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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6682738" data-attributes="member: 996">In the 90s, there was a huge on-line debate, comparable to the edition war, almost, which painted 'Storytelling' as ROLE-playing and D&D (that same 2e AD&D) as 'ROLL-playing.'  Shoving them together like that strikes me as odd, like constructing a straw man.  And, I don't think that either AD&D or troupe-style storytelling was at all immersive, though for very different reasons.  The latter really encouraged thinking of your character as a character in a story, not an alter-ego, and the former was so complicated, abstract and arbitrary a system with so many artifacts (system artifacts, that is, not artifacts/relics) that it was always right there 'in your face.'  It's also not what it sounded like Mr. Edwards was arguing against.  He seemed, to me, to set up the idea that the system didn't matter, that it was all about the GM, as the dogma he was trying to poke holes in.  I can agree it's a dogma that could do with some deflating.  It's certainly true that games like D&D in the 90s (and today) and Storyteller, and many others can run very well with sufficient DM skill & freedom ('Empowerment'), but that doesn't mean that "bad rules make good games" (as one of the Wolfies famously said), just that good enough DMs can run a great game by overruling the system when needed (whether that's almost constantly, or once in a while).   Good enough DMs can also run great games with functional rule systems, and less experienced/talented/whatever not-quite-good-enough-to-salvage-a-bad-system GMs can run great games using a good-enough system. And, I can agree that 2e and Storyteller both hid system flaws behind that dogma. But all Edwards came up with was a new, more baroque dogma.  One that, really, mostly still let systems off the hook, just substituted unity of agenda for 'good DM,' as being more important than system quality. It doesn't, I quite appreciate clear communication.  That was just a humorous aside.   Now you're just wildly exaggerating.  I'm not sure I buy that.  A lot of arrows may 'miss' (which in D&D might mean be stopped by armor & shield, as well as fly wide of the mark), and some may roll low damage and do less than half of even a very ordinary adult human's hps (which, in 5e, based on that one side-bar, might not leave a mark on them, so might be hard to distinguish, in the narrative of the game world, from a miss stopped by armor).  The difference between taking a few hps from a low damage roll and being dropped by a high damage roll or crit are going to look like luck or marksmanship, not like there's a plot-armor buffer that has to ablate before you're in any danger.But, if you /do/ want to go the full rules-as-laws-of-physics deal, and the game has hps, then the characters would be aware that there's something - luck, fate, a guardian angel, whatever - between them and death on the battlefield.  By the same token, if the game has some other player-managed resources or meta-game factors that have an observable effect on the game-world, then the imagined beings in that world would have a similar awareness of them.  Just as they know they can't be killed by the first arrow aimed at them in a battle, they may know that they can pull off certain tricks once or a few times in a fight that they can't otherwise count on working for them, or that fate will sometimes send enemies into their hands in convenient ways.  It's a weird world that has hps and other such mechanics as it's 'laws of physics,' but if that's the standard you want to play to, you should judge all rules by that standard, not apply it selectively. You can't forgo your knowledge, it's there.  But you can discount it when deciding how your character acts - which is the ideal you've put forth as how you want to play RPGs (and, apparently, how you want the mechanics to force everyone to play).  A character doesn't know he has 40 hps.  He knows that he's more skillful and lucky than most in a fight, but he never knows when that luck may run out, or when he may face someone with greater skill.</blockquote>

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