It's not that the combat stat blocks itself represents everything about the creature, but it does reflect the true nature of a creature.
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All stats have meaning, based on objective facts about the creature; and, as long as those objective facts don't change, you can't claim consistency if you then change how those objective facts are represented.
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I don't think anyone is arguing that 4E has ever tried to paint an objective reality, though.
Are the first two sentences claims about how you like to use mechanics? In which case I believe you when you make them.
Or are they claims about what can be done with mechanics? In which case I strongly disagree. My 4e game paints an "objective reality" (insofar as that phrase can be meaningfully used to described an imaginary fantasy world). For instance, the world has a history. The people within it, including the PCs, have histories. All those people have capabilities, and they exercise those capabilities to do things, and the intersection of all the things that they do explains why the world is as it is. For instance, the Elemental Chaos was held at bay, in part, because Torog maintained the integrity of the Underdark. Now that Torog has been killed by the PCs, the Chaos begins to break through.
The stats that I use to adjudicate the play of the game, however, are not objective facts about the creatures, nor in isolation are they measures of such things. They are mechanical devices for determining what happens when those creatures do various sorts of things.
Just to give one example: the fighter PC has an ability called Footwork Lure, and an ability called Warrior's Urging. Both enable him to force an enemy closer. At the level of tactical resolution, the choice of which power to use is quite important, and is governed by a range of mechanical considerations around targeting, resource expenditure etc. But I in the fiction, there is no reason at all to think the character is doing anything different when he uses one or the other technique. In either case what he is doing is using his mastery of his honking great halberd to get the better of his enemies in melee combat.
If you fall, you use the same hit points you use in combat.
Who is denoted by "you" in this sentence? When the players in my game wanted their PCs to kill a behemoth (= dinosaur) by driving it over a cliff, we didn't use hit points to resolve it: they made a successful check within a skill challenge.
In the same game, when the PCs and an NPC tagalong were fleeing a collapsing temple, the PC mage wanted to take advantage of the confusion to kill the NPC with a Magic Missile. I resolved this as an Arcana check to "minionise" the NPC. The check succeeded, and hence the auto-damage from the spell proved fatal.
if you're going to be the least bit internally consistent you have no choice but to have combat stats "always on" even when there is no combat nearby.
The post in which you asserted this gave no actual reason; it simply reiterated the assertion.
The gameworld is sinply *not* internally consistent if there is a bubble around the PCs in whch game mechanics work differently.
This at least is not an accurate description of my 4e game. There is no bubble around the PCs. There are action declarations by the players, and these are resolved using the mechanics. That is not the mechanics working
differently. It is the mechanics
working. I don't need the mechanics to tell me what is happening in the gameworld outside the context of player action declarations for their PCs; I can work that out for myself.
If Joe the paladin has 45 hit points, then it consistently takes ~10 arrows from a long bow before he goes down. You can prove this, over any number of battles, because it's an objective measurement.
From my point of view this is a gross conflation of player knowledge and PC knowledge. What the PCs know is that this one time, and perhaps this other time too, 10 orcs loosed their bows straight at Joe and yet Joe survived.
What the players know is that the character sheet for Joe records 45 hp, and the monster entry for the orc indicates d8 hp damage from a longbow hit.
But the PCs don't have the players' knowledge. And to assume that they did, and hence that they could infer anything about Joe and arrows, would in my view be an error.
And at least in my game, the PCs certainly aren't going to do any experiments in which they test what happens if the party ranger shoots arrows over and over at Joe. (Why would the player deliberately want to break the 4th wall like that?)
For a consistent, objective reality, it cannot be different on one side than on the other. In editions prior to 4E <snip> the players and the monsters used the same mechanics.
This is simply not true. For instance, in AD&D and B/X monsters and NPC use moral and loyalty mechanics, but PCs don't. PCs all have ability scores, but most monsters don't. A fighter's hit points are expressly called out as more-than-meat, whereas the contrast is drawn explicitly with a horse, and might be drawn implicitly with a giant slug or dragon (and was by some commentators back in the day), whose hp are basically all meat. PCs use the levelling mechanics, but NPCs don't (not even all NPC fighters can gain levels - see eg the rules for mercenary officers on pp 30-31 of Gygax's DMG).
The rules are the only things we know about D&D. Classes are the only way we know of describing D&D characters. Hit points are the only way we know of describing their health.
If we don't assume that the rules we know about are the ones that determine everything that happens in this fictional world, then what does?
I can only answer your question for my own case: what determines what happens in the fictional world are the causal processes that operate in that world. My players and I understand them because we have a shared conception of the genre in which our game is set.
