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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6301071" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.The post in which you asserted this gave no actual reason; it simply reiterated the assertion.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.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?)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).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 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").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.I agree with all this.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".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.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.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.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!</blockquote>

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