pemerton's latest activity

Agreed. 'Hit points measure how much damage you can take, and damage represents how many hit points you lose'.

But the GURPS player doesn't have the same incentives as their alcoholic PC. The PC craves alcohol. The player doesn't have any...

But being in control of an imaginary character's mental stat is just authorship. All RPGing involves players authoring characters. I...

Right. The GURPs player doesn't actually feel any desire to drink alcohol. They're not playing an alcoholic. They're playing a rational...

These two things are often at odds with each other though. 'Cool monster to fight' is surely a more common roadside encounter in your...

But shorn of all the real world inputs that affect such a perspective. Hunger, tiredness, social pressure, courage, desires, fears, etc...

I just want to elaborate on this a little bit. The only time characters in fiction do things that "don't make sense" is (i) if the...

If, from a first person perspective, alcoholics always tried to avoid the temptation to drink, the world would be a very different place.

Let me back up and break down my objection a bit further. I was thinking in terms of what makes sense for the character as seen from a...

Except when they represent luck. or skill. Or a close shave. Which we have had so many arguments over it is baffling that one would...

I don't use "simulation" to mean follows a rule. In the context of RPGing, that tends to mean that all RPGing is either simulatiionist...

No. They ARE how much damage your can take before being taken out of play. They don't represent anything in the fiction, though. The are...

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This is less simulationism and more post-hoc rationalization of game mechanics that likely gets "grandfather claused" in simply as a...

I think calling Hit Points simulationist is a stretch for nearly any definition of the term. Hit points don't represent a thing in the...