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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 6050591" data-attributes="member: 52073">I don't know about the other posters here, but this is how I post on other forums and how I talk in real life, with plenty of digressions, examples, parentheticals, asides, qualifications, and so forth.  Pedantry, thy name is Eldritch_Lord.  Just be glad that "talking" with us online means you can close the tab if the verbosity gets to you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Spoilering long replies once again:mlund[sblock]Well, keep in mind that simulationism doesn't mean "simulates the real world and real physics," it just means "simulates an internally-consistent world."  Creating a fireball involves throwing bat poop, spouting gibberish, and waving your hands around, which is nothing like the real world at all.  The simulationist part is that if spells require bat poop, hand waving, and gibberish to make a fireball, then stealing the bat poop, tying their hands, or gagging them prevents the fireball.  Compare to 4e, where a wizard might describe his casting as involving huge, dramatic gestures and booming incantations, but he can accomplish the same thing just fine if tied up and gagged.  The game world's ground rules are nonsensical from a real-world perspective, but once the ground rules are known, things proceed logically from there.  Different levels of abstraction doesn't mean things aren't simulationist; we have no idea what hand gestures you need for a fireball or what words you need to say, but we know that you need to say them.The fact that fighters don't get Nice Things is a separate problem unrelated to the level of simulationism; rather, it's related to the fact that fighters started off as the class you played if you didn't roll high enough stats to be a "real" class or if you were new to the game, and that before that they were the sidekicks and meat shields in Chainmail for the "real" PCs.  That fighters need to gain the power level and options of a "real" class doesn't mean you need to get metagame-y with the fighter to do so.I disagree that universality in mechanics is a bad thing: if you're trying to break something by hitting it with pointy bits of metal, it should probably work the same whether you're a 12-foot-tall giant doing it or a human-sized fighter doing it.  If you want to have dragons, wizards, and magic items to all let you shoot fireballs, better to use the same mechanics for all of them  then to come up with dozens of pointless variations, like how 4e cyclops all have an Evil Eye power yet none of them do the same thing.  Making mechanics less universal just makes getting a handle on the rules more difficult and raises the bar to entry, since new players can't just learn "here's what a fireball is" but have to constantly look up what this version does.I'm completely on board with you about fighters not needing to follow the laws of physics, I just don't think they need to get metagame to do it.  The D&D world has different laws of physics than the real one; we can make a fighter who follows those laws of physics just fine.  Take the rogue, for instance; he gets Evasion, which lets him dodge 40-foot-diameter fireballs in a 20-foot-wide room.  It's a fairly simulationist ability: your ability to dodge the fireball is dependent on your dodging skill (i.e. it works with your Ref save rather than being something else), you can't dodge if you're restrained, etc.  It just happens to be physically impossible, which is not the same as non-simulationist.Yes!  Exactly!  That's what I'm going for, but instead of saying "High-level fighters can't survive explosions like in action movies, but let's let him get away with it because plot," I'm saying make it so high-level fighters can survive explosions like in action movies, and give them all that goes with that.  John McClane survives crashing through a window because he's a protagonist; Beowulf survives crashing through a window because he's superhuman.  John McClane can't survive a shotgun blast to the chest, because movie audiences know that that's lethal while they're willing to ignore the shards-of-broken-glass thing; Beowulf survives a shotgun blast to the chest because, yep, still superhuman.Basically, I'd rather believe that someone who makes a living by stabbing twenty-ton flying death machines in the face survives that because he's actually that tough, skilled, and talented, not due to an increasingly-long string of plot contrivances.  Whenever I see mechanics that say "the wizard can do his job because his magic works like this, the fighter can do his job because the plot is throwing him a bone," that takes me out of it.[/sblock]pemerton[sblock]He says that HP aren't entirely physical:Likewise in the 3e DMG, where hit points are both your physical integrity and your ability to turn bad wounds into less bad wounds (luck, skill, etc.).  A simulationist view of hit points doesn't require that you treat every hit point lost as a gallon of blood lost or anything like that, it just asks that you treat a hit as actually being a hit (even if a hit for 40 damage is just 1 point of actual physical damage and 39 points of skill turning a decapitation into a glancing blow), because treating a hit as "a miss that makes you more tired" or whatever most of the time but as physical contact whenever there's poison or some other on-hit effect on your sword leads to silliness.The problem with fighter saves has nothing to do with simulation vs. non-simulation, it has to do with simulation of different things.  In AD&D, "magic" is a static thing (every fireball is as resistable as any other), while in 3e "magic" is a personal thing (a high-Int wizard's fireball is harder to resist than a low-Int wizard's).  The math for good saves is actually fairly similar between editions (I did the math on that at one point and it turned out that translating save-vs.-spells to 3e DCs assuming minimum Int resulted in a fighter having +9 to +12 base saves), the difference is that in 3e you add your casting stat to your DCs and you can raise your casting stat a lot higher than in AD&D.  Changing the 3e DC formula to just 10 + spell level doesn't make it any less simulationist, nor would changing it to something like 10 + 1/2 level + Cha like the SLA formula.[/sblock]Manbearcat[sblock]Thank you as well.  It's rare to see threads get to page-and-a-half-long posts without lots of arguments and snark getting thrown around.As mentioned above, HP are simulationist as long as you always include some aspect of the physical, they just aren't concrete.  Just like BAB and THAC0 are quite abstract, condensing dozens of factors down to one number, but they're still simulationist (the better you are at fighting, the more often you hit).Granted and agreed.  