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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6885870" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>This is very odd.</p><p></p><p>It's no real surprise that the rulebooks will contain explanations why, in the fiction, magical items lose plusses on other planes. As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has pointed out, the explanation is relatively thin (it doesn't seem to deal very well with items that don't have pluses) but it's there.</p><p></p><p>But the point that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is addressing is this: <em>why write that fiction</em>? Why write fiction that MUs can't use swords? And that fighters can't use spells? (There is another well-known fantasy RPG, Runequest, where wizards can use swords and fighters can use spells, while still maintaining a tolerable distinction between characters who are primarily sorcerers and characters who are primarily warriors.)</p><p></p><p>The fiction didn't write it itself. And it wasn't written just because someone thought it made for great literature! The reason for making travel to the planes debilitating to PCs' magic weapons and armour is obviously to maintain the mechanical challenge of higher-level play. Likewise the mass-nerfing of spells.</p><p></p><p>Other examples abound: in the D-series, for instance, teleport spells don't work. There is an in-fiction justification (magnetic fields) but that fiction has been written in order to block the option of teleporting out of the underdark to rest and recuperate between forays. Drow are loaded with magic armour and weapons (which makes them tougher against high level PCs than most monsters, both in the to hit and the AC department), but those items decay under conditions that most PC parties aren't going to be able to avoid once they finish the module. Again, the fiction is given but the metagame rationale is transparent.</p><p></p><p>This is part of the difference between being a game designer and being a novelist.</p><p></p><p>*************************************</p><p></p><p>But <em>damage</em> there doesn't mean anything other than <em>the orc gets closer to its goal of killing you</em>. We don't even know if you're bleeding or not! (As Gygax said, on p 61 of his DMG, when hp are lost but the character is still standing the issue of hit location is not germane, because no significant injury has been suffered.)</p><p></p><p>No process has been simulated. An intent has been declared (<em>the orc wants to kill the PC</em>), a task has been declared (<em>the orc is going to use his/her sword to do the killin'</em>) and after the die roll is successful we know that the orc came closer to realising its intent (<em>knock of a damage dice worth of hp on the PC's sheet</em>). That's indistinguishable from a 4e skill challenge or a HeroWars/Quest extended contest.</p><p></p><p>But this is like complaining that sometimes a roll of 10 hits and sometimes it doesn't! To know whether or not a roll of 10 hits, you have to look up the to hit bonus and comare it to the AC.</p><p></p><p>To know whether 8 hp of damage is fatal or not, you need to look at the hit points remaining.</p><p></p><p>The number of hp of damage dealt, <em>on its own</em>, tells you nothing about what is happening in the fiction. That's why D&D is not simulationist. (Contrast, say RQ or RM, where 8 hp of damage does have a constant in-fiction meaning.)</p><p></p><p>First, <em>damage</em> is not (in general) something that is suffered by living things. Damage is something that is suffered by houses, boxes, machines etc. Animals suffer injuries. And tiredness. And other conditions which - even if we give them "folk" rather than technical/medical labels - reflect that animals are in dynamic equilibrium rather than static equilibrium like a rock or a kitchen table.</p><p></p><p>Second, here are the relevant Gygaxian passages (DMG, pp 61 and 81):</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">[H]it points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of domage caused are not germane to them. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the last handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">[D]amage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch.</p><p></p><p>Hit location is not germane, because at most there is perhaps a nick or a scratch. And there is no proportionality between "damage sustained" (ie injury) and the number of hp marked off. That is, losing 8 of your 80 hp doesn't mean that you are "10% damaged" (whatever exactly that would mean, for a person rather than a rock); and the loss of 8 hp that kills you, or that leaves you on 1 hp and hence vulnerable to any potentially killing blow, is quite different (in the fiction) to the loss of the first 8 of your 80 hp.</p><p></p><p>So yes, it's metagaming that the player of the cleric knows that the same spell can heal the 10th level fighter who has taken one "hit" from a dagger, and the 1st level MU who was reduced to 1 hp. That was a feature of AD&D. (Which 4e mostly eliminates, by adopting surge-based proportional healing.)