D&D 5E Simulation vs Game - Where should D&D 5e aim?

[Lanefan]

They're for playing a game, not for inventing fictional models of physics. Even high-sim games (which D&D most assuredly is not) recognize the utility of abstractions. You're arguing for a game without abstractions, where every simplified game convenience takes on the weight of an observable physical law.

Personally, I'm arguing for the abstractions to meld with the physics as far as they can (while knowing they never fully will) so as to produce an internally consistent and believeable game world. Is that such a bad thing?

EDIT to add:

There always was in any edition. A kobold was always a minion to everyone. An Orc quickly becomes a minion. As I go up levels gaining magic weapons and whatnot, more and larger monsters effectively become minions.

The only difference is that 4e bakes that right into the mechanics.

Not quite. An Orc with 5 h.p. still stays upright if hit with an arrow for 3. And no pre-4e giant will go down to a single arrow shot except in the most bizarre of circumstances.

Lanefan

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Are the first two sentences claims about how you like to use mechanics? In which case I believe you when you make them.

Those are claims about how to use the mechanics to represent an internally consistent objective reality. If you don't care about consistency or objectivity, then you can use the rules however you feel like.

From my point of view this is a gross conflation of player knowledge and PC knowledge. What the PCs know is that this one time, and perhaps this other time too, 10 orcs loosed their bows straight at Joe and yet Joe survived.

The thing about the truth is that it doesn't require anyone to know it in order for it to still be true. It is a fact that Joe has the capacity to withstand ~10 arrows before dropping, whether or not the PCs or the players are aware of it.

If the chain had a weak link, then it had a weak link - always and objectively. It's just that this style uses a different technique from your preferred style to work out whether or not that is true. In your style, the GM decides all that stuff in advance -

I'm not even sure how you would play otherwise. Is it just an exercise in making stuff up off the top of your head, in order to justify things after they already happen?

If a PC examines a room, then I consider it my duty to faithfully describe what the character sees, and I can't do that if I don't know ahead of time what all is in the room. What if I improvise something later on, and it turns out that the PC would have acted differently if I had previously defined that thing?

The flip side of your post here is the following: I know that 4e style mechanics are consistent with an "objectively real" gameworld. I know because I've done it.

You can claim that you use them to represent an objective reality, but you can't objectively claim to use them to represent a consistent one.

Objectively speaking, your described use of the 4E rules paint an inconsistent reality. This is the case, regardless of what you claim.

 

[Lanefan]

If a PC examines a room, then I consider it my duty to faithfully describe what the character sees, and I can't do that if I don't know ahead of time what all is in the room.

You don't necessarily have to know what's in the room ahead of time, as long as you know *at* the time. In other words, it's fine to make it up on the spur of the moment.

What if I improvise something later on, and it turns out that the PC would have acted differently if I had previously defined that thing?

Different issue. Once you've described the room you're pretty much bound to that description unless there's an in-game-world reason to later change it*; which means if you're winging it you really need a good memory or to be taking copious notes as you go.

* - e.g. the room when first seen had an empty chest in it but when next seen there's the mangled corpse of a giant rat where the chest was and the chest is gone - between one viewing and the next some orcs wandered by, killed a big juicy rat they happened to find, then took the chest for firewood planning to come back and get the rat later once their cookfire was nicely stoked.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

Whatever else you might call them I think anyone who has played more than a single session of Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel, Marvel Heroic, Sorcerer or Dogs in the Vineyard could honestly not call them games. There is a right way and a wrong way to play them, and they absolutely punish strategic mistakes. They differ from games like D&D in that optimal play is not reflected in your characters having an easy time of things. There are patterns to discern and interpret - they are just different patterns.

I agree with this overall, but there is also one thing that I want to focus on.

Some game mechanics mean that optimal play is reflected I the PCs having an easy time of things. Other do not. I personally prefer the latter.

The problem with the former is that when the PCs are having an easy time of things gameplay tends to be less exciting. I have had this experience in Rolemaster, with scry-buff-teleport, and in AD&D also, with methodical, prep-based play being the best way to succeed I the game.

One thing I like about 4e is that it often isn't true. For instance, in combat the best way for the dwarf fighter in my game to succeed is to be in the thick of things, subject to attacks from all parties. That produces excitement. The sorcerer has close burst powers, which require getting into the action to use them. Even when he makes this easy for himself, say by dropping his Cloud of Darkness, this introduces complications into the situation for the other characters (and hence the other players).

