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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8401777" data-attributes="member: 71699">I had a thought about how to reconcile that sort of thing. The general idea is that if one wants to think about how discrete grid positions, initiative counts, hit points and so on connect with any fiction, you have to suppose that they are fuzzy.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">So the fighter is about 30' from the exit, and he is just far enough away that it will turn out to be out of reach. The orcs center of mass is 60' further in, but they are in truth dispersed throughout the room and some will turn out to be far enough in to block escape.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Initiative is the same. Even though the fighter did not waffle on the decision, the sad truth is that he was just enough slower than he needed to be (he lost initiative) that the orcs were able to cut off his retreat. Given the assumption of fuzzy positioning, we may imagine he started on his dash, but enough orcs got between him and the door to cut him off... and the rest piled in.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Speed has a similar fuzziness. It tells us roughly where the reasonable next position for each participant, but not precisely how quickly they get there or by what exact route. Our hapless fighter perhaps turns out need to use more than 30' of movement to make it to the door. On the game grid he will die in the square he is standing in, but in the fiction he makes it a few desperate paces toward the exit. All the grid tells us is that it is reasonable to treat the fighter as being about here, when he dies.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Hit points are of course considered likewise. Not all the hit points the fighter will lose to the orcs will be flesh hits. Some of them capture that his luck ran out this day.</li> </ul>It seems to me that once we want to connect the precise abstracts of the combat mechanics to the fuzzy details of our fiction, we possibly ought to see that those apparently precise abstracts must themselves be fuzzy. We could see them as the statistical hot spots - the fighter is most likely found about here, 30' from the door, and most of the orcs are likely found about over there, 60' further in.The combat rules and pieces represent well-enough what is going on. But they do not represent exactly what is going on. There is enough leeway that rolling that 1, surging the orcs to block the door, failing to make that desperate dash, are adequately represented by the combination of game elements. Grid positions. Speeds. Initiative rolls. Hit points. None of these need be seen as precise statements about the world, rather they are the world represented usefully.</blockquote>

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