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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6991901" data-attributes="member: 6775031">But it's still abstract. Sure, knowing that it was your third rib on the left is slightly less abstract than knowing that it was just an undetermined rib that was bruised, but it's still abstract. Saying that you are somehow injured, with no further specification, is more abstract than saying that you have a bruised rib. It's a spectrum. You can't point at any one system and say that it is entirely definitive, or entirely abstract, because whether or not it's abstract enough for the purpose at hand will vary with the circumstances and what you want to get out of it.Unless RM is a vastly different experience from D&D, I don't imagine that mandatory climb checks show up that frequently. A penalty of -10 on a check that you aren't going to make is essentially no further causality within the game; it's not meaningful, according to your own terminology. Or rather, it's meaningful in the same way that 10 damage is meaningful, because it might make a difference later on. From a cube->cloud->cube standpoint, taking ten damage in D&D creates a change in the narrative which might well alter the outcome of future mechanical interactions.Does it matter to the game mechanics that one injury is associated with bone, and the other with blood? If I tell you that the ogre's attack did 12i damage to you, as compared to 12j damage, then all you need to know is that you need to cast Cure i Wounds rather than Cure j Wounds in order to fix it. It doesn't matter in the slightest to the game mechanics that type i wounds represent a broken bone and type j wounds represent bleeding or vice versa.Just as RM doesn't bother to differentiate between a left tibia that's fractured two-thirds of the way toward the foot and one that's fractured three-quarters of the way toward the foot, D&D doesn't bother to differentiate between a wound to the arm and a wound to the leg. As far as the game mechanics are concerned, your movement speed is cut to half (or you're twelve points closer to falling unconscious), and you can fix it with a healing spell from Bone Law (or Cure Wounds).(Likewise, if monster B inflicts status ailment P to you, you don't need to know whether P stands for Poison or Petrification or Apoplexy in order to know that it causes -3 to Agility checks and can be cured with a Restoration VII spell.)In every case, you could skip the left-facing arrow that translates the mechanic back into narrative. The only reason you might need that arrow is if the rule system is insufficient, and the GM is expected to apply ad-hoc situational modifiers (Persuasion is at -2 because you just came out of the sewers, even though that wasn't explicitly written anywhere); but even then, the GM can just as easily apply -2 for "being wounded" as for "having a bloody nose".</blockquote>

Verification