Out-of-combat, too, the system doesn't reward the same sort of prep-based play as does more traditional D&D. It's not quite in the same league as some of the games that Campbell mentions, but it is noticeably different from how D&D has tended to be in earlier editions. I personally find this makes for more spontaneous and more exciting play.

I'd actually make the argument that as games, Story Now games are more successful. When you make a decision that leads to engaging the game mechanics in a game like Burning Wheel you have to accept the consequences of your decisions as a player. Unlike games like VtM, there is no guardian at the gate to mitigate consequences. The GM is just as limited by the rules of the game as any other player. Say Yes or Roll The Dice is a rule.

<snip>

I'm here to make sure their PCs lead interesting lives, and need to make hard decisions. I am not here to detail histories, make passive plots for them to puzzle out, or draw dungeon maps.

<snip>

If any argument could be made for RPGs not being played as games it's the style advocated by Planescape, Classic WoD, and others where player decisions are marginalized.

This all makes sense to me.

Storygames are games designed for players to purposefully tell a story. They all the use the same mechanic: narrative resolution.

<snip>

Story-games make game playing into telling a better story.

By this definition can you give an example of a story game? Marvel Heroic RP, Burning Wheel, Maelstrom Storytelling and HeroWars/Quest certainly don't fit it.

2e did publish a some very bad game books which didn't even include game statistics for game components within them. But that's due to ignorance of design. Of course I'm talking about all the 1000s of books which actually do have game stats.

And I'm talking about the 1000s of things in those books that don't have game stats.

Here is an example from Gygax's AD&D DMG (p 96), which predates 2nd ed AD&D by 10 years and can hardly be considered aberrant:

THE LIMED-OVER SKELETON OF THE ABBOT is in this pool of water, but it appears to be merely a somewhat unusual mineral formation. Clutched in the bony fingers is the special key . . . If the remains are disturbed in anyway, a cylindrical object will be noticed, the thing being dislodged from where it lay by the skeleton. . .

The pool is about 10' long and 15' wide. It is about 4' deep at its edge and 7' in the centre. There are a score of so of small, white blind fish in it, and under the rocks are some cave crayfish, similarly blind and white.​

That is a part of the gameworld that the PCs absolutely are expected to interact with, and it has no game stats. All we are given is a description of an imaginary state of affairs. How does one disturb a limed-over skeleton in a pool of water of the described dimensions? No game mechanics are given - it is taken for granted that the players and GM can work this out be extrapolating from the stated fiction.

If a PC is trapped in the room can s/he avoid starvation for a time by eating the fish and crayfish? There are no mechanics to answer that question, either - no mechanics for calorific requirements, nor for fishing - but that doesn't mean that a player couldn't declare his/her PC making such a move. The GM would adjudicate it by reference to the stated fiction.

Just to give one instance - suppose a player says, during a bar-room situation "I spill my beer on such-and-such an NPC so we'll be able to identify him later by the smell of beer on his clothes". Nothing published by TSR that I'm aware of has any rules for resolving this game move. It depends entirely on imaginative projection of the properties of cups, of beer and of human noses as the participants know them to be in the real world.

Are you incapable of using game mechanics to provide for all those actions? D&D game books are not complete works. They are suggestions for DMs to create the codes they will use behind the screen. And alcohol, beer, scents, and tracking are hardly uncommon game components given everything that's been published.

My point is that I don't need mechanics - though I could use some if I wanted to - and that for as long as D&D has existed GMs have been resolving such situations without reference to game mechanics.

It's simply not true that a player who has his/her PC spill beer on an NPC to facilitate subsequent tracking or identification is deciphering a pattern. Similarly, a player who declares that his/her PC uses an axe to chop down a door (usually taking a full turn, according to Gygax's DMG at p 97, and requiring at least 3 wandering monster checks), is not deciphering a pattern. The intention of these "moves", if made by a player, is to change the state of the shared fiction - to include a beer-smelling NPC, or to no longer include a solid door obstructing progress - so that other options are opened up for the players' PCs.

In hardline postmodern theory "sharing" can only be done ironically or in delusion.

And? Do you have any arguments to offer in defence of this view? If not, why are you mentioning it? I certainly don't believe it, in part because I am not any sort of postmodernist and certainly not a hardline one.

You're simply feeding into the viewpoint of the Forge trying to purposefully confuse people into believing fiction producing games (and any conjecture that goes on about such fiction) are "the one true" role playing games and not another hobby entirely.