I already said D&D was S with a side of G, and I dislike 3e's use of a metagame mechanic as "life force" for item creation and spellcasting or whatever; if you have to use a metagame resource like XP, keep it purely metamage, don't give it an in-game manifestation.  I much prefer the straightforward loss of life force = Con loss mechanic from AD&D item creation.Again, simulationist ≠ concrete.  I prefer shorter rounds and more granular mechanics myself, and am glad 3e went that route, but that doesn't make highly abstract combat gamist or narrativist.As I mentioned above, simulationism doesn't mean it follows real-world physics, it means it follows internally-consistent physics.  I think the problem here is that you're associating abstraction with gamism when you can have either simulationist or gamist concreteness and either simulationist or gamist abstraction.A Huge titan being able to move around normally as if it were human-scale rather than following the square-cube law isn't gamist, it's assuming different physics that allow giants to walk around, dragons to fly, etc., just as including magic in a game doesn't make it gamist.  Titans following the same 5-foot step rule that Medium creatures do is gamist (to prevent creatures from moving more than 5 feet without provoking AoOs) because the simulationist approach would be to assume that, given that the laws of physics allow the titan to walk around just as if it were a big human, it should be able to move proportionally, so since its base speed is twice that of a human it should be able to take a 10-foot step instead of a 5-foot step.I disagree with the assessment of it being good enough, and it's that kind of "eh, close enough" reaction that often marks more gamist mechanics.  Consider: there are no other mechanics in the game that make you attack yourself beyond those few tricky rogue maneuvers, and you are forced to take the attacks whether you want to or not.  To address the first point, if fumbles or some other means of attacking yourself (such as AD&D/3e confusion) were part of the game, that would make that slightly more consistent: you run past some enemies in a tricky manner, and because you're tricky, something that can already happen (fumbles) happens more often.  Sure, I can buy that.Also, there's no general rule for making people fumble (like all of the 3e effects that say "this works as confusion blah blah blah"), so the rogue can't attempt to do the same outside this particular power.  The rogue can thus make this singular effect occur only in very specific circumstances and no other, and no other classes can accomplish that, which stretches the bounds of believability (for me, at least).  More believable but more complex to resolve would be a Bluff check, an attack roll to parry, or something like that to justify the rogue actively tricking them, as opposed to them just whiffing and hitting themselves in the face, though of course that brings up the multiple-roll problem and resolution-speed problem.  More believable and just as simple to resolve would be the rogue attacking each time, instead of the enemies attacking themselves; same number of rolls, same time to resolve, but more believable (the rogue is stabbing everyone as he goes by, and doing that requires some effort and setup, so he can't just do it all the time).To address the second point, the automatic attack-forcing is problematic from a tactical standpoint.  If you're fighting a guy in 3e who has Robilar's Gambit and Combat Reflexes (i.e. every time you take an AoO on him he gets to hit you), after the first time you see that he can counterattack AoOs, you stop taking AoOs on him.  An intelligent enemy who sees his buddy try attacking the rogue during Bloody Path and hit himself instead should know not to take that attack.  An intelligent enemy who sees the rogue use Fool's Opportunity before Bloody Path or vice versa should be expecting that sort of thing and not take the opportunity the second time.And even if you want to talk about the confusion of combat and all that, would you tell a player in 3e going up against that Robilar's Gambit guy, "Oh, I know Steve just tried to take an AoO and got hit and you don't want to get hit, but you didn't actually see that and your character would take the AoO, so you have to take it"?  Of course not (or at least I hope not).  Part of the game's abstraction is the assumption that you're watching in all directions, hence the lack of facing, so being able to react to someone's tricky tactic is something to be expected.  Only when you have a mechanic to determine whether a character would fall for it ("You rolled a 5 for Sense Motive?  Yes, you're positive the creepy-looking noble is telling the truth") can we determine independently of the player's choices whether a PC falls for something and do players expect to have that choice taken away from them, and though tricking monsters obviously don't have the problem of removing player choice, players shouldn't be able to say "All the monsters fall for my tricks because my class makes me tricky" any more than they should be able to say "The NPC can't roll Sense Motive because my lie was believable."If Bloody Path involved making enemies attack each other, sure; that's both a staple of the genre and a mechanic that has shown up in every pre-4e edition so far, to my knowledge.  But where in Pirates or Princess Bride did you see Jack Sparrow make Barbossa stab himself in the leg or Wesley make Inigo trip and fall on his own sword?  And if they were to accompllsh that, would you expect Commodore Norrington or Count Rugen, having seen the same trick just moments ago, to fall for it as well?The reason skill checks for social skills to exist is precisely to define when characters are so supernaturally skilled that they can fool someone who is as smart as Vizzini thinks he is, turn someone into an instant ally with a few words, make someone wet their pants and run away with an angry glare, and so forth.  We obviously don't know what supernatural skill at conning people looks like, or whether someone with supernatural intelligence can figure that out, so we turn to the dice to adjudicate that.  For a power to not only bypass that for the first target (which might be excusable if they're just that sneaky) but also not provide an Int check for later targets to see through it, add a penalty on later attacks to represent people wising up, etc. goes against expectations, and that's why I advocate for either including such mechanical tweaks to grease the wheels of our suspension of disbelief or avoiding powers that cause that dissonance in the first place.[/sblock]</blockquote>

Verification