Paragon

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I tend to present this strongly because I think its an aspect of the overly reverent attitude this hobby has to the power of the GM, and I think that meme is fundamentally a mistake. However its possible some people have also conflated my views with Warp9's, and we aren't writing on the same page even if we're using the same pen.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I trust the GM to try and be fair. What I don't assume is that they'll succeed. The issue is, I don't think all GMs are equally good at this, and even the best ones fail on occasion. People can go through their entire driving lives without an auto accident; I don't see that as a good reason not to have seat belts. I don't disagree. I just think that people who find an intrinsic virtue in ignoring the rules when not strictly necessary are making as much a mistake as those who cling to them when they clearly aren't working, and I think there's a clear attempt in some people to project the former as superior.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Apparently since I don't share your view of how frequently the situations a decent set of rules can handle come up I'm unreasonable? Charming.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement When I'm convinced it actually makes for a better game, I'll deviate. I just don't happen to think that's anywhere near as soon as others on this thread do, and I think with a competently written set of rules it should come up rarely for anyone who has reasonable expectations.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Whereas the worst I've ever seen have been those who were casual with the rules; it lead them to using that casualness to solve any GMing problem they had, often at the expense of their players.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement But you see, in the long run I'm of the opinion that's a habit that does more harm to the fun of a game than good; it leads to lazy GMing, and lazy GMing leads to a lot of negative experiences. So essentially, I don't buy the premise that this really _does_ add to the fun of the game. At most the limits of process sometimes make it a necessity, but like most such things its not a virtue in and of itself.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I've never been fond of effects the GM simply pulls out of thin air that can't otherwise be approximated by a player, barring issues of degree that are simply not practical in-scale to the campaign. While I agree they're sometimes a necessary evil, I still consider them an evil.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement And to me, the latter is intrinsically undesirable, both as a GM and a player. Its either the sign of inconsistency in the world, or that the rules aren't versatile enough to serve the purposes needed. If mental illusions don't work the way you want them to once (especially with a build and modify system like Hero) to me, they probably just don't work. To me that's a sign they should be fixed, not ignored.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement There's a fundamental divide here though; to me, being a GM is not about telling stories; its about setting up situations that let stories occur. If the rules don't let the stories I want to occur do so, that's a sign I need to change the rules, not that I want to ignore them.

There was one case that didn't seem entirely clear from your reply. There are a number of martial arts that have maneuvers that are, in one fashion or another, improved Dodge; Martial Dodge and Flying Dodge come to mind. I can see an argument that levels with those specific martial arts are analogous to the levels with specific manuevers, and thus should add to missile DCV _only_ when using the Dodge. What's your feeling on that one?

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement In my personal case, I'd say you do start to get to some issues of diminishing returns; in particular, the matter at hand turns on how the mechanics of damaging objects or barriers is done, and I don't think that works very well for conventional weapons in almost any game. While theoretically you could set up rules for the specifics of the problem you're looking at, I'd have to question whether the system overhead justifies the process, honestly.

This is another one of those things that may have changed with editions or may not, and I couldn't find anything authoritative in the book or the FAQ. Dodge manuever is an unusual one in that its' DCV modifier applies to both ranged and melee. But what about level applicable to Dodge? Overall Combat or DCV specific levels clearly apply to both, but what about other kinds of levels? I'd always assumed since the dedicated point of the manuever was general defense, that if levels were relevant at all to Dodge, they'd apply to both (even if they normally didn't on other manuevers, just because of the nature of Dodge) but I can't really find an indicator one way or the other. The only thing I could find was a comment about not being able to do this with 2 point levels, but that doesn't address 3 point levels with three maneuvers or martial arts, or 5 point hand to hand levels used with a Dodge.

Re: Fighting against more speed That's really my point; what you want in this situation is something that generically "wastes time" occasionally, not things that have to micromanage phases anyway. I'm not sure there's any easy way to do that, but the lack of it means there's situations that occur in both reality and fiction that, effectively, just can't happen, and in heroic settings, they aren't even that rare a situation.

Re: Or just fly into orbit and use your laser vision on the entire continent Well, I wasn't primarily talking about superheroic; this is much less an issue there because you rarely see signs of fights in those settings taking long.

Re: Earthquake and Move Earth Thanks for the pointer, but the big issue is that this isn't normally supposed to do damage to people (it might do a little if they fall, but that's no more severe than any other fall) directly, and since its in a game that uses Knockdown, its not easy to move it upwards. In the end, the instant Change Enviroment was probably as close as I was going to get for that part (and that was the cheap part--the damage to structures was far more expensive, since the way Earthquakes damage structure is more or less NND).

Re: Fighting against more speed

Re: Fighting against more speed Even if they were doing all of that, its unlikely any battle would last longer than a minute or two just because of the probabilities involved. And the issue is sometimes you want that sort of duration for plot purposes, but there's essentially no way its actually going to come up in the game. The classic is buying time to finish something where a couple of minutes are needed. Honestly, how often has anyone ever seen a hero fight that lasted 10 full turns? I don't know that I've ever seen one. Even on Heroic scale games, that's 30-40 phases.

Re: Fighting against more speed Firefights often are very quick, but there are forms of combat that aren't. As an example, when you have two forces, both of which have some cover to work with, you can have fights that take ten or twenty minutes as people pop out or use corners to take shots, drop back and get their bearings, and repeat. You see the same thing in some kinds of melee combat where an awful lot of time is spent circling and assessing people. In the game, there's little reason to do either of these.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement But see, I feel I need that sort of "protection" from every GM. Scott Bennie is a fine GM; he's in fact one of the finest I've ever played under, and ran one of the finest campaigns I ever played in (his Hollywood Knights Gestalt-based campaign). Yet even with Scott, I felt it was good from time to time when he was doing something to be able to go "Scott, you are aware the rules do X here, right? Is this really a good idea? If so, do you want to house rule this so we know its going to work that way from now on?" And most GMs _aren't_ as good as Scott. In addition, I honestly think that the less detailed the rules are, the less consistently you can play your characters on the whole, because you simply don't know what sort of difficulty or process the GM is going to use to resolve things. Sometimes if you know your GM very well this is less of an issue, but I'd argue in those cases the people are really working on a pretty detailed rules set, its just that a lot of them are being stored in everyone's head rather than on paper.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Yes. The latter is what I've been trying to refer to as "judgment" problems (though I think its a bit broader than that; deciding that a particular level of difficulty is "appropriate" for something can also turn into a judgment problem. A set of hard rules doesn't prevent that, but it tends to make it more obvious in the first place, and more arguable when its done). As I said, its not intentions where the problems of most GMs run into difficulty; its execution.

Re: Fighting against more speed

Re: Fighting against more speed This is all true, but even when battles primarily turned on melee combat, you saw this effect as forces would engage, fight, fall back, engage, fight, and so on. Part of it is that game almost generically ignore the human reaction to combat (which is sometimes lumped in the phrase morale, but there's a lot more to it than just the will to keep fighting--sometimes you simply have to take time to get your focus back).

Re: Fighting against more speed I've misunderstood your point then; but if I'm understanding it now, I don't think spreading the phases out over larger time generically really addresses this well; it may produce a result that looks better in gestalt, but you end up back in the situation (which is very noticeable in modern games) where rates of fire start to seem very slow. What you really want is a mechanic where some phases simply end up wasted, but I don't know of an elegant way to do that.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement