Choosing to prioritize reliability over spiky results seems to me to be a valid choice, both at a metagame level AND at a character level. I can easily an adventurer choosing to prioritize his ability to consistently mitigate damage rather than occasionally avoid all of it.
I'm not 100% sure I understand this as an ingame character choice, but then I know nothing about fighting or dodging explosions.
But as a metagame, player choice it makes perfect sense: do I want the unrelenting dreadnought, or the showy dealer of spike damage? It resembles (without being identical to) the choice between defender and striker in 4e.
many players have internalized narration that a miss on a 16 is described differently than a miss on a 3, despite their being no rule to support that interpretation. It's just fidelity to their internal imagined process simulation. And yet, I imagine there would be a lot of resistance to doing attacks as (d20 + attack modifier + weapon dice) - (armor value); with the value returned being the damage result. A value of 0 or below would then be a "miss". This would seem to be a better model of "simming" the imagined process behind attacks.
This is how HARP does it: roll to hit, apply attack mod, subtract defence mod (which includes both active and passive defence), then determine hit/miss (anything above 0 is a hit) then apply weapon damage mod (daggers hurt less than greatswords on this approach), and read resulting damage of a chart. (HARP is RM-lite, after all!)
HARP is a process sim game, with all the pros and cons thereof. One of the features is that we can tell if a strike was defeated by defence (good attack roll negated by high allocation to active defence by enemy) or by attacker error (poor attack roll that would miss even without active defence).
Part of my objection to the D&D approach of "3" is a wild swing and "19" is a rousing hit is similar to my objection to "one attack per 6 seconds" - it yields a fiction of fighters standing there like lumps of stone, swinging at one another periodically like automatons, never dodging but not so skilled as to be able to strike, without difficulty, a static blob.
Conversely, once I insert the sort of image that I personally have of melee combat, it becomes clear that most misses must be due to defender skill as much as attacker error, and saying that this only happens 1 time in 4 or thereabouts (when the shield or DEX bonus made the difference) simply makes no sense. It lacks verisimilitude, to borrow a phrase!
The idea that fortune resolution for mundane abilities as (something like) the inputs of entropy + skill yielding a firm fictional positioning output with few (or none at all) liberties of interpretive rendering being required to acquaint the two sides of the equation with one another strikes me as completely untenable (if that is indeed the position...its hard to say).
As is usually the case, the sticking point is the unwillingness to have a roll for any one character affect the reality outside the character. The result of an attack roll has to represent the relative skill applied to the character's swing. Rolling an 3 on a longbow attack is the character firing wide, not an errant gust of wind at a bad time or the target raising his shield to catch the arrow. Gusts of wind should be a conditional affect rolled by the DM, and blocking with the shield is purely a function of the roll compared to the Armor Class. (It's OK to narrate a miss by 1 or 2 as hitting a shield, because that's the difference in AC that the shield gives.)
I agree with both these posts (except I'm more confident that Manbearcat in the accuracy of his interpretive hypothesis). And the endless threads and poles also have a further, related cause - namely, an apparent blind spot to the possiblity that anyone might play differently, and hence a move without further argument or analysis to the conclusion that these mechanics are inherently flawed and make no sense and wreck the game.
It strikes me, at least, as a very blinkered conception of what mechanics in an RPG might be for.
More and more, I think the biggest difference between the camps of roleplayers is the willingness to embrace or not embrace different narrative stances in play.
Stances and related techniques. It's been a while since I've quoted this particular
passage from Ron Edwards, so it's time to trot it out again!
Step On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things:
*Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what.
*Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.
*More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.
And we can see all the same objections: objections to author stance; objections to FitM and associated deferral of exploration; objections to casual negotiation of exploration using system as constraint but not determinative ("It's not consistent!). As always, the thing that most puzzle me is how and
D&D player can treat D&D's particular systems - with their lack of active defence, and their hit point ablation - as
anything but fortune in the middle.
In googling up my quote I also found this
other passage which seems apposite too:
I submit that playing in the Narrativist mode is just as intuitive and instantly understood by most people as Gamist play. . .
Author Stance may be considered the default for Narrativist play only in the sense that it needs to be in there somewhere. Narrativist play doesn't have to be exclusively in this Stance, nor does it even have to be employed more often than the others. The only requirement is that it be present in a significant way. Narrativist play is very much like Gamist play in this regard, and for the same reason: the player of a given character takes social and aesthetic responsibility for what that character does.
I think this is borne out by [MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION]'s reports about the ease of teaching MHRP and FATE to newbies. And I don't think there is any reason to think that new players would find "damage on a miss" confusing. They're choosing to play a particular sort of character - what I've called the "relentless dreadnought" - and the mechanics reflect that. And if that's not the character you want to play, take responsibility and pick a different ability!
