Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5452925" data-attributes="member: 82106">There are a lot of differences between computer games and TT games. TT games have much more significant playability constraints in some respects for instance. A computer game can do an almost infinite amount of book keeping and complex calculations and tracking. There is a hard limit on this kind of thing in TT PnP games. OTOH TT PnP games naturally have greater rule transparency.PnP games are also in a sense always more simulationist than most computer games. The 'rules' of the world are inherently open-ended and incorporate all the things we normally expect from reality to some extent. There is ALWAYS a 'schema'. Maybe in a few games things are stretched and bent a whole lot, but your typical RPG has basic mundane reality as a firm jumping-off point. Magic or whatnot may break the ordinary rules of the world, and the characters may have highly exaggerated capabilities, but they are usually starting off from what we see around us every day. You expect gravity to work and falling to hurt. I think the design decisions related to TT games have more to do with conveying a specific genre and its unique expectations. Getting the right 'feel' to things so you can support player expectations properly. So for instance in Call of Cthulhu the PCs are relatively fragile and rarely, if ever, become superhuman or possess extraordinary capabilities. No matter how long you play your CoC character a shoggoth is still going to eat your lunch. Core system design is the main tool here. It isn't about realism vs gamism, it is about what basically does the genre demand as basic assumptions and how does the game system hold to them? CoC pits your doomed investigators against unimaginable cosmic horrors which cannot be overcome (mostly). 4e D&D pits your almost super-human adventurers against an ever more deadly array of monsters and situations in an adventure-movie-like sequence of events where you forge on bravely and pull out that last trick from your back pocket in the final scene to win the day, and then level up so you can do it again with even nastier opponents.Personally I think 4e's approach works well for the genre it aims at. Healing surges are 'realistic' in the same way that Bruce Willis can get shot in the arm in scene one, slap a bandage on it, and come right back for more in scene 2. It is not particularly realistic, but it is very much in tune with the genre expectations for action adventure. This is more important than having detailed realistic healing which would create all sorts of story constraints. Notice that some games have done that, but they are also permanently marginalized in this genre, while D&D has enjoyed great success. I think as long as you understand what sort of game you're playing this is all fine. THAT is where the designer's challenge is, to make sure that the players internalize the genre expectations appropriate to the game they're playing. Trying to play CoC like D&D will get you nasty surprises. Trying to play D&D like CoC will just be weird and probably won't convey the cosmic horror aspect very well.</blockquote>

Verification