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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8963024" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This treads dangerous close to illusionism again. You're just dancing around &quot;those people want to be lied to&quot; again, and that's where it usually turns insulting. There has got to be some way to make whatever this point is without suggesting that it's flawed.I think realism is actually orthogonal to the simulationist impulse. People often like it, but it isn't a necessary part of the system. [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] put it well here:Mechanics create fiction without recourse to any player stating what occurs. They take in the existing board state, a declared action, and output a new board state*. Thus, whatever they say about the world (and as importantly, whatever incentives they create) are true. The impulse to &quot;realism&quot; comes up when they mechanics produce an outcome someone finds dissonant and wants to change the underlying mechanics to avoid it...but that's an attempt to create a specific kind of resulting fictional world, not a comment on the process. Hitpoints can support a lot of fictions. but not ones where getting stabbed by a sword is particularly lethal. You can imagine a wuxia or xinxia derived setting where all adventurers are assumed to be engaged in body cultivation, and just regenerate regularly until they run of qi, for example. Fundamentally, the rules are designed to produce a game, and the game plays however the rules allow it to and a setting follows.The fiction is a projection of the mechanics. It isn't important that HP are a terrible model of real-world injury (or even more book-narrative takes on injury), it's necessary that whatever the setting has to say about injury aligns with HP, once they're the given mechanic.*This is cycle is actually the biggest constraint on rules design in that kind of system, specifically because it requires temporal consistency and a strict relationship between the decision to act and the action.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8963024, member: 6690965"] This treads dangerous close to illusionism again. You're just dancing around "those people want to be lied to" again, and that's where it usually turns insulting. There has got to be some way to make whatever this point is without suggesting that it's flawed. I think realism is actually orthogonal to the simulationist impulse. People often like it, but it isn't a necessary part of the system. [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] put it well here: Mechanics create fiction without recourse to any player stating what occurs. They take in the existing board state, a declared action, and output a new board state*. Thus, whatever they say about the world (and as importantly, whatever incentives they create) are true. The impulse to "realism" comes up when they mechanics produce an outcome someone finds dissonant and wants to change the underlying mechanics to avoid it...but that's an attempt to create a specific kind of resulting fictional world, not a comment on the process. Hitpoints can support a lot of fictions. but not ones where getting stabbed by a sword is particularly lethal. You can imagine a wuxia or xinxia derived setting where all adventurers are assumed to be engaged in body cultivation, and just regenerate regularly until they run of qi, for example. Fundamentally, the rules are designed to produce a game, and the game plays however the rules allow it to and a setting follows. The fiction is a projection of the mechanics. It isn't important that HP are a terrible model of real-world injury (or even more book-narrative takes on injury), it's necessary that whatever the setting has to say about injury aligns with HP, once they're the given mechanic. *This is cycle is actually the biggest constraint on rules design in that kind of system, specifically because it requires temporal consistency and a strict relationship between the decision to act and the action. [/QUOTE]

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