Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6260649" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your whole post is very good and thoughtful. But I want to pettifog a bit more over this.I think you can break up the action without modelling steps of an inworld process. 4e turn-by-turn initiative is an example of this, I think: the frame is frozen on a periodic basis, but this is regulated simply by reference to the action economy, and doesn't map to anything distinctive in the fiction. In Burning Wheel, the need to script again after every 3 exchanges is another example: the whole scripting technique emulates or evokes, at least for some players, the uncertainty of combat, but the actual timing of the scripting and the revelation of what has been scripted isn't modelling any step of an in-fiction process.I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm focusing on initiative systems. <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">Ron Edwards said of rolling for initiative that</a> it "has generated hours of painful argument about what in the world it represents in-game, at the moment of the roll relative to in-game time", and I think that generalises to initiative mechanics, and related devices like the action economy, more generally.As another instance of this, consider an arrow shot by a ranger in 4e. Whether it is done as an immediate action or as a standard action confers a different mechanical status in the game, and establishes different relations to other events within the action economy, but within the fiction all there is is this guy shooting arrows faster than the NPCs can dodge them.A contrast would be way that Runequest handles attacks (taken from Ron Edwards again - he is talking about simulationist priorities in general, but I think RQ is one particularly clear example):The causal sequence of task resolution [is] linear in time. He swings: on target or not? The other guy dodges or parries: well or badly? The weapon contacts the unit of armor + body: how hard? The armor stops some of it: how much? The remaining impact hits tissue: how deeply? With what psychological (stunning, pain) effects? With what continuing effects?Here, the breaking up into steps - with player input at those steps, if only in terms of rolling dice, but for some of them also a decision (eg dodge or parry) - is meant to correspond, I think, to the causal sequence in the fiction.That "story" comment will provoke disagreement from some anti-story gamer types if they read it. Neither Moldvay Basic nor Gygax's DMG gives me the impression that XP is a measure of "amount of story".But anyway, that's somewhat orthogonal. XP is a marker used to signal certain changes in the fictional status/capability of the PC. But the earning of experience doesn't itself model any ingame process. For instance, in classic D&D you get XP for looting, but the award of the XP isn't measuring some ingame causal process that your PC as a result of looting. (Gygax says as much in his DMG.) And in 4e, get enough XP and you'll become a knight commander. Or a demigod. But the earning of XP isn't modelling the ingame causal process of being promoted up the ranks of a military order, nor of earning the favour of the existing pantheon.Contrast encumbrance in classic D&D, which does correlate to an ingame causal process that results from looting (namely, being weighed down by loot). Or the buy-the-book treatment of enhancement bonuses in 4e, which correlate to an ingame causal process of wielding magic items of varying degrees of power.Every minute? Every 6 seconds? And how do you explain the freeze-framing (in modern D&D) or the fact that archery always happens before swordplay (in classic D&D)? It's a transparent metagame device.Yes, how fast and alert the PC is factors into the action economy in certain ways (eg ranger bonuses to surprise in AD&D; DEX added to init in WotC D&D and some versions of classic D&D; various powers that manipulate starting initiative in 4e; etc). But that doesn't mean we're actually modelling a process. What is the process? In a real fight, there is no process that has a regular cycle of 6 seconds or 10 seconds or 60 seconds. Yet our initiative systems and action economies are based around those ingame passages of time.This is all true but strikes me as irrelevant. In Tunnels & Trolls you can only win a melee if you have a melee weapon - a toothpick or dandelion flower won't cut it. (Contrast Toon, perhaps.) But that doesn't make T&T a process-sim game: it's even loss process-sim than D&D!I'm not talking about other defeat conditions, and I don't know what makes you think I am. I'm saying that when I roll my fighter's attack against an orc with a longsword, until the attack die is rolled and the result applied, and then any damage dice rolled and applied, the mechanics tell me nothing about what I'm doing in the fiction other than trying to beat this orc in melee using a sword. If I miss, the mechanics still don't tell me anything except that I didn't land a lethal blow. If I hit but don't reduce hp to zero, the mechanics tell me a bit more: I didn't land a lethal blow, but I did wear the orc down in some way. Only if I reduce the orc to 0 hp do the mechanics tell me that I dealt an injury - namely, a lethal one.As I said in my earlier post, if you or your group want to embellish beyond the mechanically mandated minimum, nothing is stopping you indulging your tastes. (Though I think you're going to get the occasional corner case, like the orc wielding a polearm who takes a crit, is reduced to 2 hp, has that narrated as an arm being severed, but then through a change in die roll fortunes turns the tide to win the battle, and walks back to the tribe victorious. How does that work? And why can the orc be healed to full health without needing a Regeneration spell?)But the resolution mechanics don't need to model the action. They just need to model the conflict. For instance: roll opposed dice. Whoever rolls higher wins the conflict. If one of the antagonists has a marked advantage due to fictional positioning, they get to add 3 to their roll.This is a viable resolution system for a simple RPG. Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised uses a variant of it for most action resolution, though with slightly more fiddly win and loss conditions based on a more granular comparison of the roll results; and Marvel Heroic is more complicated then this, but uses an idea a bit like this as its starting point.A system like this certainly involves the character's acting: including acting to improve their fictional positioning so as to get bonuses to rolls. But it doesn't model any ingame processes.The player is doing something: they're putting their PC into circumstances whereby the game rules permit them to make an attack roll. The character is doing something to - namely, engaging the goblin in melee combat - but more than that the core D&D rules don't tell us.You can impose such a rule at your table if you like. It's not part of the game rules, though. The resolution of a D&D melee combat won't change depending on whether or not this extra narration is added. In mechanical terms, there is nothing for you to respond to. It's all epiphenomenal. The causal links you're asserting aren't actually there in the mechanics. You can narrate it however you like and the resolution won't change.That's part of why 4e's combat mechanics are quite different from classic D&D (and perhaps 3E - I don't know the latter well enough): it has plenty of results of combat that aren't purely epiphenomenal: forced movement, condition infliction, etc. So by D&D standards 4e gives a comparatively large amount of information on what is happening in the fiction as a result of combat (though not as much as, say, Rolemaster).You can narrate your attack that way. You can equally narrate it as "I go for the gut" or "I try to get an advantage - what openings are there?" or even "The orc parries badly, leaving an opening on the left side that I take advantage of." (Though presumably many would find the latter objectionable because it is "martial mind control".) I personally have no experience in melee fighting, but from what others say I gather that one of the latter two has more in common with the reality of fighting than "I go for the head" or "I go for the gut" which I gather is meaningless in the absence of more information about what sort of error (forced or otherwise) the opponent has made.Sure, but doesn't that mean that your way is not the One True Way? In other words, you might choose to narrate hit point loss as injuries whenever it occurs, but - given that nothing in the mechanics mandates that - why are you trying to assert that it is a default, or even a necessity?There's also a marketing issue here - if you're telling me that D&Dnext doesn't have room for 4e-style hit point loss (which includes damage-on-a-miss), you're telling me I shouldn't buy it or play it. Luckily for WotC I think you're wrong, and that in fact there is very little in D&Dnext's treatment of attack rolls, damage and hit point loss that requires me to interpret in the way you are saying I must. (It's healing rules are another matter, but they can probably be rewritten.)</blockquote>

Verification