D&D 5E A case where the 'can try everything' dogma could be a problem

[The Crimson Binome]

Notice particularly how the abstraction of the action economy and the abstraction of hit points interact - part of the reason why we don't need to decompose the events of the one minute round into the detail of actual manoeuvres, strikes, parries etc performed is because we are assuming that what is being achieved is the wearing down of one's enemy, until the final decisive blow is struck.

The game system is only as abstract as you need it to be. You can play up the abstraction if you really want to expand your narrative possibilities, but you necessarily dispense with the inherent meaning of any action in order to do so. It's a trade-off that you could make, if you really wanted to, but which is by-no-means required.

Even with one-minute rounds, you always have the option to take it as-is and say that it requires the bulk of your effort over the course of a minute in order to accomplish the task(s) inherently associated with the Attack action. You don't need to model every thrust and parry in order for actions to correlate strongly between the out-of-game and the in-game.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But how is that fiction authored? In D&D, the mechanics of a damage roll in and of themselves don't dictate anything - nothing at all about the fiction follows from a damage roll of "7" rather than "2". (Note the contrast with, say, Rolemaster, where a damage result of "foe decapitated" does directly tell us what the damage is; and also where the loss of (say) 10 concussion hits does correspond directly to a particular degree of bruising and blood loss.)

I strongly disagree. The correlation is there, but it lacks detail. A damage result of 7 has a strong in-game definition, based on the inherent meaning of damage and HP as defined by the system.

When the orc gets hit, it suffers from (the thing which correlates to the loss of 7HP). The 5E rules tell us that this thing may vary by the DM, but one common interpretation is that HP loss represents physical trauma, and the degree of physical trauma depends on the amount of damage done, either in an absolute sense or relative to the total HP of the victim. Thus, the translation protocol is defined. It's a systems-level question, which (in the unique case of D&D 5E) is intended to be set by the DM prior to the game. (Most games don't leave that translation protocol up to the DM.)

To translate the whole action, "The PC hits with the attack" tells us that the character's weapon impacted with the orc; "The attack dealt 7 points of damage" tells us that a moderate amount of physical trauma was caused; and "The orc is reduced to 0HP" tells us that the total trauma sustained was enough to incapacitate the orc. The in-game effect directly follows from the in-game cause. The descriptions might seem bland and scientific, but the correlation is there.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The game system is only as abstract as you need it to be.

It's as abstract as the designers needed it to be to make a workable system.

Abstraction may be qualitative (I'm honestly not sure, there may well be ways to measure it quantitatively that I'm unaware of), but it isn't a subjective quality: opinions about it may be highly subjective.

You can play up the abstraction if you really want to expand your narrative possibilities, but you necessarily dispense with the inherent meaning of any action in order to do so. It's a trade-off that you could make, if you really wanted to, but which is by-no-means required.

Without changing or ignoring the rules, you can't really increase or decrease the level of abstraction. For instance, deciding that a 7 hp wound always represents an injury to the left arm would be reducing abstraction and changing the rules. Even deciding that 7hps of damage always represents a physical injury as a way of reducing abstraction (slightly) would be changing the rules (and in a way that would incongruous for, say, the psychic damage type).

Even with one-minute rounds, you always have the option to take it as-is and say that it requires the bulk of your effort over the course of a minute in order to accomplish the task(s) inherently associated with the Attack action. You don't need to model every thrust and parry in order for actions to correlate strongly between the out-of-game and the in-game.

Correlated is different from concrete (the opposite of abstract), you're right that an abstraction is correlated with the the range of more concrete things it's standing in for. You're mistaken if you think that means it's optionally correlated with only one thing in that range instead of others, or that the ability to visualize one concrete set of events that validly correlate to the more abstract model (or to visualize one that doesn't) precludes other visualizations (or invalidates the model).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Without changing or ignoring the rules, you can't really increase or decrease the level of abstraction. For instance, deciding that a 7 hp wound always represents an injury to the left arm would be reducing abstraction and changing the rules. Even deciding that 7hps of damage always represents a physical injury as a way of reducing abstraction (slightly) would be changing the rules (and in a way that would incongruous for, say, the psychic damage type).

This goes back to the difference between changing rules and interpreting rules. If I read the rulebook and gain certain understanding, but you read the rulebook and gain a different understanding, then neither of us has changed anything. Neither of us is introducing a house rule; we're just in disagreement over what the rule in question actually is.

With 5E in particular, they address the issue by saying that it's up to the DM; since there are so many ways that the (damage and HP) rules could be interpreted, the version chosen by your particular DM is the canon one. If you are using abstract not-necessarily-physical HP, and I'm using proportional-injury HP, then those are both equally RAW.

 

[Tony Vargas]

With 5E in particular, they address the issue by saying that it's up to the DM; since there are so many ways that the (damage and HP) rules could be interpreted, the version chosen by your particular DM is the canon one. If you are using abstract not-necessarily-physical HP, and I'm using proportional-injury HP, then those are both equally RAW.

