Chris' recent post about applied Bricolage got me thinking about a few things, one of which is a not-so-recent episode in my Draug campaign. And then, when I started thinking, I started rambling. To be honest, I'm really not sure where I'm going with this.

Changing the system as you go

Victor August, young and rash, has for some reason or other decided that two younger kids (he's just 17 himself) need a thrashing. Who initiated the fight I can't recall. This was the first and only time we actually used the combat rules as written. Result: Victor's opponents hit him a few times, and as his combat abilities dwindled due to the damage, he had to cut a retreat.

I don't think the player liked it. It didn't fit with his view of the character. After that, we haven't used the combat rules, and the player - and the others - have mostly avoided getting into direct combat situations.

Why it's hard to post in "Actual Play", and how it's like talking about a dream

(Oh, man. "Actual play" is hard. How do I write about this without taking into consideration all the other situations that could have escalated into combat, that perhaps were combat but we didn't play them that way, etc? And without mentioning how this supposed "playtest campaign" actually turned into a very system-less campaign, which directly influenced my decision to remove almost all the rules from the game before it was published?

Seems to me that writing a post like this is similar to telling someone your dream. The way you tell it, the words you use, and the things you emphasize in telling it, are what will be interpreted. Without knowing it, you give away the problem and the solution just by putting it into words. But someone else has to repeat your words for you so that you can hear how obvious it all is.)

Using dice in the face of GM-force

But we still use the dice every once in a while. I think it's mostly a symbolic action: We roll in order to say "this is a dramatically significant moment", or "this is a moment of uncertainty". No matter how much GM force I use, and how obviously, we all still like to roll the dice.

A recent example of that: Christian August, the vicar, is told by an Angel of God to go to the beach to save the fisherman lying there. He finds Bleike (another PC). Bleike's foster father, the ruler of the mythical island Utrøst, is bent over him. Christian August soon realizes that the Utrøst ruler is holding Bleike's beating heart in his hands.

Christian's player wants to knock the heart out of the Utrøst ruler's hands and kill him. He rolls +4, which is the maximum in Fudge, and he succeeds. But since we're doing task resolution, I'm justified in doing this: When they go looking for the heart, they find it's disappeared, and when they put the Utrøst ruler's body in the ocean to bury him, he turns into a big fish and swims away. So instead of saving Bleike and killing the Utrøst ruler, they end up with Bleike's heart gone and the Utrøst ruler swimming away.