Hey Vincent,

What's the status of your Web site? The entire www.septemberquestion.org site is currently offline.

TTFN,

Yokiboy

Yeah, that's the status all right.

Dunno what's up. I expect it'll be back soon, like tomorrow.

-Vincent

I think I know what causes it to go down: me needing to explain an RPG theory to someone and wanting to pass it off to Vincent.

So then I have to explain. And I'm not very good at that. And then people think that I just play these hippie games where everyone's a winner.

It's back up.

Hippie games where everyone's a winner, huh?

-Vincent

That's right. Hippie games where everyone's a winner.

See, the problem, as I see it, is that the resolution mechanic in most games is "Do you do something cool?" with the odds being good enough that no, you don't do something cool. You roll a lot of dice over the course of the game. You'll fail to do something cool pretty often.

Maybe a better way to look at it is that the roll determines if the story goes on now, or if it's delayed until you get a good enough roll.

What I like is a game where the dice determine if the character gets what sHe wants now, or if there's further complication. You, the player want those rolls to go back and forth because it makes the game unpredictable enough that you wind up in tenuous control of the story while retaining full control of the character. It solves the "GM makes the story while the players run the characters" paradox.

I'm a little high on this kind of thing because our PTA game was so good last night.

One of the players who made it so good wants to run D&D next. I've had consistently bad experiences with D&D, but consistently good experiences with the player. I trust him implicitly to make the game enjoyable, and I suspect he'll work around the deficiencies of the system well. But I've done a poor job at explaining what can be done with the system and was hoping to pass the responsibility to you.

One idea that I had was to roll for every relevant skill with a differently colored die, then decide which one looks like the best thing to do, given those rolls. That way, you can take the most interesting course of action. The problem is that the system is still set up to equate the efficacy of the character in the story with the well-being of your character, so the wages of failure are still a reduced ability to get on with the story. It's also a PiTA to keep track of those dice.

nikola wrote: I'm a little high on this kind of thing because our PTA game was so good last night.

Emily Care wrote:

nikola wrote: I'm a little high on this kind of thing because our PTA game was so good last night.

Ah, you're getting some honey from some other hive. Still down for PtA in G'field this weekend?

ps I like your multiple color dice idea: looking at a batch of possible outcomes and choosing the most interesting sounds way, way intriguing. I have another thought, but this is all so OT anway...