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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6845745" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you are limiting what I'm saying.So for example, quite a few modern fantasy RPGs are trying to adopt some form of gridless combat when abstract positioning like "Near", "Far", "Close", "Remote" or whatever.  That system creates a game that looks a lot like classic Final Fantasy cRPG combat, where the combatants line up in a line, adjust their positioning abstractly and make moves.  It's fully functional as a combat system if you want to remove the grid and are willing to accept the consequences of that.  But some people aren't willing to accept those consequences.  In their head, regardless of what the rules are saying, they are running a combat that looks to them like what they picture a melee to look like, and it's taking place in a two-dimensional space.  For those people, you need a rules system that tracks that position in two dimensional space, otherwise they are always fighting against the system because it doesn't match what they imagine and are content with.I think were we have gone with mechanics is a push toward elegance that necessarily is creating disconnects where the mechanic doesn't feel like the thing people are imagining.  One of the big problems that brought this home to me was early in my 3e play, I had a chase evolve from play.  I naturally tried to run the chase using the combat rules, since the chase had evolved out of a combat scenario - someone was running away.  Once the combat turned into a chase though, the turn based, discrete, synchronous, nature of the combat resolution where this person did something fully, then this person did something fully, and so forth stopped being believable for me.  I was willing to over look the abstraction of the combat system while we are trying to resolve a melee and it was 'good enough' (at least, until someone tries an elvish bucket brigade), but it wasn't 'good enough' for a chase.   Because the essential aspect of a chase was that as you were moving, the thing being chased was also moving away from you.   What worked as a model of melee combat just didn't work as a model of a chase.At first I started trying to fix this problem by patching the combat system.  But that just didn't work.  The turn based nature of the system was too heavily built into the system to fix the problem with patches and tweaks for the 'edge case'.  It was all edge case.  And if you tried to remove turn based linearity the resulting system while more realistic and versatile was also just too complex to resolve quickly and accurately (simultaneous secret declarations, impulses, speed factors, etc.).  Ideas that worked in 1e or BECMI didn't work here, because those ideas were the complexities (often overlooked) of those systems which - unlike 3e - were otherwise simple systems.  I wasn't sure what to do until I bought a brilliant (well, mostly brilliant) pdf called 'Hot Pursuit'.  The author of the PDF completely bypassed the problem.  Instead of tweaking the existing combat subsystem to handle something it was never designed to handle, with the result of making a combat system that could somewhat handle chases but was now worse in some measures at handling combat, he just invented a completely new chase subsystem.  (Ironically, it works something like the gridless combat systems I mentioned earlier, which works pretty well, because usually a chase can be mentally simplified to a linear 'one thing is following' another model.)  At first I thought this was both brilliant and rather ugly, but the more I thought about it the more brilliant it seemed.  Instead of one huge sprawling uber-game trying to simulate two separate challenges and either not doing either well or doing both super slowly, he broke the problem down into two little minigames each of which on its own would be more simple and elegant than the two combined.  There is of course overlap between the two systems (and needs to be).  Both use d20+modifier >= Difficulty as their core fortune mechanic.  But each creates a different picture of what is going on in the scene.And when I accepted that it was ok to be inelegant, I realized that's actually how I wanted things to work.  Modeling social interaction like physical combat ends up missing out on the best parts of either combat or social interaction, or both.  And trying to have one system that catches all the nuances of things that in real life look vastly different ends up just being an entire system wide kludge.  cRPG designers have been ahead on this one the whole time.  Because they have to actually model the physical space of their rules to create usable interfaces, they've inherently had to have different minigames for each separate subsystem they wanted to include in their main game if they wanted to make 'play' for that subsystem.</blockquote>

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