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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6348997" data-attributes="member: 58197">Rules = Newtonian physics: An abstraction which accurately models (the fictional) reality under most circumstances. I'm not saying that the rules need to be perfectly true to the fiction--that's an obvious impossibility. What they need to be is close enough to the fiction that, under most circumstances, the rules produce sensible outcomes. Just because Newtonian physics goes wonky in the vicinity of a black hole doesn't mean it's useless here on Earth.It's funny that you bring up the length of a combat round as an issue here. As you note, the length of a combat round was 60 seconds in AD&amp;D and 6 seconds in later editions. Between 2E and 3E, the length of a round was reduced by an order of magnitude. Why the change? Because 60 seconds pushed the abstract model too far from the fiction! It created too many situations where the model's outcomes didn't make sense. People could accept a system where making a &quot;real attack&quot; requires about 6 seconds' worth of feinting, parrying, and positioning to set up. 60 seconds was a lot harder to swallow.The Batarang question is much the same: If you're only allowed to throw a &quot;magic Batarang&quot; three times a day, it's roughly equivalent to having rounds that are 8 hours long. If you're playing a game where you follow the hero's life story over months and years, and don't get into the details of daily events, that could be a perfectly fine abstraction. But if you're getting into the details of individual combats, it's a problem. It's using Newtonian physics in a situation that calls for special relativity. My original objection was to the claim that D&amp;D is like chess, so we shouldn't complain when the rules diverge widely from the fiction. In chess, when this happens, the rules win. In fact, the idea of &quot;fiction&quot; in chess is slightly absurd. Chess doesn't have &quot;fiction,&quot; it has a few bits of flavor--the names and shapes of the pieces--on top of an abstract strategy game.In D&amp;D, if the rules are producing results that diverge widely from the fiction, the fiction wins. That's the whole point of &quot;rulings, not rules.&quot;</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 6348997, member: 58197"] Rules = Newtonian physics: An abstraction which accurately models (the fictional) reality under most circumstances. I'm not saying that the rules need to be perfectly true to the fiction--that's an obvious impossibility. What they need to be is [I]close enough[/I] to the fiction that, under most circumstances, the rules produce sensible outcomes. Just because Newtonian physics goes wonky in the vicinity of a black hole doesn't mean it's useless here on Earth. It's funny that you bring up the length of a combat round as an issue here. As you note, the length of a combat round was 60 seconds in AD&D and 6 seconds in later editions. Between 2E and 3E, the length of a round was reduced by an order of magnitude. Why the change? Because 60 seconds pushed the abstract model too far from the fiction! It created too many situations where the model's outcomes didn't make sense. People could accept a system where making a "real attack" requires about 6 seconds' worth of feinting, parrying, and positioning to set up. 60 seconds was a lot harder to swallow. The Batarang question is much the same: If you're only allowed to throw a "magic Batarang" three times a day, it's roughly equivalent to having rounds that are 8 hours long. If you're playing a game where you follow the hero's life story over months and years, and don't get into the details of daily events, that could be a perfectly fine abstraction. But if you're getting into the details of individual combats, it's a problem. It's using Newtonian physics in a situation that calls for special relativity. My original objection was to the claim that D&D is like chess, so we shouldn't complain when the rules diverge widely from the fiction. In chess, when this happens, the rules win. In fact, the idea of "fiction" in chess is slightly absurd. Chess doesn't have "fiction," it has a few bits of flavor--the names and shapes of the pieces--on top of an abstract strategy game. In D&D, if the rules are producing results that diverge widely from the fiction, the fiction wins. That's the whole point of "rulings, not rules." [/QUOTE]

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