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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4040257" data-attributes="member: 42582">Apologies to all for the crazed sequence of postings, but this thread has kept moving while I was working!Fair enough. I hope you can see why I find that answer pretty hard-core. I must say I found Kahuna Burger's response less surprising.RM does it the way you say: the fall is a Crush attack, and there are generic rules for open-ended attack rolls, critical hits etc.I have plenty of experience of what you say, both in D&D and RM.Now what I find interesting is that you desribe this as "good play". If the rules are the physics, then it's bad play (or tangential play, anyway). If the GM is just in the habit of overriding the action resolution mechanics for his or her own mysterious purposes, then it's supplicant's play, but I personally have no time for abusive GMs and supplicant players. I think it's an unhealthy playstyle, because so rife with potential social conflict at the gaming table.Now, if I were playing in a rules-as-physics game, this is the sort of thing (the leaping, not the affected fear) I would like to see! Play those demigods like the demigods they are! D&D can be fun played this way occasionally, but my own taste runs against playing it like this for an extended campaign.That's one way to play an RPG.But the narrativist D&D player and GM don't want players to be afraid of their PCs falling over cliffs. Rather, they want gameworlds where people survive 90' falls only when something is at stake that matters to the shared narrative. (This requires divorcing the emotions of the PC from the emotions of the player - it's the opposite of playing well-GMed Call of Cthulhu, and I think that KM is right when he says it has the potential to break immersion.) But it doesn't mean that the PCs fear is irrelevant. Part of what enables heroic fantasy to be used for narrativist play is that we know that falling over a 90' cliff is a terrifying experience, and that surviving such a fall would be a remarkable emotional experience, and hence these very facts about human frailty and human emotions become part of the gameworld material available to us as a foundation for our thematic interpretation of the events taking place in the gameworld. (Wherease in a "mechanics as physics" world, in which heros have no reason to fear 90' cliffs, we do not have the same richness of material available for our thematic interpretations.)So when a player decides that his PC takes the plunge, or when his PC in the course of adversity is knocked over the cliff, that PC's survival of the fall (as dictated by the D&D action resolution mechanics) will contribute in some way to the overall narrative purpose. It might illustrate something about the importance of fortune even to the greatest. Or, as in the LoTR movie, it might reiterate the importance of a personal bond, so great that the character's have no alternative but to continue until they are united (rather than star-crossed lovers, they would be fated lovers - Tolkien has a tendency towards sentimentality which Peter Jackson certainly didn't eliminate!).Exactly what the narrative meaning of the PC's survival is up to those at the table to work out (in whatever way the rules, be they explicit or implicity, allocate that role). But it is certainly not dictated by the action resolution mechanics, and it cannot be worked out just by knowing that a PC survived a fall over a cliff.Does that give some idea of what I'm trying to get at in distinguishing the action resolution mechanics from the physics of the gameworld, and also in distinguishing the the other rules of the game from those physics?</blockquote>

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