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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 4137885" data-attributes="member: 32164">I think the real problem is that people always bring up the gamist/narrativist/simulationist garbage as a way of disparaging either the game or someone else's playstyle.If you regard yourself as a simulationist, you have to either decide how the martial daily powers work. They're in the game for gamist (i.e. balance) reasons. If you want player decisions to be character decisions, then the rationale that they're based on some external power source, like magic or mojo, works fine. If you want them to be based purely in skill and luck, you have to invent a rationale that works - for some reason, martial daily powers can only be used once a day.A pure so-called "narrativist" has no problem with the "for the good of the story" argument.Someone who doesn't mind anime has no problem with the "martial magic" explanation.Drawing a distinciton between a "player decision" and a "character decision" works if you prefer a more "realistic" explanation for how the powers work.If you want a "realistic explanation" (style preference) for a gamist element (daily martial powers), you can use either a gamist (it just is), narrativist (for the good of the story), or various combination (wuxia magic, occurrence of rare circumstances determined for character by his player) explanations. All of them work perfectly well for different people. Personally, I don't like "it just is" and "wuxia magic" so I adopt a combination of  'rare occurence determined by player' and 'for the good of the story.' As a martial artist and swordfighter, I can accept that your best moves are hard to execute reliably. As someone who likes to use D&D to emulate my favorite fiction, I can accept that, for dramatic purposes, certain things shouldn't happen all the time. This is the rationalization that works for me (and for Ari, I think).It's not that you can't come up with rules in the game for how often these things happen that aren't quite as "gamist" as "once per encounter" or "once a day." It's that the added effort of tracking all the variables that determine the frequency just isn't worth it for the vast majority of gamers. Especially not when a much easier, more fluid system is just a slight shift of mindset away.If you can't come up with your own explanation, you have to expect that many other people's explanations won't work for you. If something doesn't, the only response is "sorry, can't buy that." But then you shouldn't be surprised when after 50 or 60 suggestions, someone says "maybe finding a rationalization that works for you is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole."You also shouldn't hide your personal preference behind fancy-sounding phrases like "Sorry, that's not simulationist enough for me." Because, in the end, since everyone has different defintions of what constitutes "simulation," that means nothing.My (slightly more than) two coppers.</blockquote>

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