How do you Dent a rope?

[Epic Meepo]

The playtest rulebook uses the term, "Dent," to measure damage to dealt an object. To me, this terminology produces a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. How, for example, would I "Dent" a rope by attacking it with a sword? How would I "Dent" a piece of paper by cutting it with scissors?

It would almost make more sense if objects took generic "Hits" instead of "Dents," as in: this statue has Hardness 10 (5 Hits). That's slightly closer to plain English than the current terminology which equates "damage" with "dents."

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Although I'm calling out "Dents," in particular, I think that term exemplifies a larger trend in the game rules. Lots of things are saddled with unusual keywords that don't exactly fit any sort of plain English definition: bulk as a unit of measurement, screening (an apparent neologism), awkward phrases like Focus Activation action, etc.

At times, as in the case of "Dents," the rules seem to read less like English and more like computer code, where the names of variables are assigned arbitrary values as needed, with no regard to the dictionary definitions of the names themselves.

This may or may not be a problem for other readers. I can only speak for myself when I say that much of the terminology in the rulebook comes off as awkward and artificial, so I hope it sees some sort of revision before the playtest process is finished.

[Lucid Blue]

I'm in agreement. Too many things feel like function calls (over fiction). It creates all kinds of usability issues.

E.g. Bulk seems wholly unnatural. It removes a unit of measure that we instinctively understand and adds an abstraction that we need to constantly reference to figure out what it is. I get the "some things are extra bulky and that matters more than weight." But that's a corner case. And now I can't even answer how much a weapon weighs.

[Kodyboy]

Lucid Blue wrote:

I'm in agreement. Too many things feel like function calls (over fiction). It creates all kinds of usability issues.

E.g. Bulk seems wholly unnatural. It removes a unit of measure that we instinctively understand and adds an abstraction that we need to constantly reference to figure out what it is. I get the "some things are extra bulky and that matters more than weight." But that's a corner case. And now I can't even answer how much a weapon weighs.

I agree along with resonance these are answers to questions nobody asked.

[Epic Meepo]

Lucid Blue wrote:

I get the "some things are extra bulky and that matters more than weight." But that's a corner case.

In a system where armor with numerical modifiers can also have the "clumsy" or "noisy" traits, it seems that an item could have a distinct weight and also have the "bulky" trait if that item has a larger than normal impact upon one's encumbrance.

Doing things that way would make the encumbrance system more complicated, but an overabundance of traits seems to make everything in the game more complicated, so encumbrance would fit right in; and at least then we'd know what everything weighs.