"Narrative Options" mechanical?

[pemerton]

Despite the system being amazingly crunchy and precise, appeals to the GM to make a judgement call are scattered throughout the text of the current rules

Interesting.

There is a level of abstraction in HERO. The same rules constructs can describe different effects in the game world - fire blasts, raw magical energy, lasers or entropic forces could all be represented by varying levels of the power Blast. HERO System uses the term 'special effect' for the game world aspect of a power. This mostly seems to apply at the character build stage though. Once it's decided what a power will be, that's what it remains, so it's a different kind of abstraction than FitM, I think.

Agreed. My impression of some of the criticisms of 4e for "dissociated" mechanics is that they didn't draw this distinction. That is, they envisaged "association" of mechanics as having to happen at PC build stage (eg my Come and Get It is a taunt) and then noting that an association of that sort doesn't makes sense sometimes (eg how do you taunt an ooze).

Marvel Heroic RP uses an interesting mixture of HERO-style abstraction and FitM. Powers are mostly HERO-style: so Thor, Captain America and Sue Storm all have Durability as a power, but in Thor's case it's his skin/physique, in Cap's case it's his shield (and so he has a Gear disadvantage) and in Invisible Woman's case it's her forcefield. The GM and players are then expected to have regard to these details in the way they frame conflicts: for instance, if the GM announces an attack by poison gas, Cap's player can't declare a defence based on Durability (because a shield doesn't protect you from gas); similarly for Sue Storm vs a light-based attack (because here forcefield is fully transparent).

But once a conflict has been framed and the dice rolled, FitM is build into the narration of the resolution - and their are even options like spending a Plot Point to change damage type, so the bad guy might have inflicted physical damage but you can spend a point and then narrate how you avoid physical injury but it makes your really scared (or angry, or whatever) instead (ie convert physical stress to emotional stress).

I've seen discussions on RPGnet about MHRP where people have disagreed over the proper approach to resolution precisely because they're having trouble telling, within the design of the rules, over where HERO-style abstraction stops and FitM begins. For instance, Daredevil is blind. But he also has a power to spend a Plot Point to negate advers vision-based effects. That implies, at the mechanical level, that he can be affected by those things if the player doesn't spend the point. So does that mean that the GM can frame a vision-based attack against Daredevil, forcing the player to spend a point to keep Daredevil true to type (within the mechanics there's no trouble getting the point, though it can cost you in other indirect ways)? Or the GM can't frame a vision-based attack against Daredevil as such, but eg can frame a vision-basd attack against a (spontaneously specified) truck-driver, whose truck will then crash into Daredevil? In the latter case, what exactly is going on in the fiction then if Daredevil's player spend a point to negate that consequence?

I don't think Cam Banks ever posted how he would handle it.

 

[pemerton]

You may be kind of conflating two things that are very distinct in my mind: a "rewrite" and a situation left unexplored. But I think I follow you in that essentially, the player (and, really, the character, too) says, "We're just going to do this the easy way."

I think it's important to remember that in D&D, at least, the "easy way" can easily fail (the other side of "save or suck" is that nothing happens), but, yeah, the impulse is to just jump over the struggle the DM has put in the way. It might be analogous to zooming OUT the level of focus in a FATE game -- turning what might be a true "conflict" into a simple single-roll scenario.

If I've understood you right, FATE has a "simple resolution" mechanic like those other systems I mentioned. In which case, yep, "the easy way" is like that.

I agree in D&D that the attempt to resolve via "the easy way" can often fail. That's a distinctive thing about D&D - in HW/Q, for instance, if you fail your "zoomed out" check it doesn't mean you now have to engage the scene in detailed mode; it just means the GM frames a new scene that follows on from you having failed in the last scene. The analogue in D&D would be if the MU tries to polymorph the orcs into chickens, and fails, then the GM cuts to a scene in which the chickens have the MU tied to a stake and are getting ready to burn the witch. Wherease, in fact in D&D if your "easy way" attempt fails then you can still succeed in the scene, but you have to engage it via "hard way" resolution.

I think this is an area where I see a spellcaster/otherfolks divide in D&D, and it does have to do with the fact that, historically, a spell (being a limited resource in the fiction) can zoom out the action and turn a battle into a simple die roll, but that an attack roll (being a limitless resource in the fiction) can't. Kind of an interesting way to see magical power: it lets you control the pacing more than non-magical power. Certainly something that should probably be expanded to more than just magical classes.

