Fortune-forward Vs. Fortune-backward

[contracycle]

I think they are roughly similar after all, I just reversed the cause and effect.  The signal feature was that, for each condition that might prevent success, you had to resolve a seperate "task".

But essentially, its a mechanical idea I'm quite fond of.  On a related note, I've been toying with an idea that breaks up, umm, areas of life experience, like "being a cop", by say Expertise, Experience, Talent, with different values for the mechanism.  Rather than having skills, more like Cover in Sorceror, but allowing differentiation of weighting - so the young hotshot has high Talent but low Experience, the veteran might have the reverse.

[greyorm]

That's dramatically different than what Gareth described, and honestly, I like his version of the mechanics a lot better.

You think so?  I guess I don't see that...Gareth had it right, at least the very essence of it, while I just wrote up more detail on the exact process.

He's right about:
  --different colored dice for your abilities
  (frex: Red is Willpower; Green is Movement)
  --you roll a bunch of different colored dice for resolution, and the one that fails is the one which tells you why you failed
  --both his examples are pretty much correct

I agree there is some difference between them, as Gareth's idea seems to have been to roll a number of dice representing various influences on the situation all at once to derive success or failure; admitedly, I really like that idea.

Heck, I think I'm going to run with that idea (if you don't mind, Gareth) and make something out of it.

[lumpley]

Gordon, I agree with you that

In some ways, this is more like an Improv technique than a game mechanic - the dice replace the "idea thrown out by the audience" as the random seed-generator. But arguably, it (and the rest of a system) can also provide an opportunity for more organized and directed "play" than is possible in your average improvizational acting scene - and thus, we maintain a roleplaying game rather than move entirely into Group Storytelling.

and

There does seem to be a general "win" for Narrativist goals in moving that "Steps" stuff OUT of the resolution system, as that avoids a number of the complications that can arise when trying to map story-appropriate, premise-supporting, PC-protagonizing outcomes into a model of (possibly twisted and/or reversed) chronological event description.

In fact, I'm not sure I have anything to add.  Except that maybe all game mechanics are about who gets to say what about what, it's just hard to tell with conventional mechanics because they disguise the fact.

In fact, I think I'd say that conventional mechanics exist to protect players and GMs from having to negotiate, by strictly limiting who is allowed creative power over what, and (conversely) many unconventional mechanics exist as an aide to consensus, by distributing creative power and game-credibility.  But boy, that's me talking at the jargony front edge of my theory and who even knows.

-Vincent

[Gordon C. Landis]

But boy, that's me talking at the jargony front edge of my theory and who <U>even knows.

We all do that a LOT around here - it's good to be reminded from time to time  that there are no real experts and definitive answers yet.   That doesn't mean it's useless babble (I think your point is quite good, aligns nicely with some of Fang's Scattershot stuff, and would be good for any game designer to keep in mind), but we are well-served by taking most all this stuff as thought-experiments, not proven theory.

Gordon