[hieronymous]

Thanks for the post. Getting back to the 5m leap example, I would suggest that in a fairy tale game, describing a chasm as 5 meters in the first place is out of place. The chasm might be "terrifying", "abyssal", "dizzying", "broad" etc. To cite an extreme instance, drawing it out on a hex grid battle map and counting hexes is wholly inappropriate. Given that emotional or poetic descriptions are dictated by the genre, how can a player possibly claim that a "daunting" chasm this week should be only -2, because last week's "extraordinary" leap from one rooftop to another was also -2?

Even if the Narrator parsed her words very carefully, and had an exhaustive list of adjectives corresponding to modifiers, what difference would that make? The objection I have to games that equate a value for a word is that they've just substituted one adjective ("daunting") for another ("-2"). And I write that fully cognizant that I have done the very thing to a small extent in Seven Leagues.

Finally, so what if there's no consistency from week to week? I'll refrain from making that haggard Emerson reference, and only say that fairy tales are rife with examples where an opponent or obstacle are daunting in one scene, but two pages later pose our hero no threat. Isn't adherence to the literary genre more important, as niklinna suggests, than to some 1970s notion of wargaming "balance" and "fairness"?