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<blockquote data-quote="Professor Phobos" data-source="post: 4040044" data-attributes="member: 18883">I don't agree at all. I have, in all my years, never once, as a player or the GM, thought the mechanics were anything other than an abstraction. I have never blinked at a man in Call of Cthulhu dying to a gunshot that technically couldn't have killed him in a single hit. I have never once worried about how the Demon: The Fallen novels had a ton of lobotomies without the rules being able to mechanically represent them. I never once thought that the absence of rules for sleeping meant no one ever needed to sleep, or that the absence of rules for losing a hand meant no one ever lost a hand. And I have never, until the internet, even encountered the idea that the rules in D&amp;D were the sum totality of a D&amp;D world. I can certainly see an initial, &quot;Hey, that's weird...&quot; sort of response when the High King Lord Badass falls and cracks his head open. I can even see them going and saying, &quot;It must be dopplegangers!&quot; But I don't expect them to reject, once investigation has concluded, the very possibility that it was just a mundane accident.No game I own, barring except GURPS, has this expectation for the rules system. Not Unisystem, not Storytelling, not D20, not Reign, not Warhammmer FRP, not Blue Planet, not Paranoia XP (well, maybe that one), not Ars Magica... It is totally unreasonable and I just don't follow your logic. I think I'm going to need a direct, example of the kind of progression you are talking about- from the &quot;not allowed in the rules&quot; situation occurring to the total collapse of my game, society, dogs and cats living together, etc.All of your objections seem to rest on the idea that it is intuitively obvious that the rules are a total, comprehensive simulation of all possible events in a game world. And I think that is ridiculous. You also seem to assume that it is impossible for players to understand this separation and that it will inevitable lead to the total breakdown of their conception of reality, hitting 0 SAN, and going off to worship Cthulhu.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Professor Phobos, post: 4040044, member: 18883"] I don't agree at all. I have, in all my years, never once, as a player or the GM, thought the mechanics were anything other than an abstraction. I have never blinked at a man in Call of Cthulhu dying to a gunshot that technically couldn't have killed him in a single hit. I have never once worried about how the Demon: The Fallen novels had a ton of lobotomies without the rules being able to mechanically represent them. I never once thought that the absence of rules for sleeping meant no one ever needed to sleep, or that the absence of rules for losing a hand meant no one ever lost a hand. And I have never, until the internet, even encountered the idea that the rules in D&D were the sum totality of a D&D world. I can certainly see an [I]initial[/I], "Hey, that's weird..." sort of response when the High King Lord Badass falls and cracks his head open. I can even see them going and saying, "It must be dopplegangers!" But I don't expect them to reject, once investigation has concluded, the very possibility that it was just a mundane accident. No game I own, barring except GURPS, has this expectation for the rules system. Not Unisystem, not Storytelling, not D20, not Reign, not Warhammmer FRP, not Blue Planet, not Paranoia XP (well, maybe that one), not Ars Magica... It is totally unreasonable and I just don't follow your logic. I think I'm going to need a direct, example of the kind of progression you are talking about- from the "not allowed in the rules" situation occurring to the total collapse of my game, society, dogs and cats living together, etc. All of your objections seem to rest on the idea that it is intuitively obvious that the rules are a total, comprehensive simulation of all possible events in a game world. And I think that is ridiculous. You also seem to assume that it is impossible for players to understand this separation and that it will inevitable lead to the total breakdown of their conception of reality, hitting 0 SAN, and going off to worship Cthulhu. [/QUOTE]

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