[UA] Invisible Rules

[Mark Fender]

Part of the fun of RPGs is often the chance to play someone who is tougher 
and more powerful than yourself.  Cage is my sample character.  Instead of 
being a slender, gentle, SNAG*, I get to act out as a crude, boorish thug 
-- in a safe, unreal setting.  It's fun.  It's my bag.

Other people like doing the whole fragile, thespian, 
playing-through-the-mental-breakdown thing.  Cool.  That's fun too.  I hope 
UA can support both styles without selling out either.  But I really don't 
think it's much of a cultural comment one way or the other that people drop 
Soul or max it.

Well, I was more referring to the comments on people statting out 
themselves in UA. For a made up character, either way makes perfect sense.

>And what's the correlation between gamers having high Minds for those
>Stress checks, yet the news stories continue to trickle in of gamers
>confusing fantasy with reality?

Well, that was also something of a kluge.  The guy who pointed out that 
each stat has it's Real Immediate Use (hit points, initiative, suriving 
madness and using the funky powers) was bang-on.  To perfectly model human 
mental stability as I understand it, one would actually need a stat 
measuring how f-ed up your childhood was, how supportive your friends are 
now, what sort of intimate emotional support network you have.  But that 
would have made the game really clunky, so realism was sacrificed for 
playability.

Actually, this would be pretty sweet. I'd love to see how that sort of 
system would pan out. How many points is not having a TV as a kid worth for 
the Fucked-Up Childhood scale?

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