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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5623864" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, if by "purposefully argumenative" you mean "knowingly disagreeing", then you'd be right.The reason I disagree is that I do not accept that an association between a mechanic and the fiction can be created without telling me what the relevant element of the fiction actually is. So you don't create an association between the Evasion mechanic, and the gameworld, simply by telling me that when a sleeping rogue evades a fireball, s/he is using a learnable EX ability. I want to be told - what ability is she using? How? In paticular, how does she do it while sleeping? Without waking up?If your answer is that she phases, then my response is, What the hell is this non-magical phasing?At which point the debate is no different from the debate about knocking a snake or an ooze prone. Suddenly "magic" doesn't have its ordinary meaning, but is a term of art (like "prone" in 4e). And suddenly Evasion means a range of different things, including phasing, in different circumstances - just like knocking something prone. And we get other parallel questions to, like Why can't the rogue phase through walls?4e's answer to all these questions is that its mechanics are metagame (or, if you prefer, "dissociated")? What is 3E's answer?Well, as I've said, in my view you don't show that the mechanic relates to something in the gameworld until you've actually told me what is happening in the gameworld.No. I'm not a mathematician. But given that no such proof exists, I remain confident that circles can't be squared. Is the D&D gameworld meant to be different in all these respects from the real world? I've always assumed not.Well, this is where I play my game very differently. Plot protection isn't experimentally verifiable by the protagonists of a story, because it is a phenomenon that exists only at the meta-level.Again, others may play differently. I'm not really interested in playing that way, though. (It also raises other questions, like - what is the relationship between the luck conferred by hit points, and the luck that can be conferred ingame by spells, items etc?)But what does "1 HD" even mean here? Does it refer to skill? Meat?The PCs know they're more skilled than the aveage villager. The fighters know they're also tougher than the average villager. But do they know that they're less vulnerable to physical punishment than the typical elephant? I've always played the game under the assumption that the PCs don't know this, and that the players' knowledge of this is metagame knowledge.</blockquote>

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