thread: 2006-05-09 : T equals ... approximately zero, right?
On 2006-05-09, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
I love this. It's a beautiful refinement of [i]Dogs[/i], not just a setting hack.
In particular, I love the sophistication of stakes, in that (a) the generic "let's negotiate possible outcomes, then roll between them" is forbidden, (b) it's entirely possible that you change your mind about what you want to do with the stakes between declaring them and winning them, thanks to the back-and-forth of conflict (this is rather a strong point of [i]Capes[/i], in my experience), and (c) specific changes in characters' internal and external states are marked "you must make a conflict to change this" (something [i]Capes[/i] does very little and that I've missed in it).
Also:
you can name the stakes implicitly by only speculating how you might resolve them. "If I win, he chops your head off with his axe," for instance - what I'm really saying is that your head is at stake.
Also: "the monster has made the slave a promise that she's not going to fulfill. Name it. The monster has given the slave something that the slave does not want. Name it." That's beautiful.
