The Blog of Roon

With trust, any game mechanic works, quoth Ampersand.

Yabbut… that doesn’t mean it’s a good mechanic.

Last night it occurred to me that the Ars Magica damage system actually does much of what I want a damage system to do—make people think!—and does so without complicated hit-location tables.

Really quite simple. No automatic healing in Ars. And ordinary healing takes a loooooooong time.

Consequences. Consequences! I always approve of consequences.

Interestingly, the GM for my current D&D campaign handled my brief foray into Ars also. The same man paid a great deal more attention to describing physical damage in Ars than he does in D&D. I can’t attribute that to anything but the system.

Annia ex Bjornaer got herself badly hurt—burned from a granary fire, then broke a leg in a bad fall. That was, real-time, several months ago. Afletana went down to three hit points last session. I frankly don’t remember how. Er, oh, yeah, walking suits of armor with greatswords. Whatever.

The system does matter. I stand by my earlier post.

As for game balance, I’m not so keen. The whole idea smacks of my youthful desperation for a world I could consider fair. That’s not a notion that appeals to me in a gameworld as much as it once did; I’m more interested in investigating stacked decks, acting in spite of them. Losing once in a while.

(Explains why I enjoy gaming with Li. This woman stacks a deck cold, and does it so cleverly you never notice.)

I subscribe to the every-character-needs-a-niche theory, expounded by several other Game WISHers. In fact, I’m often quite happy taking niches other players don’t even want, Afletana being a cogent example. (Some priests fight. She isn’t one of them. I literally cannot imagine anyone else in my current group wanting to play her or anyone like her.)

A niche need not be granted by game balance, however—and in some games (yup, D&D3e again) game balance is raised to such a near-deific level that everything else is subordinated to it. I hate hearing “this party needs a cleric” and “this party needs a rogue.” What all parties need are interesting characters.

And sometimes it’s precisely the imbalance of the world that makes characters—or people, for that matter—interesting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2003 at 11:00 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.