</p><p></p><p>It's true that D&D doesn't have two pools. (Though many variant rules which create two pools exist - the first version I know of is from the very early 80s, published in White Dwarf by Roger Musson; it uses "hp" as the luck/fatigue pool, and CON as the physical/wound pool.)</p><p></p><p>But clearly the game contemplates hp loss equating to what you call "luck damage" or "skill damage": I just quoted Gygax to that effect ("The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch").</p><p></p><p>Hit points, at least as described by Gygax, are neither physical nor non-physical. They're not a measure of <em>any</em> ingame quantity, because - as Gygax makes clear - they're not part of a process simulation (the "not proportional" comment is enough to show that; the "hit location is not germane" reinforces the point).</p><p></p><p>Hit points are a measure of a game-state - how close is the character to suffering a fatal blow, to losing the conflict? What, in the fiction, has brought that about - fatigue, bad luck, resignation - is left as an exercise for the game participants. How any event of hit point loss is to be narrated - a scratch, a narrow escape that leaves the character wrong-footed, a jarring parry, etc - is likewise left as an exercise for the game participants.</p><p></p><p>That's not to say that one mightn't treat hp otherwise (eg as meat, with all hp loss being proportional to the total hp in physical consequence, as you are suggesting). But the game provides no support for this - eg it won't tell you what the injury is, what part of the body it happens to etc. Which is to say the game won't simulate any process for you.</p><p></p><p>RM is like your second example; RQ is like your first.</p><p></p><p>But I don't agree that hp in D&D don't make sense. I think they make perfect sense - as long as you recognise what they are (a metagame device for tracking how close the character is to being worn down and defeated). In AD&D the lack of proportional healing does somewhat undermine this, which is why I regard 4e as a superior implementation of Gygax's hp model (because it eliminates the problem that the more your hp loss is due to loss of luck, the more likely you are to need a "cure critical wounds" spell).</p><p></p><p>*************************************</p><p></p><p>And what about all the other participants in the fight? Were they frozen in time? And then, when they take their turns, what about my PC who acted before them?</p><p></p><p>In this respect 3E and later are actually <em>less</em> simulationist than AD&D and other earlier editions, which tended to use far more continuous resolution with their "side initiative" rules.</p><p></p><p>Games like RQ, RM and other simulationist systems go to great efforts to achieve something close to simultaneous action; and/or to have losing initiative actually correspond to actually standing there unmoving for a moment or two as the other character gets the drop on you.</p><p></p><p>*************************************</p><p></p><p>Which players? Not me, when I'm playing. And not my players, as far as I can tell.</p><p></p><p>When my players make choices that are fun, or dramatic, the other players don't find that jarring - they often laugh or cheer, sometimes they groan or say "not again . . . ". It's a game. One reason for playing games is to get involved, and enjoy them or roll your eyes at the other players or to make the other players roll their eyes at you!</p><p></p><p>I don't think this is true of my players. All but one has been playing since the early 80s, as have I. (Which I think is longer than you?)</p><p></p><p>This can't be <em>literally</em> true - after all, choosing to pick up a die is not making a decision as one's PC would. So the question is, how is the metaphor to be cashed out?</p><p></p><p>If my PC <em>really wants</em> something, and is putting all her effort and all her hope into it, and at the table I spend all my fate points and cash in all my inspiration chips, to me that looks like I'm making decisions as my character would and exercising my character's agency.</p><p></p><p>You might think that effort and hope aren't part of a character's agency, but that's not a definitional feature of RPG design or play. It's a difference in aesthetics and the philosophy of (fictional) action.</p><p></p><p>Again, what you are presenting here as a principle of design is actually an aesthetic view about fantasy fiction.</p><p></p><p>If players don't have luck-type mechanics (be they hp, fate points, re-rolls, whatever) then the metaphysics of the fiction are the same as the physics of dice - cold, uncaring randomisation. But that is not a neutral or natural fictional state of affairs: it is a definite stand against whole swathes of fantasy fiction (especially providential romance like Arthurian legends, Tolkien, the film Hero, etc).</p><p></p><p>You're entitled to your preferences. But when I play a game in which PCs' convictions, and hope, and effort, <em>matters</em>, I don't cease to be roleplaying. I'm just playing with a different sort of fiction. (And that's before we even get to view about the role of <em>protagonism</em> in fiction, which is also an issue of aesthetics, not minimum design specifications.)