Editing Samsara:Fundamentals (section)

==Contests==
The basic concept used in <B>SAMSARA</B> is that of the contest.  A contest occurs whenever some actor attempts to do something at which he might fail.  Or, to put it another way, whenever reality resists an actor’s intentions.  This is implemented by that old, RPG stand-by: rolling a die.  <B>SAMSARA</B> uses one twelve-sided [[dice|die]] (d12) as the method to simulate randomness, the will of the gods, or whatever it that causes an actor to sometimes succeed and sometimes fail.  Rolling high is good; rolling low is bad (see <i>The Contest Roll</i>).

For reference purposes, every contest has two actors: a <i>protagonist</i> and an <i>antagonist</i>, although these may be individuals, armies, or abstract ideas.  In the broad sense mentioned above, reality is always the antagonist, variously manifested.  But don’t be confused by that; the examples below will clarify.  These two roles will also shift during the course of a contest.
  
The prototypical contest in most games is a fight, whether that is a duel between bladesmen or a shoot-out.  Those are contests alright, but there are many more types of contests.  A few examples of contests:

*A cutpurse attempting to remove a drunken lord’s wallet without being noticed.
*A courtier at the court of Louis XIV attempting to belittle a rival in public by delicate witticisms.
*A horse-breaker attempting to tame a wild stallion.
*An artist attempting to produce a masterwork.
*A scholar attempting to decipher an unknown language.
*One army attempting to force a second army to surrender.
*A person wrestling with their own worst impulses.

Every actor in a contest has a goal, or victory condition.  If that actor wins the contest, his goal has been accomplished.  If it is a swordfight, the goal might be to disarm and render the opponent defenseless.  Or it might just be to kill him.  The artist mentioned above has the goal of producing a masterwork.

But who is this artist’s antagonist?  The masterwork is his antagonist and its goal is to avoid being created. Yes, that’s not a misprint.  So if the masterwork wins the contest, the artist is left with a blank canvas or perhaps a load of rubbish.  This abstraction might be a bit odd compared to the usual run of RPG opponents, but it is a basic, building block of <B>SAMSARA</B>. To repeat the confusing statement from earlier: reality is always the antagonist in the ultimate sense and the burden of action is always upon the protagonist.

Thus, <B>SAMSARA</B> has no “combat system” as such, nor “skill system”, nor “magic system”.  All of these activities are subsumed into the category of contests and all function in the same way.