thread: 2012-06-12 : Color and Currency!
On 2012-06-15, Tim Ralphs wrote:
Oh man. I was just going to reply with "Thanks, that makes a lot of things make sense and sorry for the sloppy formatting."
But you asked.
So on the one hand, you've got rules of unreliable currency bringing in mechanical risk, which is exciting. The dice rolls matter, they may introduce the unwelcome, they may make situations snow-ball, all of that. On the other, you've got rules of unreliable currency that call for moments of judgement, which give us a visceral sense of the game world's integrity. (With your caveat, that judgement creates unreliable currency "maybe inherently and inescapably, but maybe just overwhelmingly, I don't know.")
It feels like there's something more that needs to happen for a moment of judgement to be satisfying though, and I asked my question because I wanted to be sure I understood reliability before taking the next step. It feels like there's something maybe grounded in the Czege principle at work. In Apocalypse World, if a player successfully reads a situation then it is on the MC to create certain details. The player has to do some sort of interpretation of those details to get the +1 modifier. In my experience that subsystem works, and I wonder if there's a link between both creative parties being engaged with the fictional circumstances and the system incorporating both kinds of unreliability.
And then I wrote a load of stuff, got to the end of it and doubted I'd grasped what I was talking about. Let me ask another question, going in the opposite direction. Let's say we're playing Apocalypse World, but the rule is different. If someone reads a situation, then we treat it like they got a hit, always. They're guaranteed an answer to their question. If they act on that answer, then we assume they got a 10+ on whatever it was they were doing next. Is the currency reliable or unreliable? Did we lose the moment of judgement?
