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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5618019" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks!I think this is right.So is this.[MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] has been making the point that the PC isn't real, and doesn't literally know or do anything. The stats and abilities on the character sheet are, primarily, tools for the player to use to play the game. Because the game is an RPG, the main way the player plays the game is by engaging the ficitonal situation via his/her PC. That is why many of the stats and abilities on the character sheet pertain to things that the player can have his/her PC do. (I don't want to say that this is inherent to roleplaying, but I think it is pretty central to most RPGs.)But it is a further question whether the rules that govern a player's deployment of his/her PC must also be rules that model the ingame, imaginary causal processes of that PC.RQ and Classic Traveller are two well-known RPGs that come closest to this sort of simulationism. As some have pointed out, 3E comes close in some places but not others (turn-by-turn combat, for example, and associated notions like "full attack", clearly are not simulationist in this sense - the constraint of taking turns is not something that exists within the fiction - only the participants in the game know or care about turns.)4e has more of these mechanics which are addressed to the player, but do not model ingame processes. But it doesn't follow that no one at the table knows what is happening in the gameworld, nor that the fictional characters can't be imagined to narrate their own biographies. It also means that the 1x/enc or 1x/day limits on some abilities are not necessarily part of a PC's biography. The rules constraint operates on the player, not the PC. That is, it's not necessarily the case that a PC fighter can't perform a sweeping blow more than once in five minutes. It's just that s/he never does.An issue that [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] has raised in many threads on these boards is a different one from that of so-called "dissociated" mechanics, namely, does adjudicating action resolution in the game require the real-world participants to know what is happening in the fiction? I agree with LostSoul that if the answer to this question is "no", then we're sliding from an RPG to a boardgame/wargame. But I think that, in the case of 4e, the answer to the question is "yes" - although the sorts of fictional details required are different from what they might be in other games (eg position is very important, precise swordplay technique used is not that important).To my mind, this is what encounter and daily powers in 4e are about. The design intention is pretty clearly that, if the GM builds encounters according to the guidelines, and the players do their best to engage those encounters using the abilities on their character sheets, than a dramatically satisfying combat will result.Whether or not this design goal has been achieved is a different question (in my experience it has been, but others' experiences seem to differ).Whether or not the action resolution mechanics operate without the participants needing to engage the fiction is also a different question (in my experience this is not the case, but again others' experiences seem to differ).That's a good post (and makes me feel more sane - someone else has noticed the indie influence on 4e's design).Wrecan's comments on falling damage and damage remind me of this passage from Maelstrom Storytelling (p 116):A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. . . focus on the intent behind the elements in a scene, and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character . . . The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities . . .  Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.There is something similar also in HeroQuest 2nd ed (pp 72-74):Resistances [that is, DCs] are determined relative to the PCs' collective ability ratings . . . Resistances are usually asssumed to have all complicating or mitigating factors built into them. Even when the PCs re-encounter a previous obstacle, you can change the resistance directly if . . .  dramatic or pacing reasons indicate that this is the most entertaining choice. Make sure that you describe changing conditions so that the change in difficulty appears believable . . .This is how I run skill challenges in 4e. The fact that combat works in a different, and more simulationist, fashion contributes to what I regard as the biggest flaw in 4e's action resolution mechanics, namely, the lack of guidance on how to integrate skill challenges with the tactical resolution system.I would have thought that Spiritual Attributes in TRoS are "dissociated mechanics", in that - from the point of view of the PC - the use of bonus dice from SAs does not correlate to any particular thing that the PC is doing when egaged in a passionate rather than more pedestrian conflict.</blockquote>

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