Hence the possibility of "minionising" an NPC: it is within our shared understanding of the ingame situation that a person can die from a single Magic Missile. (For instance, this happens every time a person on low hit points is hit by one.)
To give another example, when I talk about Torog's death meaning that his power is no longer maintaining the integrity of the Underdark to hold back the Elemental Chaos, my players and I understand what that means for the fiction. But not because we look at some mechanical system for resolving the success of a god's attempt to fortify reality against encroaching chaos. We understand it because we have a shared conception of the idea of divine power ensuring the integrity of the world, and the death of a god permitting chaotic forces to break through into the world. Particular instances of this trope that I personally draw upon include Norse Myth and the Ragnarok; the imprisonment of the Titans in Tarterus; Seigfreid's actions brining Wotan's plans for creation to an end at the culmination of Wagner's Ring Cycle; Dr Strange comics in which Dread Dormammu and/or Nightmare wreak havoc on reality in until Strange or the Ancient One forces them back into their home dimension; etc.
I have never heard of anyone who plays D&D and, for example, believes that not all people in the world possess a strength score, or that the strength score is not an objective measure of how much physical strength each character has. Any creature of any type can be directly compared with regards to their strength score. It always means the same thing, and it has objective and easily observable consequences. It has nothing to do with any metagame considerations.
The idea of suggesting that this is not the case is really unfathomable given the totality of the rules as presented.
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What if there are one-armed veterans? The players can participate in an infinite number of battles and have no risk of losing an arm, nor of severing someone else's. If they encounter such a one-armed veteran, most any player will ask "How did he lose an arm? That's not in the rules." And they'd be right.
I played B/X D&D and AD&D and absolutely took it for granted that many beings in the world had no strength score. For instance, B/X D&D defines STR only for PCs and NPCs built along PC lines. Which means, for instance, orcs have no STR score.
AD&D expands somewhat the category of creatures with STR scores, but cows and horses never had a STR score, and the rules for loading and encumbering beasts of burden had no connection to the rules that governed PC and NPC STR and encumbrance.
So now you have met - or at the least received communication from - someone who played (and plays) D&D and yet did not believe that everyone in the world had a STR score.
As for the one-armed veteran, when I was in my first year of GMing AD&D (so around 1985) I remember wondering whether the game rules permitted a one-legged pirate wearing an eye patch. It seemed to me that they must - after all, swords in D&D are just like swords in real life (or perhaps fantasy stories) and hence can sever limbs or inflict blindness. It's simply that the action resolution mechanics do not make provision for such results to be suffered by PCs in the ordinary course of adjudication (although Gygax does state the following proviso on p 82 of his DMG: "If any creature reaches a stat of -6 or greater negative points before revived, this could indicate scarring or the loss of some member if you [the GM] so choose").
They, through their characters, see only a giant; with no idea how it is represented in the game mechanics but fully aware it's gonna flatten whatever gets in its way.
I regard this as a matter of taste. The players in my game often learn the mechanics, either in advance by way of Monster Knowledge checks or else in the course of resolution as they witness me deploying them. Knowledge of the mechanics - and hence an ability extrapolate to possible ingame consequences of the conflict - I find is actually one useful way to build tension during play.
very few things in stat blocks can be measured objectively, AFAICT. Precisely which things varies a bit from edition to edition, but generally most D&D stats focus on combat, which D&D explicitly handles abstractly (most prevalently in older editions).
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fighters didn't make one actual-fictional swing per round back when rounds were a full minute long. Furthermore, its not evident that a "hit" at the table corresponds to your weapon actually physically damaging a creature (missile attack or melee) or whether they just spent a bit of luck, divine providence, etc. to avoid your efforts in this last minute.
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even Gygax talks about poison saves representing a dodge to the poisonous blow, rather than just toughing it out. That is to say, a "save" might include both avoiding the exposure and/or resisting the disease. So, did a hero avoid the disease because his immune system fought it off or because he happened to do a better job cleaning out that wound today or because he happened to turn the blow so that the disease didn't reach the bloodstream? Which happened in any particular case is generally impossible to tell from the rules alone.
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There are plenty of corner cases that make that not so. One example that springs to mind is "massive damage" rules and sneak attacks, critical hits, or backstabs, which would trump/shortcircuit one's ability to measure HP by checking how many licks with this broadsword does it take to get to the center of that ogre.
I agree with all this.
My favorite example is when the hero is chained to a wall, but still gets to save against dragon breath. According to Gygax, it would be impossible to dodge the blast in that situation, so the save represents that maybe the hero finds a weak link in the chain, and breaks free to hide behind a rock just in time. If that were true, then it would imply that there is no objective reality, and the weakness in the chain and the existence of the rock are both determined after the save is made.
