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<blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 4242293" data-attributes="member: 1645">I'm having some difficulty understanding what you're saying.&nbsp; Using your terminology, if I understand you correctly, a simulationist expects each roll of the dice to represent something real in the game world -- a hit or miss, say -- while an abstractionist does not -- a &quot;to hit&quot; roll may or may not refer to a hit, and a &quot;damage&quot; roll may or may not reflect any physical harm being done.My gut instinct is to call the first good design and the second bad design -- not because the first is more detailed and the second less so, but because the first models something we're trying to model, and I don't know what the second one is even doing.We could, after all, build up an equally abstract system -- that is, with little specific detail -- that still modeled something.&nbsp; We might, for instance, combine the separate to-hit and damage rolls into one attack roll, or we might even combine multiple such attack rolls into one combat roll.&nbsp; The system wouldn't tell us the details of how we got from here to there, but it would tell us the result: Conan defeats all the brigands.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="mmadsen, post: 4242293, member: 1645"] I'm having some difficulty understanding what you're saying. Using your terminology, if I understand you correctly, a simulationist expects each roll of the dice to represent something real in the game world -- a hit or miss, say -- while an abstractionist does not -- a "to hit" roll may or may not refer to a hit, and a "damage" roll may or may not reflect any physical harm being done. My gut instinct is to call the first [i]good design[/i] and the second [i]bad design[/i] -- not because the first is more detailed and the second less so, but because the first models something we're trying to model, and I don't know what the second one is even doing. We could, after all, build up an equally abstract system -- that is, with little specific detail -- that still modeled something. We might, for instance, combine the separate to-hit and damage rolls into one attack roll, or we might even combine multiple such attack rolls into one combat roll. The system wouldn't tell us the details of how we got from here to there, but it would tell us the result: Conan defeats all the brigands. [/QUOTE]

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