</p><p></p><p>This, plus your earlier comments about the GM not actually making any decisions, suggest that you want the game to unfold more or less mechanically from a set of starting conditions. I personally don't find that a very appealing pastime, and I don't see what in particular it has to do with RPGing.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6885870, member: 42582"] This is very odd. It's no real surprise that the rulebooks will contain explanations why, in the fiction, magical items lose plusses on other planes. As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has pointed out, the explanation is relatively thin (it doesn't seem to deal very well with items that don't have pluses) but it's there. But the point that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is addressing is this: [I]why write that fiction[/I]? Why write fiction that MUs can't use swords? And that fighters can't use spells? (There is another well-known fantasy RPG, Runequest, where wizards can use swords and fighters can use spells, while still maintaining a tolerable distinction between characters who are primarily sorcerers and characters who are primarily warriors.) The fiction didn't write it itself. And it wasn't written just because someone thought it made for great literature! The reason for making travel to the planes debilitating to PCs' magic weapons and armour is obviously to maintain the mechanical challenge of higher-level play. Likewise the mass-nerfing of spells. Other examples abound: in the D-series, for instance, teleport spells don't work. There is an in-fiction justification (magnetic fields) but that fiction has been written in order to block the option of teleporting out of the underdark to rest and recuperate between forays. Drow are loaded with magic armour and weapons (which makes them tougher against high level PCs than most monsters, both in the to hit and the AC department), but those items decay under conditions that most PC parties aren't going to be able to avoid once they finish the module. Again, the fiction is given but the metagame rationale is transparent. This is part of the difference between being a game designer and being a novelist. ************************************* But [I]damage[/I] there doesn't mean anything other than [I]the orc gets closer to its goal of killing you[/I]. We don't even know if you're bleeding or not! (As Gygax said, on p 61 of his DMG, when hp are lost but the character is still standing the issue of hit location is not germane, because no significant injury has been suffered.) No process has been simulated. An intent has been declared ([I]the orc wants to kill the PC[/I]), a task has been declared ([I]the orc is going to use his/her sword to do the killin'[/I]) and after the die roll is successful we know that the orc came closer to realising its intent ([I]knock of a damage dice worth of hp on the PC's sheet[/I]). That's indistinguishable from a 4e skill challenge or a HeroWars/Quest extended contest. But this is like complaining that sometimes a roll of 10 hits and sometimes it doesn't! To know whether or not a roll of 10 hits, you have to look up the to hit bonus and comare it to the AC. To know whether 8 hp of damage is fatal or not, you need to look at the hit points remaining. The number of hp of damage dealt, [I]on its own[/I], tells you nothing about what is happening in the fiction. That's why D&D is not simulationist. (Contrast, say RQ or RM, where 8 hp of damage does have a constant in-fiction meaning.) First, [I]damage[/I] is not (in general) something that is suffered by living things. Damage is something that is suffered by houses, boxes, machines etc. Animals suffer injuries. And tiredness. And other conditions which - even if we give them "folk" rather than technical/medical labels - reflect that animals are in dynamic equilibrium rather than static equilibrium like a rock or a kitchen table. Second, here are the relevant Gygaxian passages (DMG, pp 61 and 81): [indent][H]it points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of domage caused are not germane to them. . . . Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the last handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . . [D]amage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch.[/indent] Hit location is not germane, because at most there is perhaps a nick or a scratch. And there is no proportionality between "damage sustained" (ie injury) and the number of hp marked off. That is, losing 8 of your 80 hp doesn't mean that you are "10% damaged" (whatever exactly that would mean, for a person rather than a rock); and the loss of 8 hp that kills you, or that leaves you on 1 hp and hence vulnerable to any potentially killing blow, is quite different (in the fiction) to the loss of the first 8 of your 80 hp. So yes, it's metagaming that the player of the cleric knows that the same spell can heal the 10th level fighter who has taken one "hit" from a dagger, and the 1st level MU who was reduced to 1 hp. That was a feature of AD&D. (Which 4e mostly eliminates, by adopting surge-based proportional healing.) It's true that D&D doesn't have two pools. (Though many variant rules which create two pools exist - the first version