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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6261012" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think this question of causal-temporal sequence, and the relationship between ingame causality and at-the-table causality, leads to other weirdnesses of interpretation/process-sim projection.For instance: I regard it as pretty obvious that the function of off-turn actions in 4e is to introduce some dynamism into the resolution system, to reduce the "freeze frame" vibe that turn-by-turn initiative otherwise creates. So for me, the analysis goes like this: the gameworld is like the real-world, with everyone acting chaotically all-at-once, and the action economy is a type of approximation to that, using various devices like off-turn actions to try to model the "reality" of the ingame events.But I've seen other posters look at off-turn actions in an opposite sort of way, that because they're different in the rules they're trying to model something different and distinctive in the fiction, leading to idea such as that reaction time has some sort of role to play in understanding or adjudicating off-turn actions in a way that it doesn't for on-turn standard actions; or even that resolving an OA or an interrupt actually involves a type of winding-back of time, as if  the sequence of at-table action declarations corrresponded to the sequence of events in the fiction.I can relate to all this, though for me it was the late 80s, and especially 1990 - the year I first played Rolemaster.  And RM does try to have an "XP as learning" model; a description I have used is "hard field training" (fighting, using your skills, coming back from the dead, etc - all events which help one learn in the "school of hard knocks"; it's a bit like adapting RQ's learning-by-doing system to a level-based game). Of cousre I'd read all the Gygax stuff in the DMG, but the general assumptions of the time (or at least as I encountered them, eg in Dragon magazine) hadn't succeeded in really explaining to me what Gygax was on about.I had moved away from that sort of XP to goal-based XP by the late-90s, but without having a particularly good theory of what I was doing. For me, it was Ron Edwards rather than Gygax himself who actually gave me the conceptual resources and understanding to work out what was going on, and then to go back and finally make sense of what Gygax was getting at in his books. (Not that I personally want to play an XP-for-treasure game, or even really wanted to then - I put the treasures in to my old AD&D adventures in order to make sure the PCs levelled, but always preferred the adventuring to the looting as a focus of play - but at least I could finally work out what was going on with it!)</blockquote>

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