Re: mechanics of surprise

In article <1173117612.543984.154790@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
psychohist
wrote:
> Neelakantan Krishnaswami posts, in part:
> 
>   The number of mechanical events has no correlation with the pace of 
>   decision.
> 
> Most of us in this newsgroup are using the term "pace of decision" to
> mean the pace of player decisions in the context of the mechanics of
> the game.  Brian Gleichman introduced the term and provided a pretty
> good definition in that introduction.
> 
> As best I can tell, you seem to be using the term in some other sense,
> as a measure of narrative detail.  If you want to talk about the level
> of narrative detail, I suggest you use another term to avoid confusion
> - "pace of narration", perhaps?

No, I genuinely mean Brian's sense of "how fast can you lose?"

When you use the game mechanics, you also have to supply an
interpretation to figure out what that means in terms of the game's
fiction. You can then judge whether the results were decisive or not,
based on the fictional outcome. If they weren't decisive, you can try
again, and otherwise not.

The im****tant point here is that a player's victory/loss conditions
are relative to the fiction -- I care whether the Dark Lord opened the
hellgate yet, or whether my PC is still alive or not, and not
intrinsically about the numbers on the character sheet (except insofar
as they reflect the fiction).[*]

So when the interpretation can be freely chosen, you and the other
players can set the pace of decision to just about anything you like,
because you can set the result of a mechanical defeat to as small or
large a fictional setback as you like.


[*] An exception to this is if the game's mechanics have interesting
tactical depth in their own right, independent of the narrative. No
one really cares about the "story" of a chess game.

But OTOH you can have perfectly usable rpg mechanics with no intrinsic
tactical depth at all.

-- 
Neel R. Krishnaswami
neelk@[EMAIL PROTECTED]