Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6006920" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is all true, but I don't see how 3E ACs satisfy that simulationist constraint, because "natural armour" is whatever the designers need it to be to make the maths work out!Some monsters have natural armour in the 20s and 30s? What the hell does that mean in the fiction, given that the best possible magical full plate gives +13 (+8 armour, +5 enhancement)?This is why I finid a lot of the "simulationist" gnashing of teeth at 4e a bit hard to understand. They are happy with hit points - which measure what ingame quality? (I know - starship-style force shields, on your theory of them!) They are happy with the action economy and turn-by-turn initiative - which measure what ingame quantities? They would be happy with martial powers powered by "fatigue" points, even though the expenditure of such points would bear no connection to actually being fatigued (eg even at 0 "fatigue" points a PC could still run and jump and fight in a non-flashy way).D&D strikes me as so obviously non-(process-)simulatonist in its mechanics, and so metagame heavy, that I find this line of objection to 4e hard to fathom. The only rationale I can see is that, for some player, there is a difference between essentially passive metagame manoeuvres - hit points, reactive saving throws, the action economy, etc - and active ones, which require actually making choices about what metagame-constrained thing my PC will do.But then 3E has features that elide this distinction too, such as immediate and swift actions.So colour me confused.</blockquote>

Verification