Sunday, June 14, 2015

Misbegotten Children

Despite the failure of my conflict cards, I still receive requests to send the card images to individuals who are anxious to . . . I have no idea what these people mean to do.  I suppose that someone is entitled to make them useful as a system, if it can be done at all.  Still, it is a pain in my side.

I had put all the images up on the old Same Universe Wiki, long gone now.  To satisfy the curious, I've added the conflict card images to the New Wiki, Tao at Wikispaces.  The card sheets I used to print up the cards before slicing are there, with hash marks so that if anyone wants to take them to a printer, the paper stock can be cut by that printer also.

Cost me, I think, something like $75 when I did it.

For the record, let me know if you find any links on this blog that don't work - particularly links that were supposed to go to the Same Universe wiki.

3 comments:

  1. Banff is a beautiful place. I've only been once, but I hope to return someday.

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  2. If you don't mind, could you explained how the system failed? I read through your old posts on the subject and thought there were some interesting ideas there. I'd be interested to know where it went wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dan,

    You may not have examined the attempt to employ it in the online campaign. Offline, it seemed to work better; working in it offline allowed greater lassitude for the players and the real problems exposed themselves.

    I can explain it easily. Because there was no limitation in how often a conflict could be initiated, the players could initiate the die rolling process repeatedly until they got the result they wanted.

    For example, you won't give me your cart? How about your horse? How about your sister? How about helping me to town? How about giving me five pieces of gold? Okay, if not you, how about your brother? How about your cousin? How about three hours from now? How about six hours from now?

    Etc.

    These are all practical difficulties that have to be addressed. I tried in different ways to solve it while retaining actual principles of discourse (if you told me yesterday that you wouldn't help me do something, what is the actual chance that my asking you today will make you angry? It isn't automatic). I wasn't able to. So I shelved it, purportedly to think about it. My solution since has been to run my game differently, moving it away from creating situations where verbal conflicts are likely to occur; it is harder to explain that. Effectively, I make it very clear what NPCs will do and then let the players operate effectively inside that limitation. If the player asks and I have no specific reason why the NPC wouldn't do that thing, I just have the NPC agree.

    It means, however, having a very definite limitation in place; on the whole, my NPCS are NOT generous to strangers. At all. Ask twice and you'll get threatened. That kind of thing.

    ReplyDelete

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