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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6261239" data-attributes="member: 17106">Sure it does. And it's still fundamentally different then a game where the DM flips a coin, the player calls it, and if the player wins he gets to narrate an event of his choice.Sure it is.I think it's abundantly clear that the exact opposite is true. Hit points and the various level bonuses to d20 rolls (as well as spells, feats, and other categorical abilities) almost invariably create observable and reproducible in-game consequences. The distance you can jump, the amount of harm you can sustain, and the amount of information you can remember, are all very knowable.In a d20 Modern game, I think materials scientists can determine that hardness, hit points, and special damage vulnerabilities of any object. Sports science segments on ESPN can essentially deduce an athlete's Jump modifier or Con score. Psychologists have probably deduced a probability curve for the population's Intelligence scores, corresponding roughly to what in real psychology is called the "G factor".In D&D, the culture is less advanced and there is less scientific methodology, but I still think that a character with 100 hit points knows roughly how far he can fall and survive, how much damage he has at any given time, and how long it will take to heal. I think a character with 40 ft. speed knows that he is roughly a third faster than everyone else. A character with 14 Cha knows that he is more charismatic than the average commoner. Given that all of these correspond clearly to outcomes that are observable to the character and which occur reliably according to the rules, it's hard to believe that the character does not reach some common sense conclusions about his competencies relative to the tasks he does.If you're suggesting that this creates a bizarro world that doesn't work like the real world, this is of course true. It's fantasy. There are dragons and magic and alternate planes. That's part of the fantasy. It's also part of the fantasy that no one ever really gets hurt, or that probability distributions are usually linear rather than normal. All fiction is this way; it all takes place in an alternate reality that reflects creative decisions made by the author, practical limitations of the storytelling process, and most importantly the sheer limitations of the author in observing and rendering reality.</blockquote>

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