thread: 2005-04-25 : Technical Agenda
On 2005-04-29, Charles wrote:
strictly representational rules are necessarily insensitive to social situation.
(although you did actually state it much more agressively in the post itself: I consider this pretense socially destructive.)
Do you consider rules concerning character class and character power balance to be technical simulationist or are they effectivist? They refer to things in the game world, but they are clearly designed to structure player-player interaction and control distribution of player power and screen time.
If such rules are effectivist, then I definitely agree with your weaker formulation (strictly representational rules are necessarily ...). It seems to me that the social structuring of games like AD&D derives from the very tight structuring of game goal, and the parcelling out of player power in the form of character class. Games like GURPS, with a lack of character class and a less fixed goal, provide vastly less coherent guidance on how they are supposed to be played.
This may be a total tangent, but what does "I'm not all that good with horses, 2d8" mean in DitV? It seems to me that that means that the fact that I'm a mediocre horseman is going to come up often and save my ass every time. In play, does that mean that I'm constantly falling off my horse just as someone was about to shoot me, or accidentally spooking the horses in ways that help me out, or does it mean that I actually constantly inexplicably succeed at horsey tasks, even though I stated I wasn't all that good with them?
Sorry, but I have been struggling with the concept of Effectivist rules all day trying to understand that one.
I totally see what a proceduralist rule of that sort would mean: "My poor horsemanship will get lots of screen time, 2d8", but the effectivist version puzzles me (because my success rate, rather than my screen time, is what I'm putting dice into, but my number of dice (and therefore success rate) doesn't need to connect to my character's actual skill level).