There's a distinction between interpreting the rules and visualizing the narrative. 5e empowers the DM to interpret the rules and puts DM rulings over actual rules, making 'RAW' something of an irrelevance. Visualizing what the rules so abstractly model, OTOH, is something everyone at the table does. Those visualizations don't override the rules, let alone DM rulings, nor do they reduce the level of abstraction present in the rules.



Bottom line, you can work from a resolution under the rules to one or more valid visualizations imagined within the corresponding fictional narrative, but you can't reason from the validity of one visualization to the invalidity of another, let alone of the rules, themselves.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

There's a distinction between interpreting the rules and visualizing the narrative.

I'm not certain that I would agree with that. It goes down to whether you consider the code for translating game structures into narrative structures to, itself, be a rule. For all practical purposes, I would consider it to very much be a rule.

And of course, you should always feel free to change the rules, but your changed rules are still rules. If you decide that HP loss above 0 are always fatigue, and only the KO-hit is a physical impact, then that's still a rule.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm not certain that I would agree with that. It goes down to whether you consider the code for translating game structures into narrative structures to, itself, be a rule. For all practical purposes, I would consider it to very much be a rule.

The fact you can visualize a successful check in a variety of ways would tend to contradict that idea. What you describe would require a much more concrete and granular system, one with a 1:1 correspondence between rules and the imaginary action's they model. That would be entirely impractical. You could never have anything as simple as a making a check to pick a lock, for instance, you'd need rules on each type of pick vs each type of lock, and the various methods for using the one to pick the other. Leave any wiggle room, and you loose the 1:1 correspondence.

I understand, from other conversations that your platonic-ideal vision of an RPG is a simulation rather than a game, but no game is ever going to live up to that.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The fact you can visualize a successful check in a variety of ways would tend to contradict that idea. What you describe would require a much more concrete and granular system, one with a 1:1 correspondence between rules and the imaginary action's they model. That would be entirely impractical.

The rules of the game tell us which actions correspond to which narrative, in the same way that the stats on a suit of plate armor correspond to the in-game object that is a suit of plate armor. It doesn't need to be detailed in order to have a strong correlation.

Of course, strength is relative. If I spend my one-minute round in order to move 15 feet and take the attack action, then that translates into the character moving ~15 feet and performing some combination of thrusts and feints and parries which ultimately results in the opponent suffering some amount of injury. It's a strong correlation between "taking the attack action" and "performing some combination of thrusts and parries, etc." You could abstract that up a couple of notches if you wanted the freedom to describe a series of elaborate maneuvers that simple unnerve the enemy into being easier to skewer later on, or you could increase the correlation to the point where each facet of the d20 corresponds to a body part and each facet of the weapon-damage-die corresponds to a a depth of penetration.

When I say strong correlation, in the context of this thread, it's relative to the many other models that are in use. In particular, I mean that there is enough information derived directly from the check results in order for it to tell us what's going on within the narrative, rather than it simply compelling the GM to narrate vaguely-related circumstances in a vaguely-related way. For me, the line between strong and weak correlation is evident in the Perception check to find a particular item in a town, when there's every possibility that it might not exist there. For you, that level of correlation might still be considered too weak to be meaningful.

 

[Tony Vargas]

When I say strong correlation, in the context of this thread, it's relative to the many other models that are in use. In particular, I mean that there is enough information derived directly from the check results in order for it to tell us what's going on within the narrative, rather than it simply compelling the GM to narrate vaguely-related circumstances in a vaguely-related way.

Maybe I'm missing what you think the point of that correlation is? It sounded like you were trying to deny that the way Pemerton ran something in some example was valid. If a visualization of an action is consistent with the resolution of the corresponding check, I don't see a big problem. Clearly, there are many such consistent visualizations possible for any given check, so it's hard to see it as a 'strong' correlation. There seems to be plenty of room for the imagination to do it's thing.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Maybe I'm missing what you think the point of that correlation is? It sounded like you were trying to deny that the way Pemerton ran something in some example was valid. If a visualization of an action is consistent with the resolution of the corresponding check, I don't see a big problem.

The disagreement is in the inherent meaning contained within game mechanics.

In the relevant example, regarding a player looking to bypass an enemy's armor, Pemerton would have the quality of that armor be determined by the result of a Perception check made on behalf of the PC looking for it; I view this as improper procedure - not in keeping with the purpose of the rules in an RPG - because the quality of an object must exist independently from observations made of that object (the observer effect not-withstanding). The inherent meaning of a Perception check (I purport) is that it relates information about what something already is, rather than itself determining the nature of that object.

Pemerton seems to be of the opinion that, since this is all just make-believe anyway, there's no difference between discovering some truth about the fictional reality and defining a truth about that fictional reality.