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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9315933" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>There are plenty of reasons why! I don't even see why that is controversial. This goes all the way down to pre-RPG "make believe" where the complete lack of rules would support all sorts of social interactions but couldn't resolve two players disagreeing over the relative merit in the story of one of their characters being shot by the other guy. </p><p></p><p>What you are simulating through tabletop RPG play is not symmetrical. Combat is not equivalent to a social encounter. Again, the more we talk it out the less like combat it's going to actually be, whereas the more we talk it out the more like a reified non-abstract social encounter it becomes. This is exactly what Brennan is saying.</p><p></p><p>If it were true that you could improvise combat as easily as a social encounter, then we would expect wargamers to have gravitated right from the start to combat as conversation and combat as improvised theater. We would expect that the more an RPG player cared about combat as the focus of play, the less detailed the combat mechanics of the system would become. But historically, the opposite happened. Combat mechanics got less and less abstract through the first 15-20 years of RPGs existing precisely because people were unhappy with the abstractions of the early systems for speed of play and they wanted grittier and less abstract combat that more closely resembled their own understanding of combat. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Are we locked into the mindset that D&D's mechanics are an arbitrary result of history, a mere accident, and that they persisted only through familiarity? Because I don't think that is remotely the case.</p><p></p><p>Consider the stealth situation. We could come up with a game that dealt with the issues of stealth in a non-abstract way by applying factors like distance, hard and soft concealment, and multiple types of sensory tells like heat, noise, electromagnetic radiation and odor. We could have a system that hard deals with tests for like can you fit in the locker or the ventilation shaft. I'm not sure I agree with the creator of Mothership that because stealth is important you don't need rules for it, but I do fully understand as someone who has thought about why getting a more concrete and less abstract stealth and evasion system working is hard why they want to avoid single highly abstract roles if stealth is important to the game, and why they would throw up their hands at making a system detailed enough to be both concrete and useable in play and so be motivated in what sounds like a fairly non-crunching system to leave it up to GM fiat. </p><p></p><p>But again, this has to do with the fact that the various things you are trying to simulate in a tabletop RPG aren't symmetrical and interchangeable but are in fact minigames with their own very different characteristics because the reality is that combat, stealth and conversation in the real world all work in different ways and so a single system that treats them all as just abstract tests is going to be bad at all of them.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9315933, member: 4937"] There are plenty of reasons why! I don't even see why that is controversial. This goes all the way down to pre-RPG "make believe" where the complete lack of rules would support all sorts of social interactions but couldn't resolve two players disagreeing over the relative merit in the story of one of their characters being shot by the other guy. What you are simulating through tabletop RPG play is not symmetrical. Combat is not equivalent to a social encounter. Again, the more we talk it out the less like combat it's going to actually be, whereas the more we talk it out the more like a reified non-abstract social encounter it becomes. This is exactly what Brennan is saying. If it were true that you could improvise combat as easily as a social encounter, then we would expect wargamers to have gravitated right from the start to combat as conversation and combat as improvised theater. We would expect that the more an RPG player cared about combat as the focus of play, the less detailed the combat mechanics of the system would become. But historically, the opposite happened. Combat mechanics got less and less abstract through the first 15-20 years of RPGs existing precisely because people were unhappy with the abstractions of the early systems for speed of play and they wanted grittier and less abstract combat that more closely resembled their own understanding of combat. Are we locked into the mindset that D&D's mechanics are an arbitrary result of history, a mere accident, and that they persisted only through familiarity? Because I don't think that is remotely the case. Consider the stealth situation. We could come up with a game that dealt with the issues of stealth in a non-abstract way by applying factors like distance, hard and soft concealment, and multiple types of sensory tells like heat, noise, electromagnetic radiation and odor. We could have a system that hard deals with tests for like can you fit in the locker or the ventilation shaft. I'm not sure I agree with the creator of Mothership that because stealth is important you don't need rules for it, but I do fully understand as someone who has thought about why getting a more concrete and less abstract stealth and evasion system working is hard why they want to avoid single highly abstract roles if stealth is important to the game, and why they would throw up their hands at making a system detailed enough to be both concrete and useable in play and so be motivated in what sounds like a fairly non-crunching system to leave it up to GM fiat. But again, this has to do with the fact that the various things you are trying to simulate in a tabletop RPG aren't symmetrical and interchangeable but are in fact minigames with their own very different characteristics because the reality is that combat, stealth and conversation in the real world all work in different ways and so a single system that treats them all as just abstract tests is going to be bad at all of them. [/QUOTE]
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