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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Professor Phobos" data-source="post: 4156256" data-attributes="member: 18883">There's not a game I can think of that wouldn't inevitable run into a silliness problem, with this assumption. I can't follow your logic.I'm not saying anything contrary to that. I'm saying your position on rules-setting transition makes no sense.Because we're using different rules sets to tell different kinds of stories. The rules can prioritize elements that we want to see appearing in a game. The world is the backdrop for those stories. It doesn't need to be reflected in the rules, because the game isn't about the world, it's about the characters and their story. Critical to the characters, and to the story.Again, the problem is- the character doesn't view the world through the rules. The character is completely unaware of the rules. If it helps, think of it more as if the campaign is the legend of your characters, told through the ages, and exaggerated. In the game, Hero Protagonist was stabbed by a goblin, spent a healing surge, and kept fighting, despite a deep wound to the stomach. In reality, it wasn't even a goblin, but a particularly angry house cat, and Hero Protagonist spent two months with a fever because of the infection. But a thousand years later, as the story is told, he has mythological qualities. The rules aren't building the world. The world is presumably more complex than the rules can reflect. No one in Call of Cthulhu expects to be up on their feet so quickly after a gunshot, or for a man of sufficient health and size to be flat-out immune to dying from a single wound from a .22 pistol. That doesn't mean the Call of Cthulhu rules don't work or have no utility- they're simple, they're fast, they emphasis the things the game emphasizes, etc. It just means you need a little common sense to cover the edge cases, offscreen events, and the like. No one would ever say, if I had a really large and healthy man turn up in the morgue with a .22 bullet to his brain, "But that can't happen! A .22 maxes out at 16 HP and he had 17!" It can't happen to PCs and it can't happen to NPCs the PCs are shooting at. But presumably, since Call of Cthulhu is explicitly set in the real world, it still happens. While it might be helpful to have a rules set that more accurately represents the potential lethality of the .22 caliber round, I would never in a million years want such a set unless it was at least as simple, flexible and playable as BRP. Every rule in a game has to justify its existence with a direct correlation to some positive benefit to play. If it doesn't, it is an unwelcome and unwholesome imposition on my time. I mean, every time this discussion comes up it's the same bits. "That ruins immersion!" Well, if your priority is solely and exclusively total immersion in the game world, and that this demands a rules set completely consistent with that world (even if only at an abstracted level), then frankly I can't think of a single game that has ever existed that is right for you. I mean, what about the other priorities? A lot of the changes to how monsters work are designed to make it easier for a GM. They're not designed with world building concerns in mind. The hue and cry against this is all about this perceived inconsistency, and yet...it makes things easier for the DM. How can this be ignored? Why is simulation the most important thing for a game?</blockquote>

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