thread: 2011-06-27 : The Dice & Clouds series from 2009
On 2011-07-02, Simon C wrote:
"Concrete" means the things they say the character is doing are happening in the fictional world of the game, they're meaningful, and you can't take them back.
Apocalypse World encourages this kind of thing by making moves triggered only when things have already been done, and by making sure the moves require you to describe exactly what you're doing before the GM knows how to respond.
"Detailed" means you say lots of things about the details of what the character is doing, and you describe exactly what they're doing.
Not a lot of games encourage this. One way to do it is to make resolution depend on lots of minutia of what the character is doing. It's hard to do that without lots of little modifiers and such, but you can do it. My alternative harm rules for Apocalypse World do it, but only for fighting: http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=1678.0
"Aesthetically pleasing" means it's pleasing to the people around the table. Maybe they like fancy descriptions, or things that sound brutal and gory, or humour.
Games like "Exalted" encourage aesthetically pleasing description with GM-awarded benefits for saying things fancy. I'm not a fan of that approach myself, but it seems to work for some people. A different way of doing it would be to have the GM judge, for example, if your description was "brutal" or "elegant", and resolving the action differently based on that judgement.
