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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7596742" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION], Ovinomancer here is saying to you much the same things as I said to   [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] upthread.I didn't mention BitD, as I don't play that game - I mentioned Prince Valiant, Cortex+ Heroic and BW as games that permit these various things through a mixture of processes (especially important in BW) and GM narration of consequences - which is my guess as to how it is handled in BitD. (If that guess is wrong then   [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] or   [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] can correct me.)It's not just playing silly buggers - the fact that you think it is means that maybe you've missed   [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s point.That point was the following: one effect of the AD&D DMG disease system may be that a PC, on some occasion of play, suffers a disease which debilitates him/her for a little while. And that may increase the player's sense of the authenticity of the fiction, the setting, the play experience.But that doesn't mean that the system is a remotely realistic one, nor even that this episode of disease contraction was realistic.Good RPG design, I think, has to be concscious of the fact that it's systems are not world models but rather devices for producing particular experiences among participants in a game. If you want that experience to include contracting a disease then you may need a quite unrealistic model of disease contraction in order to ensure this has a chance of coming into play.I think some early systems, like classic D&D, RQ and Traveller, are a bit confused about this aspect of design. A fairly obvious D&D example is the City/Town encounter matrix in the AD&D DMG Appendix C. If we treated that table as a model of the prevalence of powerful fighters, undead, demons etc in typical AD&D urban settlements the result would be ridiculous - how would anyone ever survive? If we treat it as a tool for ensuring that the players, via their PCs, will have urban encounter experiences that emulate (say) REH's stories about Conan's urban exploits, then the logic of the table becomes much clearer.You can also see various sorts of workarounds. Eg the Moldvay Basic rules and even AD&D rules tend to ensure that 1st level fighters will have better armour and hence better ACs than the orcs and kobolds they might have to fight - so the combat system can approximate to "world simulation", but we use game logic in another place (here, allocation of equipment) to help ensure that the play experience comes out correctly. Likewise, D&D PC generation rules tend to ensure that the players, especially at low levels, will have access to more and more potent magic than their adversaries.Would it be "more realistic" for 1st level D&D fighters to have the same sort of armour as the orcish warriors and town militia that make up their world? Maybe, but I've rarely seen that particular brand of realism advocated for.This isn't true, though. Nothing in the 5e rules precludes a GM narrating a scene in which NPC A fights NPC B and NPC A's sword breaks.In some circumstances, a GM is probably also entitled to narrate that a PC's sword breaks.It's true that the combat resolution procedures don't produce broken swords, but it's clear in the 5e rules that those are not the only method the game permits to generate fiction about swords.</blockquote>

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