thread: 2012-11-21 : Positioning: Some Looly Pooly Groundwork
On 2012-11-25, Kirk Mitchell wrote:
Greg, I don't think so. The arrows show lines of influence on positioning, which is your range of options available in play, rather than actions that you are actually performing. If you took out the smiley faces, you'd get this rapid cycling between the mechanics and the fiction, which isn't accurate. You need to show that things can in the fiction that influence your options in play without actually going all the way to the "dice".
Fr'instance, a character gets thrown in the dungeon. There's no rule in this game for "being in a dungeon", but I'll be damned if I do anything other than narrate that character being tortured in the dungeon, or trying to get out, or talking shit with another prisoner. I don't get to do anything with that character but stuff that happens in or because of a dungeon until circumstances say otherwise.
"Circumstances" here will generally mean something happens in the fiction that makes leaving the dungeon a natural causal progression. How that happens is also determined by your positioning. Maybe there's no "being in a dungeon" rule, but there's a "rescue a friend" rule. If that rule kicks in when a friend is in trouble, we've got the fictional circumstances reaching up through the smiley faces to trigger the "rescue a friend" rule. It doesn't bypass the smiley faces, because they're the ones that decide when and where to implement the "rescue a friend" rule. Maybe there's no direct communication at all between the "rescue a friend" rule and causality of the fiction, because you only get to use that rule when you have five Awesome Points. You only get Awesome Points by rolling Highlighted Stats, and that's just the dice and the smiley faces talking to one another with no interaction with the fiction needed at all. Well, shit, I've only got three awesome points, and I'm the only one with "rescue a friend". Crap. Better roll those Highlighted Stats if I want to get you out of that dungeon...
Draw a big circle around the diagram: that is what the players say and do.