All RPGs create fictions. I just quoted a fiction created by Gary Gygax as an example for RPG play. But for some reason you seem to believe that all fictions are stories. I don't know why - you have never explained this. It's obvious to me that not all fictions are stories. The law exams I sit involve fictions, but not stories. Einstein's thought experiments in relation to special relativity are fictions, but not stories.

Fictions don't reference a real world noumenon.

Firstly, fiction frequently references real world objects. For instance, the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle references the city of London and the River Thames. Plus commonplace objects of the time such as hansom cabs and deerstalker hats.

Second, not all D&D play references a "real world nounenon". You mention the map. But Gygax's map on p 95 of the DMG doesn't include the mineral formation (just the letter "B" marking where it is), nor the special key, nor the cylindrical object, nor does it depict in any way the depth of the pool. The map doesn't tell us other petty details about the fiction either, and in fact Gygax has a range of charts and tables (on pp 217 through 222 of his DMG) for filling in such details of the fiction which can be used in the course of play. (He describes them as "MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS AND POINTS OF SEMI-INTEREST FOR CORRIDORS AND UNPOPULATED AREAS OR TO ROUND OUT OTHERWISE DRAB PLACES" and on p 221 says "these various descriptive words will serve the DM in good stead when preparing level keys or when "winging it".)

What your talking about is rhetoric and using reasoning to support such, which you've repeatedly put forth as what players in all role playing games do even though D&D and most every RPG were never designed to do this.

First, I have never asserted that all RPG play is about rhetoric. That is a lie about me and I'd prefer you to stop repeating it - I've already asked you upthread to stop projecting your preconceptions about some Forge bogeyman onto me, and to actually engage with what I'm writing.

Second, you seem to have no idea about legal education or examination. A law exam does not examine rhetoric. It examines the ability to reason about an imagined situation. Without the imagined situation - that is, the fiction - no reasoning is possible. The imaginary fact situations which students are required to engage with are called "scenarios". They obviously are not real - they are fictional. All roleplaying, as used as a training or educative or evaluative tool, involves fictional scenarios: for instance, a person pretends to be a client or a customer or a boss or a worker or whatever else is being practised within the particular roleplaying exercise.

Games are patterns. People play them to engage in strategy.

Not all strategy involves patterns. Nor do all games involve patters. Pictionary is a game, but it is not about patterns. "I spy with my little eye" is a game, but it is not about patterns nor really about strategy either.

Furthermore, there is no contradiction between engaging with patterns and/or strategy and dealing with fictions. For instance, declaring that my PC pours beer onto an NPC, so that it will be easier to track/identify that NPC later, is a strategic decision. But it clearly involves dealing with a fiction - because the beer, the PC and the NPC all do not exist. They are imaginary.

To the last bit, games and puzzles are entirely about pattern recognition. That this is not the whole of existence is obvious, but it's a key component of what makes activities games and puzzles rather than something else.

Please explain how Pictionary is about pattern recognition. Please explain how triva quizzes are about pattern recognition. Please explain how "I spy with my little eye" is about pattern recognition.

These are all games. They are not all about pattern recognition. (Unless by "pattern recognition" you simply mean "cognition". In which case reading a book or watching a movie is equally about pattern recognition, given that both involve cognition.)

Bob, your character sees an orc" all game components and game terminolgy. "Seeing" is referencing something happening in a game.

This is ludicrous. What is happening in a game that "seeing" refers to? It does not refer to any mark that the GM makes on his/her map. It does not refer to any mark that the player makes on his/her PC sheet. It refers to an imaginary event, occurring to an imaginary person (Bob's character) in an imaginary world. That stuff is all made up. None of it is real. There is no orc. Just as in Gygax's example there is no abbot. There is a marking on a map (the letter "B") and there is a written description of an imaginary thing (the calcified remains of the abbot in the pool). If you can't imagine a calcified skeleton in a pool, you can't play Gygax's game.

Notice that nothing comparable to this takes place in a game of chess. Playing chess does not require imputing imaginary mental states to imaginary beings. You don't say "White's knight sees a pawn available for capture" - it is the player who sees the pawn, and who uses the knight to capture it.

What is Gygax talking about here, given that the oil, the pouch, and the indicated moments of time, all DO NOT EXIST? He is talking about imaginary oil, in an imaginary pouch, in which imagined time is passing.

