That is how YOU interpreted saving throws. I always portrayed the poison going into the bloodstream and the character fighting off it's effects.
So you house-ruled AD&D saving throws. That's fine - you woudn't be the only person ever to drift AD&D in a more process-sim direction than the rulebooks indicate.
But the attack in question is still the attack. It still hits and does damage. Nothing about this is not process-sim.
Huh? What is
not process sim is the passage of a minute, the failure to resolve all the other attempted attacks, the failure to resolve any active defences (eg parry, shield block) by the victim of the attack, etc. Shorter rounds, and active defences, are two of the most basic moves that any process-sim combat RPG makes (eg RQ, RM, and I'm pretty sure GURPS, HERO and C&S).
Most players I know saw it as progressive wounds but obviously not linear in effect. Meaning early wounds are light and later wounds are heavier. So if a person with 100 hit points is down to 5 he is bleeding badly. If he is down to 95 then he has a scratch.
But how does the PC who is on 5 hit points
know that the next orc attack, if it hits at all, will be a severe wound rather than a scratch? The player knows that because s/he can look at the hit point total on the scratch paper in front of him/her. But how does the PC know? As far as I can tell s/he can't. That is the most fundamental reason why hit points aren't process sim.
XP I admit was completely outside the game. It never enters the minds of characters at all.
Admittedly I was talking about AD&D, where this is ture. In 3E, though, casters can spend it as currency. How does that work for the process sim player?
I believe the process-sim attitude in this case is that the thing in question turned out to be one that could not be handled. Meaning if the gate is too strong to be lifted it's too strong to be lifted. Same for the lock.
And there is your solution to martial dailies. "I tried it again, but this time I just couldn't do it."
Just like, in AD&D, you can try again after a level, so in 4e you can try again after an extended rest.
Now maybe that solution (I hesitate to call it a house rule, because it is not really changing or contradicting any of the published rules text - but if you disagree with me on that, you might think of it as a house rule) isn't palatable to you for whatever reason. That's fine: no one's trying to force you to play 4e. But this is why I don't think there's anything special about the so-called "dissociative" mechanics in 4e, compared to AD&D, except perhaps that 4e has a greater variety of them on the active side.
I believe the game was playable in 1e,2e,3e for people in my camp. 4e was unplayable.
All this proves was that some process-sim lovers stuck to D&D through 3 editions but not a fourth. But what about all the process-sim lovers who quit D&D as soon as they discovered RQ, RM, C&S, GURPS, HERO etc? Does the existence of them - and there were very many of them (at one time, I think ICE was the second-biggest RPG company after TSR, admittedly on the back of its MERP licence) - prove that AD&D was unplayable? Or intolerably narrow in its appeal? All it proves is that some people like somethings and not others.
D&D had sucked up all the simulationist players
Except for those playing the serious simulationinst games out there! Do you have figures for how many people dropped Rolemaster or Runequest for 3E D&D?
In fairness to pemerton, these descriptions come directly from the explanation for saving throw in the 1e DMG.
Thanks. Like you, I can't quote a page number but it's in the discussion of combat rules.
I guess my point, which I didn't really do a good job of making clear, is that old editions allowed for a certain playstyle.
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I believe game designers in those days were asking - Is this realistic? and not - Is this balanced? or Is this fun?
Different editions can be drifted different ways. But I don't think AD&D is especially broader in the range of playstyles it supports well than is 4e. (It may be broader in its appeal, but that's a different thing. Maybe heaps of people love a rather narrow range of playstyles.)
Others may accept the use of dailies but a dissociative mechanic is a defined thing. And a daily is one. It may not feel dissociative to some people. I'm going by the popular definition of the term. Obviously being dissociated is subjective. But there is a thing called a dissociative mechanic that I suppose is only dissociative for some people. So I'm using it in the proper noun sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by "proper noun" here, but as far as I'm aware there is no "popular" definition of so-called "dissociative" mechanics - as far as I can tell, it is intended to refer to a certain category of metagame-heavy action resolution mechanics, but is not uniformly applied to all mechanics that exhibit the feature in question (eg hit points - how does the PC know the next blow will be deadly rather than a scratch? or open locks - what is the explanation,
in the fiction, for a new attempt being possible only after a level has been gained? or attack rolls in minute-long combat rounds - what decision, taken by the PC, does the rolling of the d20 correspond to?)
They are written very process sim. And here is where so many who don't understand dissociative mechanics go wrong. The level of abstraction has nothing to do with it.
As I've said above - what decision, made by the PC, does the player's rolling of a d20 as part of the resolution of a 1-minute combat round correspond to? This is fortune-in-the-middle - you can't narrate it until the dice are rolled and resolution is in train - but martial encounters and dailies are just the same. I mean, whatever narration you use to explain why only one attack has even a chance of getting through in a minute, you can use to explain why only one Rain of Blows has any chance of getting throuh in five minutes!
If you read the fireball spell it is very explicit. What the caster is thinking and the player is identical.
As [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] posted upthread, one thing that the player is thinking about is rolling his/her d6, and the GM rolling the NPCs' and monsters' saving throws. Is the PC thinking about those things?
In the same way that we assume the PC is
not thinking about those things - the mechanical expressions of his/her fictional capabilities and good fortune - so we assume that the PC is not thinking about some deft combat manouevre being an encounter power - which is, likewise, a mechanical expression of the PC's fictional capabilities and good fortune.
I cannot cope with DnD from a strict Process Sim perspective due to the amount of scrutiny that I have put it under which has revealed that its Process Sim efforts are extraordinarily unsatisfactory and will not stand up to objective, unversally-applied standards. Most of DnDs mechanics are not Process Sim "task resolution". They are "conflict resolution" by way of abstraction. Therefore, by definition, Process Sim cannot bear itself out with keen fidelity toward what it is modeling.
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the position that DnD was premised upon strict, rigid, task-resolution oriented Process Sim and has evolved under those auspices is completely untenable
This is a pretty good summary of my position.
I like a bit of good process-simulation play from time to time.
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I simply can't imagine using any version of D&D to scratch that itch.
Agreed.
