Quote:
Originally Posted by Mailanka
You don't need a roll. Can you justify it? Sure. But why would you want to justify a whole bunch of rolls if they're not strictly necessary?
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You seem to be confusing "requiring a roll" with "sadistic GMing". If you've made the roll to locate a creature's Vitals once in a combat, I'm certainly not going to require you to roll it for
every attack! On the same token, though,
not requiring that roll can massively
decrease dramatic tension — perhaps not in the case of Vulcans, as you suggested, but in the game that caused me to mention it the particular speciality is Physiology (Demons), where “demons” are an alien race with an incredible degree of morphogenetic variation (think Zerg or Tyranids).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mailanka
The same applies here. You should roll for things were dramatic tension matters and you should aim for fewer, rather than more, rolls, especially during moments as tense as a fight scene. You want that roll, and the tension of the moment, to turn on whether the character hits or is hit. Can you imagine the anti-climax of passing your physiology roll ("Oh, I remember where a Vulcan heart is!") only to miss?
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And for some (not all — possibly even not most) games, that's fine. For others, the dramatic tension hangs on figuring out
how to damage it, and then seeing if it worked — and once you've solved that puzzle, the actual defeat of the monster, while still hazardous, is the
denoument, not the climax.