I think this issue of controlling pacing is certainly a significant part of it.

I don't concur with that distinction. Both actions are means of resolving the threat created by the orcs.

[MENTION=5143]Majoru Oakheart[/MENTION] has given a detailed reply to your points, and I basically agree with the general thrust of what he's said (though I don't have anything like the same epxerience with the details of 3E play).

The main thing I want to add is that, in the passage above, you're looking at the play from an "in-fiction" point of view - the PCs confronted some orcs, and the threat was resolved.

I'm talking about it from an "at-table" point of view. In one instance, somewhere between 10 and 60 mintues of table time was devoted to resolving things with the orcs - it's a "scene" that the players engage with, and have to resolve. Stuff happens. Points get made (by the players, by the GM). Character gets displayed. Etc.

In the other instance, the scene changes more-or-less immediately. The wizard player reframes the situation into something else.

I don't see the fighter charging in, attacking one orc, it drops, Great Cleave to attack the second, it drops, Great Cleave to attack the third, it drops. The situation is no more explored. The threatening situation wasn't one at all.

That's not very different, no. But my experience is that in traditional D&D the wizard has quite a bit more of this than the fighter.

I said in my post that the boundary can be blurred, and that it depends on a range of factors including system and table expectations. For instance, in Gygaxian D&D I don't think there is any significant distinction between what I'm calling action resolution, and what I'm calling scene re-framing, other than time taken at the table. (That may well be why Gygaxian D&D didn't worry too much about giving wizards more of these options than fighters.) I say this because "engaging with the fiction" isn't really an end-in-itself in Gygaxian D&D. It's all about the victory conditions (gold and XP). But as soon as you move into non-Gygaxian modes of play (eg the Dragonlance style that [MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] mentioned upthread) then engaging with the fiction does become an end in itself. We want the GM to frame good scenes (othewise our attempt to derive aesthetic pleasure from engaging with the fiction will fail), and we want those scenes to actually play out at the table.

I know some people think it's "just part of RPGing" that sometimes the "big bad" dies in a single die roll. Personally, though, I think that if you're wanting to play a Dragonlance-style game, then it is a failure of design if it permits this sort of outcome - if it permits the scene to be over before it's begun. (A single die roll might still do the job, depending on the mechanical system being used, but to get that die roll you should have to engage in some fashion and actually explore the confrontation with the "big bad".)

I personally favour a playstyle in which the GM has strong authority over scene-framing, precisely because otherwise the game is prone to these sorts of pleasure-reducing "fizzles". After all, once you give the players abilities that let them reframe away encounters in the polymorph-into-chicken style, the players have a fairly strong incentive to do so - especially if the resource costs of actually engaging the scene are likely to be higher (eg hit points lost compared to one spell spent). At which point the players have to choose between faithfully playing their PCs - which means deploying their "re-frame away challenges" abilities, because that's the rational in-character thing to do - or squibbing on their play of their PCs so as to have more of a fun time ("It would be boring to just polymorph the BBEG again!").

Some others - eg [MENTION=27570]sheadunne[/MENTION], if I've understood right - prefer the players to have a high degree of reframing authority. Not my own preference, but I'm very happy to hear more about what it adds to sheadunne's (and others') play experience.

But whichever way one leans on the distribution of scene-framing authority between players and GM, in a game in which the difference between engaging and bypassing or "fizzling" a scene matters, it's hard for me to see why the distribution of this sort of authority among the players should differ depending on PC archetype chosen. If there's a reason for players to have it, all should. If there's a reason to confine it to the GM (eg conflict of interest reasons of the sort I stated above), then none should. (This is bascially what 4e does.)

So how is any threat on the new planet in MHRP determined?

The GM has a suite of resources - the Doom Pool, and the rules that govern its use - whereby s/he can introduce new Scene Distinctions or Scene Complications, or new opponents, which keep the scene alive. But more siginficantly for my example, because MHRP is based on semi-freeform descriptors rather than D&D/wargame-style times and distances, action resolution, and hence a scene, is not geographically bounded. So a player whose PC teleports away from the Skrulls can still (everything else being equal) meaningfully engage with the scene containing the skrulls - for instance by declaring a teleport back in to imopse a "surprise counter-attack" complication on the Skrulls. Or by attacking the transmission tower on the new planet, and thereby inflicting complications on the Skrulls as you scramble their telecommunications. Or perhaps by establishing some sort of asset for an ally - perhaps you teleport a handy Skrull-fighting ray gun back to them.

