anyway.

I find this part of it interesting because it seems to address very directly that persistent concern lurking in some corners:  videogames are coming to kill us and take our stuff.

If I take a close look at what the GM is called upon to do in those rules, it's obvious to me that it can't be automated with anything short of strong-AI.

It's not only that your brain can do it, but also that nothing short of your brain is sufficient either.

I love this stuff.  Unfortunately I'm only able to sell these sort of concepts to half of my players.  The other half are like "but that doesn't accurately simulate reality!"

I'm working on it though.  I think that Guns and Stuff rule would work better for my players than the Rock of Tahamaat rule.  Baby steps...

I understand your point, but an entirely valid objection is that you've entirely sidestepped the issue of how to arbitrate "what you hoped for" and "what the GM offers you" (not to mention "what the weapon is ideal/good/lousy for") against what the opposite party thinks is reasonable.

A reducto ad absurdum is when I claim that my peashooter is an ideal anti-tank weapon and should be able to blow it up. Or if the GM says that a club is lousy against leather armor because it's not pointy.

It doesn't even take silly or malicious players to break this. We might just not know the domain well enough to be able to say. If I'm playing Settlers Of Plymouth, I don't actually know what a 17th-century musket is capable of doing, whereas the author of the game has probably done the research and can include some reasonable numbers in the rules.

I firmly believe that an RPG is like playing make-believe as a kid, except that when you and your friends disagree you can consult rules instead of hitting each other. (And the rules can either give the answer or provide a framework for compromising.) The Guns 'N' Stuff mechanic doesn't provide adequate rules if the players aren't already able to negotiate the meta-issues of handling disagreements about physical consequences.

Me, I long ago got over teenage kicks like memorizing the minutae of AD&D weapon tables, but I do want to have a rough feel for how the game world works, and whether a mook carrying Weapon X is capable of taking me out in one round of combat or just mussing my hairdo. (Or the opposite, if I'm the one with Weapon X.)

Again, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just saying that your answer isn't valid for all types of games or gamers.

Vincent talked a bit about this on comment 17 to the full rules, and I'll try to explain why that is important:

Roger mentioned that strong AI would be required to resolve this, and technically that's not true; (relatively) simple pattern matching AI could do it IF it was working with situations that the programmer was familiar with. In other words those arbitrations would be made according to a standard pattern matching formula that gave them their in-game significance.

This is exactly what many rules systems provide, a ready made heirachy of significance, importance, effect on plot etc. In fact, loads of guys design games because they want to swap out the existing "what is important and how important is it" schema and put in their own. And then put in different mechanics in order to make it "look different", hiding the fact that their really just wanting to say

"Hey guys, lets play D&D in my world today, where a knife is more dangerous than a broadsword".

An alternative to this is to have players explicitly make such a heirachy, and then force themselves to be consistent: If in Jame's world knives are more important than broadswords, then they should be more important in a specific way he doesn't go back on.

(For importance/dangerousness etc, you could fit a whole host of different factors like flexibility or speed or appropriateness or whatever else people are trying to rank)

In other words, you could pull the geek-wrangling out of the general form of the system and put it up in front of the players, so they agree to play in one guys world with it's own rules, and play by their own arbitrations in their own game. They can then pragmatically show that their way leads to more fun games for the group, or not, without having to reinvent hitpoints every few weeks in order to justify it.

On the other hand, doing that seriously leads you on the path to reproducing something like universalis, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.

I'm just enjoying this series, especially as a great followup to the "moment of judgment" bit from before.

Right on.

Play always requires judgement of the fiction.  This is just about making sure that the judgements you make are open, in the sense that there's a clear place for them in the rules, and easy, in the sense that you're making judgements about discrete categories - ideal, good, or lousy, are you in personal danger?, could this kill them? Rather than fine variables - Is this roll difficulty 15 or 16? Is the darkness worth -2 or -4?

Thumb up for Simon C on #6.

And I think that Rock of Tahamaat's rules do this better than the Guns&stuff rules. The later has more room for sliding away from the group aesthetic (or to make the group's aesthetic diverge from the designer's intended aesthetic). Whereas RoT's rules are more rooted in the aesthetic of the game. We can expect that they should be more coherent.

Roger (#1): try to make video games that rely on such players' jugement, and you'd have a real RPG video game.

sneJ: Oh! Yeah, yes. I'm not talking about handing this stuff off to the players, all unprepared and unsupported like that. No. The games I'm imagining would include weapon lists of the designer's creation. At the very least they'd have to include concrete rules for the players to follow in writing up their own weapons.

You asked "Did you spot where the character's weapon comes into play?"... my opinion?

It's not explicit, but this is the place it's most likely to come in:

"1. If it might kill them, call for the player to roll for "I'm vicious."

2. If it might, at worst, cripple, maim, break, terrorize or shatter them, call for the player to roll for "I'm desperate."

3. Otherwise, call for the player to roll for "I'm craven." (If the character has no opponent, it'll always be "I'm craven.")".

The kind of weapon you have (and how you wield it!), will, of course, inform what kind of damage you can do.

Vincent,

I'm interested in "circumstance-responsive vs circumstance-analytic."

I guess I find it interesting to think about exactly what kinds of judgements are easy to make, and which kinds are difficult.  I think I know what you mean by the above phrase, but I'm not sure.

Is "discreet vs. continuous" a good distinction? Discreet, like, counting things, putting things into one category or another.  Continuous like judging how much of a particular quality something has, etc.

I think there's also something to be said for what kind of consequences rest on the decisions you make.  Maybe I'm anticipating your reliable vs. unreliable stuff here, but for example, I find Burning Wheel has the worst combination of these qualities: As GM when you're saying what the obstacle of the task is, you're making a quantitative judgement of a bunch of continuous variables, and the consequnce of your decision is often whether the task is feasible or impossible.

On the other hand, in Dogs for example, judging whether a raise is just talking, physical, or fighting or whatever is a judgement of categorical variables, and the consequences aren't immediate or predictable.

All I want in this beautiful green world is to design a game to show what I mean. But listen good, Baker! It has to wait. HAS TO WAIT. You got things to do.

I hear you.

It's exciting stuff though.