
From the point of view of how rules coordinate people's interactions to create fiction, Pendragon's and Ars Magica's fighting rules are interchangeable. They operate upon fully identical assumptions about play, take extremely similar inputs and produce outputs across exactly the same range of possibilities. I like the Pendragon approach better for purely aesthetic reasons, taste, not because there's any principled difference between them. Millenium's End's fighting rules, similarly: wildy different aesthetically, but pop one out and pop another in, they fit in the exact same rpg design space.