MHRP in this respect is like HeroWars/Quest, and I assume like FATE, in being considerably more flexible in its action resolution, and hence considerably more flexible in what counts as closing a scene or keeping it still open, with in-fiction geography being a less important part of that.

In my 4e game I have tried a coule of times to run scenes in which the PCs are geographically separated. I don't want to say it's hopeless, but it's not easy. The rules don't offer much support for the generation of consequences by a player whose PC is at in-fiction location A which have in-scene consequences for another player's PC at in-fiction location B. In one case I dealt with this issue by improvising with some features of the situation that had already been established - a crystal ball, a teleportation power, and a sphinx NPC with mysterious magical abilities. In another case I dealt with this issue by having NPCs move from place to place carrying with them, in their dealing with PC B, the emotional and practical consequences from PC A. But there is nothing in 4e analogous to, or as simple and general as, the MHRP ideas of creating assets and complications.

There can only be a threat if the GM succeeds in a die roll, where the GM in D&D makes a decision on what, if anything, is happening in the Seven Heavens?

I'm not sure what die roll you're talking about. But in D&D, if there is a new threat on the Seven Heavens we're probably talking about framing a new scene rather than continuing the old one.

Does the D&D activity change back if the Demons can plane shift as well, and follow the PC's even into the bastion of Lawful Goodness of the Seven Heavens?

Yes, but historically D&D hasn't had much in the way of reactive teleport tracking. That's an example of what I mean when I say that the boundary betwen actin resolution and scene-reframing is sensitive to the details of the mechanical system being used.

 

[N'raac]

There's an optional hit location system, which we're not using for this game, that does allow for limbs being disabled. I just had a look at the rule and it's GM's option whether a disabled limb has actually been severed or merely badly damaged, so HERO may have more scope for FitM than I thought. (Despite the system being amazingly crunchy and precise, appeals to the GM to make a judgement call are scattered throughout the text of the current rules, which I find a bit weird.) The other way to do it is a power called Transform, which potentially permits anything to be turned into anything, and is very much a fallback in HERO for when you can't think of any other way to represent an effect.

There is a level of abstraction in HERO. The same rules constructs can describe different effects in the game world - fire blasts, raw magical energy, lasers or entropic forces could all be represented by varying levels of the power Blast. HERO System uses the term 'special effect' for the game world aspect of a power. This mostly seems to apply at the character build stage though. Once it's decided what a power will be, that's what it remains, so it's a different kind of abstraction than FitM, I think.

Hero’s basic philosophy, to me, is to provide the toolkit to build the game you want. It provides extensive crunch, but the decision of the extent to which it will be used (eg. whether to use that optional disabling rule), and how, rests in the hands of the player group (which, under traditional GM driven games, means largely in the GM).

The game provides limited “balance” as we might recognize the term in D&D. Much of the balance is provided by character limits applied in the specific game.

In the SW themed game, I’d lean to applying the Disabling rules, or some variation thereof, with lightsabers meaning “limb severed”. That said, from a source material perspective, does it matter? When has a “limb severed” opponent in the source material returned later, or even kept fighting? Functionally, the opponent is defeated, so if you simply allow “knocked out” to mean “limb severed; he backs off and cowers”, removing him from the combat either way, it doesn’t much matter.

I haven’t read it in detail, but Hero’s Star Hero book provides extensive discussion of applying Hero rules to SF games, and I imagine there’s a lightsaber clone in there somewhere, among other SW tropes.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Hit points have this character: I can choose to have my PC confront a risk (say, a fight with an orc or a jump down a cliff) knowing that s/he can't die from physical injury, whereas my PC can't have the same knowledge.

Absolutely false. The character most certainly can and probably does know roughly how many hit points he has and how much damage effects are likely to cause him. Objects have hit points. An enterprising physicist in a d20 world could drop blocks of stone from varying heights and determine physical laws that explain how much hp and hardness the stone has and how much damage falls cause. A character probably doesn't have time to examine his own properties that way, but they are objective and observable to him and they work the same way. If he jumps off a cliff, the result is reproducible, and he can predict it if he periodically challenges himself. Is this abstract? Yes. Realistic? No. But there's nothing going on here outside of the character's awareness.

The metagame aspect is when you start talking about experience and levels. I doubt the character understands why his hp go up so much. That's very much metagame, because experience and levels mean nothing to that character (unlike hp, which are very real to him). In some cases, the XP rules do encourage metagaming by having players choose the path that will net them the most XP, rather than acting rationally within the game. That's one reason I don't use XP. But hp themselves don't force the player out of the character's perspective that I can see.

