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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8614621" data-attributes="member: 42582">Description is fiction ("clouds"). Numbers is mechanics ("boxes"). The difference between a RPG and (eg) chess is that it involves engaging in, and generating, a shared fiction. So the fiction matters!The appeal of pre-authorship/mechanical determination, over authorship, is (in my view) a combination of "playing to find out" and "being subject to rules rather than whim". It's probably also worth considering that when the major simulationist RPGs were designed, the sorts of techniques for channelling/constraining/building on "whim" found in systems like Apocalypse World or even Burning Wheel hadn't been fully worked out or understood. The salient contrast was D&D, where not only is the fiction "whim" but it doesn't affect subsequent resolution.My experience is that much of that sort of colour in D&D combat - about bites, etc - is mere colour. It doesn't affect the resolution that follows. Maybe in your group it's different?Upthread, in multiple posts, I've referred to the salient details/elements of the fiction. What is salient is relative to tables and to individuals and to mood and expectation. But in RPG combat there are some fairly well-known conventions here: am I hit? am I hurt? am I bleeding? is my armour damaged? These were clearly on Gygax's mind when he wrote his defence of hit points in his DMG; they are clearly on the minds of the RQ and RM authors. They are still on Luke Crane's mind two decades later, designing Burning Wheel. Even Apocalypse World uses armour as damage reduction, and has rules for bleeding out!No one has asserted is not a simulationist mechanic entails sucks.At the moment the FRPG I am obsessed with is Torchbearer. It uses hit points in its extended conflict resolution system: they are generated for each side at the start of the conflict (as the number of successes on a dice pool throw), are spread across the team members, are lost by suffering Attacks and Feints from the other side, and are recovered within the context of a conflict by successful Defence and Regrouping.A conflict ends when one side has no more hit points left. And at the end of a conflict, we work out what actually happened to the members of each team by considering how many hit points the winning team lost, as a proportion of their total, and negotiating a compromise that reflects that.This is an interesting mechanic. It has some resemblance to HeroWars/Quest - Robin Laws's innovative Glorantha-oriented RPG. It's not remotely simulationist!Maybe it affects healing/recovery? In hit point/body point systems, normally body points take longer to recover than hit points. In Torchbearer, the Injured condition has the same mechanical significance however a character acquires it, but the difficulty of healing it differs, depending on whether it is bruising, a cut, a burn, etc.</blockquote>

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