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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PrecociousApprentice" data-source="post: 4240920" data-attributes="member: 61449">So it is more of an issue of a consistent one to one cause-effect sort of resolution. The rules can be there, in your face, and as "unbelievable" as needed, just that there is no interpretation of them. The general theme is Input + Rule-> Unambiguous Output. No interpretation necessary.Maybe not in the same way, but there is an entire industry of scientific professional journals that would not exist if there was no need of interpretation of outputs (read data). To really understand science, one needs to realize that there is a level of interaction of reality that is so fundamental that is exists in a conceptual space that is outside of what humans can possibly experience. We can observe the outputs, create models of what we saw that describe what we saw, but we always have to keep in mind that the rule we created to describe the event we saw was not the real interaction between the objects in the event. It was just a description, and that is all we can ever get. We continuously revise these rules so that they better describe the totallity of all the events we have observed, but we will never get at the underlying interactions, and it is likely our rules will always have corner cases that do not fit in our existing rules.In medical science it is well inderstood that if one were to read medical journals at a pace that is greater than average for every second of every day for a year, then one would be almost nine hundred years behind at the end of the year, for just the information and rules published in that year, in medical science alone. And we still do a terrible job at predicting things in medicine that are relatively fundamental to the science.A system of role playing that requires rules that are infallible in implementation and never create a "what the heck was that?" moment in the game would be so unweildy so as to be unplayable, if they were comprehensible in the first place. This is the reason for abstraction, fortune in the middle, and metagaming. They allow you to just hand wave the result to whatever you want so the game remains fun, comprehensible, and playable. Anyone who thinks that their simmulationist game will never have corner cases either uses liberal doses of abstraction, metagame constructs, does not understand the game, or isn't really playing it. Even in natural sciences this is true.And I am not sure the natural science analogy is accurate for RPGs. RPGs are not for explaining data or predicting future events for which we have massive amounts of data to support. RPG rules are for organizing play and distributing power in a social context. It is actually much more like law than it is like science, even if rolling dice confuses the issue.I am intrigued that you would use what has been reported to be a very hard core simulationist game for narrativist play. How do you accomplish protagonization of the PCs with what I have heard is a purist for system style game? It seems like giving ultimate power to the rules is by default deprotagonizing.Why not 4e? Seems like it should be very easy to accomplish a narrativist agenda with 4e than most non-nar games. Why are you wed so much to a heavy sim game?Back to where I started. I agree. I don't feel confident in my ability to distinguish vanilla from pervy, as I think that 4e will be a relatively complex rulset, but yes I do think that story is pre-eminently the focus of my games. I likes me some butt kicking in there as well, but I really don't mind a little abstraction. I definitely like the fortune in the middle. No need to get stuck at the "Why did that happen?" moments. Make it up.I suspect this might be why WotC made most combat maneuvers tied to HP. This retains the luck/endourance element of the keep on fighting mechanic that is HP. The damage on a miss mechanics also might fit in this category. The attack roll determined if the character was sucessful with his goal. His opponents' luck/endourance/fighting spirit might have been lessened anyway. The abstraction allows you to narrate in a way that makes sense to the story.</blockquote>

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