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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8619187" data-attributes="member: 6696971">1)  These are Abyssal Ghouls right?  As in, "of-the-Abyss?"  These aren't the guys from "Night of the Living Dead."  These are human-like monstrosities, who dwell in some deep layer of the Abyss (where only Epic Tier heroes dare tread), insanely hopped up on some Abyssal version of Fentanyl meets Super Soldier Serum.  They're feral x 1000 but Epic Tier heroes (with 150ish HPs at that level) who brave the Abyss can deal with them in droves because of D&D's gamist construct of HPs.2)  Just like you're mapping some kind of process simulation position onto D&D's gamist construct of HPs (which are meant to facilitate functional play and genre tropes within the D&D), you're mapping some kind of process simulation orientation onto the abstraction of position and attacks.  Both of those things are abstractions on a battlemap specifically and in D&D generally.  You're not statically occupying a small space in combat with others.  There is all manner of distance control management, circling, feinting, flurrying, and retreating going on in a short interval.  "The square" is an artificial game construct meant to facilitate functional play.  It isn't the fiction of play.  Same goes with "the attack."  You aren't just attacking once.  And, the rules of threatened squares and attacks of opportunity show that you can threaten/menace everyone around you while "attacking" (again, game construct) one party; this is basically an exception-based iteration on Threatened Squares and Opportunity Attacks.The Abyssal Ghouls aura is a piece of fiction married to the game engine.  These mad zombie horrors of the Abyss scratch and claw and bite at everything around them with insane speed and ferocity and implacability and unpredictability.  You get near them and stay near them and its jaws and claws and necrotic spittle (see their attack) everywhere; Aura 1 - each enemy that starts its turn adjacent takes 5 damage.Gamist constructs easily mapped onto fiction for awesome layer of tactical overhead.  You're interpreting the architecture of D&D's engine (HP, Position, Attack...while also eliding the fiction of Threatened Squares and Opportunity Attacks) in a particular way that creates a nonsensical fiction and then blaming the engine for that.  You can toggle off your process simulation orientation to the aforementioned constructs and rewire your game engine: fiction mapping.</blockquote>

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