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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4510994" data-attributes="member: 74166">But let's say you have a square and a triangle. Not the same thing, are they? But you can still talk about area and perimeter as it applies to both of them, because they're closed plane figures, and all closed plane figures have areas and perimeters.The story and the mechanics both articulate relationships between ideas. Story in the default human set-theory model, with maybe a little bit of comparison - Company X arrived before Company Y and after Company Z - and mechanics expressing more complex numerical relationships. But you can interpret the results of the mechanics at the story level - if you run the starting positions of Companies X, Y, and Z, the terrain they had to cover, and their average traveling speeds, you could work out what order they arrived in. Curse you, lack of nested quotes.But really, you're undermining your own argument. If mechanics and story really were different, then nobody would be fussing about keeping them apart. I mean, does it even make sense to say "whenever Democracy gets in the way of a Triangle, the Triangle should win"? Of course not, since Democracy and Triangle have nothing to do with each other.But story and mechanics are trying to address the same thing: the behavior of the game world. Um, the DM always adjudicates the results. What kind of D&D are you playing that the DM doesn't?The wall isn't between mechanics and story but should be between explicit and implicit skills. Implicit skills have hooks that need to be specially removed by the DM (for example, an unclimbable wall, or a Beefeater-style undistractable guard) while explicit skills have hooks that need to be specially placed by the DM. Explicit skills, because they are deliberately placed, are more story-related, since the DM is responsible for creating the story. Having them draw from the same pool as the implicit skills means that characters have to sacrifice their general utility in the world for the ability to participate in the story, which I don't believe is a desirable outcome.Next you'll be saying there's a barrier because somebody creates a city inspector and makes him a Rogue, to model his stealth, agility, and general ability to foil locks and misdirect criminals. But wait! Isn't a "rogue" an outlaw? How can you make someone who works not only within the law but to uphold the law and call him a "rogue"?!The names for mechanical features are intended to evoke certain broad ideas to make them easy to remember, but they encompass more than just those ideas, so they don't always map perfectly onto the story. Nor should they, because that would mean sacrificing utility for the sake of preventing  a few seconds' confusion.I'm sorry, I thought you were raising those dissonances so you could have them resolved, not because you wanted to complain about how the books didn't resolve them.</blockquote>

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