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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8267293" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The question is meaningless, because the 4e combat rules aren't what you use for this purpose. You would be using the Skill Challenge rules for that, or else handling things purely narratively. In either case, combat statblocks never even come up.This does happen, but it is not nearly as common as you think. Most of the time, these people really were exposed to those "guidelines," they just never knew them as anything more than gut feelings.Just as, for example, you (assuming English is your first language) know-without-knowing that the correct way to list English adjectives is, as Mark Forsyth wrote it, “opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.” For a native speaker, one just knows that there's something "wrong" with the phrase, "That's a French lovely knife," even though that is theoretically a perfectly valid phrase.In music, for example, chord progressions exist and are vital. In the vast majority of allegedly "only did good work because no one told them they couldn't" cases, the composer will either have an intuitive understanding of chord progressions (particularly cadences), or accidentally re-create them, or imitate the extremely popular ones they heard as a child/teen (e.g. the vast majority of "pop" music uses the exact same four-chord progression, as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I" target="_blank">quite humorously parodied by Axis of Awesome</a>.) The principle applies outward to other things: the basic principles of color theory, for example, is almost always ingrained into children at a very young age. It's why (for example) you see over and over and over again the "orange-and-blue" action-flick poster color scheme, because human skin is some shade of orange (brown is dark orange, after all) and azure is the complimentary color to orange (midway between cyan and blue).Or, to use the extremely famous case of "that guy at some university who showed up late to class and found an important solution to a question because he didn't know it was unsolved"--yeah, it's a complete myth that he was "untrained" in the slightest. He, George Dantzig, was in a doctoral program at one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation (UC Berkeley) with one of the finest statisticians in the world as his doctoral advisor and teacher (Jerzy Neyman), having already completed a master's degree in mathematics. Yes, he did mistake two open problems for homework assignments, and did solve them. But it is not even slightly the dramatic reversal as shown in the movie it inspired (Good Will Hunting)--it took a decade of education and actual work as a statistician before he got to that point. I am not even slightly trying to disparage his achievement, he absolutely proved that a fresh mind that hasn't been told "you DEFINITELY CAN'T do this" can do things. But "guidelines" are not and never have been "you DEFINITELY CAN'T do this." They're "you shouldn't do this unless doing so is better than not doing it." Which is what I've said. Repeatedly.I'm not talking about bell-curve stuff. I'm talking about, "Because I have Feature X and Kit Y and Spell Z and Weapon W, I can obliterate ogres in one shot at level 1." This isn't "it might happen once a decade" stuff. This is "I can pull this off at least once a day" (or whatever the "you get back your resources" cycle is).If "generally, vaguely, kinda sorta tells [you] what to expect" is all you need, why are you so hung up on an absolute representation then? The narrative part of a monster--the part that doesn't change, the part that is always true in the world, regardless of what abstractions we derive from it--tells you at least that much anyway. The combat mechanics don't need to....so...you're not even actually playing D&D, you're playing "the thing I made from D&D that includes several systems that were never part of any official D&D in order to make the things I want to make sense actually make sense"?Come on, man. This isn't cool for a meaningful discussion about things. You can't substitute "the thing I built out of D&D which differs in key ways from every published D&D" for "D&D," no matter how much you might like to.Hard disagree, if only because there's absolutely no reason a character should be able to "see in the fiction" that an adult black dragon's scales are 2 points worse than an adult red dragon's scales--arbitrary differences that, while meaningful for what choices you might make, are only meaningfully available to the players if they read the statblock itself. Which is exactly what an abstraction is.Stop.Stop right there.I did not say it has "different intrinsic toughness." That's something YOU are bringing into this. Stop doing that.I said its intrinsic toughness remains: but the way that intrinsic toughness manifests in any given context changes.An ogre, for a 3rd-level character, should be very hard to hit with even a glancing blow, but even a glancing blow should contribute to taking it down. That's both a real, physical element of the world, AND a narrative, pacing element of the game. 4th edition manifests this as "to a 3rd-level character, an ogre