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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9703017" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, that was my first proposition, so we don't have a lot to disagree on.My point is does "getting into the weeds" actually model reality in any way given that the modifiers are typically arbitrarily chosen by the designer and not actually tested or drawn from any real experience or data.  We might can say, "Yeah, it's reasonable that longer ranges mean being harder to hit" but we can't really say -3 to hit on the 3D6 bell curve produces the result we would observe in reality.  There is no testing to suggest that that 3D6 range of values represents the fine grain we need.  Maybe we need 5d6 so that -1 or -2 isn't as gross of a penalty.  Why was 3D6 chosen?  Because it was convenient, not because it reflected a good approximation of observations.  What I'm trying to say is that taking in all these factors - getting "into the weeds" - soothes your sense of disbelief because it checks off the boxes that you feel are intuitive as the factors that would go into some sort of solution, but that focus on the process kind of obscures the answers its throwing out.  It makes it less intuitive where the answer you end up with came from, or what range of answers and with what probabilities you were actually producing.  The outcome gets hidden behind the process, and it's the outcome that determines realism, not the process.  We're modelling something but plugging all these variables into the process, but it turns out that when we get to the outcome not only by that point do we not know whether the answer is realistic, we know longer care.  The process has convinced us that this is close enough because well it was detailed and plugged in reasonable variables.  Whether we crunched those reasonable variables into reasonable answers is a wholly different matter.Pheonix Command is my favorite example here because it's so pretentious about this process and all the variables and factors that go into it.  But does it really produce anything like the right number of casualties per bullet fired or the right range of battlefield injuries per bullet that struck the target?  Most players don't actually even concern themselves with that.  It feels right.  It feels like it's taking the right things into consideration.  So you accept the answer largely without context.  And that's what it's actually producing.  Satisfaction rather than correctness.  If you were to start deriving tables for common situations so that you could map a single random D% to all the possible outcomes of all the Pheonix Command results for that situation, I think a lot of weirdness would actually come out and the recognition that the percentages assigned to the likelihood of each outcome first not only didn't match the realistic percentages assignable to each possible outcome, but that the entire complex process for that situation could be approximated by a simpler process (the single die mapping to the final table being a case in point).  Ultimately, the question is, "Is Pheonix command actually more realistic than D&D with very large ranges of possible damage for each weapon hit?" is not one I find easy to answer (or that anyone really wants to answer).  Like if behind the scenes I was using some simpler system like D20 + Bonus >= DC and then just rolling 1d45 for damage against targets with 10 hit points, and randomly assigning some hit location weighted to the severity of the damage, how long would it take to penetrate that black box and go "wait, those results aren't realistic!"?</blockquote>

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