NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9716441" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's good - thank you!Yeah, this is the sort of thing I have in mind in talking about how demanding Sorensen's principles are.Edwards is sensitive to this issue, too, in his <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">simulationism essay</a> (and to be honest that's probably where I learned to think about it clearly in the context of RPGs, as opposed to the philosophical analysis of counterfactuals). He gives the example of the hit location roll, which typically is made after the attack and parry have been resolved, but reaches back into the past to give us additional information.Right. Which is why initiative and action economy are such big deals in process sim design.It's no coincidence that Rolemaster has two rules for resolving Fireball (its ordinary rule, reiterated across editions and a statistical variation on that rule found in War Law and used for larger skirmishes and battles); but has endless variations on its initiative rules and action economy, across the editions and published in the Rolemaster Companions.At my own table, in my 19 years of playing RM, the initiative issue - where the breakdown between simultaneous/continuous resolution and the initiative rules would manifest itself - would come up from time to time. We called it "initiative purge", and regarded it as a deficiency. But various modifications made to our own initiative system over the years didn't fully eliminate it - Edwards is right to note it as a challenging technical issue.Interesting, RM does not have the RQ hit location issue, because it doesn't do attack, parry, damage in time sequence. In the fiction, the attack is made - and then we pause the fiction while attack and crit (which determines location) are rolled - and then we restart the clock and find out what happened in the fiction. That didn't cause any issues in our play, unlike the initiative purge.</blockquote>

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