Professor Phobos
First Post
Andor said:
What...what....if it is all of the above? What if RPGs are about playing a character in a consistent world, a tactical game, and an exercise in storytelling? What if a game has to support all three?
Also, I am officially declaring an moratorium on the statement "joint storytelling then I don't need rules!" It's over. No one can ever use it again, because if you do, my head will explode with anger. And I'm not talking just like a little explosion, like my brains get all over my computer and my housemates have an awkward cleaning bill. I am talking a kiloton range explosion. Say a 550 KT warhead, going off on the ground right here in the city in which I live. We're talking at least a half million deaths from fires, the explosion and the resulting fallout.
Do you want to kill 500,000 people? No, I didn't think so. Storytelling games need rules. That's why they all have them. Or hadn't you noticed that all the various folks who advocate storytelling in games or say "hey these narrativist games are the bomb" are using rules? Are they just lobotomized space chimps to you?
The rules serve a purpose in a storytelling game- they add an element of tension and unpredictability. The rules serve a purpose in a tactical game- they define the gameplay and so forth. The rules serve a purpose in a simulation- they do the simulating.
But a RPG is all of these things, all at once. And guess what? Playability trumps simulation. Playability trumps tactical complexity. Playability trumps storytelling needs. All of these serve the central Gods of "Fun" and "Ease of Use."
Hit points do not model anything at all. They aren't an abstraction of damage, health, willpower, luck and dodging- they represent nothing but a gameplay tool. Literally just how many hits you can take. Nothing more, nothing less.
See all those rationalizations about "what hit points are" that people have argued over for decades now...they mean nothing. Hit points aren't a model of anything. It's why Max Payne can take painkillers and get over a gunshot wound, but in a cutscene he suffers from them normally. It's why Aeris dies. It's why in Call of Duty 4 you can be next to a grenade when it goes off and badly injured- but a few moments later you're up to full health again. And yet in a cinematic or a cutscene, you'd suffer real injury.
Why? Gameplay. It would suck for a first person shooter to say, "Okay! You got shot in the stomach! After six months of intensive care, you're able to return to duty." Call of Duty 4 would end pretty quickly- and you'd miss all the cool action sequences that game offers.
Even Call of Cthulhu, a game where I once lost an investigator's foot to frostbite and ended up dying of infection after the amputation, has ridiculously fast healing times. 2d3 HP a week is entirely possible- you can get taken down to the verge of death by gunshot wounds and be back on your feet in a month or two. And unless the GM exercises the "Keeper's Discretion" rule on injuries, you'll never need a colostomy bag, a reconstructive skin transplant for your face or anything that real people need. You won't die of sepsis after a punctured pancreas. You won't even bleed to death unless the Keeper says you do. Why? Gameplay- knocking an investigator out for a couple of weeks is bad enough if there's only a year before the Great Ceremony of Doom.
Even Call of Cthulhu, explicitly set in the real world, thematically organized around "regular, plain jane humans with no cinematic qualities", is generous (well, for CoC) in recovery.
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