COMING SOON! -- The Awfully Cheerful Engine on Kickstarter! An action comedy RPG inspired by cheerful tabletop games of the 80s! With a foreword by Sandy 'Ghostbusters' Petersen, and VTT support!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7638899" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Oh man, we're having this conversation...yet again.It isn't just HP that are the problem for someone trying to model actual world biology and physics/collisions between objects.  Its the whole thing.  D&D's discrete parts (HP, AC, Attack Rolls) push against that idea as well as the combat round (be it 1 minute, 10 seconds, or 6 seconds).  Worse still for the effort, when those 4 intersect?  Good_Night.Hit Points - Not meat; some indecipherable amalgamation of combat prowess soup, physical resilience, mental resilience, divine sponsorship/protection, magical wards.AC - Not damage mitigation; some indecipherable amalgamation of avoidance, parrying, reflexes, nimbleness, other protections.Attack Rolls - Not a discrete attack; a combination of pressure which includes feints, footwork to take angles and wrongfoot, and actual attacks (multiples).Rounds - Even at 6 seconds, the number of actual blows that can be delivered by a skilled combatant against a non-sentient target overwhelms the D&D PC build and action resolution mechanics.  Therefore, it should scale downward (if we're looking for any kind of fidelity to real world combat exchanges) BASED ON THE THREAT/SKILL OF THE DEFENDER...not the prowess of the offender.  Further still, the offense offered up by an offender should typically scale upward as time progresses.  Martial combatants probe their opponents early, determining responses, establishing distance, establishing timing.  This is why you almost universally see a typical bell curve in combat in terms of output.  Time piles up and comfort increases, output increasing in proportion.  Then, as time piles up further, gas tanks become depleted and output decreases in proportion.[HR][/HR]Sum total:If you're parameterizing a model for actual physical combat, D&D's collection of combat mechanics would be just about the last place you'd look to...because not only do they model absolutely nothing well (in terms of real world fidelity)...but they actively push back against very fundamental aspects of martial combat (such as the bell curve of output).As I've mentioned before, in my opinion (as someone who has actually been a real world combatant for much of my life), things like Minionization and Roles (informal, "player-facing", hierarchical arrangements are fundamental to the world of martial combatants...despite the Blue Belt being formally hierarchically below the Black Belt...everyone knows that THIS particular Blue Belt has a borderline indefeatable Guard and his Choke game is off the charts...that Black Belt wants no part of him) and Defender mechanics in 4e better reflect the relationships of combatants in the real world than anything D&D has offered before or since.  Not to mention the fact that Minionization elegantly (in terms of ease-of-use, table handling time, cognitive workload) models the genre logic of mythical fantasy action adventure (in the ways [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] mentions above).  The idea that these two things are seen as grotesque offerings by a segment of D&D culture is a source of endless frustration for me.</blockquote>

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