Just an idea

MJ, I was thinking, since your objective with this forum game is to teach us how to referee, I thought perhaps a better way to do it would be for us to tell you what rolls to make. I say "Well, I want to go get such and such a gun at the gun store. Roll a GE roll." or "I'm going to go talk to that lady over there, roll a persuasion check." You get what I'm saying, right? I just thought that might be a better way to go about it.

MJ does a pretty good job of explaining what rolls he's doing on the Behind the Screens thread. What I think would help me in learning to referee would be page references.

"Roll to hit" (page 497).
"Roll a GE roll" (page 1337).

That sort of thing. The one thing that most gets in my way trying to learn the rules is that I can't make heads nor tails of the layout of the book.

I just read it over several times. Suggestion: anytime you find yourself looking for a rule you've seen before, grab an index card. When you find it, note down the rule, the chapter, and the page. For example, zero-level attributes are covered at the very end of the Worlds chapter. I've learned that since the third or fourth time I had to go hunting for it, but perhaps an index card would have helped.

Why there? Well, as near as I can tell they're covered there because that's when they came up in the discussion - in designing a world, you need indigs, and some indigs are non-human, and some non-humans have zero-level attributes. Might these rules be easier to find again if they were under Attributes? Yes. But that's not what came up in the discussion of attributes, which was player-centric. So, they're not to be found in the Attributes chapter, which instead discusses how to evaluate new players' scores, what sorts of things the attribute checks cover, how to calculate averaged attributes, and the rules for advancement of attribute scores.

That's my understanding of how the book is organized. It's almost conversational - MJ Young tells you about the game. Rules are in there whenever they're necessary to follow the thread of the discussion. The advantage of this, presumably, is that it's easier to just read through the book and come away with an understanding of how things work - you can follow the discussion more easily.

Index cards.

To John:

Well, maybe, but then, that's not the way the game is played. Besides, there are two problems with your assessment.

One is that sometimes the referee knows things about the world that you don't know. For example, you just suggested that I roll a persuasion check because you're going to talk to that lady over there--presumably to persuade her to take some particular action. (If you want her to like you, that would be a charisma or an-mag check.) Yet I might know that the particular action that you are suggesting is criminal in this world, or that the particular lady you've selected holds what you might consider odd religious or moral beliefs. Many versers recall the occasion on which Michael di Vars met a village full of happy blue people and greeted them with "Hi", only to be brutally beaten to death for whatever it was they thought he meant.

The other is that it is often the case that there are multiple ways of solving the same problem, and it is left to the judgment of the referee to choose the one that best fits his concept of the game and the situation and the player. For example, you could say "I want to run over there and jump on the train before it leaves." I could look up your normal running speed, determine the distance to the train and the time before it leaves (and possibly whether it will have to accelerate with doors open so you could catch it a few feet later), and roll a skill check using relative success to get your exact velocity, measuring time and distance against velocity, to see whether you make it. I could instead decide whether this should be a bonused or penalized check based on time and distance, make the adjustment to your chance of success, and roll a skill check to see (again using relative success) whether you make it easily, barely, or not at all. I could instead roll a skill check, decide from relative success how fast that means you were running, then roll a general effects roll and incorporate your speed as an adjustment to my interpretation, to see whether the train was close enough and waiting long enough for you to reach it. I might roll the skill check and say you make it if it's a successful roll. I might just decide that this is an ordinary unchecked situation, and because you run you succeed. Which of those I do is going to depend on a lot of other factors--how detailed is my version of the rail station? Do I have a map on which items are placed? Have I been tracking time against a rail schedule? Does my scenario suggest how much time you have to catch the train? Is this going to be a good time for a dramatic moment? Is running an oft-used skill of yours, and do you have special abilities in it? Thus how I handle so simple a thing as "run and jump on the train" is going to depend on how I think it ought to be handled this time, and I might handle it differently next time.

What would be better would be if after I determine the outcome of one of your suggestions, you posted behind the screens to ask, "Why did you do this instead of that?" "Why was there no persuasion check involved?" "Why did you not calculate my speed against the time and distance?" "Why was there no skill check?" Asked as questions for clarification of how these things are done, such are welcome.

Harry:

I do apologize about that factor. As Scott says, a lot of things got put where they were needed. Part of that was that we didn't realize we didn't have them until we got to the spot where we needed them. Ed had never really considered the possibility that you would ever need to roll an attribute check for something with sub-human attributes, and it wasn't until I was working on how do you populate a world that I recognized the need on that. Fall damage is a particularly annoying one to me, because I reailzed that there was no system for fall damage when I was writing the skill for avoiding or reducing it, and I also realized that I didn't know where else to put it. (So much of the system is skill-driven that there are not a lot of places for discussing things not based on skills.)

There are two problems with your suggestion, from my end. One is that I use the same rules repeatedly, and quite a few of them. For example, let's take your character shooting your pistol at a bird in flight at point blank range. Let's also assume that initiative and surprise have already been resolved, and that we're not worried about combat sequence--this is just the attack itself. Here's something of an overview:
--an attack is a skill use, discussed on pp.27ff.
--The chart is on p.29.
--The concept of decimalizing scores is on p.12.
--Skill Ability Level is explained on p.24ff.
--Best Relevant Attributes are explained on p.35ff
--Character Bias is explained in p.24
--World bias is explained in various places including the chapter on Bias
--Situation modifiers include those important to combat attacks, discussed in detail in the chapter on combat and listed in the expanded chart p.430
--Ranged Strike Value v. Martial Strike Value....
--Ranged Strike Value calculation....
--Target Value....
--Size penalty....
--Range bonus....
--Movement penalty....
--Cover does not apply....

Obviously, I do not look those up every time. So again, it makes more sense for you to post behind the screens to ask, "Where do I find that?" where "that" is something specific--e.g., where do I find the instruction for how to calculate RSV, or where does it say that RSV is included in the skill check, or how do I know that it's RSV instead of MSV in this situation. You're not going to want every location of every applied rule in every post in which it is applied, and if you did I would not be able to provide it all, because I do have to do other things besides look up rules I already know.

Scott:

Pretty close, really. There was a lot of initial outlining done, most of the chapters named, and at the same time writing began at the beginning. The skills chapters were outlined in essence by creating the framework of levels and intensities, figuring out what concepts were foundational for each level and then placing skills on them (and more than once entire sets of skills got moved to a different level before the product was finished). Gaps were filled as we found them. Sometimes we put something somewhere other than where we were currently working, but there was a tendency not to add things earlier in the text if it could be avoided, because the flow of the earlier text was already sort of established. So if I realized while working on Bod Skills that I needed encumbrances, I made a note to put encumbrances somewhere later in the book (which in my recollection was one of the most difficult problems to address, and I tried several systems before finding one that satisfied me at all) rather than trying to squeeze it in to the earlier chapter on attributes. Part of that was because the effort was collaborative, and it was so vast that there was a feeling in everything that "that part is finished, don't mess with it" even when it wasn't really "finished" but was complete in the sense that everything in it more or less fit together.

For what it's worth, I've been working on trying to reorganize everything in it for probably the past decade, with only limited success. It's just a great deal of material, more than I can organize in my head, and I find myself correcting corrections and trying to figure out how to get C near A without moving B too far from it.

--M. J. Young