The double standard for magical and mundane abilities

[Andor]

Yeah, but this has "real world" magical physics.

Formula 8.9: To Throw a Lightning Bolt

Magic Point Cost = 25 x (voltage in kilovolts) x (current in amps) x (time in tenths of a second).

Which he claims is 96% energy efficient.​

So lessee, if I wanted to jump start my bike it would be 25*.0012kV*6amps*30(3 sec)= 5.4 mp. Seems legit.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Choosing your race is not something that exists in-game (barring wild magic and Reincarnation). It's an entirely out-of-game decision.

So is deciding to use CaGI to make enemies approach you. In-game, enemies approached you and you attacked them. Same logic applies to any sort of objection. If you can make one decision out of your character's head, that changes the world in a way outside of your character's control, and be OK with it, why not another?

 

[evileeyore]

Yeah, but this has "real world" magical physics.

Formula 8.9: To Throw a Lightning Bolt

Magic Point Cost = 25 x (voltage in kilovolts) x (current in amps) x (time in tenths of a second).

Which he claims is 96% energy efficient.​

That is some serious magical thinking right there.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So is deciding to use CaGI to make enemies approach you. In-game, enemies approached you and you attacked them. Same logic applies to any sort of objection. If you can make one decision out of your character's head, that changes the world in a way outside of your character's control, and be OK with it, why not another?

Okay, I see where you're going with this. I suppose that the world where enemies happen to decide to move in when you feign an opening is not any more or less believable than the world where enemies stand back and act cautiously. That's still the player acting in director-stance rather than actor-stance, during gameplay, though.

Character creation is not the game. The game is what happens after you all meet in a tavern. During the pre-game, you are not your character. During the game, you are your character.

(And that's not even getting into how CaGI is a resource-based mechanic that the character really should be aware of. There's no narrative way to explain how a director-stance power to make this thing happen would be based on when the character in-game takes a long rest.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

As expected, I get nothing but snarky reactions to my attempt to explain why people have an emotional attachment to D&D and that is why they fight for D&D to resemble the game they love.

You asked about a 'happy solution,' and, very honestly, I replied that the happy solution would have been to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude back in 2008.

Fans of 3.5 have been playing well-supported 3.5 all this time - they could have done so without the edition war.

Tony you have to be blind to think 4e did not massive change the game. Every single class took on the AEDU structure which alone makes the game MASSIVELY different even if nothing else changed.

Of course they're major changes. 3e made major changes, too. For the most part, both were very much for the better - and long overdue, since D&D had been stagnating for 20 years.

Someone asked why we fought for D&D to not continue going down the path of design that 4e represented. You can want different and that is fine. We just disagree on what D&D should be. I could argue that games using your design considerations exist out there. Massively narrative games are all over the place.

That you keep thinking I'm a 'narrativist' because you identify as a 'simulationist' and figure it's the opposite shows just how little you understand the issues, even after /years/ of this back and forth.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Okay, I see where you're going with this. I suppose that the world where enemies happen to decide to move in when you feign an opening is not any more or less believable than the world where enemies stand back and act cautiously. That's still the player acting in director-stance rather than actor-stance, during gameplay, though.

You could classify it that way, then again, does that disqualify it from being sim? Because, honestly, the whole actor-stance thing isn't something I find credible as players staying in 100% of the time.

Character creation is not the game. The game is what happens after you all meet in a tavern. During the pre-game, you are not your character. During the game, you are your character.

Meh. It's still part of the game. If you 'are' your character once the game start, you 'are' still someone who chose your character's race.

(And that's not even getting into how CaGI is a resource-based mechanic that the character really should be aware of. There's no narrative way to explain how a director-stance power to make this thing happen would be based on when the character in-game takes a long rest.)

Why should the character be aware of it, anymore (or less) than he is aware that you chose his race for him? I mean, /you/ are aware of both things, but you are also very much aware that you are /not/ your character, so there's a huge suspension of disbelief, the magnitude of that makes a few moments in directors stance or the knowledge of a past decision pale into insignificance.

Your character is aware that he's fighting, that enemies closes with him and he put up a good fight. You're aware of the same thing, and a bit more (that you expended a very abstract, out-of-game-world resource to make that happen), just like he's aware that he's a half-orc, and you're aware that he's a half-orc /because you chose for him to be one/.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You could classify it that way, then again, does that disqualify it from being sim? Because, honestly, the whole actor-stance thing isn't something I find credible as players staying in 100% of the time.

