2 hours ago, whafrog said:

I can't give 1/2 a Like... I agree I prefer to hear inspired descriptions rather than either a) rote descriptions, or b) bogging the action down while somebody tries to think of something witty.

But I do encourage it when it goes too long without someone offering something narratively interesting.

It doesn't have to be a long, lengthy description, but I like to have my players justify why they're passing the boost. Even just a simple "The blaster bolt hit the wall next to their head, making them flinch" or "They're focused on me, leaving them open". It doesn't have to be " I leap over the burning fuel on the floor, kick the one stormtrooper in the chest and elbow the second, leaving them all off balance for a counterattack" every roll.

2 hours ago, 2P51 said:

I agree, how you describe what is to be accomplished sets the parameters of how to judge the results. It's not pass/fail to pick the lock, it's open the locked door, pass means you did so well, fail means you got frustrated and broke it down instead and maybe people heard you, critical fail means they did hear and everyone roll initiative.

Exactly. I'll often openly tell the players that unlocking that lock is a forgone conclusion, and that the roll is to find out how long it takes you and how quietly (or how much it looks to the security guards that the lock has been jimmied) you get the job done.

Locks are for honest people.

Trust the pirate to know this.

59 minutes ago, Desslok said:

Exactly. I'll often openly tell the players that unlocking that lock is a forgone conclusion, and that the roll is to find out how long it takes you and how quietly (or how much it looks to the security guards that the lock has been jimmied) you get the job done.

In D&D, this is still binary! You're only rolling a D20 and the result will either pass...or fail. How you decide to interpret that is another thing entirely. My contention (and this goes for all the previous counter-responses pre-Desslok), is that EotE offers a "built-in" way of managing the effects of the dice rolls. D&D does not. Anything the GM creates to maintain the adventure is tacked on, since the results leave little to interpretation.

Using the locked door example above, if the door is locked, you have Strength checks or lockpicking to get past it - with equally binary outcomes. If the GM wants to get creative and say, okay you failed the first attempt, perhaps you can set fire to it...okay that may have failed. Enter the next attempt at it... The GM/players have to try, and try, and try to get past the same boring encounter making for tedious gameplay. Sure you can spice it up e.g. Oh you failed, and the Bugbears on the other side of the door open it up for you...right before smashing your face, but it's not always as easy as that.

Finally, because the results are so binary, it's hard to incorporate really cool story because the players could fail and die. E.g. walking a tightrope between two towers to avoid fighting the guards. Pretty much an Athletics check. Strictly speaking, fail the check and you fall 100ft to your death (monk's excluded, of course) - or the equally unlikely event of landing a a group of halflings who break your fall! In EotE, the fail result can be negotiated by the group.

Let's use the example with EotE. Okay the door is locked. You roll 2 fails but 4 adv. The players and GM can reinterpret the scene so that the door is beyond your ability to penetrate, but in your attempt to break through, you spot that outside the window is a ledge that can lead you to the other side. D&D does not naturally do this. Given the same scenario, unless the GM tells you there is a ledge or anything there, there is no guarantee you can reinterpret the scene.

P.S. I'm not here to slag-off D&D.

4 minutes ago, masterstrider said:

P.S. I'm not here to slag-off D&D.

And I won't defend it but I don't think it has to be as bad as you're making it. The "falling" one is a key example: I would never let a tightrope walk over a 100ft chasm result in "falling to your death". I had this exact argument with another GM in our group. We were playing BRP (uses percents), not D&D, it's the same concept.

In real life I'm a pretty good swimmer, and even if I'm tired in bad conditions, I know how to work with the water instead of against it. In BRP game terms, my "swimming" is probably 80%. But this means, in BRP game terms, if you only apply binary result, my swimming will get me killed 20% of the time. That's really bad for something I do a lot of, and in game terms, it's a really poor showing for a PC who is supposed to be good at it.

There are many things you can do with a tightrope walk in a binary system that are better than "falling to your death". You trip and now you're sprawled across the rope and it's going to take longer. The guards look up and see you, and start taking shots. You trip and are hanging, and have to do hand-over-hand to reach the other side. The rope snaps and you do a Tarzan right into the destination tower. You Tarzan into the room of the princess, 3 levels below the wizard's tower, and she wakes up and is about to scream...

