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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9589776" data-attributes="member: 2067">One of the things that seems to be a little...slid over...in conversations like this is how "reifying" game elements helps in game play.Like, treating a hobgoblin statblock in a baldly mechanical way is like pointing out that Romeo never really drinks poison and doesn't really die on stage and it's all really just artifice made to elicit an emotional response and this is factually correct and then you can see Juliet's decision to drink poison with an analytic distance that allows you to meditate on the themes of tragedy and conflict. It is just a tool, after all. It's not REALLY poison. But, treating the hobgoblin and the longsword as props helps you to actually feel the tension in the scene and embody the mental state of the characters and feel and react as they would react and to understand how it feels to have your love ripped from this mortal coil by the tragic act of your own deception, how it is to be caught in the crossfire of family rivalries, to imagine what would drive someone to kill themselves after their lover did the same. The poison is real, the love is real, the families are real, the characters are real. If one of the goals of an RPG is to embody a character in a context and to act as they would act, the latter stance is useful, even if it involves some smoke and mirrors. An analytical perspective on game elements isn't the kind of perspective most characters have, it's a perspective that players have. To brave knight Lionheart, the hobgoblin wielding a longsword isn't a collection of numbers in an encounter designed to sap 70% of resources. It's a hobgoblin wielding a longsword. And every game element that makes it seem less like a hobgoblin wielding a longsword is eroding (sometimes to a small degree, sometimes to a significant degree) the sense that I am the brave knight Lionheart. You can get away with some of this - there is some distance between a prop sword and a real sword. We don't ACTUALLY want to kill our actors. But the '24 edition sneaks a little bit farther away from viewing these things as props and a bit closer to that analytical, distant perspective of these things as game mechanics.</blockquote>

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