thread: 2012-06-18 : Moves as Jumping-off Points
On 2012-06-19, Jim D wrote:
Heh, looks like I'm late to my own party.
I confess the idea of "only model the interesting parts" and the potential folly of "universal mechanics" (per Gregor's comment) caught me completely off-guard, though perhaps that's the byproduct of a mind raised on d20.
My own work has been trying to hold fast to the idea of an "old school"-style treatise on action movies of the 1980s, and eschewing details that didn't matter. A couple friends of mine (and I myself) have expressed concern about what the game *doesn't* do well—things like involved social conflict—but here it turns out that I accidentally stumbled into the right answer. I guess it's a natural extension of one of the biggest tricks in game mechanics that I've found, namely "reinforce actions in play you want to see more of, and de-emphasize ones that you don't." Action movies are about action, so why not concentrate on it? (Would this also be why latter-day D&D games are essentially the story of the murderhobo, since they want to allow any natural course of action, but pay undue emphasis and reward to fighting?)
Looking back on what little I've learned about the lofty goals of the OSR, it now suddenly makes more sense why these games are willing to use completely different systems for varying actions, and why that's not only okay, it's *better* than where the brands from which they're inspired went in the 90s.
tl;dr: Thanks, guys. Nice to finally understand why what I was thinking was wrong, and what I was doing was right.
