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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6641642" data-attributes="member: 42582">To me, this is very much a taste thing.For instance, the winch that you describe - that allows a crossbow to be cocked in one second - strikes me as virtually magical in itself, and involving a degree of precision engineering (in respect of its bearings, its ratchets etc) that are out of place in a standard D&D universe. If you're going to posit such an high quality winch, why not just go all the way and posit a hand crossbow that is somehow self-cocking (eg via some sort of lever arrangement)?I think this is very much optional also.When a thief climbs a literally sheer wall, I don't really stop and picture it (is the thief like Spider Man? does s/he have anachronistic suction cups?). When a rogue lops of a giant's head with a shortsword, I don't really stop and picture it (how exactly does that work? isn't the rogue absolutely covered in blood and gore? etc).When stop motion initiative plus freestyle movement allows an archer to duck out of cover, shoot, then duck back behind cover before an enemy can respond, although notionally in the fiction everything is happening simultaneously (it's all the same 6 seconds, after all, not a series of chess-clock turns), I don't really stop and picture that either. (To elaborate: the movement allowance for the archer is factored in terms of 6 seconds of movement, but the turn-by-turn initiative rules allow that movement allowance to be deployed in virtually an instant, before anyone else can take their turn. Taken to its limit it gives you the peasant rail gun, but even the sniper archer version is weird - move 15' out of cover, shoot, then move 15' behind cover before anyone else can respond.)Often a general description of the action is all that I am working with, and picturing is a hindrance rather than a help!Well, as you know I invented wrist cords in my post upthread.But I don't really think it's laziness. It's a willingness to tolerate slippage between mechanics and fiction in this case as in all the other cases, some of which I've mentioned above. (What is the explanation, in the fiction, for the trick the archer can pull?)Sure. But I can carry 10 kg of groceries in one hand without too much trouble. I mean, I wouldn't want to have to run a race carrying it or anything like that, but I can walk a few hundred metres. And I'm not Conan or Aragorn, I'm just a regular person with a white collar job.Conan uses his mighty thews to strangle people, giant snakes and the like with a single hand. When he punches people in the head, skulls and necks fracture, and people die. I bet he's got pretty strong fingers!</blockquote>

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