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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6307037" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I understand what was said upthread,, [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] takes the same view as you.I don't take that view in my game. I regard the rules around AC, hp etc not as models of how things happen in the gameworld, but as devices that we (the real people playing the game) use to determine, under certain circumstances, what happens in the ficiton of the game. They are rules for us, but not rules for (nor models of rules for) the gameworld.My dispute with Saelorn was not over the merits of either approach (I have my way, you have yours) but over the claim that your approach is the only way to ensure an objective, consistent gameworld. It's not. Just as a novelist can ensure a consistent fiction without adopting or assuming the devices of AC, hp etc, so can a group of RPGers. Like the novelist, they simply make sure that action declarations, narrations of resolution, etc are all consistent with the estabished backstory and the broader constraints of genre and "common sense".This strikes me as, once again, running together ingame and metagame. The arrow/spear/whatever shot/thrown by the PC causes the creature to be dead. The skill check causes the players at the table to agree that that is what happened in the fiction.Well, if you're an assassin in AD&D you can do this. But that's obviously not a full answer to your question.For my part, I can only speak to my own game. The appropriate action resolution mechanism depends upon what is at stake - both the fictional stakes (how important is this to the PCs?) and the more nebulous stakes of the play dynamics (pacing, likely interest of the resolution experience, etc). Killing a dragon via a skill check would be fine - in A Wizard of Earthsea Ged kills several young dragons in a manner that, in 4e, would be modelled either as skill checks or attacks vs minions - but the player is not going to get much out of it (it's not a high stakes encounter and so, for instance, isn't going to yield piles of gold).If you want every encounter with a dragon to be high stakes then of course you wouldn't make them minions, nor frame the hunting of one as a skill check. But as I approach the game, that's a decision that is shaped by real-world concerns, not by imagined features of the gameworld.</blockquote>

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