I know of is from the very early 80s, published in White Dwarf by Roger Musson; it uses "hp" as the luck/fatigue pool, and CON as the physical/wound pool.) But clearly the game contemplates hp loss equating to what you call "luck damage" or "skill damage": I just quoted Gygax to that effect ("The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch"). Hit points, at least as described by Gygax, are neither physical nor non-physical. They're not a measure of [I]any[/I] ingame quantity, because - as Gygax makes clear - they're not part of a process simulation (the "not proportional" comment is enough to show that; the "hit location is not germane" reinforces the point). Hit points are a measure of a game-state - how close is the character to suffering a fatal blow, to losing the conflict? What, in the fiction, has brought that about - fatigue, bad luck, resignation - is left as an exercise for the game participants. How any event of hit point loss is to be narrated - a scratch, a narrow escape that leaves the character wrong-footed, a jarring parry, etc - is likewise left as an exercise for the game participants. That's not to say that one mightn't treat hp otherwise (eg as meat, with all hp loss being proportional to the total hp in physical consequence, as you are suggesting). But the game provides no support for this - eg it won't tell you what the injury is, what part of the body it happens to etc. Which is to say the game won't simulate any process for you. RM is like your second example; RQ is like your first. But I don't agree that hp in D&D don't make sense. I think they make perfect sense - as long as you recognise what they are (a metagame device for tracking how close the character is to being worn down and defeated). In AD&D the lack of proportional healing does somewhat undermine this, which is why I regard 4e as a superior implementation of Gygax's hp model (because it eliminates the problem that the more your hp loss is due to loss of luck, the more likely you are to need a "cure critical wounds" spell). ************************************* And what about all the other participants in the fight? Were they frozen in time? And then, when they take their turns, what about my PC who acted before them? In this respect 3E and later are actually [I]less[/I] simulationist than AD&D and other earlier editions, which tended to use far more continuous resolution with their "side initiative" rules. Games like RQ, RM and other simulationist systems go to great efforts to achieve something close to simultaneous action; and/or to have losing initiative actually correspond to actually standing there unmoving for a moment or two as the other character gets the drop on you. ************************************* Which players? Not me, when I'm playing. And not my players, as far as I can tell. When my players make choices that are fun, or dramatic, the other players don't find that jarring - they often laugh or cheer, sometimes they groan or say "not again . . . ". It's a game. One reason for playing games is to get involved, and enjoy them or roll your eyes at the other players or to make the other players roll their eyes at you! I don't think this is true of my players. All but one has been playing since the early 80s, as have I. (Which I think is longer than you?) This can't be [I]literally[/I] true - after all, choosing to pick up a die is not making a decision as one's PC would. So the question is, how is the metaphor to be cashed out? If my PC [I]really wants[/I] something, and is putting all her effort and all her hope into it, and at the table I spend all my fate points and cash in all my inspiration chips, to me that looks like I'm making decisions as my character would and exercising my character's agency. You might think that effort and hope aren't part of a character's agency, but that's not a definitional feature of RPG design or play. It's a difference in aesthetics and the philosophy of (fictional) action. Again, what you are presenting here as a principle of design is actually an aesthetic view about fantasy fiction. If players don't have luck-type mechanics (be they hp, fate points, re-rolls, whatever) then the metaphysics of the fiction are the same as the physics of dice - cold, uncaring randomisation. But that is not a neutral or natural fictional state of affairs: it is a definite stand against whole swathes of fantasy fiction (especially providential romance like Arthurian legends, Tolkien, the film Hero, etc). You're entitled to your preferences. But when I play a game in which PCs' convictions, and hope, and effort, [I]matters[/I], I don't cease to be roleplaying. I'm just playing with a different sort of fiction. (And that's before we even get to view about the role of [I]protagonism[/I] in fiction, which is also an issue of aesthetics, not minimum design specifications.) This, plus your earlier comments about the GM not actually making any decisions, suggest that you want the game to unfold more or less mechanically from a set of starting conditions. I personally don't find that a very appealing pastime, and I don't see what in particular it has to do with RPGing. [/QUOTE]
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