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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6153690" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree with this at all. The rules aren't contextless. They are for something. The test is whether they succeed at that something.The encounter design guidelines of the game are a key part of that. (For instance, classic D&D rules tend to break down once you leave the dungeoneering environment. Apart from anything else, there's not much non-dungeoneering action resolution.)Two things. First, I talke about a table consensus on genre (with the GM having the lead). That is not the same as GM fiat.Second, not all rulesets will work with a "credibility constraint" on scene-framing. For example, that sort of notion has no work to do in Runequest or Traveller. But it is pretty important to a whole range of resolution systems, including the ones I mentioned, plus 4e skill challenges.For instance - can a high level fighter use an Endurance check to withstand shoving his hand into a super-hot forge in which an artefact is being reforged? In my game, the answer was yes. At other tables, the answer might be no. Deciding what sort of tone you're going for, and what the parameters of that are, are part of playing a game in which narrative control is (i) shared, and (ii) not predetermined by the mechanics. And that's actually a fairly large swathe of RPG play.I don't see any evidence of that in the OD&D > AD&D transition. And the only evidence in the Gygax AD&D > 2nd ed AD&D transition that comes to mind is the change in the XP rules. Hit points and saving throws didn't change. Nor did the action economy.My point is that I don't concede your last sentence. "Playing one's character"can have a range of meanings in an RPG, of which hardcore actor stance with no metagame mechanics is only one version.Of the systems I know, the only one that really gets close to that ideal at the mechanical level is Basic RP (CoC, RQ etc). Of course, in actual play CoC is chock full of metagaming, such as the players having their PCs undertake madcap investigations that no sane person would; but there is no mechanical expression of this author-stance play.Because it makes the game better? (For me? For others too?)As is often the case, I find myself wondering why you don't play one of the dozens (hundreds?) of excellent process sim games out there. Given that (from your posts) you seem to play D&D mostly below double-digit levels, I think Runequest would probably be a pretty reasonable fit. I don't know GURPS so well, but from what I do know it might also be a good fit. Why stick with a game that either has to be interpreted as metagame heavy in its combat mechanics (D&D hp) or else leads to absurd fiction in which the protagonists are nothing like the humans they are superficially depicted as (every person walking around with a bucketful of hit points and an internal hit point meter)?I know you use VP/WP, but do you use dismemberment rules? If not, do the characters in your gameworld ever wonder to themselves why, in all these many swordfights that have taken place, no one ever had a hand or arm severed? An eye poked out? Some other cause to use the Regeneration spell? (Unless a vorpal sword or sword of sharpness - two of the most powerful magic weapons known to mortals - is in use. And even then no one is ever blinded.)How many bard PCs have lost fingers in sword fights and therefore found themselves unable to play the lute anymore?However one handles such oddities - and genre blindness is the default mode, in my experience - those of us who treat hp as predominantly metagame, or who use encounter powers, are doing the same thing. At least in my case, I assume that the combat rules aren't the be all and end all of what can happen in the world - some NPCs somewhere have been blinded by a blade, just not on screen very often - but rather the action resolution rules set the parameters of what will happen to the PCs when their players engage the fiction via those rules. The rules set limits on the fiction to be narrated when the PCs are on stage, not limits on the causal capacities of entities within the gameworld.As soon as a PC bard can charge into battle without worrying about the risk of losing a finger (let alone more serious, and less class-specific, risks like dying of infections from wounds suffered), the equivalence between player and PC has been lost. But playing one's character needn't be confined to that equivalence. For at least some players, including many of those I've played with, "playing one's character" is as much about authorship as inhabitation. It's about presenting one's PC in a certain light at the table, and then pushing hard with that character and finding out what happens. Metagame mechanics are no special obstacle to that, and good ones can facilitate it.</blockquote>

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