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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4227899" data-attributes="member: 42582">What is the basis for this generalisation? Yes, a certain sort of player will treat a non-simulationist ruleset as if it were simulationist. They should play simulationist games.If what you say was true of all players, then there would be no players of HeroWars - which expressly states that, during the course of an extended contest, Action Points measure no ingame property.What this won't give you is a horde of foes, all of whom are threatening (in terms of attack output) but some of whom are destined to fall before a single blow of the protagonists.As I've said in another post, minion status is just like AntiFate points. It could be implimented in various ways. Minion rules are one such way.  Simulationism + Rules = Ridiculous. That is not a win for simulationism - its a reductio on it.But there is not, in the relevant sense, a particular class of creature, because minoin status is not itself an ingame category. So what we have is that some orcs are lucky and some unlucky. But for the PCs (as opposed to the players, who can be expected to read the rulebooks) there is no basis for predicting whether any given orc will be lucky or not.This is not true, because D&D "damage" is not always physical damage. We know that some of it is the wearing down of a foe, the purely abstract reduction of luck, etc.But not all hits have to be treated as these sorts of hits. Welcome to fortune-in-the-middle.But the rules don't say that a peasant with a spork can kill a demon minion 5% of the time, for at least two reasons: first, the rules don't define the spork as a weapon; two, the rules aren't intended for the resolution of NPC vs NPC combat.I expect the rules to tell me how to play the game. NPC vs NPC combat is not playing the game - it is the GM generating backstory. (Now, if one of those NPCs is a PC-extension - eg a cohort or a pet - that is a different matter. We don't yet know how 4e handles such things. I'm pretty confient that it just won't be a question of taking the monster stats and applying them as if they were PC stats.)</blockquote>

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