Of course all those things exist, they must exist to occur in the game.

In that case please tell me where the oil is located. Or the pouch. Where do they exist? Why can't I use the oil to lubricate my bike chain, or to cook with, if it really exists? Why can't I use the pouch to carry my notebooks in?

The answer is obvious. They don't exist. They are imaginary. The reason that they can figure in the game, despite being imaginary, is because human beings are capable of reasoning about imaginary things. It is one interesting way in which we differ from (say) chickens.

The fact is, you simply have no conception of why D&D was designed with 1000s of books and requires campaign worlds and adventures to even run. Why DMs are a necessity to playing the game. Of course those things are irrelevant in the game you play because you have no desire to play D&D as designed as you've made abundantly clear. You're pushing D&D as a storygame and not only that you're pushing all RPGs as exclusively storygames.

Given that I have denied, upthread, that all RPGs are storygame I don't think I'm pushing D&D as a storygame. You are the one who assume that all fiction must involve stories, whereas I have denied that repeatedly and continue to do so.

I also don't know why you think that GMs are irrelevant in the game I play, given that I GM the game I play. Nor do I understand why you think that I don't need a campaign world, given that my game occurs within a gameworld (authored primarily by WotC).

As for D&D being designed with 1000s of books, it actually wasn't - I played D&D for the first time with two books (Moldvay Basic and KotB) and first played AD&D with three books (PHB, DMG and MM, using Appendix A of the DMG to generate a random dungeon). I don't know when the number of books published for D&D reached the 4-digit figure, but I doubt it was anytime before the 1990s.

So lawyers have been playing cooperative games hidden behind a screen tracking in memory and in their notes what the portions of the game map the DM relates? Because that's D&D and it is the unique identity which created the RPG hobby. People who hate that practice are the ones who are attempting to destroy one hobby and whitewash it with another.

I don't understand this at all - are you now saying that techniques of legal education and examination invented (as best I understand it) in the latter part of the 19th century are also parts of the Forge-ite conspiracy to destroy gameplaying as the world has hitherto known it?

Or are you saying that the idea of roleplaying in RPGs has no connection to the prior development of such techniques by (among others) teachers of lawyers - despite having claimed the contrary in umpteen posts up to this time?

My point is that lawyers, for a long time, have used imaginary situations to examine their students. Another word for an imaginary situation is a fiction - they are fictional situations. And students are expected to reason with them. Your claim that all reasoning with fictional situations must be rhetorical has no foundation, either in theory (Derrida probably agrees with you, but Derrida is wrong - the tradition that includes Frege, Dummett, Tarski, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Quine has the right of this issue) or in practice: I have marked 100s of law exams in my career to date, and most of them contain very little rhetoric but quite a bit of technical reasoning about the imaginary situations.

You are the one who is caught up in dogma - that all fictions are stories, that all reasoning about fictional situations is rhetoric, that all games are pattern-recognition exercises - none of which has any truth to it. And you also dogmatically propound your own view of D&D - which includes such non-Gygaxian notions as "the magical system" or "the clerical system" - as if it were the only true way to play the game. In previous posts you have even asserted that you know better than Tom Moldvay how D&D is meant to be played, because his rulebook makes provision for the GM resolving player action declarations by assigning a percentage chance of success ascertained on the spur of the moment, and treating the state of the unmapped parts of the fantasy world as something that my be determined by that spur-of-the-moment roll (eg a stream below a cliff to break the PCs fall).

I know how Gygaxian D&D is played, and the fact that I prefer to play a different sort of game is neither here nor there.

Gygax could not have been be discussing resolution mechanics. They didn't even exist in games until the Forge invented them.

Here are some quotes from Gygax's DMG (with page references):

Page 61:
The steps for encounter [sic] and combat are as follows:

1. Determine if either or both parties are SURPRISED.

2. Determine distance, if unknown, between the parties.

3. . . . determine INITIATIVE . . .

4. Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon by the party with the initiative . . .

5. Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon by the party which lost the initiative . . .

6. Continue each melee round by determination of distance, initiative and action until melee ends . . .

Page 65
Use the following procedures for spells cast during melee . . .

Pages 68-69
Procedures for Determination of Evasion Underground . . .

Procedures for Determination of Evasion Outdoors​

Now here is a definition of "resolution", from dictionary.com (Random House): a decision or determination.

Here is another (Collins World English Dictionary): something resolved or determined; decision.

