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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6302714" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Because something is true for us at the level of player at the table with dice, doesn't mean that the characters in the world are aware of it. So, for example, the player hopes for a critical hit (a natural 20), however, the character is not imagined to be aware of the die roll at all. The character is (usually) imagined to only hope for a blow to strike home. If he should down his target, the character literally has no way of telling whether the player rolled a critical hit, just high damage, or it was the last HP that the target had. Within the context of 4e and its re-skinnability, the character may not even be imagined as aware of what powers are or aren't on his character sheet. He just fights like this. In fact, with the fictional world that the character inhabits, "Biting Volley" and "Twin Strike" may not even be things-you-could-know. Heck, combat "rounds" are something the characters should only be aware of while watching a boxing match. If they exist as anything other than a tabletop mechanical contrivance to order the steps we take to resolve fictional conflicts....well then combats look very strange on that world.This is what gives the lie to the premise that somehow characters can reverse-engineer the game rules from what happens in the fiction. The abstraction of the HP system and D&D combat mechanics in general prevent this, because truth at the dice-and-table level don't correspond very directly with truth-for-the-characters. So, line up 100 peasants in front of 100 lvl 1 fighters with longswords. The fighters all attack. Six seconds later (or possibly a minute?), in the fictional game world (what the characters will see); some of the peasants are cut down, others are merely wounded (but just as capable of doing anything as they were before), and still others managed to stay untouched. An important note is that the ones who dodged actually fall into two groups at the level of the players, but that are indistinguishable to the characters; some of those who dodged are a little less lucky than they were a few moments ago, others are just as lucky and likely to survive another attack. Those two groups correspond to a fraction of those who survived successful attacks, and those who were missed entirely. Some of the fighters swung once, others multiple times. Which means that even some of the dead peasants have differing numbers of wounds.But, y'know what. Forget I wrote that last paragraph. Let's entertain the notion for a moment that everything mechanical corresponds 1-to-1 with something in the game world. Think about what that means for that world. An attack that we players see as a number on a die-roll now corresponds exactly to someone making a singular attempt to do harm in the game world. That means that clever characters (and remember, some of them are as smart or smarter than Einstein) could fairly quickly devise any number of tests and experiments to reverse-engineer what are (to them) the laws of physics, but are (to us) the rules of the game. Also, given the threat-laden nature of most D&D worlds, they are strongly motivated to do so. That quickly leads to a situation where you're playing a game with genre-saavy characters, making the world more Order of the Stick than Lord of the Rings. If that's what you're after, fine, but that's only one playstyle (and it ain't simulationist).</blockquote>

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