(07-30-2017, 05:32 AM)Meena Wrote: Not to speak poorly of FATE, but it seemed a little clunky for my to use, a little too long set up when yu wanted to do a on the fly scene with people who just showed up.
In my FC, we have our own independent system where /random rolls either get a positive bonus or a negative bonus depending on a few stats.
I agree, and it's why I'm working on playtesting something different. In particular, the issue of resolving a roll can take up to 20 minutes as people go back and forth spending FP and invokes and things to get the best possible result on a roll. Part of that is explained by the written format; a roll might take five minutes at most in tabletop but because everything has to be written out, things last a fair bit longer. But a larger and unavoidable part is just how much modification can be done to a roll after it's made, but before it's resolved.Â
To be clear, there are still mechanical things I really like about Fate, like Aspects. But the moment-to-moment rolls can be irritably long.
(07-30-2017, 08:49 AM)Kilieit Wrote: My preference is for full narrative fights. In one-on-one or small group RP (I'd say about 95% of my combat RP is like this), I feel like by the time you get to the stage of asking/allowing people to make their own character sheets, you probably trust them enough to make the jump to full narrative anyway. I like to think that, in such situations, I give my character a fair win/loss ratio without me having to struggle for hours to fit him into the constraints of a character sheet. I certainly feel that the other people I RP with in those situations give their characters fair abilities in each of those ways. Another concern I've heard is that full narrative PvP will take forever - but again, when the two parties know and trust each other, I find it actually resolves quicker than Grindstone rules bouts do.
My distaste for freeform conflict resolution has little to do with time - as my response above should show, even good rules systems can have time management issues. And it has little to do with god-moding, because as Chachan says, people can learn to minmax and abuse the system. I have lost count of the number of times I've had to step in because somebody was designing a Stunt that seemed more about punishing other players than modeling the character's abilities, and "whose Stunts are too powerful" is a constant topic of discussion in the Roll Eorzea LS and Discord.
My distaste for it stems from two major concerns: first, after years of watching freeform RP devolve into OOC argument, I find that for many players it's about a competition between each other in the form of "Who has the best unbeatable logic construct." That was the worst in the Wild West days of Ayenee and Rhydin, when everybody was immune to various things or had some obscure weakness, but it still shows itself in long strings of nested attacks where players try to maneuver each other into unescapable situations with lots of if/then statements and such, or by setting the terms of what they consider to be "good" combat such that the other player's style is inherently worse. The complaints about people using "would" in RP posts? That word's prominence comes from all those nested statements.
The other one is that I find freeform conflict resolution really predictable, and really boring because of it. Because of either a need for OOC resolution beforehand in the case of trusted players, or the "logic construct" problem above, it's usually pretty easy to see when a fight is going to break out, how it's going to be resolved, and what the after-effects will be. Giving up some agency to a randomizer, even one that's designed to represent accurate chances rather than fair ones, can lead to results that neither party expects.
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Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
