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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9290126" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well. That's good to know. And deeply infuriating, since I had been very clear in every prior conversation (with other people, I don't think anyone in this convo?) that I was talking about game balance, which spotlight balance doesn't achieve...and they either never bothered to correct me or were using the term incorrectly as though it did provide gameplay balance (and was, in fact, the best form thereof.)Will definitely keep this in mind.A pithy and perhaps brusque way of putting it, but yeah, this."But physical combat...like...fighting each other is the most natural thing for us humans that we can do in an RPG. Putting that in a corset of formality and squeezing it into rounds with limited actions feels strange to me. It would kill any spontaneity that makes a fight a fight."The structure remains symmetrical: IRL fights are absolutely incredibly spontaneous, constantly-evolving things, where you absolutely do NOT have this artificial structure of "initiative" to put actions in a sequence, nor any limit other than the time it takes to do something on what actions you can perform moment to moment. Real brawls are messy and unstructured, with no rhyme or reason, every man for himself kind of thing.We accept the heavy and harsh abstractions placed on combat because we're used to those abstractions. Doing that to social stuff feels weird only because it's new, with much less testing and different sets and kinds of variables.Why can't conversations be chaotic, fast-paced, abstracted situations where players and DMs want to make informed decisions on the plane of meaning?</blockquote>

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