NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5622162" data-attributes="member: 42582">This strikes me as obviously false. For example, as far as I know, no version of D&D has rules governing love, or the consequences of love (this is a difference from HeroQuest, for example, or The Riddle of Steel). Nevertheless I have played D&D games (and Rolemaster games, which in this respect resembles D&D) where romantic love has been a prominent part of the fiction, and manifestly has mattered.Generalising: not all significant consequences in an RPG result from direct application of the action resolution mechanics.In HeroQuest, this issue is framed as a Credibility Test - with genre conventions as the starting point for adjudication, and with adjudication ultimately in the hands of the GM.Introducing a similar sort of credibility test into the 4e action resolution mechanics for combat would be a houserule, but a fairly minor one in terms of complexity (obviously not necessarily minor in terms of implications for play!). The idea of a credibility test is already part of the skill challenge mechanics, although it's not framed in quite those terms (it's somewhere around p 75 of the DMG, I think).Does this tick your first box: the GM describes to a player how the player's PC notices his mortal enemy across the street, and the player responds by saying "Cool, I run across the street while drawing my sword to cut her down!"?Does this tick your second box: a player expresses a desire to use a mechanical ability, someone at the table expresses some curiosity as to what in the fiction the ability represents, a brief discussion ensues, and the ability is then used?Except that it's only a death blow because the character is low on hit points. Mechanically, it's just another roll of the old d8 damage die. What in the fiction does this damage roll correspond to. And what in the ficiton does this low hit point status correspond to? A liability to being killed by some indeterminate set of weapon strikes?I'm not feeling the association.Which is not to say that hit points are a metagame mechanic. But they're not a causal-process-simulationist one either.It's getting there. The module in the Monster Vault outlines a social skill challenge to deal hit point damage to the solo at the end of the module.</blockquote>

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