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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4197695" data-attributes="member: 4937">Obviously, because I'm still promoting the sometimes disparaged idea that DMs should have a referee stance. Of course not.  One way of using dice to dictate the narrative is called 'a random encounter'.  But the dice have an inherent referee stance.  They don't care who is throwing them or what the circumstances are.  So sometimes the DM has to put his thumb on the dice and overrule them when the narrative that the dice indicate is not actually good for the story.  However, as the very fact that we do use dice to adjudicate combat all the time would indicate, we would not want the DM to do this as a matter of course.  The rolling of dice is compatible with the DMs referee stance.So far I haven't said anything indicating disagreement agreement.Agreed.  But is this a good analogy for what is going on?  Suppose the creature had 1 hp (only the DM knows this of course), and the player offered the proposition, "I [in the role of Sir Bob] swing my sword in a powerful attack, "Take that you fiend.".  I roll the dice and it comes up some high number, "A hit, a very palpable hit.", and then finally I report that I inflicted 12 damage.  All according to the rules and very above board.  As the DM though, I report that, "The fiend howls in pain and rage as its vile ichor spurts from its arm.  It counterattacks with blinding speed..."  At this point, we both would agree that the dice aren't dictating the situation.  Yet this is not a good analogy for what is going on either, you would say.  You are correct, but now we need to somehow slash our two analogies in two and put them Frankenstien like back together.  Your question is, "If we can track success abstractly in combat, why can't we track it abstractly out of combat."  The answer is that we are only happy in doing so because we accept that our propositions in combat are fundamentally abstract ones.  "I attack the monster" doesn't wager any particular end state.  As you say, we don't propose and aren't used to proposing, "I cut off the monsters head" in combat.  We aren't wagering an end state.  We are somewhat used to applying 'fortune in the middle' techniques here.   But we also must admit that there are circumstances that many people find the 'fortune in the middle' hit points jarring in the extreme.  For example, many people are extremely bothered by the falling rules.  I've previously argued that the reason that this is so is that falling from a great height is a fundamentally different sort of proposition than 'I attack', in that it does explicitly stake its end stake - namely, 'You are now at the bottom'.  This explicit end stake at the beginning of the proposition is fundamentally at odds with attempts to run fortune in the middle.  You can do it (we've been doing it for years), but its a nagging problem for many.It's saving grace is that usually 'falling' is not a player initiated proposition.  The end stake isn't usually explicit.  (When 'falling' starts turning into 'jumping off the high cliff', even more people balk at the jarring disconnect between concrete end state and abstract mechanic.)  I'm suggesting that many if not most out of combat propositions carry these fortune at the beginning conotations, both by traditional D&D convention and intuitively just based on the sort of words we use like, "I try to open the door."  We don't expect to do abstract opening damage to the door.  We expect it to either open or not.  And further if we've seen someone else open the door in a single tug, we don't expect that its going to take us 5 tries just because we didn't spend half a minute looking at the door and talking about it before hand.  When the door doesn't open after the dice indicates success, the fact that it is because the DM arbitrarily decided that it takes 6 steps to solve the challenge and inflates the difficulty of opening the door, there is a whiff of the DM adding hit points to a monster because he's decided that this combat should take more steps to win it than it has.  And actually even 'steps' is a misnomer which is indicative of a common misunderstanding of the system; I just don't have have a better more descriptive term at hand which I think is indicative of how counter-intuitive the whole process is.Can you run everything FitM?  Obviously.  But if you are going to do so, then do so and don't try to cludge a FitM subsystem into the midst of the normal task resolution system.</blockquote>

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