thread: 2005-03-23 : Strong Stuff Indeed
On 2005-03-25, Dave Ramsden wrote:
I agree 100% that stuff that doesn't contribute to your participation is pointless. I disagree that stuff which doesn't get rolled on or provide modifiers is pointless—because stuff can contribute to meaning without being a die roll or die roll modifier.
The problem isn't that things that don't add modifiers or such are totally meaningless. We can always add meaning to anything. It's that they're meaningless with reference to the rest of the designed system, and that any meaning that is ascribed to it is effectively arbitrated by the players without any guidelines. I'm having exactly this trouble with something in the game I'm designing, simply because I can't think of how to connect it to the rest of the system. It's not a problem that the players get to do it - it's just a problem that the system is, essentially, not all one piece.
