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Ordinal Fallbacks

Game designers often lecture (or bemoan) that nobody can possibly make a realistic game. But in the words of Queen Victoria, I am not interested in the possibility of failure.

Instead of looking at ‘is this showing what would happen if you really mounted a dragon while wearing armour’, I prefer to look simply at the ordinal Mathematics (i.e. relative values).

• If someone’s a shit-hot martial artist then I really don’t know how many people they might kill in a minute, but I know that more training should up the expected kill-count.
• Better ‘Persuasion’ should mean a better chance at persuading people.
• Wearing armour should increase a character’s chance of surviving a battle.

Players won’t notice much about the chances of doing something, and probably don’t care if a torch illuminates 10’ or 5 metres. What they all care about however, is that holding a torch lets them see better in the dark. As long as ordinal relations hold, the system has done its job of responding to a change in the plot.