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Moose Riders crossing lake

Rules that unify

Have you ever wondered why most role-playing games devolve into the march of the murder-hobos?  Why is combat the only choice to pick up the pace and turn on the action?  Why do hints and clues fail at the table?  Why do add-on rules seem to give more choices, but end up just creating a rabbit warren of sub-optimal dead-end options?  Can't we have a system that doesn't break under the weight of its own expansion? Can't we have a system that is easily modified; changing its tone, setting, magic, and nature?  Can't we have a system that works for the gamer who wants to play tactically?  Can't we have a system that works for the player who wants to tell a story?  We can.  We do.

Some people point to their pet system and say "look it works" after they have a few good games in a few narrow and similar situations.  Even then that experience soon becomes elusive and the GM fights to get it back... repeating old paradigms, trying to dip their toes back into a river that has moved on.  You're not broken.  Your game is.

Temporal Rift

Games with rounds and turns confuse sequential and concurrent action. 

Competence Gap

Characters can do things that players can't and players can do things that characters can't.  So when it comes to making choices -- the war of role and roll -- who gets to decide?

Abstraction Gulf

Why does it matter that the only time you know what a "hit point" means is when you are all out of them?  Why does it matter that your character is paralyzed when it isn't their "turn?"  Why does it matter that armor doesn't reduce harm, but makes you harder to hit?  All of those problems compound to create a problem translating the game into the story and the story into the game.   
By solving these problems of abstraction and granularity we combine all three perspectives at once so that if you take a story-first approach, a character-first approach, or a game-first approach, your play experience makes sense.  We have boiled away the old ways of doing things and are building on strong foundations.

So isn't a Talent just a statistic?

No.  A talent is how well you perform an action.  It is the thing that we measure; say, how well you play chess.  A statistic is an assumption, often a facile one, about the underlying characteristic that allows for proficiency in an action... let's use intelligence.   Intelligence helps when playing chess, but more so when you are first learning, as your proficiency increases it is more about practice.   Read up on the Polgar sisters and come back.  In the seventies role-playing games tied themselves to descriptive words about the characters they wanted to play.  This was admirable.  Then, they realized that the game needed to be about actions, so they linked the two together with simplistic arithmetic.  Yes, there is a relationship between the two but it is really muddy and complicated.   Better to just group the actions and measure what the players are going to use.  Nothing good comes from statistics.  You can quote me on that.

My Game Solves it

Okay, you may have specific examples of how your game solves X or Y.  I'm not saying that you are having fun wrong.  I just know that as a whole all of these games create inconsistencies.  These inconsistencies get in the way of running a great game.   You can still have a great game because of hard work and skill.  All I am saying is that we have a better tool to help you do what you love to do.  Why not give it a go?
In fact, I'm probably a big fan of that game.  yeah, even that one you think I haven't heard of.  

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