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Luka Rejec's avatar

A fine piece, though I would also approach this question:

“When does the conversation stop and the mechanics begin? 

The answer is what the designer wants the people around the table to care about.”

In a slightly different way; particularly as it concerns randomizers-as-mechanic. Instead of randomizers in general, I’ll just use dice, but this applies to any randomizer.

I see the dice as something that comes into play not just when the designer wants the table to care, but also in two metasituations:

- when the table does not know an outcome of a situation

- when the table cannot know the outcome of a situation

The two are a little different, but in this situation that’s not particularly crucial. The point is that the dice transform one situation into another in an unpredictable way.

In this role, they are / can be a mechanic that escapes any potential designer control and gives creativity to the table (and the dice as oracle).

Though, of course, one could also argue that this is a case of designer-intent, where the intent is to provide the table a means to escape edge cases and designer intent.

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djuD's avatar

I tend to refer to my game as "realistic" (...and also put the quotation marks around it) because I think that Believable as more to do with consistency than any logic of the world. When I say "realistic" I don't mean that the system is fully simulating physics or anything like that. I want to set the ground level of understanding: the fictional world is like the real world you experience every day.

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