The same website, drawing upon Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, lists as synonyms for "resolution" the following (among others): answer, judgement, determination.

As the above quotes show, Gygax's DMG absolutely contains procedures for determining the outcomes of "moves" made during play - in other words, RESOLUTION MECHANICS. The idea that there were no such things until Ron Edwards is laughable.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You don't necessarily have to know what's in the room ahead of time, as long as you know *at* the time. In other words, it's fine to make it up on the spur of the moment.
Different issue. Once you've described the room you're pretty much bound to that description unless there's an in-game-world reason to later change it*; which means if you're winging it you really need a good memory or to be taking copious notes as you go.

That's what I mean, though. If I describe the room, I'm bound to that description unless there's a reason to change it. If a Fireball goes off in the room, then I can't decide there was a big rock for people to hide behind (as in the Gygax example), because I had previously defined that there wasn't a big rock.

To contrast, if I leave the room undefined, and a Fireball later goes off - at which point a successful saving throw means that there had always been that rock in the room - then it's entirely probable that the PCs would have wanted to examine/move/etc that rock as soon as they entered.

 

[pemerton]

Those are claims about how to use the mechanics to represent an internally consistent objective reality.

They identify your preferred way to do so. They are not the only way to do so. I know, because I'm doing it a different way.

If you don't care about consistency or objectivity, then you can use the rules however you feel like.

I care about both those things, and I take a degree of umbrage at your implication to the contrary.

I use the rules in a way that I prefer, which does not compromise the consistency or objectivity of the gameworld (to the extent that any imaginary, non-existent thing can be objective).

It is a fact that Joe has the capacity to withstand ~10 arrows before dropping, whether or not the PCs or the players are aware of it.

Says who? In my game there is no such fact.

There is a fact, within the gameworld, that on some occasion or other, Joe withstood withering bowfire from some orcs and survived. It does not follow that there is any such modal fact as that he could do so again.

There is a fact that does not obtain within the gameworld, but that does obtain in the real world, about the number written in the hp box on the PC sheet for Joe, and about the dice notation in the damage entry for orcs in the Monster Manual. But those are not facts about the gameworld.

I'm not even sure how you would play otherwise.

There's a lot of things I don't know how to do. It doesn't mean they can't be done. It just means I have to ask someone who does do it how it is that they do it.

If a PC examines a room, then I consider it my duty to faithfully describe what the character sees, and I can't do that if I don't know ahead of time what all is in the room.

I assume that, when the players in your game tell you that their PCs examine a room, you don't describe every dust mote, every flake of paint, every drop of water, every minute insect hidden in the folds of the rugs and tapestries. I make this assumption because I have played under many GMs, and read many adventure modules, and have never encountered a GM or a module that goes into this level of detail.

If the room is a rich merchant's house, do you describe every article of clothing in the dressing room? Every piece of crockery, and its particular glaze and place of manufacture? Every facet in every jewel? For the same reasons as I gave, I am assuming that you don't.

Hence, it is not literally true that you know ahead of time all that is in the room. At best, you know everything that you think might be salient to your players.

What if I improvise something later on, and it turns out that the PC would have acted differently if I had previously defined that thing?

Then I guess they didn't notice it.

For instance, what if - had you told them the merchant's crockery had a cobalt blue glaze - they would have decided to go to where the crockery came from in order to start up a cobalt mine? By not telling them that, and simply telling them "You see kitchen shelves with typical accoutrements of a wealthy merchant of this town", you have deprived them of the opportunity to make that choice.

Yet the game goes on.

Is it just an exercise in making stuff up off the top of your head, in order to justify things after they already happen?

I'll start with a quote from Gygax's DMG, p 61:

One-minute rounds are devised to offer the maximum of choice with a minimum of complication. . . The system assumes much activity during the course of each round. Envision, if you will, a fencing, boxing or karate match. During the course of one minute of such competition there are numerous attacks which are unsuccessful, feints, manoeuvring and so forth. During a one-minute melee round many attacks are made, but some are mere feints, while some are blocked or parried. One, or possibly several, have the chance to actually score damage. For such chances, the dice are rolled . . .​

Gygax is taking it for granted that the participants in the game will fill in the details of the one-minute round as makes sense. He is certainly not envisioning a bizarre stop-motion world.