is a powerful solo monster with higher-than-average AC and HP." To a 13th-level character, it is not only easy to hit an ogre for at least a glancing blow, it's reasonably possible that they could just cleave through its defenses with a single telling blow. But instead of trying to somehow force "AC 25" to simultaneously be super-duper-ultra-hard for a 3rd-level character AND super-duper-ultra-easy for a 13th-level character (a very delicate balancing act that, quite often, simply fails), it says: "Okay. When you land a hit on an ogre as a 13th-level character, it's not the same kind of thing as when you land a hit as a 3rd-level character. You hit an ogre at 13th, you're gonna kill it dead. Skip over all the complicated mathematical gyrations to make that happen, and just say it happens."And that's what an ogre minion IS: it is recognizing that, BECAUSE a hit from a 13th-level character is simply so much more than a hit from a 3rd-level character, and BECAUSE the toughness of an ogre doesn't and shouldn't change, the mechanical representation MUST change in order to account for the new relative difference between the far-more-powerful character and the no-more-powerful ogre.I didn't say that. I said that pretending an abstraction is reality is the problem. "The map is not the territory." There IS a difference between "these are what the mechanics say about this monster" and "this is the absolute totality of what this monster IS." There has to be. No abstraction IS the thing itself, otherwise it wouldn't be an abstraction, and more importantly, it wouldn't be useful.You keep projecting onto me the notion that the mechanics MUST be one, singular, only representation when I have explicitly rejected that notion and asked for you to demonstrate why it should be that way. Stop just steamrolling with that same assumption, and either justify it, or accept that you're bringing an assumption that is just, flat, NOT required.Not at all unrelated. It is a problem that precisely and exactly arises from treating abstractions (HP) as though they really, literally, physically were the object being abstracted, and not merely symbols standing in for something. When you accept the abstraction AS an abstraction, you can then accept that modifications to that abstraction must also be understood as abstracted away from the actual, physical thing, and thus look for whatever actual situation is happening to have given rise to that abstraction in the first place.Again, you are conflating weird edge-cases with consistent numbers, which is exactly what the problem with 3rd edition IS: that it sets hard numbers for things, and then almost immediately invalidates those numbers because players have the freedom to build their own solutions outside those limits. I'm not talking "dealing 45 damage on a crit." I'm talking "dealing 45 average damage." Because, believe it or not, sometimes it really is possible to achieve crap like that in 3e. You even see shades of it in 5e, despite the overall power-down of the system; for instance, IIRC, it was quite possible (20%or 25% probability, IIRC) for a commoner to deceive Asmodeus himself, while simultaneously being possible for an ultra-tricked-out hyperfocused Bard to fail to do so with roughly the same chance. THAT is the kind of enslavement to numbers I'm talking about: again, NOT weird statistical edge cases, but reasonably common events. (One in five commoners attempting to lie to the Prince of Darkness himself really shouldn't succeed.)Not at all. Players are not permitted to fiat declare success, for instance. The rules can and do limit what players can do. With relative representation, however, the system no longer needs to set such rigid scaling, because it innately accounts for "you now deal so much damage that, if you even hit an ogre once, it just dies." So the players are free to employ their zany schemes without being shut down by "no, sorry, you can't do that, it's too much damage" or "no, that's an unfair advantage over the fighter" or whatever.No, they aren't. The numbers are there to represent how the creature interacts with its current environment. They don't need--and have never needed--to represent the whole entirety of the creature as a natural object for all time. The numbers exist to enable actions, and to respond to the actions of others. D&D has never handled monster-on-monster action particularly well, and 4e was honest enough to admit that.I mean, if we want to talk about gamist BS in editions, how about that explicit rule in...was it OD&D or 1e? where the instant a monster allies with the party, it loses its darkvision. Doesn't that pretty well put the pin in the idea that the abstractions were EVER meant to represent the sum totality of things, and were instead meant to represent the interactions between things?Nope. I'm saying one set of numbers for the creature--and then you make an abstraction from them whenever you need it, to represent what they are in a specific combat situation. You make these on demand, because the system has your back: you know exactly how to translate the stats in a useful way, applying your logic as DM to what kind of threat something should be and then following the formulae from that decision.Why? You keep saying this without justification or