Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Yesway Jose" data-source="post: 5631196" data-attributes="member: 6679265">Then 45 is literally the magic number.&nbsp;There's an old saying that everything happens in threes. Your wizard has amazingly discovered that randomness is based on fives. Combined with the discovery of 45 being the magic number, he wins a Nobel Prize.&nbsp;I think that hypothetical examples are enlightening in illustrating a point, but I'm not sure what it is here, and I'm not invalidating your examples, as I enjoyed the thought experiment, but maybe someone else can help in way that I can't.&nbsp;The PCs cannot observe the mechanics of HD, but they can observe that some creatures, noticeably the tougher ones, are immune to sleep spells. That's why PC and NPC wizards didn't try to cast sleep on dragons, because they knew it doesn't work. (Part of the fun was not knowing if the sleep was going to work on all monsters.) There's a predence for elite monsters in fantasy literature shaking off the effects of puny weapons and lesser magic, and it always seemed intuitive to me.&nbsp;At the end of the day, I guess it's not something that can measured and quantified. We look at the abstraction and decide for ourselves if the fiction is plausible/associated or implausible/peripheral to the mechanic. For me, some mechanics seem to feel more simulationist than others.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Yesway Jose, post: 5631196, member: 6679265"] Then 45 is [B]literally[/B] the [B]magic[/B] number. There's an old saying that everything happens in threes. Your wizard has amazingly discovered that randomness is based on fives. Combined with the discovery of 45 being the magic number, he wins a Nobel Prize. I think that hypothetical examples are enlightening in illustrating a point, but I'm not sure what it is here, and I'm not invalidating your examples, as I enjoyed the thought experiment, but maybe someone else can help in way that I can't. The PCs cannot observe the mechanics of HD, but they can observe that some creatures, noticeably the tougher ones, are immune to sleep spells. That's why PC and NPC wizards didn't try to cast sleep on dragons, because they knew it doesn't work. (Part of the fun was not knowing if the sleep was going to work on all monsters.) There's a predence for elite monsters in fantasy literature shaking off the effects of puny weapons and lesser magic, and it always seemed intuitive to me. At the end of the day, I guess it's not something that can measured and quantified. We look at the abstraction and decide for ourselves if the fiction is plausible/associated or implausible/peripheral to the mechanic. For me, some mechanics seem to feel more simulationist than others. [/QUOTE]

Verification