And in part he could do that because both he in his mind and the readers in theirs could and did assume that those off-camera parts of the fiction happened in a consistent manner with the parts actually written out in the book. We know how Orcs fight because we're given examples of it at various times in their dealings with the Fellowship's assorted members, and can extrapolate from there.
I mean, you can make whatever assumptions or extrapolations you want, about 'off camera' or glossed over sections, because they're not covered - you can also not bother doing so.
It's the whole "if a tree falls in the forest but nobody hears it, does it make a sound" question. (and yes it does, by the way
) Yes, and doing that with any integrity either requires an assumption that off-camera things work the same as on-camera, or a clear statement going in that things work differently off-camera thus implying the setting is not consistent with itself.
Things /do/ work very differently off camera, when you're making a movie. On-camera, you have a set, script, actors, lighting, foley, post-production, OMFG, so much stuff /working/ to make the scene. Off-camera: nothing. That's working pretty differently.
Things also work differently on-camera depending on the nature of the scene. Time compression, for instance. If the self-destruct device is going off in one hour, the first 45 minutes may take 5 minutes on screen, the next 12 twice as long, and the last minute may take 5 or 10 minutes, as /each/ characters last minute of action is examined in minute detail.
The same things happen in RPGs constantly. Minions? Really no different.
However, a TTRPG is not a novel
Obviously. If it were, it wouldn't be 'a model of genre fiction,' it'd just be "genre fiction."*
Sometimes in a TTRPG you do end up fighting the same foes over and over - if you're in a war zone, for example, and keep encountering patrols of enemy soldiers.
Often you do in fiction, too. Sometimes prettymuch exclusively. Ripley, for instance, fought an Alien for a whole movie, then, next movie, a bunch of aliens, that were just like it, yet died a whole lot faster, then a big-bad Alien Queen that was at least as hard to finish as the original.
What you say is correct here, but the solution lies in a different direction
It's not unfair to note that an alternate solution could go in a different direction, but the 4e solution of secondary roles /is/ a perfectly valid solution - and, a powerful one, in that it allows greater ranges of levels /and/ competence, to be 'modeled' (or 'generated,' pem) by functional play.
flatten the power curve and reduce the overall power gain as characters advance.
That'd be modeling an entirely different story arc. What's more, it'd be making the fiction being modeled a slave to the mechanics doing the modeling, which is the exact opposite of the point of modeling, in the first place.
Really, looking at it that way, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's idea of 'generating' rather than 'modeling' fiction makes more sense.
From all I can tell, 5e has done a pretty good job at this and thus a given monster can be and remain a viable opponent over a wider range of character levels without having to massage its numbers to suit the situation.
It's a less effective solution to the same issue, which is why I brought it up. 5e manages to cover 20 levels, ~8 of them (4-11) , over which, most character don't get any better, at all, at most things, and only a little better - +4 - at things they're trained in. Is that 'zero to hero?' Does it really make sense alongside having 10 times the hps? 4 times the attacks? 5 times the damage dice? 11 times the slots? 40 times the spell points? But only 20 or 40% (depending how you like to talk %s) better at a skill?
It's not, well, /internally consistent/. ;P
Yes, along with all its other numbers. A comparable-but-different creature might - well, very likely would - have different numbers e.g. better AC, lower potential damage output, etc., that ended up giving about the same XP value (and from all I've seen 4e is pretty non-granular with its XP values in the modules, usually rounding to the nearest 100).
There's no rounding. All 4e monsters of the same level & secondary role have the same xp value. No fiddliness. When buiding encounters you can largely skip adding up xp, and just go by levels & secondary role.
Not to an audience, but I do see the setting as - to use a metaphor perhaps - a product of which the players are the end consumers. What they do with it and-or how they consume it is up to them, but the product - the setting - is what it is.
Audience? Consumers? Whatever. If the point is the setting, not the PCs, the PCs are just the spoons the players eat up whatever you serve them with, and the player role is ultimately passive.
The point of the game, then, is for the players to use that setting as a backdrop and milieu in which to play their characters; and for all involved to then generate some sort of story as that play rolls along.
That's back to the point of the game being the PCs, because only the setting they /actually interact with/ matters.
* - no matter how intentionally or not, nor how disjointed or not.