Sydney Freedberg wrote:
And the more I think about it, the more I think the solution is something along TonyLB's lines -- limiting the PLAYER'S knowledge of the situation to force them to make crappy decisions for their characters.

Really, the ONLY power a GM actually has is the power to describe the in-game reality (which only exists as an infrastructure of words supporting a more-or-less-shared imaginative space). I've come to believe that game mechanics should recognize this fact and consciously adjust how much and what type of information the player is given.

ALL of the information that the players have is coming from the GM. And the players have to translate things that the GM tells them verbally and come to their own understanding of what they are being told. And hopefully this aligns with what the GM is communicating. So I'm very concerned about any kind of response that encourages the GM to throttle this connection even further.

The whole story is being told through a very narrow pipe already (what the GM verbally tells the players); there's a significant uptick by turning some of it into visual information (miniatures, maps, diagrams, etc.), but there's still a lot of information that the players don't have that a person in the same situation would have.

If I was standing in an alley, I could see in an instant what might provide the best cover for me if someone suddenly started shooting at me. In a game, however, I have to either remember the things the GM has already described (and do we really want to encourage the GM to describe every little bit of debris beforehand, so the player can choose what to try to use for cover), or I have to ask questions. But at some point, since the world is being held in the GM's head, I have to rely on the GM for what I can or can't do.

To try to mimic the intensity of the situation by forcing the players to react quickly ("give me your answer in five seconds, or you lose your turn") is mostly going to be a failure. It might work for you because you can communicate with your players really well. But there are a lot more GMs who will turn a system like this into hash.

I thought the example that TonyLB gave was very compelling. It's good, because it seems, according to his description, to have been handled quite even-handedly. It worked against the players, at first, but they learned how to use it to their advantage.

TonyLB wrote:
I was pretty pleased with that aspect of the system, particularly when the PCs turned it around on the bad guys and spent a lot of time casing them from cover, then blasted them mercilessly while laughing hysterically at the thought of how many perception checks their opponents would have to make before they had the faintest idea what was going on.

Oh, and we came very close to two PCs killing each other by accident, because they didn't want to waste time verifying who their "enemy" was. Which was cool.

Having something that quantifies the noise in some fashion (in this case, two PCs not wanting to take the time to verify their "enemy" is a workable solution. (Add me to the list of people who would really like to see this if you can find and post it, Tony.)

The good thing that Tony's example does (or seems to do) is that it doesn't arbitrarily limit the player's information. I could see myself as the player with the vodka glass asking the GM a half dozen questions about the setting (is the table the best cover available, etc.) before announcing my move once I decided I didn't want to try to first figure out where the shots were coming from.

In the James Bond RPG, Chris Klug wrote (and I'm paraphrasing here, but I read this just a day or two ago, so I'm recalling from reasonably fresh memory) "the players are going to try to insist that they can return fire and climb the stairs and attend to 009's wound and call M for more information all at the same time."

Both of these are bandwidth effects. Game time and real time do not correspond. Limiting the character's options through a mechanism that applies to all sides is the fairest approach. It's trivially easy for the GM, who is the source of all information to the players, to make things confusing for them. Quantifying the degree of confusion in some fashion helps to level the playing field.