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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5716395" data-attributes="member: 42582">My impression - and it's just from reading what people post on internet forums, not from any more systematic inquiry - is that the opinion you express here is pretty widespread. And a similar sort of outlook can be found in early discussions of saving throws (eg Roger Musson's "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive", which as far as I know was the first instance of a wound/vitality system based on CON/hp).But if you look at what Gygax actually says about saving throws in the DMG, it's not just about an arbitrary rather than a systematic assignment of saves to effects. Gygax says that (for example) the manacled fighter's successful save vs Dragon Breath can represent finding a cleft in the rock and taking some cover within it, or can represent the manacles breaking at the last minute. The same is not true of a Reflex save in 3E - as the name itself indicates, and as is reinforced by its relationship to the DEX stat, a successful Reflex save represents some sort of dodge or other feat of evasion and agility.And this has implications for the actual resolution of the action. Suppose a monk with the Evasion ability (it didn't have that name in AD&D, but the ability was there) successfully saves against a fireball while standing at ground zero, in a low-ceilinged room, and surrounded by orcs. The monk takes no damage; the orcs are badly burned. What happened in the fiction? In 3E, this produces the puzzle of what evasive manoeuvre the monk performed while never moving from his/her position. I've seen this issue become the subject of debate on message boards. In AD&D, though, there is no problem, because the rules don't attempt to dictate what a successful save vs a fireball means, other than the outcome. The rules oblige everyone at the table to agree that the monk is unhurt, but leave it open as to what account is to be given of how that came about. And the constraints on that account - did the monk use his/her mind powers? did the monk drop to the floor and pull an orc over him/her as a protective shield? etc - aren't themselves established by the mechanics to any very great degree.I have two responses to this.First, if you're right, then the contrast I was trying to draw in the OP becomes blunted, I agree. I didn't read Monte Cook's statement in the way that you did - especially as he went on to give as an example one component of the movement mechanics - but I'm not claiming to be a mindreader!Second, though, I still think that there is an interesting difference between the role that mechanics can play in establishing the content of the shared fiction - they can attempt to dictate it by modelling the fictional causatal processes to a greater or less extent (and this is what I took Monte to mean by talking about "rules as a basis for a shared reality"), or they can place parameters around it, by establishing certain outcomes as given, but leave it up to some other process (GM or player narrative authority, for example) to stipulate what actually happened in the fiction so as to produce that process. And I think the difference between AD&D and 3E saving throws is an example of that difference in the possible roles of mechanics.I can agree with this, but I still want to say that there are different ways of setting boundaries.I know it's not always helpful to use analogies, but I'll try. This one is drawn from jurisprudence. Consider a law that says "If you're unconscionable in the way you deal with other's confidential information with which you have been entrusted, you will be obliged to account to them". Now consider a law that, being motivated by the concern to hold parties to account for their unconscionable dealings with others' confidential information, establishes a technical cause of action for breach of confidence, with various elements that have to be proved, and various technical rules governing the relationship between those elements and the availability of a range of technically-defined remedies. Both laws set out to establish a civil remedy for unconscionable breaches of confidence, but it is generally accepted that they do so in very different ways, involve very different approaches to argument and adjudication, and so on.Likewise when it comes to setting boundaries in RPG narration. I think there is a big difference between a rule which says, on a certain occasion "OK, here's the outcome. Now you guys work out what happened in the fiction to engender that outcome," and a rule which models a fictional causal process that results in that outcome. Both contribute to the setting of boundaries, but in pretty different ways.I think the practical proof of this difference is the number of calls for Come and Get It to be an attack vs Will. Because this would then mean that the mechanics explain what the ingame causal process is whereby all the assailants rush the fighter. Whereas the unerrataed version of Come and Get It (which we still play with at my table) simply specifies an outcome - the assailants end up closer to the fighter - and leaves the account in the fiction of how that happened to be sorted out some other way (eg via the genre constraint approach of HeroQuest).When I see Monte talking about the rules as a basis for the shared reality of the gameworld, I get the "Come and Get It should be an attack vs Will vibe". As I said above in reply to DEFCON1 I may be misreading him. But I think his examples of climb mechanics tend to push in the direction of my reading.</blockquote>

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