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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
partner555

NP Monday Feb 5 2018

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Tactics and Strategy.

It matters not if you are commanding an army, campaigning for political office, running a business, or playing a game.  You need to remain aware of both the big picture and the details.

Admiral Ashley committed resources to a battle that should have been avoided and may have cost herself the opportunity to end the war.

The upcoming meeting with the Commander In Chief won't involve tea and cookies in the garden.

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Ashley is treating this like a role playing game, where there isn't a winner/loser as such (Table top RPG, I understand you can win a CRPG).  The objective is to have fun and scoring enough points to "win" defeats the real goal of having fun.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Ashley is treating this like a role playing game, where there isn't a winner/loser as such (Table top RPG, I understand you can win a CRPG).  The objective is to have fun and scoring enough points to "win" defeats the real goal of having fun.

I have seen a few games where 'winning' was a mere end condition and the outrageous events underway were the real purpose of the game. They have always been a favourite of mine. And in a good tabletop roleplaying game, things will go like this. Ironically enough, some of my greatest successes ever of this kind as a storyteller was in the crapsack World of Darkness. Since the true enemies were basically unbeatable we didn't have to worry much about winning so we had awesome fun with drama, (sorta) heroic sacrifices and occasional downright absurdity. We even had a campaign end in utter tragedy and when it was over we sat looking at one another a few moments. Then one of my players said, "That was awesome. So who feels up for starting a new campaign? And how about pizza while we discuss it?"

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16 hours ago, mlooney said:

Ashley is treating this like a role playing game, where there isn't a winner/loser as such (Table top RPG, I understand you can win a CRPG).  The objective is to have fun and scoring enough points to "win" defeats the real goal of having fun.

Dan explicitly confirmed that Ashley was NOT deliberately throwing the game. But it's true that ditzy or not, her objective was always having fun, not win. Maybe without ditzy, she WOULD be able to deliberately throwing the game :)

And in most cases (of course, not in Paranoia or World of Darkness as The Old Hack described), EVERYONE is winner in Table top RPG. Just like in most movies, where you know in advance the hero will win, but you are watching to see how.

(Well ... partial winner. You win the campaign, the game continues.)

12 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Blame Math.  First, Last, and Always.

Blame yourself. Math is predictable. If you found math is against you too late, it's your fault to not compute it earlier.

 

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On 2/6/2018 at 2:34 AM, The Old Hack said:

was in the crapsack World of Darkness. Since the true enemies were basically unbeatable

World of Darkness is quite possibly the best game system for ease of inverting. My daughter was in the habit of picking a Flaw and designing a character in such a way that it was an Advantage - and she made up great backstories for them. My shtick was to twist the standard assumptions about various sorts of characters - for a while I played a pantheistic member of the Celestial Chorus, and I was designing a quantum-physics-based Dreamspeaker when for various reasons we dropped out of the LARP group.

(Interestingly, the March 2018 issue of Discover magazine has an article about the possible quantum basis of consciousness that fits perfectly with one of the two possible paradigms I came up with for a Quantum Dreamspeaker. And definitely doesn't contradict the other one.)

Not that other game systems can't be inverted. In 4E D&D, I figured out that if you want to build a really good, powerful Barbarian, the character class you should pick is Cleric... and I also built a semi-pacifist Wizard. (Semi-pacifist in that there's a geas on him against doing damage to any person with magic. But he does use a staff, and know show to thump heads with it.)

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