Could you give us an idea of what kind of setting this game will take place in? Perhaps there is a certain vernacular of the region in your game.

In the movie the Gangs of New York (for example), the script was filled with the types of phrases and commonalities of the time. Star-gazers, turtle doves, and sneak-thiefs, etc. If you can find (or develop) a vernacular for your particular world (and don't forget to teach it to people), then this feature would be all the more engaging to the player.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster If you're replacing numbers in order to improve the 'feel' of sentences, then might as well go the extra mile and replace them with more than single word. ;s

i agree. in fact, i think it would be good to have some overlap too, i.e.:

0 - 25% chance: hard
20-30% chance: challenging
25-50% chance: feasible

just so players can't translate "challenging" directly into the number it represents.

Without going into a rant on how today's empirical society (facts, figures, statics, and the scientific method) is destroying our sense of fantasy and myth (thus our spirituality), I think that abstracting the workings of the machinal (program, back-end, bits and bytes) from the humanistic (instincts, intuitions, emotions) is absolutely necessary in order to truly engage people in our worlds.

We need an interface that speaks our language...not the language of a machine.

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Original post by dgaf I would suggest a system that applied a specific sequence of qualifiers to events that can be made (simple, difficult, etc.) and another list for character traits (weak, powerful, etc.) and so on.

I agree with this. GroZZleR, you misunderstood dgaf's original post. He was not talking about showing the point values. Regard to your original post and what dgaf wrote, I don't think it ever occured to me to describe an enemy 'elementary', 'straightforward' or 'feasible'.

Regarding coning an enemy I would want check phrases such as, "risky", "too hard to solo", "might need a group of three or more", "can kill you in one hit", "your attacks won't scratch it". These phrases are not elaborated or catchy, but they are more meaningful than the normal phrases such as 'hard' and 'too hard' . They do not follow your phrasing requirement, but since it is run by a GM I don't see the necessity of that requirement.

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Original post by dgaf Without going into a rant on how today's empirical society (facts, figures, statics, and the scientific method) is destroying our sense of fantasy and myth (thus our spirituality), I think that abstracting the workings of the machinal (program, back-end, bits and bytes) from the humanistic (instincts, intuitions, emotions) is absolutely necessary in order to truly engage people in our worlds. We need an interface that speaks our language...not the language of a machine.

<off-topic>This is an interesting point. The more the game becomes a mechanical manipulation of gameplay rules, the more detached the player feels from the game. Prolonging the learning of those rules should then prolong the player's immersion in the game.

The problem is that while you can abstract that stuff away, the player still learns it and ends up manipulating the inner workings of the machine. I suppose that with sufficient complexity the player would find it a lot harder to work out the patterns beneath the surface though.</off-topic>

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I agree with krez, some overlap might be good.

I'm also going to contest the ordering (from the original listing) of feasible and complicated. The connotations of feasible imply that it refers to something easier than something qualified by complicated. Obviously semantics are a pretty subjective topic though...

You might want to think about your attribute ratings as well. Poor, Below Average, Average, Above Average and Incredible involves too many Average's for my taste. What about something like poor, average, good, talented, incredible? (as you can see I'm a little biased towards having 2 as the average skill, probably because I used to play White Wolf games...)

(and I'm not even going to attempt to come up with more difficulty adverbs after CJM's Heroic effort at that Complicated task [smile])

I agree with all of your points, and I agree to an extent that longer phrases could help shake it up. However, calling a jump a "no brainer" suggests mental capacity and not physical, so you have to be careful on what phrases you pick. Too many phrases and a player will constantly be referencing some sort of cheat sheet.

The reason for one word representing a difficulty is so a player can mentally connect the keyword to a roll and instantly know what they're doing. The numbers can't overlap because given a keyword, the player should instinctively know how many dice they need to roll or are rolling against.

Take this situation, where the words can overlap:
GM: "Hacking that computer seems feasible."
Player: "Okay, but is that 2D3 feasible that overlaps with challenging, or is that 6D6 where it hits 50%?"

The player doesn't know what to roll because the rules aren't explicit in saying so. Eventually, this constant "out of character"ness (heh) breaks the entire atmosphere all together.

For the hacking of the computer example, the dice ration can be converted into expectations. For example, when the player check the difficulty of the computer, the GM can response:

"You can probably hack it in your first try."
"It might take you several tries to succeed."
"It might take you more than ten tries to succeed."
"Your chance of success is slim."

if the GM answers like this, the player would not have to ask the question in your example, because the descriptions describe well what to expect, without showing the discrete numbers.