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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Professor Phobos" data-source="post: 4041247" data-attributes="member: 18883">Force them to do what?And I disagree with your spin on "player thinking." I don't have any players who think in purely gamist terms- in addition to the calculations of "Will this help me win?", there are, "What would my character do?" (and sometimes, "What would be interesting?") I've seen players accept mechanical disadvantage for roleplaying purposes and I expect to see it again. They're not doing it just to make me happy. Eh. If it comes up, and a player says, "But that's not in the rules!" I'll probably just copy & paste some of pemerton and John Snow's posts and send them to him.No, I'm not. I'm giving one description. The rules do not describe the world.I totally can.Again, we've hit this point before- "Just don't play D&D!" and the answer is, "But we like D&D!"Maybe I want all that feats, AoO malarkey, prestige class stuff? (I don't, but hypothetically) Let's say I want to have all that stuff and a grim world of perilous adventure.Now, you're saying these goals are contradictory- that my system doesn't support my setting. I say, "Sure", but I shrug and ignore it because I don't care. It is a trivial effort to just recognize the game mechanics as serving other purposes than simulation. I can have this cake and eat it too. Take Storytelling (the system). Mortals in the current World of Darkness system are surprisingly robust; gunshots do not tend towards all that much lethality. Is this because mortals in the World of Darkness can take a lot of punishment? No. It's designed that way because getting one-shotted sucks for a player. Intelligence is rated between one (below average) and five (extremely intelligent). Does this mean every individual in the World of Darkness can be evenly broken down into five categories of intelligence, or that there are no mentally retarded people whose intelligence could be said to be lower than one on the scale? No. Not at all. The fluff and rules contradict. Where fluff and rules contradict, the fluff wins, except in the case of PCs, of course.Take Call of Cthulhu. There are all kinds of edge cases where "the simulation" breaks down, and if the rules were the very laws of the game universe, it would not then resemble a real historical or modern day setting. People would probably notice if babies could throw footballs.But I like BRP. It is simple, it is fast, I know it well, I can run it from memory, I like the SAN system, etc. No system is perfect. Why should I discard it entirely if I'm not willing to accept its little contradictions and occasional bit of silliness when I can just take it to be solely for the purpose of PC interaction with the world?Nope. The purpose of the mechanics is to create a certain gameplay result. Tactical elements, genre emulation, speed and ease of play. Those sorts of things.</blockquote>

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