Follow-up Query

[Calithena]

Wow! That was an extremely interesting game. We're going to continue.

Roleplaying a whole land full of people mostly at Humanity 0, without memory or a sense of identity, was challenging and weird, but highly enjoyable. The protagonist took on a sort of messiah-like aura in some scenes as a result: good roleplaying plus humanity contests in the right contexts had the dramatic result of allowing people to remember who they were and 'waking them up' from their torpor.

Thank you very much, Ron.

Question: do you always play with the initiative rules? The reason I ask is that there was one combat scene where I just chucked them out and had the player roll straight-up stamina v. stamina vs. this hideous simian demon-dwarf with blood like black tar. The situation was that the hero had called on his own demon to Boost his stamina (morphing halfway into a rhinoceros-like shape) and both the simian monster (the still-bound familiar of a dead sorceress) and the protagonist just wanted to have a little WWF moment and try to break each other's spines in bare-clawed grappling action. So I just had them go stamina on stamina with the loser taking damage immediately, end of story. (Previous actions had established the grappling situation, after the demon tore away the protagonist's sword and threw it across the room.) I didn't see any reason to break this bit down any further.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Sean,

Cool!! Welcome to it, and I'm glad you're here.

That particular Stamina vs. Stamina confrontation seems very straightforward to me.

One thing I'd desperately like to re-phrase, given a time-machine, is the verbiage in the game that talks about combat resolution.

Really, what we're looking at is simple vs. complex conflict resolution. And it so happens that group combat is a complex conflict ... but role-playing explanation history led me to call it the "combat system," entirely wrongly.

So you guys were dealing with a simple conflict, and handled it appropriately - the fact that it was a combat being irrelevant to that decision. Well done.

Best,
Ron