D&D General Why the resistance to D&D being a game?

[FrozenNorth]

Ok. I just finished my first session of PF2E recently, and the impression I got was that it was incredibly rules-heavy on the player side, and the published adventure felt extremely artificial and mostly designed to take you from one fight to the next.

Which adventure did you play?

 

[Cadence]

It does mean I don't want it in my game, because I can't see that effect as anything but supernatural. So to me that ability misrepresents itself as mundane.

Like falling damage and healing from fire damage (in every edition ever?).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. But that doesn't mean that you get to decide that the fiction of my game involves supernatural events, when I'm expressly telling you that they're not. They're just circumstances of this person making these other people really angry.

I mean, maybe someone doesn't like Fast and Furious 6 or 7 because they think stopping tanks and planes with cars, using cars to catch people who are flying through the air, parachuting cars onto a mountain highway, or jumping a car from skyscraper to skyscraper, is silly or unrealistic. That doesn't mean that those films are really about magical cars.

We're talking about non-narrativist D&D here (just to head off you re-telling your D&D history). There are, quite frankly, different standards in different games, and they're all ok.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which adventure did you play?

Kingmaker. Just one session so far.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The person you responded to didn't make an argument; they made a statement.

It was a sloppy statement.

 

[Cadence]

A problem for me when each of us (I think) has a line somewhere, is that I feel like I'm arguing both sides sometimes because a bunch of you drew your lines in silly* places.

* silly places = not close to where I would

 

[Micah Sweet]

Actually, there's tons of PF2e rules players don't need to know. There's also a lot they do, but most of those are related to what particular class they're playing. About the only thing really generic to all characters are either things that are true in every D&D version (how AC and damage works) or the action consumption process--and any game with a detailed action distinction requires that.

My character sheet in that game rivals 4e for the number of buttons to push and modifiers to track. And I wasn't even playing a spellcaster!

 

[pemerton]

Is it fair to say they aren't realistically portraying things that could happen in our world?

Well, I wouldn't say they're models of realism! Nor is any James Bond film ever, or Die Hard, or Batman, or really any action film ever.

That doesn't mean they're films about the supernatural. It just means that they're works of imagination.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not entirely true; its just assumed to trail off in availability outside of areas that level appropriate. But then, those are also the places that have monsters up to the challenge of the PCs. Once you're going to deal with the idea of "appropriate challenges", one isn't that much odder than the other. At least you don't have the Starfinder thing of a PC having to be of a particular level to use a particular piece of equipment; it'll just likely be hard for them to find them.



Well, honestly, gamist mechanics often do give players more agency; whether or not they match up with the fiction is a separate question.

Matching up with the fiction is more important to me than degree of gamism.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Like falling damage and healing from fire damage (in every edition ever?).

Yeah. Falling should just kill you after a point, and natural healing should take much longer IMO. There are ways in some versions of D&D to mechanically represent severe specific damage by the way.