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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6260197" data-attributes="member: 2067">Sure, XP represents something in the fiction: the gaining of experience that leads you to being stronger, better, faster, etc. Your character at 100 XP is different in the fiction than your character at 10,000 XP. It's the Hero's Journey (or some other character development) as a point total! At the very least it represents the amount of story that has happened to the character.And Initiative represents something in the fiction, too: who acts before who in the attempt to beat someone else to the punch. In basic D&D, this kind of "defeat" is equal to physical, corporeal death. Something that defeats a creature by reducing its HP is something that can kill that creature. It's not a matter of taste: the rules dictate what happens at 0 hp, and it is exactly one kind of defeat, and that is death (or, depending on how gentle your dying rules, damn close to it). If you wanna play with other defeat conditions at 0 hp, that's awesome, but it's clearly giving up the claim of being basic/traditional/classic D&D. Which is fine (that label can do more harm than good), but it probably be something you want to enable as an option, not something you assume everyone is doing just by playing D&D. In designing D&D (as opposed to any other RPG), death is what you need to assume is at risk of happening at 0 hp in pretty much everyone's game (and an option to change that is certainly worth consideration). As long as HP loss can kill you, things that cause HP loss need to be potentially deadly. Playing around with other "conditions" can be cool, but by that point you're giving up claims of being traditional D&D. Which is awesome, but not something that should be expected of every group. Causality, mostly. With a dash of player empowerment. I've probably never played D&D As Gygax Intended. I'm not even 100% convinced that Gary played D&D As Gygax Intended. One of the big strengths of the game is that there's no One True Way!That doesn't sound like a game of action and adventure, to me. It sounds like what happens during a tough day at the office. Your treatment is a subset of mine. Without action, there's no conflict. If the player hopes to defeat the goblin in melee, they best be doing something to accomplish that goal. Hoping at it isn't going to do squat.What does that engagement look like? What do you do, specifically, to engage the creature? What are you trying to do, specifically, now, in the moment, here with the goblin in front of you snarling and the sweat on your brow and the stink of its warren permeating your nostrils. Give me some concrete actiion. It's a rule from improv: be specific. Be present. Make statements. Give detail. The more concrete things that people have to hang their vision of the scene on, the better anchored everyone is to make future decisions.  The less detailed and specific and realized a given action is, the more nebulous and wobbly it all is, the less you suspend your disbelief, the less "real" it feels, the closer we all are to realizing we're grown adults sitting around a table pretending to be magical elves. Hey, maybe some groups have a lower threshold for that suspension of disbelief, or prefer to play the game at a higher level of remove, or whatever. But I don't think the rules can presume that most people can live with nebulous general goal statements. Certainly an audience at an improv show wouldn't be able to live with "I hope to defeat this opposition!" for very long before they just want to see someone do something.  I want to encourage my players at every turn to take definitive, discrete action, to do a thing, so that I can respond, and so that we can get on with it. If the player can't pass the Journalism 101 test when they declare their action (Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?), it's not useful to me. It doesn't give me anything specific to work with to inform my response.But we can know that your PC tried to cut off the enemy's head. Just because we don't know the success of an action before dice are rolled doesn't mean we don't know what actions were taken. The only points I have in my favor as a default are points of psychology and D&D history: Injury makes you die, and specific is more interesting and grounding than general. Which isn't to say that's what it's always tethered to. That's just probably what the game should embrace as a default, IMO.</blockquote>

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