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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6153585" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, the 1st RPG was D&D, and it contained mechanical elements that permitted the player to exercise control on elements of the shared fiction outside the strict limits of his/her PC's perspective and abilites.For instance, the player could (in most D&D campaigns  - contrast RQ, which changes this rule in the interests of increasing process simulation) specify the occupation of his/her PC's parents. In many cases, the player could specify his/her PC's ability scores to some degree. The player could earn XP, and was expected in the play of the game to make decisions by reference to XP to be earned, although this bore no connection to his/her PC's motivations.There were also hit points, saving throws and the action economy, of course.For the same reason that James Bond takes cover from gunfire even though we, the audience, know that he is in no danger of dying. It's a genre conceit.In my view a good RPG will create mechanical incentives to relieve the pressure on the players to maintain their "genre blindness". In a system which uses wounds rather than "buckets of hit points", but then uses Fate Points to mitigate wounds, you can rule that points can only be spent in pursuit of a declared PC or player goal (HARP is an example of this). So fighters won't hurl themselves over cliffs willy-nilly.4e, which does use a "bucket of hit points" system, tries to deal with the issue at the level of encounter design instead. That is, it strongly discourages the GM from framing challenges in which nothing is at stake but getting down the cliff. So the player of the fighter has an incentive not to jump over the cliff because there are other stakes in the situation (be they combat-related stakes, or other dimensions of a skill challenge), and losing hit points carelessly will make it harder to gain those stakes. (Conversely, where in the fiction there is nothing but a cliff, the GM is encouraged not to frame it as a challenge at all, but instead to simply "say yes" and free-narrate the PC's successful climb down the cliff.)Balesir indicates another take on this issue:When you say "that's not what the rules say" which edition are you talking about? Classic D&D doesn't addresss this issue one way or another, but it certainly does not confine the resolution of falls to 1d6 per 10' fallen - the principal example of GM adjudication in the Molday Basic GM's section, for instance, suggests adjudicating a fall based on a fiated percentage chance of survival.And the 4e DMG has the folowing bit of text (p 40) under the heading "legitimate targets":When a power has an effect that occurs upon hitting a target — or reducing a target to 0 hit points — the power functions only when the target in question is a meaningful threat. Characters can gain no benefit from carrying a sack of rats in hopes of healing their allies by hitting the rats. When a power’s effect involves a character’s allies, use common sense when determining how many allies can be affected. D&D is a game about adventuring parties fighting groups of monsters, not the clash of armies. A warlord’s power might, read strictly, be able to give a hundred “allies” a free basic attack, but that doesn’t mean that warlord characters should assemble armies to march before them into the dungeon. In general, a power’s effect should be limited to a squad-sized group — the size of your player character group plus perhaps one or two friendly NPCs — not hired soldiers or lantern-bearers.This is the analgoue of rules on conflict-framing in games like HeroWars/Quest and Marvel Heroic RP: that is, before the action resolution rules are engaged (in this case, the use of a power) everyone at the table (with the GM having the loudest voice) has to be agreed that the framing of the situation makes sense in terms of genre, shared expectations for play, etc. Bags of rats, and extraploations of the skirmish action economy and the warlord's interaction with it to whole armies, fail that test.I think it's pretty reasonable to say that having your fighter PC jump over a cliff "just because" is likewise failing the minimum threshold on acceptable framing sufficient to engage the action resolution mecahnics.Well, I've read D&D that way at least since I read Gygax's characterisatin of hit points, saving throws and the combat action economy along these lines.Gygax didn't generalise the point to the non-combat action economy, but we easily could. Why does it take 1 turn to do this, that and the other with never a minute saved or wasted here or there? Is it because the PCs operate with a degree of mechanical precision that would shame your average robot? Or is it because the real considerations that govern the elapse of time in the game "are intangible to the characters in the game world and exist only to regulate the running of the game in the external ("real") world"? I take it for granted that it's the latter.And I'm not the only one. You can see it in every designer, from the late 70s on, who wrote a D&D-ish RPG system but purged out all the metagame mechanics in favour of simulationist ones: RQ, RM, Harn and countless others. And what do so many of these games have in common?<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Replace saving throws with simulationinst skill or ability checks (RM is a bit weak on this; 3E was the only version of D&D to turn in this direction); </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Try to make a fundamentally metagame action economy (the "combat round") behave as much as possible like a process simulation (RQ with its strike ranks; the billion-odd initiative and action systems designed for RM over the years; etc); </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Replace hit points with wounds (Harn, as per Balesir's post), or try to replace D&D's "bucket of hits points" model with a hit point mechanic that will play like a wound system (RQ); or a bit of both (RM, which uses a "concussion hit" conferring body development skilll to measure fatigue and blood loss, but overlays that with a system of wounds-as-debuffs which are the real threat to most combatants); </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Adopt a simulationist system of PC advancement (Traveller basically has none, taking the view that people don't change much once they have the bulk of their career behind them; RQ has its famous "roll under after using" mechanic; RM uses XP and levels, but its criteria for XP award are clearly meant to be simulationinst, taking the view that "hard training in-the-field" is how you get better at things like fighting and spell casting).</li> </ul>The people who designed and played these systems - and they're not a small number of RPGers  - weren't misreading D&D, or confused about it's mechanics. They wanted less metagame and more "character's perspective and abilities". That makes these games more process-simulationist, and less metagame-y, than any edition of D&D has ever been. (Despite it's reputation for process-sim, 3E is far more metagame-y than RQ or even RM.) It doesn't make them purer examples of RPGs, though. It's not as if D&D was trying to do this thing, but failed because it had too much metagame. D&D wasn't setting out to be a process-sim game. (There's also the point, made upthread by Doug McCrae at post 21, that in Gygaxian D&D the players routinely used out-of-character knowledge. Players were expected to read the MM, for instance, though I think many tables regarded it as bad form to actually consult the book during play!)Which is to say, RPGing isn't fundamentally about one very narrow conception of what it is to "play a character".</blockquote>

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