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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6324982" data-attributes="member: 42582">It sounds like this is another thing that 4e did better than 3E, then. 4e is not based on the party "having a certain amount of resources". It is based on the PCs having certain to hit and defence bonuses, but these can be achieved via magic items (resources) or inherent bonuses (adds to level bonus) depending upon taste.I don't get this - how is anyone forced to do anything? In 4e, if you want to use an ogre against 1st level PCs you build it as a 1st or 2nd level solo. If you want to use 10 ogres against high level PCs you use the 11th or 16th level ogre minions (the MM has both). If you want to use a couple of ogres against mid-heroic PCs you use the standard 8th level ogres.The point of roles is to handle the mechanics better. Against high level PCs, rather than an ogre which has lots of hp but negligible defence bonuses relative to the PC's attack numbers, you up the defences but give it minion hp (ie 1 hp but immune to damage on a miss). And rather than giving it a low to hit bonus with big damage you improve its to hit bonus but reduce the damage. The fiction is no different, but the mechanical resolution has been smoothed out. Given that to hit rolls, damage rolls, AC, hp etc and indeed the entire action economy are all abstract (no one thinks that each to hit roll actually corresponds to a single action in the fiction, do they?), it does no harm to the fiction to mathematically reframe the abstraction so as to preserve a more or less constant toughness for the ogre but make the mechanics of play smoother.What you describe here is pretty much the textbook definition of <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">sim</a>, isn't it?The causal sequence of task resolution in Simulationist play must be linear in time. He swings: on target or not? The other guy dodges or parries: well or badly? The weapon contacts the unit of armor + body: how hard? The armor stops some of it: how much? The remaining impact hits tissue: how deeply? With what psychological (stunning, pain) effects? With what continuing effects? All of this is settled in order, on this guy's "go" . . .I just don't think that D&D has ever delivered this. Runequest, Rolemaster and Classic Traveller all try to. Gygax expressly denies this sort of linearity in his DMG, especially when discussing saving throws - a magic-user's successful saving throw can be an indicator, for instance, of a successful manipulation of the magic of the spell which (necessarily) took place before the spell was fully cast; a successful poison saving throw can be an indicator, for instance, that the attack failed to actually inject any poison (which, again, is clearly something that was true in the fiction before the point at which the saving throw is rolled).3E departed from this model of saving throws, making them all about the character's response to the attack - dodging, enduring or resisting - but this was a major change in methodology. I think it was very popular, but to me this shows that many players were wanting to rewrite D&D in a more sim fashion. It doesn't show that AD&D itself was a game that conformed to your linearity requirement.One of the single biggest puzzles for linearity is initiative. Edwards discusses this, following on immediately from my quote above:All of this is settled in order, on this guy's "go," and the next guy's "go" is simply waiting its turn, in time. . . nitiative . . . has generated hours of painful argument about what in the world it represents in-game, at the moment of the roll relative to in-game time. Games like RQ and RM attempt to ameliorate at least some of this via continuous initiative - although there is still the puzzle about what the end of a round, and the rolling of initiative for the next round, actually represents in the fiction. (And I've had many debates playing Rolemaster about the absurdity of the fact that the resolution of an action seems to depend upon how it interacts with the transition from the end of one round to the action declaration phase of the next round, when in the fiction things should just be happing in a smooth, continuous way.)Although 3E goes more sim on saving throws, it actually goes even more abstract on initiative and action economy. Turn-by-turn initiative is as non-linear as you can get, which can be seen in anything from <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.120400-D-D-the-peasant-railgun" target="_blank">"peasant rail guns"</a> (exploiting the fact that actions taking place simultaneously in the fiction are resolved sequentially in the 3E turn system) to the fact that a character, whose movement rate is 30' per 6 seconds, can move a full 30' before anyone else can act (and hence eg dodge behind cover 30' away) even though there are other characters who are still to act in the round (and hence whose actions will occur, in the fiction, sometime during that 6 second period), whose attempts to attack that PC can be thwarted by the fact the PC gets the benefit of the full movement on his/her turn. 3E combat doesn't at all obey your linearity requirement. (Unless you think the world of 3E really is a stop motion one. But I don't think I've ever seen a 3E/PF player argue for that particular rules interpretation.)This is why I don't really take seriously accusations that 4e in some special way disconnects action resolution from the ingame fiction. On turn-taking and action economy it is actually more verisimilitudinous and less of a stop-motion world because of the range of off-turn actions (though it doesn't have the full-fledged continuous initiative of a system like RQ or RM). On hitting and damaging it is no more abstract than AD&D on saving throws. I don't dispute that it is different. And of course I don't dispute that some people don't like those differences - it's obvious that they don't. All I dispute is that 4e is in some way distinctive among D&D editions in having mechanics that violate temporal linearity.</blockquote>

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