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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8500907" data-attributes="member: 42582">As a piece of analysis this is incoherent - the fiction doesn't cause tallies of numbers on bits of paper sitting on my kitchen table to change!I've played D&D combats twice in the past 8 days. What actually happens is that players roll dice, apply modifiers, compare the resulting values to target numbers, determine hits or misses, on hits (or if there is damage on a miss) roll damage dice, and then compute damage totals that are subtracted from targets' hit point totals. That is a pretty complete description of the causal process, and it does not at any point require anyone to consult the shared fiction, nor to change the shared fiction except in the most generic fashion (ie a character who has lost hit points has in some sense been set back in the fight). In Baker's model, it is almost purely cubes-to-cubes (see steps 4 and 5 in Resolution System #1 in this blog post: <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427" target="_blank">anyway: 3 Resolution Systems</a>).In D&D combat there is no change in the shared imagining based on changing hit point totals.I mean, someone might posit that in some abstract or purely notional sense the fiction must have changed because otherwise the Orc wouldn't be closer to death; but no one at the table actual knows what that change is, and the table is not required to imagine anything different because a hit point total changed.That's part of the rationale of what I've called, upthread, the "simulationist reaction": in Rolemaster, for instance, if a character is stabbed by a sword or bitten by a dragon the rules tell us something that has to change in what we all imagine (eg the character is bleeding from their thigh, or has had muscles torn in their arm).</blockquote>

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