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: 5626737" data-attributes="member: 64825">Which is exactly why I used the word "precisely".  Everyone accepts that the combat mechanics are not precise recreations of fantasy combat.  The only difference is the degree of abstraction we are willing to accept.  And I don't think there's an objectively optimal amount of abstraction any given system shoudl have. You keep using the word "we perceive".  Who is this "we"?  The characters don't perceive anything.  The process of associatin the mechanics to the fiction determines what they perceive.  So they perceive nothing untoward.And the players don't "perceive" anything except the results of the die rolls.  The players accept, necessarily, that combat is going to be abstracted in ways noncombat is not.  (Noncombat may be abstracted in other ways, of course.)We don't perceive combat.  All that happened is the DM rolled a die and described what happened.  The player accepted that description, rolled a save and decided to associate the effect of that save to a specific cause.  And the DM in this case accepted that association.  (He could have negated that association and substituted his own -- "No, the spell only lasts a few seconds at any rate; the Raven Queen had nothing to do with it" -- but he chose not to.)The only perceptions are what the players envision in their minds' eyes occurring in the fictional game world.  The perception is the result of associating the mechanics to a narrative; it is not the cause.The game world's reality is whatever the DM and players accept it to be.  If the DM says the person is turned into a frog, that's the reality.  If the player rolls a save, they then determine why and that becomes the reality.  The rules can offer explanations (and they almost always do) to reduce the time the DM and players spend explaining mechanics.</blockquote>

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