Originally posted by hirch duckfinder:
i suppose i just feel its too concrete , a bit like rping by numbers . ---i prefer to hear players tell me what they are trying to do , and then quiz them as to how they think they may apply their skills/abilities in that situation . tasks make me feel like characters are just " skill carriers" and that the action is pre-determinmed , like trying to roll a six to finish a board game . this reduces immersiveness for me , which is what i like best . the less the narrative is interupted , the better .
still , i seem to be soundly out-voted .
Okay, I think I'm starting to see where you're coming from a little better now. If the rules/adventure present a task as "Routine, skill-a, skill-b" you think that takes away some of the fun from a character who doesn't have skill-a or skill-b but has skill-c and might, in a more freeform system, have been able to justify a way in which skill-c would've helped him on the task, right?
The plus side is that this makes the game more spontaneous and encourages player creativity and role-playing. The minus is that you'll get players slowing down the game trying to justify why Forward Observer should grant him a bonus on
every task.
I think we can still fit this style of play into a task-driven game, though: there's an oft-overlooked special case in the MT task system where, at the referee's discretion, Int+Edu can be used as a +DM for ANY task (after the +1 Difficulty non-skilled penalty). It seems reasonable to extrapolate from there so that at the ref's discretion any skill could benefit any task (again after the non-skilled penalty). So, in the above example, if the player pleads a good enough case to the ref, he can make the roll at "Difficult, skill-c."
The task system looks like it's set in immutable stone so that it can stay consistent across all published material, but in actual play it can be just as freeform as you want it to. There's no reason why an individual ref couldn't take it even a step further and let the players themselves define the tasks: they decide what they're attempting to do and what skills/characteristics they want to apply to it and all the referee decides is the difficulty (and duration and special task types (hazardous, uncertain, etc.) if those are being used). If the ref feels the player's choice of skills/characteristics is inappropriate, he makes the task harder/Impossible.
