NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="firesnakearies" data-source="post: 4547684" data-attributes="member: 71334">Yeah.  Having to disregard or justify various logical incongruities is simply par for the course in role-play gaming.  Or in reading fiction.  Or watching movies.  If you pay critical attention to every possible "why did/didn't THAT happen there?" moment in every film, book, video game, or tabletop RPG session, there's no way to immerse yourself into the story, because EVERY game and story I've ever seen is FULL, on a constant basis, of slightly to extremely silly or unbelievable contrivances for the sake of drama.How many movies or books have you seen where the protagonist was clearly capable of doing some very effective thing to solve an immediate problem, but didn't do so, for seeming no reason at all?  "Oh my god, Clark, you have the power to move so fast that it's as though time itself had stopped!  Why are you standing there trying to talk down the crazy bad guy?  Just zoom over there and knock the gun out of his hand in the billionth of a second it would take you, before he or anyone else could twitch a muscle!"Apparently it's an encounter power.Taking it down a different road, how about watching boxing, or martial arts tournaments, or even professional sports of any kind?  You see the fighters/athletes do some pretty awesome stuff sometimes.  Amazing moves that they've spent so much time practicing and training, and when they do them, it has a major impact on the match/game, and that moment gets played over and over again on highlight reels.Why don't they just do that EVERY ROUND?  I mean, seriously.  "That wicked awesome ducking leg sweep followed by jumping spin kick to the head combo was hella cool, man!  You should totally do that all the time!  Why are you messing around with all of these boring little jabs and such?  If you know how to do that sweet move, you should just ALWAYS use that!"Apparently, it's an encounter power."Nice touchdown!  The way you jumped up in the air amid three defenders, snatched the ball out of a sea of hands, pulled it in tight to your body and then weaved through countless attempted tackles as you hurtled down the field in an amazing display of speed and agility, zig-zagging back and forth, stiff-arming, rolling, and jumping your way down 80 yards of field for an incredible score . . . that was great!  So, you should clearly do that every time you get the ball.  Get to it!"Apparently, that one's a daily power.I've seen Tiger Woods hit a hole-in-one before, in extremely poor visibility, after a very long day of golfing.  It was pretty awesome.  I wonder why he doesn't do that every time?  It must be the sinister 4th Edition ruleset keeping him down!  I can't even watch the PGA Tour anymore without my suspension of disbelief being ruined....Seriously though, there are endless examples of times I've watched a show, or read a story, and thought, "What the hell, protagonist?  Why don't you just do X?"  Or, "There's no way that THAT would happen.  X would clearly prevent it, based on the reality of the world as it's been presented to us."  But in order to enjoy the fiction, we have to learn to ignore a lot of those seeming contradictions, and to accept the oft-times feeble and contrived justifications we are given to explain them (or invent our own!).This is just the nature of indulging in imaginative fantasy, in storytelling, whether it's non-interactive fiction, or a game in which we control the heroes.  Every RPG we ever play asks this of us.  If you know of some game system out there which manages to perfectly model an utterly realistic (yet unreal!) world, where everything that happens always makes total sense, please point me to it.But I don't think there is one, nor will there ever be.  Any one of us could pick equally huge holes in the weaknesses of logic and verisimilitude in ANY game system.  To point at one in particular (4E for example) and suggest that it is somehow unreasonably disconnected from expected "reality" compared to the rest of the genre is simply unfair -- a deliberate choice to nitpick, in my estimation.If you can ignore or rationalize the million other ridiculous things that one needs to in order to immerse oneself in an RPG (or any fiction), you can ignore or rationalize the little fact that Joe Hero can't do his Super Cool, Practically Impossible Ultra Awesome Move any darn time he feels like it.</blockquote>

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