NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8524260" data-attributes="member: 82106">I recall imposing a similar result ONCE in a (probably Holmes Basic) D&D game to my sister, [USER=2093]@Gilladian[/USER]'s character (the eponymous Gilladian the Dwarf). It was accepted basically because the situation was A) not a combat result, and B) so clearly appropriate to the situation. I think Gygax and D&D in general weren't hostile to the concept, but it was 'thin ice' as it opens up a large unregulated realm of unstructured consequences into a dungeon crawl skill test game where this kind of permanent disability kind of goes against the style of play and perhaps the agenda of the game to a degree. OTOH failing to disarm a trap is legitimately punishable by death, so "you lose a hand" didn't seem so bad (besides, a dwarf with a hook was kinda funny, apologies to anyone reading this who happens to be an amputee, I know its no joke).Right, so 5e doesn't even have, as a matter of rules, any specifics on playing on a 'map'. While it defines ranges and areas, there's no operationalizable mechanism for translating fiction into terms which work with that, or back again. At best the GM has to do this in an ad-hoc way. There are some optional rules which basically introduce a number of the more basic 'grid rules' from 4e, but they aren't really well-connected with the body of 5e rules. For example they don't really talk about movement in any comprehensive way, nor is there any explanation of how forced movement would work, or even a definition. So we can see that 5e's 'mechanics to fiction' process is MUCH WEAKER than 4e's! I'd say that there's another important aspect here, the lack of specificity removes certainty and thus decreases the authority of the players. In 4e the fiction is affected in very specific ways by the mechanical results of, say, using Thunderwave. This could play out with a definite degree of ambiguity in 5e, even if you play with a grid pretty consistently (IE is a give square in the AoE, well, AoE isn't defined in such terms, so its up to the GM).Well, I think there's a confusion between something which INFORMS the next action (IE the 1 hit point being a scratch clues the players/PCs that this monster has a lot hit points/is very tough, and they act accordingly) vs something which CONSTRAINS the move space, or triggers (maybe indirectly) another mechanical effect (IE if a wound is narrated as smashing my shield arm and breaking my shield in DW then I am surely not still equipped with said shield and I lose whatever benefit it provided, this would be potentially a legitimate hard move in DW). Note that IF 5e DID produce a 'lose use of your shield arm' effect, it could almost surely be handled in a totally mechanical way, though it would likely inform later fiction in most games (or maybe a CLW would cure it, this is STILL an open question after 50 years of D&D!!!!).Right, honestly even the first statement of the LP seems to produce the same conclusion. I mean 'rules and their consequences' are certainly a key concern of almost ANY game text (I think something like PACE might close to maximally decouple these considerations, but even in THAT game rules govern when and where consequences are to be applied, even if their nature and scope is pretty much unregulated).</blockquote>

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