I still don't understand what all this talk regarding jump cards is about. Seems like a great debate about nothing.
I don't agree with this. A PC in my 4e game, for example, has a power that lets him perform a Mighty Sprint (or Climb, or Jump) once per encounter. It's excatly like the hypothetical "jump cards" being discussed. So the discussion of jump cards has direct implications for how my game plays, and how it's play is to be understood.
Skill challenges are also like this, because after 1 use of a skill the DC increases for that PC using that skill again. So each PC only has one solid chance at gaining a success using a given skill. This is something like a "jump card".
And there's your physics. As long as it produces the intended results, you're golden.
Except that it's not physics. It's not part of the physics of Conan's world that combats are almost the most dramatic at the culmination of the story - that's a stylistic phenomenon of a story, not a physical fact about the Hyborian age. Likwise for HW/Q or TRoS.
It's absurd because the ease of jumping depends on how many times you do it.
You seem unwilling to distinguish between the probability of something happening in the gameworld, and the probability of it happening at the game table. Never once at my game table has the issue of defecation come up for a PC. Does it follow that the probability of defecation in my gameworld is zero? I don't think so.
On the other hand, the PCs in my game always bump into old friends or foes, or other exciting scenarios. Why? Because the likelihood of unusual things happening, while low in the gameworld, is high at the table. This tells us nothing about the physics of the gameworld. The Shaman has encounter tables especially designed to produce these coincidences, as part of a genre replication technique. It doesn't mean that it's part of the physics of The Shaman's semi-fictional France that coincidences are actually not coincidences at all!
But the reality of your system is that that events are not independent.
In the fiction they are independent. At the gametable they are not. Like The Shaman's coincidences.
What if a character spends twenty consecutive days in a hilly, region with lots of chasms.
In a game with limited jump cards, you might avoid setting encounters in hills, or at Olympic athletics competitions. Alternatively, you would look for ways to compress multiple actual jumps in the gameworld into a single skill check, or focus on only one or two crucial scenes in the overall 20 day episode. (I've
posted on this before - that with these sorts of mechanics, one might look at multiple ways to resolve a given situation. And Eyebeams also mentioned this upthread.)
"Absurd" is kinda a loaded word. But will you at least agree that this is a perfect example of the narrative being forced to obey the mechanics?
I don't at all dispute that it's a non-simulationist mechanic - which is how I prefer to describe what I think you mean by "narrative being forced to obey the mechanics". That's the point of a mechanic which (as I put it upthread)
places parameters on the narrative of the fictional situation.
Like Hussar, I tend to feel that your way of describing it elides the contrast with other mechanics, which also constrain what can be narrated (eg in AD&D, if I roll a 1, I'm obliged to say that my PC didn't hit the enemy). For maximum clarity: I'm not disputing the contrast, and never have, and have spent over two years on these boards asserting it. I'm just saying that I don't feel that the description you are using gets at the contrast. That's why I prefer my description. In the sort of game with "jump cards",
the mechanics are not a model of the physics of the gameworld. Rather,
they allocate and constrain the power to describe what is happening in the gameworld in a way that is
independent of the ingame, fictional physics but is responsive to
some other aesthetic desire of those playing the game. In the case of the "jump cards", part of that aesthetic desire might be a view that too much solving of problems by jumping makes for a boring game.
That's also why I think talk about "metagame" mechanics is kind of pointless; all mechanics work at the player - the metagame - level.
LostSoul, that's fair enough. I guess by metagame mechanics I mean mechanics (i) that aren't purist-for-system simulationist, in the sense that they don't express or model ingame causality, and also (ii) that can't be implemented in actor stance.