Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Yep, which is why I say that D&D combat is a necessary evil and I just kind of ignore the absurdity of it in order to enjoy the game.
D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless
- Thread starter FrogReaver
- Start date
clearstream
(He, Him)
Okay, I agree with you about that. I see it as continuous, but my games ordinarily start with a plain fiction - matching your diagram.
Okay, I thought we were questioning something that wasn't about intent, but about what was supposed to happen in-world. A "decision" being about intent. I agree that player decisions can be considered caused. I meant them to be included in cognitive processes.
Apologies, I'm not aiming to force any presuppositions onto it. To the contrary, I am trying to set aside assumptions. I feel like I might have taken "fictionless" too literally. Whereas your OP actually reads that it's fictionless as you want to imagine it. I think if we just agree that not everyone wants to imagine it the same way, we might be done.
Can you explain how you see this going, regarding the initiative die roll? I think the fiction (perhaps) brought us to call for initiative, and then how initiative falls drives our further fiction, and so on. The fact that the orcs and fighter are already positioned makes me suspect there was some interaction between fiction and mechanics that yielded that set up.
clearstream
(He, Him)
I do similar. Using your example, it concerns you that a fighter on this square and foes on those squares might seem to move unrealistically. I just take it there are some foes and a fighter in a room, both want to reach the door, the foes do so quicker. I'm not concerned to map the game state precisely to the fiction, so long as it maps just-sufficiently-well-enough. That dissolves most absurdities. I can see how some cases might not map sufficiently-well for some groups, i.e. it's subjective. I lean on suspension of disbelief: to my understanding of RPG, everyone must do so.
turnip_farmer
Adventurer
No, he was right. I play sans Grille. I don't understand why people use grids. Just choose a conversion factor between feet and inches or centimetres, and then move the models or counters with a tape measure. If you're using a VTT you don't even need that, measurement is all built in.
I don't get why grids ever became a thing. Did people learn to be okay with this weird abstraction whereby you speed up if you move diagonally because there was a run on tape measures in 1970s Wisconsin or something?
clearstream
(He, Him)
It's much faster to use squares over a tape measure, and accurate enough for many groups.
Good point about VTTs though. I think that is driven by game-as-played-at-the-table having strong influence over their requirements.
Lyxen
Great Old One
It depends on you aim, but for me, it's clearly fiction and story who should drive the world, with the rules supporting but totally bending to the above when needed.
It's exactly like using Newtonian physics for everyday computations, they are a nice tool, but when you get into edge cases, you switch to an alternate model, and you use the appropriate one for the situation, quantum for the very small and relativity for the very large. And they don't need to be fully consistent with each other, as the intent is not to create rules but to enjoy the story.
Lyxen
Great Old One
Faster and easier for beginners, true.
Some groups (not ours) also want more precision for playing the tactical battle game, it's not only about distance, i's also a lot about how many creatures can fit in a given space, be close to each other and attack, or fit within a spell effect (and which percentage of a creature need to be in an AoE to be affected, etc.). When you play combat like a fantasy fighting minigame, squares on a grid are much easier to manage.
Finally, some people were raised on systems like 3e/4e where grids were absolutely mandatory (especially 4e).
It all depends on what you expect from the game, there are many tools for many tables that's all.
Possibly. When we started making plans on velleda (usually conceptual ones, rarely to scale), we did not have squares anyway, and when the battlemaps became common, people started to have their mind formatted. Also, many maps that you find have squares on them anyway, so when you import them in a VTT, you still have the squares and they will format everyone's thinking.
Yes. It's fortune-in-the-middle. You can nearly always establish a post-hoc fiction that fits what happens. (I think @clearstream's treatment of my example of P1, N1 and P2 is pushing the limits a bit of what I can fit with a system that uses precise durations, but that's a secondary or tangential matter.)
The extra puzzle is that it's fortune-in-the-middle that rests on a mechanically complex and interactive "mini-game". That's a bit different from some other FitM approaches, which tend to retrofit onto a single check.
@clearstream, I will try and state @FrogReaver's concern, as I understand it:
During combat, participants make decisions for the characters they are controlling which matter to how things turn out (eg decisions to move, to cast healing spells, etc) and which are chosen based on knowledge of the mechanical state of the game (eg where another character is on the grid; what a character's current hit point total is; etc). But at least some of the fiction that corresponds to those mechanical states can't be known until after the decisions that matter have been taken and the actions resolved. Because only after the event do you get the sort of "emergent" fictions that you are putting forward.
This means that those decisions, and the knowledge they are based on, don't themselves correspond to decisions being made, and knowledge possessed, by the character whose action is being chosen by the participant. In that particular sense, D&D combat is fictionless - ie it involves purely mechanically-driven decision-making that (from FrogReaver's point of view) "masquerades" as in-character/in-fiction decision-making.
During combat, participants make decisions for the characters they are controlling which matter to how things turn out (eg decisions to move, to cast healing spells, etc) and which are chosen based on knowledge of the mechanical state of the game (eg where another character is on the grid; what a character's current hit point total is; etc). But at least some of the fiction that corresponds to those mechanical states can't be known until after the decisions that matter have been taken and the actions resolved. Because only after the event do you get the sort of "emergent" fictions that you are putting forward.
This means that those decisions, and the knowledge they are based on, don't themselves correspond to decisions being made, and knowledge possessed, by the character whose action is being chosen by the participant. In that particular sense, D&D combat is fictionless - ie it involves purely mechanically-driven decision-making that (from FrogReaver's point of view) "masquerades" as in-character/in-fiction decision-making.
FrogReaver
The most respectful and polite poster ever
I suppose when one thinks about generation of fiction that the whole scene doesn’t need generated all at once.
If so then it would make sense that the in turn mechanics function to create fiction even if it’s only a single detail about the fictional scene that they are establishing.
In this view what happens during the turns and rounds would be a very abstract scene where most details are yet to be fictionally established but a few are. Such a space is not totally devoid of all fiction but it’s missing the vast majority which makes interacting with it impossible other than by game mechanics. To me that’s why I call it fictionless. Because players cannot interact with it on the fictional level.
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