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="pemerton" data-source="post: 6887246" data-attributes="member: 42582">But injury to a biological system is not, in general, proportional to the sum of the total "force events" inflicted. That's part of the difference between hurting a person and chipping away at a rock.I'm a person in the modern era. I have been playing RPGs - including Gygax's - for longer than you. Given that he is one of the inventors of the game form, and one of those who coined the phrase "roleplaying game", I believe his game is a paradigm of the game-form.I just don't think you have the authority to stipulate otherwise.A system for tracking motion (ie position over time) which cannot tell you where anyone is at any given time, and which in fact requires "freeze frame" for most of the participants through most of the resolution process, and has no notion of simultaneity (because of the aforementioned "freeze frame") and which, on any attempt to unpack it systematically, will yield inconsistent results without the deft overlay of some more-or-less ad hoc narrative, is not a simulation.And it's not as if you can't easily get more simultaneity and less freeze-frame: AD&D and earlier editions actually did so, via "side initiative".And none of the above is a criticism of turn-by-turn initiative. It's just making the point that it's not a simulation. It's a device for constraining the narration of what happens during the combat.But you can choose to try hard. You can choose to hope - or, at least, can fail to give up hope. You can resolve to go on. These are the sorts of things that are happening, in the fiction, when a player cashes in those inspiration chips.What makes you so confident that the world (not the real world - that would be contrary to board rules - but the game world) is cold and uncaring. Why can't I play in Middle Earth, in which the world is not cold, uncaring and random but rather unfolds in accordance with a providential logic?Why did Wormtongue through out the palantir - of all possible objects - just at the moment when it could come into the hands of Aragorn who, having already announced himself to the Rohirrim was now ready to claim his title openly before Sauron? Providence.There are mechanics for replicating this sort of thing in an RPG. But they don't involve process-simulation.Yet my players do it all the time.What you are presenting as a logical truth is in fact a psychological conjecture, which I know from experience to be false.</blockquote>

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