Saving throws can also have this character, although it's less stark. The absence of a saving throw for classic D&D energy drain is one of its notorious features for this very reason: the player really does inhabit the character's space, knowing that there's no chance of escaping the dire fate.

In other words, not metagame. The player and character being in the same place is the antithesis of the metagaming I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is cases where, as with say your 4e martial powers or your 3e knight's challenge or your action points, etc., a player makes tactical choices that affect the character, but which the character is not aware of. Does a character know how much damage is needed to kill him? Probably. Does a character know that his knight can gain benefits from shouting a challenge to someone, but that those only work five times a day? I doubt it! That divorces the player's perspective from the character's, and pushes us from "roleplaying" towards "storygaming" (or whatever jargon you want to use).

Agreed. In a "traditional" game you ask the GM "Is there a flower pot on the windowsill I can throw down at the person climbing up the fire escape?" In a "modern" game you expend a resource or make a die roll to render it true, in the shared fiction, that there's a flower point on the windowsill that you can throw down at the person climbing up the fire escape. Both are the player contributing to the fiction - it's just that one contribution is mediated via the GM's authority, the other is not.

And that is exactly the kind of ability that I do not want any D&D character to have. The "traditional" way is fine and serves a number of purposes. I see nothing to be gained by changing it. The "modern" way is fine and serves a number of different purposes, and can go on doing so in "modern" games.

 

[N'raac]

The main thing I want to add is that, in the passage above, you're looking at the play from an "in-fiction" point of view - the PCs confronted some orcs, and the threat was resolved.

I'm talking about it from an "at-table" point of view. In one instance, somewhere between 10 and 60 mintues of table time was devoted to resolving things with the orcs - it's a "scene" that the players engage with, and have to resolve. Stuff happens. Points get made (by the players, by the GM). Character gets displayed. Etc.

I find, once combat is joined, “resolving things with the orcs” becomes a tactical exercise, whether this is resolved quickly or requires extended time. The character – personality, ethics, morals, values, etc. – of the PC’s and orcs isn’t a big part of that. Character abilities may get displayed – but that’s what that Polymorph was.

In the other instance, the scene changes more-or-less immediately. The wizard player reframes the situation into something else.

I see this more as “the wizard resolves this scene quickly, and we move on to the next as is natural when this one is resolved”.

I said in my post that the boundary can be blurred, and that it depends on a range of factors including system and table expectations. For instance, in Gygaxian D&D I don't think there is any significant distinction between what I'm calling action resolution, and what I'm calling scene re-framing, other than time taken at the table. (That may well be why Gygaxian D&D didn't worry too much about giving wizards more of these options than fighters.) I say this because "engaging with the fiction" isn't really an end-in-itself in Gygaxian D&D. It's all about the victory conditions (gold and XP). But as soon as you move into non-Gygaxian modes of play (eg the Dragonlance style that @Doug McCrae mentioned upthread) then engaging with the fiction does become an end in itself. We want the GM to frame good scenes (othewise our attempt to derive aesthetic pleasure from engaging with the fiction will fail), and we want those scenes to actually play out at the table.

I know some people think it's "just part of RPGing" that sometimes the "big bad" dies in a single die roll. Personally, though, I think that if you're wanting to play a Dragonlance-style game, then it is a failure of design if it permits this sort of outcome - if it permits the scene to be over before it's begun. (A single die roll might still do the job, depending on the mechanical system being used, but to get that die roll you should have to engage in some fashion and actually explore the confrontation with the "big bad".)

If the Big Bad is just a different tactical exercise to resolve, then whether he is taken out with a single die roll or an extended tactical exercise, this is not, to me, “engaging with the fiction”. Engaging with the fiction means that the villain makes his monologue (without a player response of “Yeah, sure, while he’s yapping I waste him with my crossbow”). Encouraging engaging with the fiction may require providing character abilities (rather than rules-less role play) to resolve conflicts in manners other than physical or magical combat.

But whichever way one leans on the distribution of scene-framing authority between players and GM, in a game in which the difference between engaging and bypassing or "fizzling" a scene matters, it's hard for me to see why the distribution of this sort of authority among the players should differ depending on PC archetype chosen. If there's a reason for players to have it, all should. If there's a reason to confine it to the GM (eg conflict of interest reasons of the sort I stated above), then none should. (This is bascially what 4e does.)

