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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6989177" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] - I agree that the rules structure around action economy and turn-taking can be a burden on RPGing as opposed to boardgaming. You would have seen I at least alluded to that in my post a bit upthread that you gave XP to, with my comment about the player who doesn't interact with terrain until is "mechanised" as difficult terran, blocking terrain etc.The only system I've GMed a lot of that has cyclical initiative is 4e. Before that I GMed a lot of Rolemaster, which tries to emulate continuous resolution, although does have an intiative-and-declaration phase which occasionally produces wonky results. (Eg because parrying is a % activity, and so is moving, you can get weird situations where you can move almost up to an enemy and have a reasonable defence against them; but move that little bit further and there's a steep drop-off in defence until the next declaration phase comes around. The analogue in 5e would be: if the T-Rex is 40' away and has 10' reach,, you can close to within its reach while dodging; whereas if its 45' away, closing to within its reach will leave you with no defence at all.)I'm now pretty used to cyclic initiative. The main thing for me that anchors it in the fiction is terrain/positioning. Although sometimes this is "imaginary" (because of the stop-motion nature of resolution) 4e has a lot of off-turn actions to reduce this sense a bit, but also things like walls, drops, cover etc are "real" and get used a lot. (I've never had more verticality in my combats than with 4e. <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?358025-Session-Report-Against-the-(Frost)-Giants" target="_blank">Here's a post</a> about how the "rift" level of G2 went, and it illustrates the sort of verticality I have in mind, including a fight with a dragon where it took cover under the PCs' flying Thundercloud Tower. I don't know how much that approximates towards the ideal you're looking for.)I just started a thread about this - "Clouds, cubes and 'hitting'". You should drop by it! (You may already have - I haven't looked at it yet since posting.)I think the reason you are getting push-back is because you are choosing to define RPGing in a way that not everyone agrees with.Vincent Baker is a guy who knows a thing or two about RPGing - he's clearly in the top 10, mauybe top 5, of influential RPG designers ever. As per the links I've posted upthread, he doesn't define RPGing the way you do (roughly, lots of colour). So when I (or some other poster) thinks of RPGing in a way differently from you and closer to Vincent Baker, we're hardly in bad company.If you want to debate what RPGing is or isn't, maybe you could at least engage with some other ideas about it. Eg: RPGing = player takes on an individual perspective within the shared fiction, combined with that fiction matters to resolution. Flavour text of ogres is pretty orthogonal to this. (I mean, MtG has built up a huge amount of flavour text. It's still a boardgame.)</blockquote>

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