Ron Edwards explains here what the procedure is for filling in those details in this sort of play:

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​

By "Exploration" Edwards means "filling in the details of what happens in the shared fiction". It is negotiated between the participants - in D&D, the GM normally has first go and ultimate say, but the player is allowed to contribute to (especially if s/he has a preferred conception of what his/her character which is different from what the GM suggests). It is done in a casual fashion - "making stuff up off the top of your head" if you like. For instance, if the player's attack roll results in his/her PC killing a hill giant, the GM might describe a feint followed by a mighty blow that fells the giant. The system delivers input which constrains the filling in of the details - for instance, if the giant is reduced to 0 hp then however the GM describes it, it has to involve the PC felling the giant - but the system doesn't itself deliver all the detail (for instance, it doesn't tell us whether or not the felling blow was preceded by a successful feint).

Describing the result of a successful saving throw is much the same. Of course contradiction has to be avoided - so if the PCs have already inspected the chain and found it to be unbreakable, the GM is not going to narrate the saving throw as the result of a weakness in the chain. Instead (as per the DMG pp 80-81) the GM might describe the fighter finding "a crevice in which to shield his or her body". Because the GM's description will never have been total, there will always be something that can be said to explain the saving throw.

As long as contradiction is avoided, the gameworld will be consistent. And given that it is not being created by the thoughts of any of its inhabitants, but exists independently of those inhabitants, it is objective. Of course it is not independent of the GM and the players. But nor is it on your approach - the GM authors the gameworld in advance. The difference between your approach and my approach is that on my approach there is potentially more in the gameworld than the GM has dreamed of. I regard that as a virtue. You regard that as undesirable. This is a difference of taste, but has no bearing on whether or not the gameworld is objective and consistent.

your described use of the 4E rules paint an inconsistent reality.

Here are some links to some actual play reports that I have posted from my own 4e Dungeons & Dragons game.. As you will be able to see if you read them, I use the techniques I have described in this thread. Can you tell me where the inconsistency is in my gameworld?

 

[howandwhy99]

If you are looking for immersive games about playing a role, almost all the Apocalypse World family leave any version of D&D you care to name in the dust. Far more immersive. For that matter My Life With Master, the very game that gave rise to the term Storygames is much more immersive and much more about playing a role than any version of D&D I can name. And D&D vs Montsegur 1244 for playing a role? No contest. On the gripping hand, Burning Wheel and its D&D-esque hack Torchbearer are much more ruthlessly built for the challenge than D&D has been (mostly because D&D grew as a trailblazing game while Torchbearer had over 30 years of experience to draw on).

D&D was written to be played in Pawn Stance. You didn't play in character. You played as if your character was a pawn on a gameboard, and the object was to get the most bling. And if you are not playing a role so much as playing a hacked boardgame or a hacked tabletop wargame (as D&D was), wanting to lay out the board as scrupulously fairly as possible (which is a fundamental driver of simulationism) is sensible. And it's something I enjoy from time to time. But in such a game the role you are playing is that of a disinterested observer who is actively trying to avoid emotional entanglements because they lead to weaknesses and hence losing. If you want to play a role as a person within a world, rather than the avatar of a player, some storygames (notably almost any member of the Apocalypse World family) leave D&D so far in the dust it's funny. Others (e.g. Fiasco) are about storytelling and put you into Author Stance.

The big dichotomy is not the one you indicate. It's whether Next is going to go for some sort of world-simulation, or whether it's going to try to decide on something to be good at at the table.

Given everything you're writing here I don't think you have any experience with any actual game theory at all - except of course the Big Model. Why on earth would I care about immersion? What have I ever said to give you that idea?

There is no such thing as pawn stance. That's a theory, not anything that actually occurs in games. It's meant to pervert games to always be narratives as its author intended.

The "Big Dichotomy" is whether D&D will wise up and learn that it has no roots at all in Big Model games or whether it will sell its soul to a philosophy designed to make players who love D&D hate it and leave the hobby for another practice with the same name.

 

[howandwhy99]

Here are some quotes from Gygax's DMG (with page references):

Page 61:
The steps for encounter [sic] and combat are as follows:

1. Determine if either or both parties are SURPRISED.

2. Determine distance, if unknown, between the parties.

3. . . . determine INITIATIVE . . .

4. Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon by the party with the initiative . . .

5. Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon by the party which lost the initiative . . .

6. Continue each melee round by determination of distance, initiative and action until melee ends . . .

Page 65
Use the following procedures for spells cast during melee . . .

Pages 68-69
Procedures for Determination of Evasion Underground . . .

