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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LurkAway" data-source="post: 5756857" data-attributes="member: 6685059">Firstly, I don't find traditional myths with their dream-like quality to be all that verisimilitudinous, ie., Thor lifting a cat disguised as the Midgard Serpent. Supposedly, Jörmungandr encircles Midgard and the world will end if it lets go. Yet a mere giant king manages to translocate Jörmungandr into a cat. The dream logic that Jörmungandr can be in two places at once (encircling the world until Ragnarok, and polymorphed by a mere giant into a cat that Thor lifts) is part of the mythic verisimilitude. Somehow it make sense in myths. Somehow it makes sense in dreams. But it doesn't make sense to me in traditional RPGs (although it could be cool if Epic tier took a crack at that, and "realism" as we know it goes out the window when PCs travel to the Astral plane and beyond).Secondly, from my personal expectations based on the genre conventions, animated skeletons are "mindless" in one sense but not another. They have no brain. If they were real-life mindless they would be an inert object. Yet they clearly have enough intelligence to understand commands, follow commands, have excellent pattern recognition (to differentiate their creator from a tree from a mouse from an intruder) and enough intelligence to fight without any combat training. But they don't have the sentience to do anything else. There is a word for this: robots, or artificial intelligence. AIs exhibit intelligent behavior without any sentience. They have no self-esteem, no sense of self-worth. They would be immune to mockery because they have no self-awareness worth mocking.(Or to put it mechanically, skeletons have a simulacrum of Int 3 for what they were raised to do, but Int 0 for everything else, including insults. Sentient undead like vampires, like AIs that have achieved Singularity, probably have self-awareness, but dim-witted animated skeletons don't fall into that category).The above is not some sort of engineer rationalization that I go through to decide what is realistic for me. It's a long after-explanation for what comes intuitively to me (and clearly for others who struggle with the bard insulting the skeleton so hard that it died) from the genre movies and literature.And I think the majority of an audience watching a D&D movie where a skeleton or ooze was insulted to death would have the same reaction -- they would laugh, because the scene is generally implausible.Now if you saw a scene of a bard in a bar, who walks over to the bartender, asks for a glass of ale, then leans over to whisper something into the bartender's ear. We don't hear exactly what he says, but the bartender's eyes open wide, his mouth opens in shock. The bard stands back. The bartender keels over. THAT is more compelling to me.But a bard shouting an insult in the middle of combat at an animated skeleton is waaaaay too video-game-y for me to be compelling.My objection is to the lack of consistency when integrating mythical dream elements into D&D. (After all, many people define unrealistic as a lack of internal consistency). And I think that lack of consistency is based on people haphazardly picking-and-choosing mythic inspiration when it suits them on a momentary need (which for me, is a short-term short-sighted way of creating compelling fiction, and will rarely yield cohesiveness in world-building).What is bizarre about hoping for some level of cohesiveness in the game world? What is bizarre about not wanting mechanics to create fiction that is not compelling for me? What is bizarre about not liking mythic elements being translated poorly into videogame-y actions?Just so that you don't get me wrong, I never liked the rogue who could completely dodge a fireball in a 10x10 room with no cover. Then again, anyone complaining about A doesn't mean they love everything about B.</blockquote>

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