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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alex319" data-source="post: 4749752" data-attributes="member: 45678">@howandwhy99: I think I understand what you're saying now. You're defining a "role-playing game" as "a game such that the players don't have to know any of the rules to start playing, and they can figure it out along the way by describing their actions and letting the DM translate it into game terms."@steenan: I wasn't myself advocating the viewpoint that "gamist" and "simulationist" are mutually exclusive - I was presenting those terms as they seem to be used by the community and pointing out that when viewed according to my new classification system, they're really talking about different things, and so aren't mutually exclusive. So you actually made part of my point better than I did.@Galloglaich: I'll definitely check out the Codex Martialis. It's been on my list for a while but I haven't gotten around to it yet (though I did read the preview portion on RPGNow). One thing that really gets me about what a lot of people say about "realistic combat" (and not just combat, realism in general in games) is that they generally choose one or two aspects that they think of as "unrealistic" - like the item costs not being realistic or Weapon X doing more damage than Weapon Y - and focus on those. So in 4e someone might say "it's unrealistic that armor reduces chance-to-hit only and doesn't act as DR at all, and it's unrealistic that plate armor is only slightly more effective than chain" which might be true - but it also ignores all the other factors that mitigate that, like that very heavy armor was very expensive to make in real life and that there were other tactics that you could use against someone in armor.What often happens when people make those kinds of incremental changes for "realism" is that they tend to add more complexity, special cases, and potential loopholes, without really making the game much more "realistic". Starting over from the ground up, as you seem to have done, is a new way of going about doing things - using realistic tactics as a basis for designing the tactical structure of the game.Here's an analogy I came up with (and have been waiting to use). 4e is like a James Bond-style action movie: full of over-the-top combat action with little pretense of "realism." There's nothing wrong with this kind of game. The Codex Martialis, from what I've heard, is like Oliver Stone's JFK movie: using information about how real-life combat works (medieval fighting in the case of the CM or ballistics in the case of JFK) as a basis for the conflict. There's also nothing wrong with this kind of game. But the "start with a completely fantastic system and make a couple arbitrary changes for 'realism'," (which describes some parts of 3.5e in my opinion) is like a James Bond movie where during the middle of the climactic battle scene, you pause the action to have Oliver Stone give a 15-minute lecture on bullet trajectories.If you want any thing approaching "realism," it has to be designed into the system from the start - realism isn't something that you can achieve just by making incremental changes. And designing realism into the system from the start it, based on what I've heard, exactly what the Codex Martialis has done.</blockquote>

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