even admitting that it's an assumption; you act as though this is a self-evident truth and it's just...not.So you agree that you aren't actually playing D&D-qua-D&D then? Because D&D doesn't use "body-fatigue" or "wound-vitality" systems....except...well, you aren't going to like this, but 4e does. Healing Surges ARE a "body-fatigue" system. You can only squeeze so much healing out of a person before they just run out of juice, and even magic can't do much about that. (Daily powers can! ...but those come back in exactly the same way surges do, so it's a wash.)A 747 is hollow and has engines. I'm pretty sure those work differently from flappy wings, and that dragons are not only not hollow, but have very heavy bones. Being flippant about this isn't brightening up the conversation.Who said anything about "morphing" the setting? You keep projecting these ideas. Please, please, please stop. I said that the RULES are about what the PCs do, not that the SETTING is about what the PCs do. The rules are not the setting, and the setting is not the rules. (Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to play homebrew settings with the same rules, nor established settings with alternate rulesets!) The rules are what tell you how to adjudicate the results of actions. The setting is what tells you what exists, and why. Applying the adjudication of the rules can, over time, alter the setting (that's what being responsive to player choice requires), and likewise things existing in the setting are the vital input information for the adjudication process. But the existing-ness and the adjudication-process are two distinct things, and always will be.Because the human mind (and any other aids we might apply, like computers) is an imperfect rendering engine, we of necessity abstract parts of the adjudication process. We do not insert the entire world into the Navier-Stokes equations in order to figure out whether the Ranger can smell the scent of her prey on the wind, we make a highly-simplified abstraction which, we hope, reasonably approximates that interaction in that context. Translating between (as DW puts it) "the fiction" and the mechanics is vital for playing literally all roleplaying games. We are, inherently, making an approximation of an ogre when we make a statblock for one: the statblock is not, and cannot even potentially be, everything there is to say about any individual ogre or even ogres as a collective group.Whereas in my experience, a lone survivor of a party means the game ends, because no one has any meaningful notion of how you can bounce back from that sort of catastrophic failure.....again with this "using a term from common use, but to mean the very specific individual way Lanefan does things." If you're going to keep referring to your own game in such generic terms, you need to explain yourself, otherwise we're going to keep having these roundy-round dances, and I am already quite thoroughly tired of them.It is the same as itself. But what "one hit" means to that ogre is fundamentally different when that "one hit" comes from a 3rd-level character vs. a 13th-level character. The abstraction--"one hit"--shifts in order to match the physical fact of the PC's strength.Why? If hit points are an abstraction--as I have said they necessarily must be, EVEN when you use a "wound" system or whatever else, because "a wound" is STILL an abstracted quantity of injury!--why SHOULD it be that "25 hit points" is the actual physical structure of the being, and not "this creature is pretty durable, but someone rising above the limits of mundane mortality shouldn't fear it." The latter seems a HELL of a lot more concrete--real, physical, true-to-the-world, learnable--than "25 hit points" ever could be.Yes. That's exactly what I've been arguing. The power curve enslaves the numbers--unless you go to relative representation, at which point, the power curve can take exactly the shape you WANT it to take. Then the combination of "what exists in the world" (your setting-consistency requirement), logic, and extensible framework rules (like, but not having to specifically BE, Page 42 and MM3-on-a-business-card) are ALL you need to produce absolutely everything that could be mechanically relevant. Anything you might need to produce that goes outside those mechanics literally could not possibly be planned for, and thus SHOULDN'T be planned for by the rules--you as DM will know better than any rules ever could what you need for those situations, because you are a human who can make decisions and apply reason, which rules cannot do.One creature, one situation, one statblock. THAT'S my end-of-story. You determine what the statblock should be when you need it; otherwise, you use its innate nature, which inherently precedes the mechanical-abstraction process.The map is not equivalent to the territory. The territory comes first; you draw the map after, and you draw it based on what you need the map to accomplish. It is, I argue, just as needles to say, "One territory, one map. End of story." How could one map possibly be the correct answer for all situations a "describe the physical space" need might appear in, even if we only consider its use for navigating around?</blockquote>

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