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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6257483" data-attributes="member: 27160">The past couple of days have seen some threads on "the meaning of life - and the end of it" in D&D. The topics raised have included "Damage on a Miss" and "The Nature of Hit Points", but several folk have commented (and I agree) that these don't really nail the underlying issue. Note that I say "issue", not "problem"; the latter assumes that something or someone is "wrong", and I'm not convinced that is the case. But to business...Reading through (as much as I could bear of) the Damage on a Miss "debate", the strident demands (as opposed to the simple statements of preference) being made seemed to hinge on an underlying assumption: that the game mechanical system should dictate not just the outcome of an adjudicated action, but also the in-game-world process by which that outcome came about. For instance, if "damage" was to be caused, then that will be because an in-game "sword swing" must have "hit" the creature taking "damage", or otherwise some similar eventuality must be described by the system to justify in in-game-world terms why and how that "damage" arose.Now, if one is making a CRPG I can see that this argument is valid; at the end of the game mechanical process you have to generate a physical depiction (on screen or whatever) of what happened. The swinging sword must either impact upon the target or it must not. But tabletop RPGs don't work the same way.Let's look at what does happen in a TTRPG. The system generates some result - lost hit points or whatever it might be. The system may also present some cues concerning how this result came about. And then - here is the critical bit - each player generates a picture in his or her own imagination of what exactly has happened in the game world.No physical depiction of the action has been generated at all. The "movie scene" of what just happened exists only in the minds of the players playing the game - and those movies will all be different in minor or not-so-minor ways. No system, however detailed or stringent, will ever control completely the imaginations of the players as they generate their personal pictures of what has happened in game. This is a key point to understand, because it points to the reason and purpose of the game rules and mechanics.Now, let's consider the degree to which a system defines the "how" of what happens in game.Not defining the "how" at all seems immediately to be problematic, for two reasons. Firstly, it gives the players no clues at all about how to envision the scene - it presents a totally blank canvas (which begs the question why we are playing this game as opposed to any other). Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, it gives no clear guidance concerning the implications of the result of the outcome generated by the mechanics. It runs the risk of failing to communicate key features of the outcome that are due to the nature of the process that generated that outcome.At the other end of the scale, defining in huge detail the process that leads to the outcome - for instance, detailing the exact path of the sword and evaluating its capability to pierce armour and skin, to slice flesh and break bones and determining which blood vessels it severs as it passes through* - generates at least two problems. Firstly, the sheer effort and volume of words required to write such a system for the majority of action types involved in even a quite focussed roleplaying game would be quite prohibitive. Secondly, the more detail is given about the process, the more likely it becomes that some players - especially players with knowledge pertinent to the subjects treated by the rules systems - will find the systems' outcomes hard to believe. Plausibility actually suffers with too much definition of process. As an example, talk of "swinging swords" and the very idea of such a thing as a hard divide between a "hit" and a "miss" are things that make no sense to me given the level of knowledge I have of medieval swordsmanship. Tell me an outcome and I can imagine a plausible route to that outcome no problems, but tell me about "misses" being so poorly directed as to "swoosh over the target's head" and I'm wondering what the bejeezus these guys are playing at.So, given that these two ends to the scale are problematic, we are dealing with a point somewhere in the middle. It's similar to the "meat-to-chutzpah" scale for hit points in this sense - the ends of the continuum make no sense, so we pick a point in the middle. But that middle is a big place.I pointed out above that TTRPG systems don't have to produce a physical representation of the action they adjudicate. No animation or similar representation is generated. That removes the neccessity for detailed process descriptions - but some folk nevertheless like them. This is, I think, the real difference of taste at issue, here. All that the actual play of a TTRPG requires is sufficient detail of outcome that clashes between what the players severally imagine to be the current situation in-game are minimised. This should be the baseline minimum any game system undertakes to provide. How much detailing of the process that leads to that outcome is provided is an aesthetic choice, but we should be aware that some players who like and even need that sort of thing will read such detail in apparently incidental words - let alone in such action-specific words as "hit" and "miss". The use of such words will be taken by some (many?) as the provision of process detailing, even if none is intended; such use ought, therefore, either (a) be avoided or (b) be used in such a way that they do, indeed, detail a process that is being dictated by the system.*: Just as an aside, yes, I do know of a system that actually did this...</blockquote>

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