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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4041384" data-attributes="member: 47776">I think one issue (or rather, one cause of issue in discussion that is itself a happy lack-of-issue) is that you have and accept as not undesirable an unusually high level of communication among your player base.  If your players accept that things just happen in the world and approach each case finding out how they are supposed to respond before doing so, then your method will not have any problems.I will point to the number of people in this thread who have commented along the lines of "I'm a player, and I love it when things that directly contradict the rules happen!" as argument that your strategy of DMing, while most useful when constructing a narrative and certainly applicable for your player base, does not generally result in hugs and kisses for the GM when attempted.Well, I don't think you will with your group, because your group does not expect the rules to be constant.  If your group has no problems accepting that mechanics in the world resolve X way when they are present and Y way when they aren't, and artfully never notice this in character ("Wow, we were really lucky to survive that battle...and the one before it...and the eighteen before that...and the being set on fire a dozen times before that..."), you're good to go.  Again, however, the vast majority of the playerbase will walk away before they engage in these leaps of illogic.  People like to understand the rules of the game they're playing; deciding that your world has properties X but is mechanically described as extremely-not-X to the players will result in any player that values consistency having their character engage in speculation as to why people assume X when not-X keeps happening, or why X keeps happening.You keep making this statement.  If you tell the players "You can die from a single lucky stab wound." and then run them through combats with standard D&D rules, the players will notice that no matter how many times they're stabbed (sometimes by magically lucky people with actual control over local fate and such) they don't die.  They may also notice that the first wounds of any battle tend to be the least severe, and so on, and so forth.  If what happens to the players is what's in the rules, and what happens not to the players is whatever you decide which goes outside the boundaries of the rules, then lots of players will seriously wonder why things that happen to other people never happen to them. Well, not really.  What you can do is have one universe of "Whatever I think best at the moment with no regard to precedent." and simply have what happens to the PCs be the rules.Pointe the firste; because unless you actually go through the rules and mark out what you consider 'unrealistic' (See Celebrim's comment, only with a wave at the explicit magic and more of a sneer on the end), or are playing with a player base that expects your particular idiosyncrasies, players assume that the fluff of the world flows from the crunch.  They assume this because they interact with the crunch, and if they are roleplaying characters capable of pattern-matching, will notice if what happens when they are around and what happens when they aren't around are wildly different.  Even if the player therefore knows that this is a world that is gritty and people can die from falling off of a horse, he's seen his barbarian buddy head-butt stone golems to death; the character will assume D&D rules are standard.Pointe the seconde: You're not using the rules as rules, you're using them as inspiration for your own story.  This is fine and good, but it's not D&D.  I can mechanically represent a 10th-level cleric in a Call of Ctuthlu campaign, but I will not be playing D&D (as the term is commonly meant to be understood) if I change the world to this degree.  Likewise, when you declare that nothing in the world has fixed mechanics but the PCs, what you are saying is that there are no fixed mechanics for anything but PvP.After considering the many and weighty citations and stunning turns of rhetoric, I am forced to resort to falling back on a rebuttal offered previously in the thread: Nu-unh.Seriously, dude/ette/honored individual of indeterminate sex. Asserting the point under discussion buys you extremely little on the persuad-o-meter.Also, a basic rebuttal; although the rules should not determine reality exactly (as there will always be corner cases, such as trying to make a Climb check in pouring rain or whether or not a dead character that somehow manages to gain 11 temporary hit points springs back to life), they should conform to the general shape of reality.  If the general shape of reality is that death can come on swift wings to anyone, then the rules should support this; bring in massive damage rules.  If the rules are that death can come on swift wings from seemingly-insignificant injuries, the rules should support that, as well (or you should abandon the pretense that the rules mean anything.)  The shape of the rules is that by the time you're into the heroic tiers, you can survive hours of exposure in sub-zero or desert-high weather.  Injuries fail to affect you direly; it's not that you can shrug off a sword to the heart, it's while you have hit points, it is impossible for anyone to do so directly while you're not helpless (and, at certain levels, you can even shrug off a blow taken while helpless through sheer toughness).  It is entirely possible for you to be struck directly by lightning and survive.  From where, then, should come the assumption that the world is different for other heroes of equivalent power and accomplishment?You know those RPGS (mostly console, and mostly J-) that have battle mechanics that bear totally nothing to do with the actual world?  Those game where you can literally kill and ressurect someone dozens of times, but if they happen to be fatally injured in a cut scene, they die for real?You know how the reason that a lot of us tabletop gamers really, really hate those games for their inconsistent and run-on-rails natures?Huh.  Quick and dirty heuristic question: Who here thinks that Final Fantasy and similar games make good models for tabletop RPG play?</blockquote>

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