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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8636337" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, its like all games have SOME SORT of genre. All games presuppose unless otherwise stated that ordinary facts of life appertain. Obviously this is true! So, yes, in HoML flanking exists as an advantage-producing tactic because that is A) something that players are likely to grasp and be able to reason about without needing to plain old memorize all the rules, and B) when you go imagine the story in your private imaginary world inside your head your brain doesn't go WTF!!!! Instead the story looks and sounds a lot like other stories of heroic battles, and the mechanics reinforce taking actions/tactics which will tend to produce those sorts of narratives. You can think of it as part playability and part concession to the genre. One thing it doesn't do is get in the way of Story Now. In fact having these things is necessary to any successful SN play, as there have to be SOME SORT of drivers on character choice that arise out of fiction. If none of those existed, then Narrativist play would collapse into Gamism, as all there would be is arbitrary ways to get bonuses and penalties (or whatever) and they couldn't be tied to anything humanistic at all! So, HoML has flanking rules. Thus if the Paladin wants to seriously crush the orc, he's going to want to stab him from behind. How does that play with his sense of honor? Play to Find Out!!! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8636337, member: 82106"] Well, its like all games have SOME SORT of genre. All games presuppose unless otherwise stated that ordinary facts of life appertain. Obviously this is true! So, yes, in HoML flanking exists as an advantage-producing tactic because that is A) something that players are likely to grasp and be able to reason about without needing to plain old memorize all the rules, and B) when you go imagine the story in your private imaginary world inside your head your brain doesn't go WTF!!!! Instead the story looks and sounds a lot like other stories of heroic battles, and the mechanics reinforce taking actions/tactics which will tend to produce those sorts of narratives. You can think of it as part playability and part concession to the genre. One thing it doesn't do is get in the way of Story Now. In fact having these things is necessary to any successful SN play, as there have to be SOME SORT of drivers on character choice that arise out of fiction. If none of those existed, then Narrativist play would collapse into Gamism, as all there would be is arbitrary ways to get bonuses and penalties (or whatever) and they couldn't be tied to anything humanistic at all! So, HoML has flanking rules. Thus if the Paladin wants to seriously crush the orc, he's going to want to stab him from behind. How does that play with his sense of honor? Play to Find Out!!! :) [/QUOTE]

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