But that's not how the game is actually played. I mean, maybe Gygax ran it differently, but I've never seen anything like that in anything between Basic and 3E. Rather, the DM would run it as if everything was pre-determined - the weak link in the chain, the nearby rock, everything - and further alter the mechanics to take that into consideration.
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In fact, the first edition where it really felt like the mechanics represented what Gygax was talking about, indisputably, was 4E.
You seem here to have explicitly moved from claims about what is or isn't necessary for the gameworld to have an objective reality, to claims about how you and your friends played the game. I believe those latter claims. I also agree with you that 4e does a better job than AD&D of realising some of Gygax's ideas.
But the ingame reality is objective in the Gygax-described/4e style play as well. If the chain had a weak link, then it had a weak link - always and objectively. It's just that this style uses a different technique from your preferred style to work out whether or not that is true. In your style, the GM decides all that stuff in advance - two consequences being that (i) if the GM never thought of it it's not part of the gameworld, and (ii) the GM can never be surprised by what the gameworld turns out to contain. In the other style, these details are worked out in part via the action resolution process. Hence it can turn out that the GM is as surprised as the players to learn what was in the gameworld. That doesn't make the gameworld any less an "objective reality".
You can easily not like that all of your chance to "not be affected" by an attack is conglomerated into one statistic, such that you can't tell whether the blow was evaded or deflected or absorbed. You can not like that wounds and impairments are glossed over in such a casual manner, if you feel like they should have more of an impact on your performance capabilities.
To say that they cannot be used in such a manner is sheer folly, though, because they are used in such a manner. I've done it.
The flip side of your post here is the following: I know that 4e style mechanics are consistent with an "objectively real" gameworld. I know because I've done it.
I think the difference of who decides (as well as what realm the decision lies in) when you are capable of the one shot kill is a pretty important one. Does the player through gaining xp, selecting feats (in certain editions), finding magical items, and so on determine when he is capable of one-shoting a particular monster... Or does the DM decide arbitrarily when your character has reached the point where he or she is now capable of such a feat through manipulation of the setting elements?
Why would the GM do this arbitrarily (ie without reason)? S/he would do it for a reason - for instance, because the Monster Manual suggests that level-appropriate ogres for upper Paragon tier PCs are overwhelmingly minions. This helps to preserve a coherent fiction for the game, which in turn is part of ensuring the "objective reality" of the gameworld.
I think the contention would arise in this situation:
The DM writes up a castle owned by an ogre king, and he has ogres that guard his castle. The PCs fight their way in to confront him, and the ogres are strong opponents. They bargain with the king for his life and leave.
Many levels later in the campaign the players discover the ogre king's treachery and return to his castle. Now, in this new story the ogre king hasn't improved his defenses or anything. He hasn't hired new mercenaries, there are just the same ogres (that the PCs didn't kill last time). But since the PCs are higher level, the DM writes the new encounter as one befitting the higher-level PCs, as one in which the heroes cut their way through the now-inferior ogres easily. So this time the exact same ogres are minions with 1 HP.
In this scenario it's not two different ogres, it's the exact same ogres encountered at different points in time. But because of the 4e system, the ogres have different stats and capabilities than last time.
But this doesn't remotely tend to suggest that the reality of the gameworld is not objective. All it suggests is that the PCs are much tougher than they used to be. Which is the whole point. (See for instance the discussion of "tiers of play" in the 4e PHB pp 28-29, and DMG pp 146-47).
Why not leave the ogre's stats unchanged and let the ease of defeating them manifest that way? This is what D&Dnext is aiming for with bounded accuracy. But whether or not that works well in D&Dnext (and I haven't read any accounts yet of this particular feature of the system), it won't work very well for 4e which uses level-based scaling. You get a lot of bookkeeping and resolution overheads - tracking hp for monsters that, when you roll their attacks, can hit only on (say) a 19 or 20 - which make play drag for little payoff.
So an alternative device - re-statting the ogres as higher level minions - is used instead. In terms of overall outcome it works out comparably, but without the dragging for little payoff.
it messes with the player's mental model of cause and effect in the game.
This also seems like a (auto-)biographical statement, describing your own psychology and that of some other players. It doesn't describe anything like a universal truth. For instance, nothing in 4e resolution messes with my mental model of cause and effect in the game: when a minion is killed, what causes that is that it got hit hard by a halberd. Why does it die straightaway when some of it's friends seem good at dodging halberds or soaking up those hits? I guess it got unlucky!