This is where I don’t see the discussion to date focusing on “narrative control”. It focuses on the ability to resolve scenes, perhaps to resolve them in a manner many around the table find unsatisfying. But it does not focus on scene framing, it focuses on scene resolution. As the chickens cluck around, and the PC’s open the next door, neither the fighter nor the wizard has any control over what will be behind that door.

And, when the Big Bad shows up, twirls his moustache and begins his monologue, it doesn’t matter whether he is interrupted with a Polymorph spell or a sword strike – the players (or one player) has “reframed the scene” from one where the fiction is engaged to a tactical combat exercise.

The GM has a suite of resources - the Doom Pool, and the rules that govern its use - whereby s/he can introduce new Scene Distinctions or Scene Complications, or new opponents, which keep the scene alive. But more siginficantly for my example, because MHRP is based on semi-freeform descriptors rather than D&D/wargame-style times and distances, action resolution, and hence a scene, is not geographically bounded. So a player whose PC teleports away from the Skrulls can still (everything else being equal) meaningfully engage with the scene containing the skrulls - for instance by declaring a teleport back in to imopse a "surprise counter-attack" complication on the Skrulls.

Assuming the wizard has two teleport spells, he can do the same with the Orcs. I don’t believe that was the intent of the Wizard example – it was “we’re out of here, encounter ended”. With that, I suggest the same intent should be assumed here if we are to have a valid comparison.

I'm not sure what die roll you're talking about. But in D&D, if there is a new threat on the Seven Heavens we're probably talking about framing a new scene rather than continuing the old one.

I think there are two possibilities. The first is that the Teleporting PC’s are attempting to end the specific challenge from which they teleport away. Whether that is teleporting back to the inn to escape the orcs, teleporting to the Seven Heavens to evade the powerful demon, or teleporting to another planet to get away from those Skrulls, the objective is to end this scene and move on to something else.

The second is that the PC’s are seeking to move from one aspect of this challenge to another, and are using the ability to Teleport to facilitate that. Whether that is teleporting back to the inn to resupply, reprovision, gather our forces and return for a better planned attack on the orcs, teleporting to the Seven Heavens to recruit extraplanar allies to battle against the demonic invasion, or to the Skrull WarWorld to knock out their communications, the players are seeking to resolve the challenge presented (directly or indirectly) by the enemies they teleported away from.


If the players’ goal is to evade or circumvent the challenge presented, rather than face and resolve the challenge, the mechanical system is unlikely to change those player goals. It may frustrate the players’ goals, but it’s not going to change them.

 

[sheadunne]

IfSome others - eg sheadunne, if I've understood right - prefer the players to have a high degree of reframing authority. Not my own preference, but I'm very happy to hear more about what it adds to sheadunne's (and others') play experience.

I have conflicting interests in gaming. When I run games, I want to improvise. I don't care about the rules and am more concerned with providing players with the capacity to achieve their goals. When I'm playing, I'm the opposite. I care about the details, rules, and abilities I have. This conflict between playing and running has been a pain in my butt for years, since there really isn't a good system that helps to resolve that conflict (detailed player side, light DM side). I certainly don't expect D&D to resolve it, but I would like it to start heading in that direction.

Reframing authority allows players to shape the game world. In an average game, I have 4 players around the table. If I ask them each to describe an apple, they would each give me a similar yet different description of the apple (some that it's green, others red, and others say that it's really an orange). Why not allow each to imagine the apple as they want, rather than how I choose the apple to look? The ownership of the game is in everyone's hands, but as a DM I feel I have the least interest in how that apple looks, since I'm not interacting with it, the players are. (How about them apples.) If only half the players get to describe the apple, while the others have to use my description or the other players' description, it seems there's an imbalance. To correct that imbalance, I can create narrative tools that require resources to change the narrative (or I can remove all narrative changing from the game). If those resources are measured equally in cost expenditure, then reframing is a matter of who has more invested interest in what type of scene it is. If the wizard really wants a comedy scene he can spend his resources (spells) on changing the orcs into chickens. If the fighter wants a 300 scene (Sparta!), he can equally spend resources changing it. The challenging part is balancing the cost and nature of those abilities from a player side, and creating tools that allow the DM to respond quickly and easily to the changed scene. I think that 3x is the most difficult system out of the box to run that sort of game. A DM who has a large amount of experience in 3x can certainly manage it (and will often work on changing parts of the system to make it easier), but an inexperienced DM will find it difficult to manage narrative changes. This isn't a flaw in the system, since it wasn't designed to do what I want to do with it.

