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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzzard" data-source="post: 1191684" data-attributes="member: 3003">I can certainly sympathize with your plight. I did something like that once to a DM, though not quite to the degree. I managed to crit the BBEGs main lackey for an instant kill. Of course the BBEG being a necromancer brought him back anyway, so it's not really comparable. The DM was not amused at the time however. But I guess I look at it as being more 'realistic'. Odd stuff happens in reality. I suppose the narrativist style doesn't look for this. I think I prefer my play world to be objective. I don't think I could ever get into a world which had a 'constructionalist' feel to it like that. Popularity has a major thing to do with it because it serves as a criteria by which relevance can be judged. Game systems which have no players can hardly be thought of a relevant. Game rules can't very well exist in a vacuum. There have to be players, and some consideration of this has to be involved in the understanding. It is certainly true that the spectrum of rules weight is wide. However the 'experienced width' is not so great. Thus people judging the relative weightiness will be based on their experience, which will generally fit into that much smaller spectrum. I suppose a good comparison for this would be temperature scales. Celcius and Kelvin use the same units. They, however, drastically change the points of focus (by setting the zero value). In day to day life, absolute zero is irrelevant, thus celcius is much more useful. Zero is cold, 100 is hot. This is all quite straightforward, and provides a reasonably wide spectrum of temperatures which people can relate to. Yes, absolute zero (ok say 1 K since you can't get to 0) is REALLY DAMNED COLD, but it is well beyond almost anyone's experience. To get back to game terms, you suggest using a Kelvin measure of rules weight. Sure, in an absolute sense it is valid. It just isn't valid when compared to most people's experience. buzzard</blockquote>

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