thread: 2005-06-02 : Immersion
On 2005-06-03, Valamir wrote:
Actually Neel, the optimal bid thing is a bit of a smoke screen. Its some rules crunchy chrome, that when you look under the hood...almost really doesn't matter.
90% of whether you win the conflict is going to come from the total sum on all the dice rolled, and that is going to depend primarily on how many and which Traits you can roll for. Since you'll be rolling a fair fistfull of dice, the randomness of the rolls tends to have a pretty tight deviation, especially if you take Vincent's advice and do alot of smaller conflicts and follow ups.
What the different bids do...and whether you take the blow, block, or reverse is simply pace the conflict and influence who takes fallout when.
Since the majority of fall out is, ultimately, a GOOD thing in terms of character development and interest you can quickly see that spending time worrying about getting the exact right bid...is pretty much unnecessary. It is something they don't have to sweat because, while conflicts ARE important, whether you win or lose has little to do with your choice of bids.
As an interesting exercise to try, have the person sitting to the left roll the dice and work the sees and raises. The player in the conflict does nothing but narrate, and the person running the dice pushes forward dice based solely on the intensity and forcefulness of the narration. That might help with the intrusiveness some.
But ultimately...I think if your players are agonizing over the ultimate bid to the point where it becomes intrusive to their immersion...they're not groking it yet. You really DON'T need to think that hard about it.
