Be honest, how long would it really take you to notice all of this stuff...?

[Lwaxy]

I super suck with numbers (discalculia) so no, I didn't notice at first. Husband told me a few things were broken, but those never came up in our games.

But once, forgot what detail it was, but 8it had to do with combat, I had a big wait a minute moment. And that's when I started houseruling some stuff

 

[pemerton]

It all just seems really like a bad approach to some real issues, one that makes people feel bad and demonised, whilst not actually solving anything or helping anyone. Calling people wankers for liking to detail stuff doesn't encourage people to realize that less-detailed worlds can work well, does it? In fact I feel it's likely to entrench and inflame opinions on the subject, if anything.

The real problems here, as far as I can see are <snip>

Speaking just for myself, a recurring problem that I have seen on these boards is an assumption that detailed world prep is the only alternative to brainless hack-and-slash.

I also agree with [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] that there is often an assumption that more world prep will lead to a better play experience, whereas I personally have virtually no reason to believe that that is so. (Now thinking about how to sting and prod your players via their PCs - that will probably improve your play experience.)

 

[Umbran]

This is just flat out wrong. Math uses root -1 right? It's a very, very important part of math. Try to find that in reality.

And the physicist uses i, all the time. It is integral (pun intended) to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

However, when we end up with a result that says something is 5i meters long, we know we've probably screwed up somewhere. We even have a term for such things - "non-physical result".

Part of what you're talking about is a simple fact of human cognition. We humans don't actually *think* in mathematics very well. Unless you're Stephen Hawking, you don't generally do partial differentials or matrix calculus in your head. Taking the math, interpreting it as a physical result, as if it were real, allows us to apply more intuition in a thought process.

And, to speak about some of the results to laymen, it is pretty much required, because laymen just don't have the math.

But, in the end, we re talking about two fundamentally different processes here:

A physicist looks at the real world, makes a mathematical model of it, and sees what comes out - we start with reality, so it isn't so weird that we then try to relate the math back to reality.

A gamer is looking at a math, accepting that it is a model of a world, and trying to infer the world from it. The problem is that a gamer is not often starting from a well-defined "reality" to start with. Sometimes (say, with a game designed to model a specific work of fiction) there's a "reality" to refer to, but we lose that when the system is more generic.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Maybe I've misunderstood you - but what you're talking about here doesn't seem related to the whole solo > elite > standard > minion > swarm progression.

The point of restatting a monster as a minion of 8 or so levels higher is to hold the toughness constant in the fiction (ie the monster has not changed in its objective capabilties) but make the mechanical handling smoother, and hence to facilitate the PCs dealing with larger numbers of such creatures without having to track hit point totals for dozens of creatures, without most of their attacks being ineffective misses, etc.

I gave a worked example upthread.

My response was to a poster who seemed to think it wasn't about holding the toughness constant, so I addressed his concept.

I understand what the "minion" rule is supposed to simulate - I'm just explaining how I find that monster capabilities that change based solely on my current power level takes me out of the fiction. That's just my perception.

The point of the debate overall is whether one version of the game is superior in its portrayal of "hit points" and what they mean or don't mean. One person described a scenario where his characters would slaughter their way through mooks that used to be almost too tough to fight - and where I would have portrayed this by having the monsters remain constant but the PCs improve, he used the 4e model, and felt that this made his story more "awesome" if I remember. And I disagreed that it would have made the story more awesome for me.

The minion rule was a clever idea to address an obvious-in-hindsight problem with 3e, and many people like it. But for some people it breaks verisimilitude. And I think 5e's attempt at flatter math may prove (fingers crossed) to be a functional solution.

 

[pemerton]

My response was to a poster who seemed to think it wasn't about holding the toughness constant, so I addressed his concept.

<snip>

One person described a scenario where his characters would slaughter their way through mooks that used to be almost too tough to fight

Unless I badly understood the posts in question, [MENTION=67338]GMforPowergamers[/MENTION] was holding the toughness of the monsters constants as the PCs in the game gained levels. But that constant toughness was mechanically realised in changing ways - solo to elite to minion.

The point of the debate overall is whether one version of the game is superior in its portrayal of "hit points" and what they mean or don't mean.

