tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973193492803191556.post6556708652949065377..comments2024-03-19T00:34:06.489-07:00Comments on Bones of Contention: Ludic Dreams III - My Body is a CageBen L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/04568198881628052274noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973193492803191556.post-90571834339241137492022-06-25T20:39:18.890-07:002022-06-25T20:39:18.890-07:00The premise of this game was very attractive to me...The premise of this game was very attractive to me, but I wasn't in love with the mechanical execution, even just on the player side.<br /><br />The use of dice in MBIAC almost feels like a vestige, something left over from the fact that it's inspired in some way by D&D. Because as you mentioned, the way the odds of success work, there doesn't FEEL like there's much of a gambling component to rolling the dice. It mostly feels like a foregone conclusion based on the decisions you made before you rolled, and then the dice just confirm what you already knew was going to happen. <br /><br />On a 2d6, you've got a 17% chance of rolling a 10 or higher. With a - modifier, it becomes either essentially or literally impossible, but you DO get a token to spend out of it. On a 4d6, you've got a 90% chance, and with a + modifier, again, it becomes difficult or impossible to fail. So it really felt like we were deciding to succeed or fail based on how many tokens we spent (that is, how many dice we pulled out of our Dice Pool) - the actual rolling of the dice just confirmed what we'd already decided. <br /><br />Plus you also earn tokens for roleplaying, and during the session, the ONLY way to lose them is to spend them to add more dice to a roll. Seeing this mechanic in action made me think that you might as well eliminate the dice and just base success and failure on an economy of tokens. That is, in effect, mostly what we were doing anyway, and eliminating the dice would get rid of the illusion that the element of chance was an important determinant of what happened in the session. It would be more honest about how things are actually decided.<br /><br />I also think that ideally, this wants to be a game where you make decisions about which stat to use based on roleplaying considerations. So like, I decide if I'm acting coolly or lazily or whatever based on the type of person I'm portraying and how I think they would feel about the situation. But if the potential connection between the stat and the action is tenuous or unclear, then there's no good way to decide that way, and it's really tempting to decide based on mechanical considerations, like, do I want a + or a - on the roll, and how big? And so that's not just a bit awkward, it's a mechanic that actively works against desired player experience.Annehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15493700749333105771noreply@blogger.com