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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LurkAway" data-source="post: 5746624" data-attributes="member: 6685059">A gamist rule is only simulating fiction if the player decides that there is an explanation that suffices for him/her. Otherwise, it's not simulationist. If you say 4E's simulation "makes perfect sense" and that there is "no trouble" in explaining what is happening, then all the power to you. I completely disagree. But really, I don't want to derail multiple pages of this thread with that.I can point that there is a world out there where Pathfinder heroes do not all get better at each of door bashing, climbing, sneaking, etc. at a equal minimum rate. There are probably other RPGs, and the majority of film, literature, and real-life where that is just as true.So by agreeing to the 4E simulation as "making perfect sense", that means you didn't allow the Pathfinder hero into your worldview. You didn't allow epic Raistlin into your worldview. You didn't allow adventurers and heroes in literature and movies who developed different skillsets at different rates and some who sucked or improved slowly at certain things throughout all their adventures.You've accepted a certain stereotype about heroes, and by doing so, you're divorced from any fictional positioning that contradicts that stereotype.So it's not that you haven't or can't find a reason to support a gamist abstraction. It's that you haven't sought an explanation that "makes perfect sense" but which may exist outside the stereotype. And yes, I do mean to stereotype as defined as a conventional, standardized, and oversimplified conception.And not to have everyone think that this specific problem drives me nuts and leaves me awake at nights. But it's a good example as any of a gamist element added to D&D which informed the fiction from the top down, dictating the pattern by which heroes act and evolve in the story, instead of using the rules to build for yourself from bottom up how the heroes behave in the story.As long as some people keep insisting that there is always a good peg to fit in the hole provided, they will never, ever understand the desire to design a bigger hole, or a more stretchy hole (innately, not by exception-based houseruling) or an official build-your-own-hole into the game system.Bingo! Perhaps more specifically (I'm not sure), that the designers didn't seem to care that someone would even conceive of the idea of making a character without that +15 bonus (even though gamers were doing it in systems like 3.X, still are, and probably always will be)</blockquote>

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