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: 8622655" data-attributes="member: 42582">This seems close to what I posted upthread:I still take the view that causal processes are more significant than laws.The goal of simulationist mechanics is to represent, and correlate to, ingame causal process ("internal causation is king", "the imagined cosmos in action"). This is the fashion in which they are not metagame, as per [USER=7026617]@Thomas Shey[/USER]'s post. Eg in RM, the attack hits, it bruises and it cuts - and the process of resolution at the table reveals this to us, unfolding it before our eyes: the attack is rolled, after allowing for defences it is applied to the table, looking at the column appropriate to the armour which indicates some of the bruising plus the crit (if any). The roll on the crit table fills in details of where and how severely the attack landed.Ideally, there would be a single roll of d10000 that resolved both the attack table and crit table aspect: splitting them up doesn't reveal anything about the fiction, but is simply a technique for making the game playable using familiar dice and manual lookup tables. At the table we know there is a crit table; in the fiction, people know that a certain spread of injury is likely from that degree of success in attacking a person wearing that sort of armour. We don't need to posit that the world inhabitants have a concept of an 'A' crit, a 'B' crit, etc; that would be a bit cheesy.We also don't need to posit that no one every suffers an injury not accounted for on the crit tables. The crit tables can represent a causal process without representing every possible variation that process might manifest in the fiction. Of course they need to represent what is typical and expected; and, as an integral part of the resolution process, they must yield concrete information about what is happening in the fiction. Ie they must do more than simply confer and constrain authorial permissions; they must dictate.I'm influenced in the above by <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">the following remark</a> made by Ron Edwards: "Hero Wars character creation, . . . isn't concerned with the implausibility of having a mastery-level in Greatsword be just as "likely" as having it in Farming; RuneQuest character creation . . . emphatically is." This rules out crit tables that produce results that are implausible relative to what is expected in the imagined world. It doesn't demand literally comprehensive crit tables. (This is somewhat similar, at a structural level, to the Classic Traveller PC gen system: the fact that no one ever changes jobs in that system doesn't mean that career change is, per se, impossible in the Traveller universe. Just that it's not typical, and hence that, by using it, we get a good representation of the process of pursuing a career in the world of Traveller.)This is why stronger claims about laws and predictions and the like seem unnecessary to me.</blockquote>

Verification