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<blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 8003517" data-attributes="member: 6683613">When this hero is fighting the dragon, is he thinking that he's going to win because it makes for a better story?Or is he thinking things like &quot;How can I avoid the fearsome beast's fiery breath?&quot; and &quot;How can I put something sharp and pointy into a tiny gap in those scales?&quot;I think it likely that Bard the Bowman spared a thought or two for armor, accuracy, movement, and range.These mechanics that you keep calling &quot;wargame&quot;-style also appear in many, many other kinds of game, and are not in the slightest incompatible with games that are intended to send their players on adventure stories set in magical otherworlds -- i.e. &quot;fairy tales&quot; as the Chesterton/Lewis/Tolkien crowd understood the term. Whether you want your fairy-tale simulator to take a simulationist or narrativist approach is a matter of preference, with tradeoffs either way. If you take the simulationist approach like D&amp;D, arguably you're better equipping your players to actually get into their roles -- they're thinking the things their heroes would be thinking vis a vis outfighting a giant death lizard, not thinking about what makes for a good story* -- but as a direct consequence of that, they might lose, or otherwise get a bad story.But all that is beside the point. In both simulationist and narrativist fairy-tale simulators, dragons should be beatable because otherwise you wouldn't be able to run that most archetypical of fairy tales, which seems like a poor design decision. And you've said a couple of times now that dragons are beatable by heroes even in wargames. So, again, why are we talking about wargame rules here?*Unless of course they are playing not Bard but a bard.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="TheCosmicKid, post: 8003517, member: 6683613"] When this hero is fighting the dragon, is [I]he[/I] thinking that he's going to win because it makes for a better story? Or is he thinking things like "How can I avoid the fearsome beast's fiery breath?" and "How can I put something sharp and pointy into a tiny gap in those scales?" I think it likely that Bard the Bowman spared a thought or two for armor, accuracy, movement, and range. These mechanics that you keep calling "wargame"-style also appear in many, [I]many[/I] other kinds of game, and are not in the slightest incompatible with games that are intended to send their players on adventure stories set in magical otherworlds -- [I]i.e.[/I] "fairy tales" as the Chesterton/Lewis/Tolkien crowd understood the term. Whether you want your fairy-tale simulator to take a simulationist or narrativist approach is a matter of preference, with tradeoffs either way. If you take the simulationist approach like D&D, arguably you're better equipping your players to actually get into their roles -- they're thinking the things their heroes would be thinking vis a vis outfighting a giant death lizard, not thinking about what makes for a good story* -- but as a direct consequence of that, they might lose, or otherwise get a bad story. But all that is beside the point. In both simulationist and narrativist fairy-tale simulators, dragons should be beatable because otherwise you wouldn't be able to run that most archetypical of fairy tales, which seems like a poor design decision. And you've said a couple of times now that dragons are beatable by heroes even in wargames. So, again, why are we talking about wargame rules here? [size=1]*Unless of course they are playing not Bard but a bard.[/size] [/QUOTE]

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