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="wrecan" data-source="post: 5626650" data-attributes="member: 64825">Then I don't understand your point in any way.  What does it mean to "associate the mechanics to the fiction in a meaningful consistent way,  and not in a superficial momentary and ultimately meaningless instance"?I thought I had addressed those quoted words in my post, but you labeled it a "straw man".  So clearly those words mean something else, but I can't figure out what you intend them to mean.Let me try again.For purposes of D&D, a "meaningful consistent" association of mechanics and fiction need not be applicable in all situations; it only has to apply in the limited number of situations in which it arises in game, and those are should number less than 5, at most.  The game assumes no more than 300 encounters throughout a campaign.  It further assumes that some of those encounters will not be combat (and the mechanics we have been discussing apply to combat only).  Moreover, each instance of a mechanic one might have to "associate" to the fiction are going to apply in a small fraction of combat encounters.Thus, any association of fiction to mechanics needs only to be meaningfully consistent for a handful of events at most.  So the paladin who justifies his save against a polymorph by the intervention of the Raven Queen is unlikely to come across a scenario in which that justification is shown to be faulty, for many reasons.  First, it is very likely that the wizard who cast the polymorph is defeated and won't be re-encountered.  Second, it is very likely that the DM is not going to have another encounter in which the paladin is polymorphed by someone using the same technique as the wizard.  Because any given scenario is exceedingly unlikely to repeat itself, the disassociation of fiction and reality is almost entirely hypothetical.  It shouldn't actually come up in the game.</blockquote>

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