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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7843726" data-attributes="member: 996">Not how it seemed in the discussions I found of ludonarrative dissonance.  Certainly, mechanics contribute to gameplay, but, also, clearly, so do other things - at least in the native contexts of the term, video games.  In TTRPGs, other things, like the DM, will clearly contribute on both the ludic and narrative planes.In a CRPG, there's a narrative established by the game, the role (or available roles you choose from) you'll be playing, the backstory of that character, their motivation, beliefs, objective - and, via needing to complete certain things to advance, and cut-scenes between them, and other devices I may not be familiar with, an actual 'story' that unfolds in a certain way or branching set of possible ways.That's a lot of establishing narrative.The dissonance comes in when the gameplay that emerges from the game's mechanics & player's choices is at odds with that story.  If the story paints the PC as a noble hero, unwilling to kill without cause, and the play is open to the PC just slaughtering his way through levels, bystanders included, was one instance I saw.That would only seem to apply to RPGs when they're being payed in a 'storytelling mode' from the GM side of the screen (as opposed to troupe-style storytelling), or when there's a pre-packaged adventure with an over-arching story presented.So, I might see ludonarrative dissonance happening in the context of a TTRPG, in an 'Adventure Path' style product.  But, not in the details of one mechanic.Like I said, you go on way too much about this sorta stuff (also, in this context, it vanishes as soon as I hit 'reply,' so really pretty useless).I'd prefer to focus on any relevant points...So if you were reading about an abstract concept of a ball, and it said "a 'ball' can be any roughly spherical object used in a game, whether made from synthetic or natural rubber, leather, or even horsehair" should that really be taken to exclude ping-pong balls, because they're plastic?  And, if you did take it that way, would it invalidate the abstraction?Because that seems an odd and unnecessary bar to decoding the concept. The point is that you are making a category error.  You expect two different things to be the same, and consider the fact that they are different a problem.If you are going to use an acronym, please type it out at least once.  To me "IRV" means "Independent Re-entry Vehicle."  Because child of the cold war.I believe we've gone over this quite thoroughly.  The lethality of an attack or hazard is measured in hit points.  And the capacity of a creature to minimize that lethality is also measured in hit points.But the creature is not an attack/hazard, and the attack/hazard is not a creature.Immunity/resistance and vulnerability are qualities of the creature that make certain attacks more or less lethal against it.Damage type is a quality of attack that can be referenced in determining if those creature qualities apply.It's all at least as consistent and sensible as anything else in D&D.(Which, no, is not saying much.)Futile.  I use browser accessibility settings:  everything appears in the same font, size, and color.Try stating the point clearly and concisely.Only if you believe that list was exhaustive.  I see nothing in the phrasing to imply that must be the case.  Any argument that rests on a natural language list being exhaustive, when it doesn't explicitly state that it is such, is doomed to failure. Find another leg to stand on.  That entire line of reasoning fails before it starts.More and more will be cut, as you add more and more extraneous verbiageIf you try to state you case concisely, you may finally realize you have nothing.Look up abstraction.You don't need to know, in the intellectual sense, that you've been stabbed in order to react to it. How do you know to snatch your hand away when you touch a hot surface?  You don't, it's a reflex.  After, you may or may not know, for certain, it was a hot surface - it may have been a chemical burn, for instance.  But, if you were innately vulnerable to one, and mystically resistant to the other, they would likely be very different experiences.Maybe they'd just get a feeling that "their luck was running out" - you do hear characters say that sorta thing. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />No, I'm saying, because hps are an abstract (look it up) mechanic, it doesn't matter which of those factors (and/or other similar factors), in which proportion, 'really' happened.  The point of an abstract mechanic is that you /don't/ need to deal with those details.Same or different proportions doesn't really matter - they could all come up in any specific instance, they could be applied in very different proportions in the same hypothetical instance, because, for one possible instance, the available proportion is different at that moment.  The point of, instead, tracking every possible factor that might help the character avoid the lethal effect of an attack, would be to model the combat in excruciating detail, but that's not practical nor of any great value in the TTRPG in question.  So there is no practical worthwhile point to having any one of those things modeled in detail (nor any one of them explicitly excluded), that's why we use the abstract measure of hps, instead.</blockquote>

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