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Re: Parrying rules in Thail. -- Rick says "just say NO!"



"It's not enough to be strong and have a big weapon if the thief can parry you 99% of the time with his short sword."

It's 5 second turns.

TFT's resolutions are more akin to CRT's than specific blows giving net effects of a brief period of action.

The average play in u.s. football runs 5 sec as a rule of thumb
while elastic energy stored in the tendons and ligaments crossing the shoulder can be released to create impressive rotational force enabling many of the fastest motions the human body can produce.

The difference twixt the two scales approaches magnitudes & that can easily make for muddy imaginative pictures of the action from the group sense if not a plain disconnect between Players concepts of what occurred over the turns course.

For Me this is a major issue as I've framed the game medium as featuring a rather unique strength in comparison to most other entertainment mediums that sets table-top gaming apart in form and function that being an active, creative collaboration between the Players.

in the act of play Players are creating a play narrative that concludes in a completed story, or perhaps chapter in long running, on going campaigns, with Players active participants in the plotline produced rather than passive observers of a completed piece as in the more traditional role of audience member witnessing a play or a person reading a text.

In taking this view I'm attempting to play to the strengths of the game medium instead of mimicing the more established forms familiar through the traditional mediums of stage, screen, and script as play and passive perception are conceptual anathema one to the other.

(Not to invalidate the common form of framing play as at the end of the day if the game entertained the thing achieved its purpose regardless of the point to point procedure used to get there but a 30min sit-com ain't likely to match Citizen Kane to matter the effort expended in the attempts and I'm dubious of gaming achieving a full _expression_ of the potential its cooperative creative strengths suggest couched in the current format the activity most commonly structures around with heavy reliance on other mediums strengths much in the manner of film that used a front row centre pov from the established sphere of stage productions for quite some time before realizing the cameras particular advantages over a play with the pov free to move freely rather than restricted to a particular seat and stage sets started requiring details like ceilings not seen on the stage where scenery and backdrops often make use of spacious eves to emerge and egress from in lieu of cluttering up stage exits between scene changes when actors are bustling to and from their place marks via stage left and right already much like a ceiling would restrict scenery in the vertical sense ergo the forgo for such on stage and when the focus is fixated upon filming the traditional play it becomes hard to recognize the mediums potential for adding a fifth wall if You will up top. IMHsimplifiedO anyway and this does not mean a stage production can not be filmed successfully in the traditional front row centre structure and carry entertainment value in so doing. I'm just trying to point out the potential for structuring the filming with completely different framing than from that single seat to produce a very different end product that relies on strengths that play to the film medium rather than aping another mediums structure from familiarity for the most part which is inevitably how mediums sharing similar function in goals are likely to start as the process of artistic exploration of the extent and limits of the new approach are felt out and established so that craft can begin functioning within the medium. The artistic process is not in agreement with the raison d'etre of a developed medium generally as its purpose is explorative seeking the new and sounding out the unfamiliar and unknown aspects that show new and different ways of viewing and conceiving objective reality which has no filter for aesthetic appearance, entertainment, elegant form meeting function in an object, or even warm fuzzy feel goods communicated by the perception of a piece as the new can often provoke confusion, discomfort, or stronger emotional upset in individuals exposed to it at first though this is not a necessary aspect of the process and it's craft that takes the aesthetic aspects of a medium exposed by the artistic exploration and produces the "pretty" most people associate with the term art leaving the more esoteric elements of the artistic process outside of the coverage of the terms umbrella of meaning in layman usage which leaves some of the work in feeling out the extremities to the given mediums limits looking like foolish nonsense with no point behind the lunacy like the minimalism of the mid-century past and studies like 4'33" lost on the majority of the public at large and seeming almost a scam taken without any contextual backing... which ends this aside by coming back around to My point about the problems that potentially arise when Players imaginative views are significantly different in a cooperative creative experience.}

In significant part the components RPG's have canonized like periodically tiled battle-maps and figures, numerical statistics and descriptions of people, places, and things, and rulesets mechanics and procedural orderings all serve as a kind of shorthand that gives more precise and specific objective information than natural language can manage without falling into the kind of effort that passes beyond entertainment and into what's required to hang dead sheep skins attesting to ones piling skills as accepted by their peers which is way outside the realm of entertaining play elseif We all hold phd's and crunch ax^2+bx+c curves for zeroing in missile fire rather than consulting the bones for unknowns where one can be clueless of how to calculate the odds and still throw a successful roll (Although doing so with regularity is gonna stifle a lot of the enthusiasm I showed when initially inviting said soul to nickel poker night as numbers sure do dominate against guesstaments based off gut feelings but digits don't do didily against pure dumb luck especially when backing what's holding with a modicum of mammon to milk through till play ponies up a pot or two making the cat what keeps puling the one card that tops ya against all odds and only aware of 52 cards in a deck from pick up a problem for Me generally as there's not really much to be done against it except match it with luck. A "get good" strategy so simple it stymies Me with complexities attempting to put it into practice like praying for a particular roll tends to go when I apply the technique and I'm left obliquely offering a game of chess as the best field to face such luck. But that's a personal problem and so a digression and I've only faced the like twice over what's now 40+ years of RPG play and I'm pretty sure it's ingrained in the beasts dna so danada address for it in a formal sense being what it is it is except for the tweak that rules that lucky blessed or no one can't throw a roll to parry a claymore with a pocket knife and coupled with every character expending fST for strenuous physical activity as opposed to the least physical class of the entire crop and a big strong guy with a heavy weapon most likely is physically fit as part of that package while skinny little thief's who's primary tactic involves never taking the tempo ergo making confrontation a situation best avoided altogether and if failing to do so then the goal is to extricate from said situation asap while the big guy eyes another prize completely on the reasonable assumption of a surplus of stamina that allows an expectation of wearing down Mr defence blow by blow with blows left for the finish if the fish can't manage to slip away... although if the little fella's already chopped down the largest tree in the forest with a herring then all bets are off as to the claymore deflecting bit mentioned before. Anyway I'm all worn out from all this babble. Typing really takes it outta ya and I'm gonna get a nap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOcxnQRUhMM