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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FitzTheRuke" data-source="post: 8711519" data-attributes="member: 59816">One of the things that I dislike about D&D (and I love D&D like I love nothing else, so bear with me!) is how much the rules often make it seem like people are standing around doing nothing. I long ago reconciled that with myself by assuming that it's not true.It's clearly not true. It's just a trap that we can find ourselves in if we take certain parts of the rules too literally. For example: You don't have to do anything to be missed by an attack while you're wearing heavy armor, If the attacker rolls below your AC, you are missed. In "real life" (and it's always dangerous to compare D&D to reall life, I know) if I had a sword, and you were wearing plate mail, and you just stood there while I attacked you, I WOULD KILL YOU. You have to defend yourself. You have to do everything you can to defend yourself. Or you die. Plate mail just helps. It helps a lot. But it doesn't do the job for you.So if we assume that there is a lot going on that the rules don't directly speak to, which I think is fair, then we have near unlimited possibilities.The rules connect to the fiction, sure, but only very loosely. It's such a delicate connection that it's worth having them very nearly unnconnected to free up head-space for story possibilities.I also don't like how "misses" in D&D often feel like incompetence on the part of the attacker, rather than competence on the part of the defender. So I encourage people to flip it around in their heads. An attacker NEVER misses. A defender DEFENDS.To use an extreme example, I will often describe a defender getting "missed" like this:Attacker (with a sword) attacks and misses.Defender (with a shield)... "Smashed the attacker in the face with (his) shield".I'm sure to many of you here - that sounds "wrong". It sounds like an attack. Shouldn't there be damage involved? Yeah, yeah. No. The attacker missed the defender's AC. That's all that happened in the "rules" of the "game".But in the story of the game, the attack missed because the attacker got hit in the face with a shield. (Though I will admit, not hard enough to lose any HP, you see, just hard enough to miss.) Because HP is an abstraction. Everything in the game is.  You can describe anything however you want, so why not?I'm sure this counts as a "playstyle" that's not for everyone, and that's fine. But I find it fun. You might too if you tried it. Or not. Who knows?But it's a really easy way to reconcile the "problem" of this thread. The attacker attacks. The defender defends. The invisible guy does whatever he can to turn that roll into a miss. He doesn't give away his position while doing it because that's what the rule says it does. The game and the fiction only loosely interact. I'm not saying "don't describe what happens" FAR from it. I'm saying "describe it however you like".rreens offMaybe the attacker shoots and the arrow splits in half in mid-air. Attacker has no idea why.Maybe it's defected so subtly that it looks like it was just a bad shot.Maybe the bow keeps dipping down.Maybe... I could go on for pages. You might like a few of them, you might hate them all. I dunno.Seeing as I probably do things very similarly to Hriston, I would object to this characterization of that style. Because I can tell you... my fiction is not slave to the rules. Not a bit of it. (As I hope the above might illustrate).The rules HAVE (almost) NO POWER over the fiction.Unlike your way (as I see it) where the power dynamic is there, so you are forced to change rules to avoid them mastering the fiction. this way it seems to me like the rules have more power over your fiction than mine do. You just punish them for it!</blockquote>

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