Anyway, there you go. I'm a lazy DM who wants to improvise and put narrative tools in the player's hands so that I can continue being a lazy DM.

 

[Balesir]

Absolutely false. The character most certainly can and probably does know roughly how many hit points he has and how much damage effects are likely to cause him. Objects have hit points. An enterprising physicist in a d20 world could drop blocks of stone from varying heights and determine physical laws that explain how much hp and hardness the stone has and how much damage falls cause. A character probably doesn't have time to examine his own properties that way, but they are objective and observable to him and they work the same way. If he jumps off a cliff, the result is reproducible, and he can predict it if he periodically challenges himself. Is this abstract? Yes. Realistic? No. But there's nothing going on here outside of the character's awareness.

The metagame aspect is when you start talking about experience and levels. I doubt the character understands why his hp go up so much. That's very much metagame, because experience and levels mean nothing to that character (unlike hp, which are very real to him). In some cases, the XP rules do encourage metagaming by having players choose the path that will net them the most XP, rather than acting rationally within the game. That's one reason I don't use XP. But hp themselves don't force the player out of the character's perspective that I can see.

OK, now you've lost me completely - how is this consistent??

If a character can be aware of how much "life" s/he has left, why on earth (or, indeed, on any other world) can't they know how much "experience" they just gained from an experience? Why can't they know what "level of accomplishment" they are at? Why can't they know that they can only do some moves once before they have to take a time-out, and be able to sense whether or not they have done it already?

I mean, if we are talking about a character that knows just how much of their "life" will be taken away by a successful attack with a sword (or a flamethrower, for that matter), then we are already talking about a creature quite far divorced from humanity. What is the difference between a fantasy creature that can sense how much "life energy" they have left in them and one that can sense what "level of power" s/he is at or whether one of his or her capabilities is currently "empowered" or not?

 

[Ahnehnois]

If a character can be aware of how much "life" s/he has left, why on earth (or, indeed, on any other world) can't they know how much "experience" they just gained from an experience?

Because XP, in and of itself, does not have any effect in the game that a character could test or observe, and does not have any cause that the character could understand.

Why can't they know what "level of accomplishment" they are at?

Actually, they probably could (see the thread a while back on things characters would be able to know about themselves; quite a bit as it turns out). They probably do have some sense of it, though determining an exact number would be very difficult because the effects of level are indirect and this is a very abstract line of thought for the character. Particularly spellcasters know that spells have levels, and can probably intuit some notion of character levels based on who gets spell access when.

Why can't they know that they can only do some moves once before they have to take a time-out, and be able to sense whether or not they have done it already?

They could realize that. But what does that mean if they can? What does a character think is happening when he shouts at someone one minute and gets an effect, and do the same thing a minute later and gets nothing? Over and over again. This is why you see people insisting that 4e characters (and other characters with nonmagical abilities with daily limits and such) cannot know these things, because if they can, the implications are nonsensical.

I mean, if we are talking about a character that knows just how much of their "life" will be taken away by a successful attack with a sword (or a flamethrower, for that matter), then we are already talking about a creature quite far divorced from humanity. What is the difference between a fantasy creature that can sense how much "life energy" they have left in them and one that can sense what "level of power" s/he is at or whether one of his or her capabilities is currently "empowered" or not?

The difference is certainly not black and white, but a shade of gray. With hp, it's reasonable to think that a character could conceptualize hp as "this is how tough I am"; and we all do have a sense of that. With these other examples (powers and so on), I just don't see what a fantasy character could possibly understand them as being. It's not fatigue, or any other construct that would mean anything in the game world. It's the old "out of rage" problem. HP are simplified and overgenerous, but powers and the other martial character abilities under discussion here simply don't make sense at all.

 

[Mike Eagling]

Because XP, in and of itself, does not have any effect in the game that a character could test or observe, and does not have any cause that the character could understand.

The difference is certainly not black and white, but a shade of gray. With hp, it's reasonable to think that a character could conceptualize hp as "this is how tough I am"; and we all do have a sense of that.

I'd argue a character could conceptualise their skill in their chosen profession in a similar fashion.

 

[Tuft]

I'd argue a character could conceptualise their skill in their chosen profession in a similar fashion.

One important part of Martial Arts training in fiction is often judging how tough your opponent is at a glance.