From my point of view the debate has a different point. Some posters are asserting that minion rules - or, more generally, multiple mechanical realisations of a constant gameworld element - make the gameworld inconsistent.

This implies that the gameworld in my game is inconsistent. I'm contesting that implication. My gameworld is consistent, and this consistency is not harmed by the fact that, at various times, fictionally identical hobgolin warriors have been mechanically realised as standard monsters, or as minions, or subsumed into the swarms which are their phalanxes.

 

[Hussar]

Note, also, restatting isn't new to DnD. I used to use Battlesystems quite a lot back in the day and you had to convert units all the time. Your PC was mechanically quite different when using this system.

Maybe that's why this doesn't bother me. Changing the stats to suit a new situation just seems like a good idea if it works better.

Kind of like the idea of treating large groups as mobs in 3e. Or treating something like a warship as a single entity. Or combining stats for mounted units.

To me, this is nothing new.

 

[Ratskinner]

Leaving philosophical questions about abstract and concrete objects aside, I think that we actually agree.

Well good 'cause so do I.

 

[Ratskinner]

And sometimes the physicists are right! After all, quarks were initially a abstract convenience -- until they were proven real.

Oh sure. Lots of different things in physics start out as accounting tricks and then end meaning much more. That's one of the things that keeps you up at night: "Why does this all keep working?" OTOH, finding the places where it doesn't currently work...and finding the math to make it work...is ripe territory for good physics.

 

[Manbearcat]

The description above covers two different tools I use.

Thanks for the post. What you depict below is very akin to the formalized advice/process for creating and handling the evolution of fronts in Dungeon World. What you've described is very familiar to me. It is, as you put it, pretty much in the middle. I've run games on both ends of the spectrum and areas in between. My current GMing best practices does push play towards low resolution setting backstory at the outset ("lots of blanks") and just enough calibrated PC backstory such that all of those setting blanks can be filled in during play (by our play) and the trajectory of the "story" is established alongside it through deft GMing (provoking players' thematic material that they have embedded within their characters) and player investment in the conflicts to be resolved.

I've found over the years that if I demand myself to be spontaneous and improvisational, I will deliver the goods and enjoy the experience more than if I prepped meticulously. Further, I've found that if I leave enough spaces/blanks for my players to fill, and demand the same level of creativity, they will deliver the goods coherently (from a genre perspective and an internal consistency perspective). In contrast, I've found that as the shared imaginary space is contracted (due to less blanks/higher resolution setting/rigid adherence to established canon), operant conditioning takes hold and players constantly look to me to vet their creative impulses. That is not what I want from me, not what I want from them, and not what I want out of our play.

I know you (and others) have had reservations about an abstraction: player agency infringement correlation. There is, of course, a natural arrestment of the causal logic chain for real life actors as information is lost. However, RPG players naturally function in a low resolution environment where sensory and spatial information is fundamentally retarded with respect to real life. Regardless of how well the GM conveys "the dynamics on the ground", there will be an inescapable perspective dissonance from player to GM and from player to player. Each player must assimilate what the GM has conveyed, what other players have conveyed, the context for that information, along with the required in-fill of their own, unique perception bias. Understanding that reality, playing with tools that zoom out a bit in response to that (broad descriptor resources and conflict resolution), heady GMing/attentive playing, and synchronicity on genre conceits has served to protect against any player agency infringement because of abstraction.

The above also applies to the exchange that Sadras[/mention and pemerton are having.

 

[Hussar]

I super suck with numbers (discalculia) so no, I didn't notice at first. Husband told me a few things were broken, but those never came up in our games.

But once, forgot what detail it was, but 8it had to do with combat, I had a big wait a minute moment. And that's when I started houseruling some stuff

I do not mean this as a dig at all. But, this is where I generally see problems in games. The intersection between "I super suck with numbers" and "I started house ruling". Because this sometimes has some really nasty effects on gameplay. I'm not saying this is what happened to you Lwaxy. Again, this isn't meant as a shot of any kind. Just an observation.

IME, many of the times when people start talking about how this or that rule is broken, there's a fair number of times the brokenness is due to user error rather than the math behind it. This is one of the things I really appreciate about WOTC D&D, either 3rd or 4th edition. The math is accurate more times than it isn't. Being able to trust the mechanics and not having to constantly audit the books is a major plus in my books.