thread: 2010-06-14 : A Bit of Hardcore
On 2010-06-18, Rafael wrote:
PeterBB: Lots of good examples, thanks! The first two sound like formalizations & mechanizations of what I think of as good GMing. The last one sounds just like what I'm having trouble accepting: it sacrifices a sense of narrative authority to avoid the chance of narrative failure through dice whim—but such failure is an extremely rare situation in my world, as I mentioned above.
I guess my current position is:
I now see that a game system that carefully chooses the situations in which (e.g.) die rolls are used and the effects they can have can preserve their psychological value while avoiding their classic pitfalls.
I can believe that a game system can ease the burden on the GM of creating satisfying drama, although I don't yet understand how in practice.
I don't yet see what, if anything, a good system can offer that a good GM can't.
P.S. As far as testing these with my group goes, I may have a solution: we have a good GM who is happy being GM, and players who are happy being players—but occasionally I have to GM something, and I'm not particularly good, so the other players might be more open to experimentation in that context. Those "Dogs" won't hunt, alas, because the setting leaves everyone in my group cold, but maybe I can talk them into something "Burning".