Procedures for Determination of Evasion Outdoors​

Now here is a definition of "resolution", from dictionary.com (Random House): a decision or determination.

Here is another (Collins World English Dictionary): something resolved or determined; decision.

The same website, drawing upon Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, lists as synonyms for "resolution" the following (among others): answer, judgement, determination.

As the above quotes show, Gygax's DMG absolutely contains procedures for determining the outcomes of "moves" made during play - in other words, RESOLUTION MECHANICS. The idea that there were no such things until Ron Edwards is laughable.

Frankly I don't want to answer the rest of your tirade. You refuse to think out of the box. You're trapped in a philosophy and digging harder and harder in instead of trying to get out. I'm not offering "the" way out, I'm offering what I believe are better understandings of why D&D is designed and played as it was. And why it become so wildly popular.

The quote above should be obvious, but I expect in your black and white thinking you will only see it as irrevocably as you've already put forth. None of Gygax's procedures are resolutions. Just reread all those definitions you've quoted. Resolutions are decisions made by people. The DM is a Referee. He or she isn't making a decision in every one of those cases, they are as best as possible reading the dice rolled, measuring on the map, and moving the pieces as directed. That may seem like a conclusion, but it isn't a decision. Narrative Resolution mechanics are about players making a decision about a fictional situation. Games have rules so people not playing them, specifically referees/DMs, can run the games without interfering with actual players playing. They are considered "part of the field".

Game rules are directives followed, not resolutions. Choices (i.e. resolutions) are made by players when they encounter options within the pattern created by a game's rules. But for those choices to be part of a game they must be among the options predefined. IOW, just like D&D.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I care about both those things, and I take a degree of umbrage at your implication to the contrary.

Then it is unfortunate that you are objectively incorrect about this. It is true that the method you describe is not both consistent and objective. That's just the fact of the matter, and nothing that either of us says or does can change it.

There is a fact, within the gameworld, that on some occasion or other, Joe withstood withering bowfire from some orcs and survived. It does not follow that there is any such modal fact as that he could do so again.

If you want to define a "hit" in that manner, then that does not alter the interaction which is represented by damage and hit points. However you want to describe a hit, as long as it's consistent, then the objective fact is that it takes ~10 of those before Joe drops.

Here are some links to some actual play reports that I have posted from my own 4e Dungeons & Dragons game. As you will be able to see if you read them, I use the techniques I have described in this thread. Can you tell me where the inconsistency is in my gameworld?

None of those links work for me. Just a bunch of redirects and 404 errors.

Suffice it to say, as a general guideline, you can't tell where such inconsistencies exist just from outside observation. Most system interactions are filtered through a lens of randomization. You could literally change an ogre's stats from round to round, and it would be 90% hidden within the noise of the dice.

But even though an action could have a range of outcomes, only one outcome represents the actual outcome of the objective reality: the one which corresponds to the actual, objective die modifier and the result of the die rolled.

 

[pemerton]

None of Gygax's procedures are resolutions. Just reread all those definitions you've quoted. Resolutions are decisions made by people. The DM is a Referee. He or she isn't making a decision in every one of those cases, they are as best as possible reading the dice rolled, measuring on the map, and moving the pieces as directed.

<snip>

Choices (i.e. resolutions) are made by players when they encounter options within the pattern created by a game's rules. But for those choices to be part of a game they must be among the options predefined. IOW, just like D&D.

Where are the predefined options, in any D&D book published in the 1970s, for disturbing the calcified skeleton of an abbot?

Also, can you please tell me your interpretation of the following passage from DMG p 96:

You must make some arbitrary decision regarding the time expended in activities which are not strictly movement.​

Or this on p 62:

As DM you will undoubtedly decide that there are situations where penalty and/or bonus do not apply, such as when an individual is otherwise prepared or when the individual is in the act of pulling chain mail over his or her head. Such adjudication is properly within the scope of refereeing the game . . .​

You are also wrong to say that "resolution" always entails choice from a range of options. A matter can be resolved although only one resolution was available. Just as a matter can be determined although only one determination was possible. For instance, if someone says "We resolved the question as to whether or not cows are bigger than hamsters", that person is not implying that the question of relative size was a matter of choice. You can find this usage in item 6 of the definition of "resolve" in the Collins World English Dictionary as extracted at dictionary.com: to find the answer or solution to; solve: to resolve a problem . As I noted in my earlier post, the cognate definition of "resolution" is "something resolved or determined".