Meh. It's still part of the game. If you 'are' your character once the game start, you 'are' still someone who chose your character's race.

That goes back to the whole meta-gaming thing, where you aren't supposed to use information that your character doesn't have. You're supposed to forget everything that your character doesn't know, for the purposes of everything that the character does. In essence, the player is a non-entity - the player is just one more cog in the mechanics, void of independent existence - because every decision is made by the character.

Of course, that doesn't hold in any game where the player is supposed to wield narrative influence. Something like 3.5 Eberron, with action points, doesn't lend itself to entirely maintaining actor-stance. Feng Shui throws actor-stance out the window entirely.

 

[Tony Vargas]

That goes back to the whole meta-gaming thing, where you aren't supposed to use information that your character doesn't have. You're supposed to forget everything that your character doesn't know, for the purposes of everything that the character does. In essence, the player is a non-entity - the player is just one more cog in the mechanics, void of independent existence - because every decision is made by the character.

Which, though a valid (if /really/ extreme) ideal, seems quite impossible. (Seriously, that sounds about on par with achieving Nirvana.)

Of the many, many things that make it impossible, mechanics like hps, race, or CaGI, are among the most trivial.

Rather than get into such a rarefied and philosophical extreme, I prefer to think of AS vs DS as simply the difference between RPing in first person vs 3rd.

I mean, it is Actor's stance, not Dissociative Personality Disorder Stance.

Of course, that doesn't hold in any game where the player is supposed to wield narrative influence. Something like 3.5 Eberron, with action points, doesn't lend itself to entirely maintaining actor-stance. Feng Shui throws actor-stance out the window entirely.

You can always approach a game how you like. You could be in AS if you wanted even in games like that, some fraction of the time, intent of the game notwithstanding.

 

[pemerton]

I suppose that the world where enemies happen to decide to move in when you feign an opening is not any more or less believable than the world where enemies stand back and act cautiously.

Correct. This is exactly how you run a game based on fiction and genre first, with the mechanics subordinate to that and used to allow players to choose genre-appropriate narratives that fit within whatever parameters the mechanics might determine.

That's still the player acting in director-stance rather than actor-stance, during gameplay, though.

<snip>

During the game, you are your character.

you aren't supposed to use information that your character doesn't have. You're supposed to forget everything that your character doesn't know, for the purposes of everything that the character does. In essence, the player is a non-entity - the player is just one more cog in the mechanics, void of independent existence - because every decision is made by the character.

As you yourself go on to acknowledge in the second of the two quoted posts, there is no "supposed to" here. Some RPGers prefer to avoid metagame. Others don't. As a GM, I use metagame all the time: for instance, if I want to make the players anxious about a pending combat, I will tell them the level of a creature, or the overall encounter level (eg "You guys are still 26th level? This is a level 32 encounter!"). The player character's don't know what's waiting for them, or how tough their enemies are (at least until they recall their knowledge of ancient monster lore). This is about generating a particular response from the players, which might then inform their play of their PCs. For instance, they might decide to buff up. In game, that is a moment of "I've got a bad feeling about this . . ."

As you noted in the passage I quoted at the top of this post, the world in which a PC has a bad feeling and buffs up out of an abundance of caution isn't less believable than one in which s/he stumbles in blindly. But (in the right circumstances) it might be more fun!

CaGI is a resource-based mechanic that the character really should be aware of. There's no narrative way to explain how a director-stance power to make this thing happen would be based on when the character in-game takes a long rest.

Why should the character be aware of it? The PC's enemies regularly charge him/her. That's hardly some bizarre event that is going to lead to genre-breaking speculation about "meta entities" dictating NPC behaviour on a 1x/encounter basis.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Why should the character be aware of it? The PC's enemies regularly charge him/her. That's hardly some bizarre event that is going to lead to genre-breaking speculation about "meta entities" dictating NPC behaviour on a 1x/encounter basis.

And yet it won't happen, ever, unless the PC takes a rest of the appropriate length. And it only ever happens to fighters, of a specific measure of skill. But not all fighters who are that skilled.

Trying to make sense of it all from an internal causality standpoint is an exercise in futility. If you're a player who doesn't accept director-stance mechanics, such as myself or E, then it's easier to just skip that edition entirely than try to work out some way for it to make sense.

This is getting off topic, though. We all agree that there are different ways to play the game, and I have yet to see that 5E will exclude either side.

Unless you want fighters to pull off the kind of mythic stunts they do in legend, of course. Those people are missing out.