24 minutes ago, whafrog said:

And I won't defend it

LOL. Secretly I won't either

24 minutes ago, whafrog said:

There are many things you can do with a tightrope walk in a binary system that are better than "falling to your death". You trip and now you're sprawled across the rope and it's going to take longer. The guards look up and see you, and start taking shots. You trip and are hanging, and have to do hand-over-hand to reach the other side.

These options are all great, but the way it's written in D&D is quite specific. You fall, and it hurts a lot. This is exactly my earlier point - players and the GM can invent thing to "tack on" to the standard rules to make the game more interesting - sub-rules. For a long time, D&D was written to have specific consequences for specific actions, that's one of the, dare I say it, features, of the game. I'm at least glad to see that with 4th and 5th ed, they've allowed some flexibility in what the term "failure" means e.g. (Straight from the 5th ed PHB) Otherwise, it's a failure, which means the character or monster makes no progress toward the objective or makes progress combined with a setback determined by the GM.

20 hours ago, Daeglan said:

One of the traps is people thinking the gm has to come up with all the results on die rolls. No the whole table should be doing so together.

Precisely.

The GM should never be afraid to solicit suggestions from the players at the table for determining what effect any advantage or threat from a check might have.

Though to be honest, a favorite trick of mine is to say "yeah, I'm gonna hold onto that threat/Despair you rolled for now..." and then spend it later in course of the session. It does a wonderful job of making the players nervous about what's possibly lurking just around the bend for them, and it gives me as the GM a way to introduce certain plot elements that I might otherwise have trouble justifying.

For instance, while recently running a streamlined version of Beyond the Rim for my FaD group, one of the PCs rolled a Despair during a check to explore some bit of wreckage fairly early in the session. I simply told the group that I was going to pocket that Despair, and for the rest of the night the group was sweating about what that Despair would be used for. The truth was that I had planned to have an Imperial Star Destroyer carrying the campaign's intended BBEG show up at Cholganna, and I saved that Despair as the justification for having it just suddenly show up just as the session was wrapping up. Sadly, it was a Skype game and we don't use cameras, so I didn't get to see their expressions, but the verbal response made the whole thing worth it.

On 2/14/2017 at 3:16 PM, kaosoe said:

To be fair, shadowrun can get really silly with its rules.

Shadowrun has always been really silly with its rules. Speaking as someone who played it starting with first edition, with each subsequent edition a major problem was fixed in the rules and a new big problem was introduced.

23 hours ago, Dafydd said:

If in doubt, get the players to do the work. "Ok, you want to spend two advantages to give player X a boost - how is what you're doing going to accomplish that?" After a while, they'll start providing the description themselves without being asked.

This is where I believe a lot of the problems are stemming from with my group. It is a big group at 7 players and 5 of them are really really green Roleplayers. So, I think the players can/need to accept some of the responsibility to provide input. I spponfed them through the first adventure and then left them more to their own devices during Jewel of Yavin.

In regards to the discussion on DND. I have played several games where the DMs are very black and white- you either beat the roll or you fail. I do not run my games like that. There are plenty of options that DMs have to be very flexible if the party is flexible. For example, some of you mentioned traps- if a party member were to fail a roll, he or she would drop, take damage and then the party needs to figure out how to get him out of there. Again, as I stated in my initial post, I prefer a story telling approach to gaming so if my players make an effort, no matter how zany, I try to come up with some game mechanics to make it work for them. In the end, it's about bringing players back to the table, and over the 15 years I have been hosting at my house regularly, I have had 123 gamers come and go. We are still going strong.

Ultimately I believe both systems do have their merits. What I am finding with the "narrative" approach is that it gives me the tools I need to flesh out little encounters without having to go over the top with 800 million rules. It allows for storytelling/cinematic excitement without the "500 level" rules discussion. It's quick, it's dirty and it works as needed. Does it always result in the maximum result for players, no? But does it enhance the game experience- yes, I believe it does when done correctly.