Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5765417" data-attributes="member: 54877">If it is not obvious, the problem with process simulation to produce believable results is two-fold: 1. The process becomes overly detailed to try to account for every result via the process. This is what pushing D&D towards Rolemaster would be doing, and is not the objection in this discussion, as few here have even hinted at it. For 4E fans, this is mainly a slipperly slope concern. 2. The process produces results that are not consistent with the desired fiction and/or results that are believable in some circumstance but not in others.  If you want swashbucklers swinging on ropes, but it takes an attack to cut the rope to make it available to swing on, this is potentially consistent with the process, but not what you want. You want to cut something, swing a blade as you grab the rope. OK, next action we'll get to you doing the actual swing, by which time the orc has leaped from the balcony and the gnome warlock has fried you. A good DM will gloss over these things, of course, and work around this problem. (That is, the DM running an otherwise process simulation will suddenly develop a passion for result simulation that gets turned off again as soon as it can. Don't blink; you might miss it.) A better game might enshrine exceptions to the process simulation, so that beginning DMs don't have to figure them out themselves. The Take 10 rules in 3E are such a rule. They do have a considerable benefit on handling time, too. This is not an accident, as process simulation rules carried one iota too far nearly always have handling time consequences that are excessive compared to the payoff. The 4E healing surge is a gaming construct that, among other things, says, "You are going to let the party buy CLW wounds and heal themselves up most fights anyway, but you still want them to eventually get worn down. To save time and confusion for everyone involved, let's just cut out the middle man and set up a framework that establishes that kind of pacing." Obviously, the conceptual jump is greater, and in the interest of handling time it has abandoned simulation concerns. However, there is nothing inconsistent with this method. And if you want to put the simulation back, as I said right after 4E launch, all you have to do is houserule that using surges takes healing magic, and then charge an appropriate amount for potions and CLW wands. Voila! If your concerns are not just suspending your disbelief, but distaste of the mechanic, limited healing by character, or other such thing, then my suggestion may not work. However, then your concerns are no longer exclusively suspending disbelief, and should not be portrayed as such. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification