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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6888099" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes, this is the point that I was making upthread. The system doesn't simulate the combat - the outcomes it delivers round-by-round are described in purely mechanical terms (hit point loss), and at the end of the process what you know is (i) whether or not someone is dead, and (ii) about how long it took to get them to that state. All the internal stuff (action economy, changes in hit point totals) isn't correlating to anything in particular. It just constrains narration.(Again, there's nothing stopping adoption of a uniform narration, like  [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] has described in this thread. But the mechanics don't mandate that in order to be used.)Absolutely!Systems like RQ, RM, BW - they tell you whether or not contact was made, they factor in the shield as a blocking manoeuvre and also parrying ("active defence"), they tell you the nature of the wound and (more-or-less roughly) which body part was hurt. There are no dice rolls that have processes and consequences defined in purely mechanical terms in the way that D&D hp loss is.I'm not saying that one approach is better than the other. At the moment I'm GMing a 4e game and a BW game, and enjoying both. But only one is a candidate for being simulationist in its combat mechanics!One feature of 3E/4e and default 5e-style initiative and turn-by-turn resolution is that it tries to be more simulationist than AD&D as far as positioning is concerned - in AD&D position is often just "engaged in melee", and typically if it's more specific than that (eg surrounded by X foes) then the specifics are established by more-or-less free narration rather than reading results off the mechanical resolution.But in the 3E/4e approach you get this rather specific spatial positioning combined with a stop-motion treatment of time. It's actually quite odd! 4e compensates by having lots of off-turn actions which reintroduce, via metagame devices, a greater feel of continuity/simultaneity in the fiction. 5e has less, I think, partly because one of its goals was to speed things up.</blockquote>

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