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When you offer a carrot, it isn't always. I can try to do something and do my best, but that's no assurance it works. If my RuneQuest character lands a good solid hit, but the opponent successfully parries it, that's what happens.

Eh. I've got things in my head that seem like they could make interesting games for a variety of people; not all of those people are me.

To a point. I still think it tells you something about the result in terms of process, it just doesn't tell you if it worked. I mean as a parallel, there are games like the incarnations of the D6 System or Mutants and Masterminds that have damage resistance rolls; but even if the target...

Its a carrot, not a stick.

And in the end got to find out it really was enemy action.

In the case of Pendragon, I suspect Stafford would view it that people who didn't want to engage with what he was doing fundamentally wanted to be playing a different game. Engaging with what the Virtues and Flaws made you do was, best I can tell, what he considered the important part of the...

Notice the phrase "too strident" in what I posted. I can understand people who consider things like armor class or hit points the price of doing business in using D&D. But at that point objecting to far less glaring style support or simplification mechanics ought to be acknowledged as "I...

Yeah, there are a lot of solutions to the "We're fighting things that would puree us" problem that don't involve inflating damage absorption. The fact that D&D does it that way is a historical accident.

Its actually very similar to a method I usually recommend in its carrot-and-stick nature. Usually I'm talking about it in terms of mechanical penalties or benefits to going with the social skill result, but the principal is the same.

The usual problem with that is whether the declared action is just autoresolved; otherwise all you do is move the problem back a bit. What's the situation that you can slide the dagger through that faceplate without any chance of failure? If the target is helpless there's usually coup de grace...

Part of it is, of course, that when Trav was created, the mechanics were such that there was a very strong incentive not to let players get their skill values up too much. I just think that would have been better served by having advancement done in micro-increments so it didn't do so rather...

Not that a lot of these companies aren't trying to make that disappear, too.

I'm not sure I really have a pickup game any more (my RPG running in the last years has rotated through too many games for one to have settled into my brain that way, and the two I probably know best I'd be pretty rusty for). Someone's suggestion of SWADE earlier wouldn't be terrible. I don't...

I can get that. I just think anyone who's willing to deal with D&D style hit points shouldn't get too strident talking about gamism as an ill.

Though as I've noted before there's at best some selective pleading for people who play D&D and object to "gamist" structures; the game is stuffed full of them and was from day one.

Uhm, they absolutely can do that if you roll badly in SW. And there's no hard line between "creatures" and high end violence.

Fine for you, but I absolutely know people who'd see it that way if the consequences were at all significant.

Whereas that's the exact opposite of what I want to have to work with; a coherent system tells you a lot about proper ways to do new things baked into it. Ad-hoc systems are just asking for unforseen consequences.

Note, as I commented before, that's not how some people will feel about it; they'll see it as a failure where you've been tossed a bone.

Sure, but they usually (note the qualification) aren't mostly about that, whereas Monsterhearts, well...