Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6569742" data-attributes="member: 27160">Spot on, and well put - thanks!Um, Glorantha. One of the oldest 3(?) published roleplaying worlds, after Empire of the Petal Throne and City State of the Invincible Overlord and before Greyhawk, was and still is based firmly on myth rather than anything recognisable as science.That might be a problem for some, but it's not for me. Because I quite deliberately don't describe what hit points mean in the D&D I run; it's none of my business how players imagine the world. I tell them what the rules are, they have to imagine the world such that those rules are true. How they choose to do that is up to them. As long as we all agree that, at 0 hit points, you hit the deck, and before that you have no penalties, the imagined state of a creature that has lost some but not all of its hit points is arbitrary. Everyone may imagine it as they see fit - provided they don't try to claim that the rules should change based on how they imagine it. That particular road is one way.No, you get a world where the laws of nature are what they are - the dice just reveal what they might be as explored by a series of tests the characters decide to run.(I could add a dig about quantum mechanics, here, but actually that arises more from the lack of individuality of subatomic particles rather than stochastic divergence, as such, so it doesn't entirely count).Others have already pointed out that the first part of this is not a sound argument because its premises are not necessarily true, but more generally it doesn't make any difference to what I'm suggesting. The dice reveal whether or not the hypothesis is true, is what I'm suggesting. I maintain that this is a perfectly functional and rational way to play. The game world has fixed natural laws, sure - but nothing says that one person should get to be the arbiter of them all, or even that they should be all fixed prior to play.For any roleplaying game world, the rules are what define the world. If those rules include randomisers, them chance plays a part in the natural laws, but that doesn't mean the world itself is random. Consider a roll to hit in melee - a commonplace in most RPGs. Does the fact that we roll dice for this mean that combat is genuinely random? That, if we were to look in detail at every move and counter-move, we could not explain everything in terms of circumstances, actions of the combatants and natural laws of motion? I would suggest that we still think of the combat as being decided by the individual small events, circumstances and actions that happen in it - and yet we roll dice to decide the outcome. Just because we roll dice does not mean that the game world is literally composed of chaotic randomness (although it might be...). Why should not the same apply to questions of the underlying, arcane nature of magic?</blockquote>

Verification