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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eriktheguy" data-source="post: 5509712" data-attributes="member: 83662">I agree. I remember d10 games being good at simulating damage. I didn't play vampire long, but I remember I only had like 5 HP, and each point of damage gave massive penalties to everything. Very realistic, not very heroic. It wasn't my thing.And separating HP and physical damage is a good trick. I like to think of the first solid hit as being the one that bloodies the target. Everyone has their own HP. The wizard is deflecting blows with magic, the rogue is twisting and rolling with hits, etc. I'm surprised you suggested this. Most simulationists I know hate the idea of abstracting HPs.Well poison is a bad example. Lethality of poison generally relies on body mass, dosage, and immunity from prior exposure or antivenom. The poison leaves your system at a rate determined by its own properties and the dosage (many drugs have half lives). The health of the recipient has little effect on resistance or duration. Granted someone with a bad health condition might suffer complications, but in general a marathon runner stands no better chance than an overweight person (the overweight person might be better off thanks to their increased body mass).Poison is an exception, I understand your point. Someone adept at throwing off an effect ought to throw it off faster. It is more simualationist for saves to be affected by level, ability scores, etc. I think the reason they don't is that non-AC defenses already confer an advantage, and the system designers figured one advantage was enough. A case of balance > sim.But why would a spell be physically exhausting while a physical maneuver isn't? I think our main difference here is that you don't see martial characters as fantastical and impossible, and I do.I again agree. This is an example of sacrificing detail and realism to achieve simplicity. You can explain away many things, perhaps the wizard is augmenting his strength checks with some magic, and your dumb fighter would probably learn a few tricks from experience. At some point you are going to great stretches to explain why your level 15 barbarian who has never seen a lock before can pick it with ease, but it's a sacrifice I make <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />.I think this is the one point where we disagree most. If you were to bind fighters by the laws of reality and disallow them any magical explanation for their abilities, they wouldn't last. There's no sensible reason a high level fighter should be able to soak 150ft of falling damage. If a first level commoner stabs a sword through the fighter's neck in his sleep, he gets up, bludgeons the commoner to death, and goes back to sleep to get his HPs back. A 30th level fighter, (or 20th, in 3e, etc...) can survive 8 doses of poison that would kill a level 1, even if he hasn't built resistance to that particular poison. That's impossible. It could only happen in a fantasy world. It could only happen if something outside of phsyics, chem, and biology were on the fighter's side. And without these things, the fighter can't compete with the wizard, so these things are necessary to have the game.Sorry, the remark about the textbook made me thing you were struggling with the math. I'm not sure what a realistic market for magic items would look like. 3e used a squared function to calculate costs, and 4e uses an exponential with an error term to produce round numbers. This does mean you can guess the next level's cost given only this level's cost, without knowing which level you are. In 3e you would have to know which level you are and the current cost in order to guess next level's cost. That's one way in which it's relative instead of absolute...But if you're saying that the wealth a high level PC carries makes most economies look trivial, and that such a world wouldn't function, then you have a point.Yeah, there's generally two debates in this thread. The debate of simplicity vs simulation, and a debate over whether increasing simulation actually gives you a more accurate picture. No edition of D&D simulates reality well at all. We can tweak the system to bring about the expected result in a situation, but in general we are only getting a few feet closer to a target that is miles away.It's very eerily reminiscent of the way we construct math models at school. We can add more parameters to a model to make it behave how we would expect in some situations, but it doesn't make it better. We are just overfitting the model to the data.So I'm on the simplicity side of the argument. And not because it's my own personal play-style. I think most changes intended to make a game more simulationist don't do so in a measurable way. They only increase bookkeeping.</blockquote>

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