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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6284229" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree.  If you define believable as 'for the most part believable', then yes, we are on pretty much the same page.  This is however possibly going to matter later...This is a problem with a particular kind of universal rules, and not applicable to rules generally.  It is however getting to the heart of the problem.   It's easy to come up with a simple, fast, universal rules system.  Celebrim's famous Universal Rule System, has one resolution mechanic, which is:1) Any time a player proposes something, flip a coin.  If the coin flip comes up heads, the proposition suceeds.  Otherwise, the proposition fails.Now, this is a system that doesn't get bogged down into details!  How does it fail?  Precisely because it probably doesn't model the reality that people want.  It's just as easy - or as hard - to jump the Atlantic Ocean as a puddle.   It's precisely because players are expecting 'realism' of some sort, that the rules start to get complicated.Again, this is a feature of a particular type of rules set and not of one generally.   But, in general, for the attacking the wall case I find you are wrong.  I didn't bring up hardness of walls for nothing.Agree.  And here is the thing - you have to expect that the rules don't model reality.  They only model the game.  If you make the mistake of thinking the rules model reality, you are going to have problems.In fact, in RAW D&D they are normal.  This doesn't normally come up, because players normally make the mistake of thinking that the rules model reality, and not the game so they don't even try to smash down walls.  And DMs, blind to the reality of their game because they also believe the rules model reality, don't inspect them.Right until they try do something like throw a naked PC into a room with stone walls, and it suddenly clicks in the PCs head that the reality is that he's imprisoned in walls of thick tissue paper.  So he proposes to the DM, "I start punching the wall."DM:"What??? You hurt your hand.  Your knuckles are bloody and nothing happens to the wall.PC: I'm a 12th level barbarian with 26 strength and DR 2/-.  I do minimum 10 damage on a punch.  Stone walls only have 8 hardness, so even with a minimum punch I should be doing 2 damage to the wall.  Stone walls only have 100 hit points per 10'x10'x1' section, and I can punch 3 times per round.  So I should be smashing a hole in the wall 10' high, 10' wide and 1' deep about every minute.  DM: What??? That's not realistic.PC: It's the rules.  Besides, it may not be realistic for you or me to punch through walls, but this is Grog we are talking about.  Stone walls cannot hold him!DM: Look, eventually even if you could punch stone you'd hurt your hand.PC: Where in the rules does it say weapons take damage when they strike targets?  Every sword we've got would be broken if that was the case.  And why don't monsters take damage when they do slam attacks?DM: Alright, but the stone you are tunneling through is 100' thick!PC: Ok, so it takes me about an hour and a half to clear through it.  Let's call it three hours to account for me moving the rubble behind me in the tunnel.And so forth.  Pretty soon DMs are yelling rules lawyers and pretending this the fault of the player for not listening to reason.  But reason here is actually 'read the DM'.  Sure, but if your rules dont' model those expectations, then its not the players fault.   And if your rules don't model those expectations, then its important that the players learn that, because they probably have some mixed up DM that will insist on the rules some of the time and on reality some of the time, and they'll just have to read his @$#@#$# mind.I think I just proved that wasn't true.Only if you insist on modeling reality rather than the game.I agree, but this has nothing to do with whether you are making your players read you rather than the game.Aha!  So now we get to the heart of the matter.Only if you are bad at writing rules.  You are right though, you will need a new rule for the class of objects that are 'drills'.  So you have a note, explicit or implicit, "This drill is a drill (ignores the hardness of stone objects)".  Now, the drill is useful, even if it only does 1 damage per minute, and is never the most powerful weapon in the game.  Maybe just as importantly, the drill works more or less like people would reasonably expect drills to work, so even if the player doesn't know the rules - and more importantly if the player does know the rule(!!) - the game keeps working in a way that makes sense.Sure, but how often are you looking up the rules for drills anyway?  Agreed, but this doesn't require you to 'read the DM'No, they won't.  But, its worth noting that the D20 rules even RAW have at least that level of casual realism anyway.  What's important here though is that the players know the rules for falling.  If the players see a character jump 100' out of the window, roll and run away, they are going to assume one of several things: a) falling in this world doesn't hurt much, or b) falling hurts but that was some sort of superhero or c) the DM cheated to protect an NPC.  Only the rules provide clarification.  Imagine a situation where the player jumps off the ledge after the character 100' below, reasoning that as he has 70 hit points, he's likely to survive the fall.  Several things may happen.  One, the DM may balk at the players and tell him, "No.  It's a 100' fall, it's not realistic that you'd jump off expecting to survive."  Or, the DM may go, "Ok, you take 10d100 damage... that's 352... you're dead."  Or the DM may accept that is precisely what players are supposed to do given that they are superheroes and falling doesn't hurt much in this world.  Or the DM may go, "I need new rules for falling."  Some of these responses are disfunctional.In general I agree.  The important point though is that the RPG never simulates reality.  You have to give up at some point.  Some people on the boards complain about me having a 534 page house rules document.  I tell them that I have far fewer house rules than they probably do.  Their house rules are called 'reality', and they are undocumented and unknowable.  Despite this, they complain about the players not knowing them.What's wrong with that?They can cover enough.  And if you really care about completeness, you can cover the edge cases with a common universal rule, such as the coin flip.Flavor perceptions are a different problem than mechanical perceptions.  You are quite right though about the mechanics of doors.  It's worth noting that the SRD pretty much does exactly that.Not if it isn't in the rules.  Again, there is a reason behind the Armor Check Penalty, and it is precisely that 1e didn't cover it and so people would argue (arugably correctly) that it didn't matter what they were wearing.  Circumstance modifier.  This is a rule specific to the situation.  As such, you inform the player in the scenario that the high wind may make jumping difficult against the wind before he jumps, and probably just tell him what the modifier is, or else you are playing "gotcha".  If it comes up often, it better be added to your rules governing the behavior of wind, and in any event, even if you don't formalize it, it will come up again when the player says, "Don't I get a circumstance modifier for jumping with the wind."  That's why there is no difference between a rule and a ruling.That's why DMs are empowered to change the rules.  In point of fact, all of them do.  Some of them are just more honest about it than others.We discuss how we think the rules should work.   Or a game.  But we aren't trying to model reality, just the game.  The game doesn't work according to physics.  Enough said.LOL.  I'll try to refrain from making jokes about 4e DM's. <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=";)" />Well, it wasn't necessarily a good scenario and it was very unartfully arranged.  Even if you had figured out that you could build a bridge, then what?  Would resolving 'building a bridge' necessarily been very fun?  A good DM would have provided 3 clues regarding how the scenario could be resolved.  Imagine the scenario as a text based adventure or an adventure game.  You can't expect the player to come to the bridge and type, "Build bridge".  The setting should subtly suggest the idea that you could build a bridge, and guide the players toward that conclusion.   The chasm should also probably have about 3 ways to resolve, in case building a bridge either doesn't occur to the players, is dismissed as a bad idea, or they push forward on a different idea before even considering it.  At the very least, you better be prepared for resolving some obvious alternatives - they decide to ride around the chasm, they try to glide over it, etc.So?  Again, it is the responcibility of the DM to interpose here and set some expectations as artfully as possible, regardless.  Any player that doesn't know the rules and hasn't tried to acquire information about the setting has to be assumed to have false perceptions.In mine their are...Even the SRD covers the basics of this stuff.None of those things seem to have came up in the scenario your player proposed.  There is no sign of a false perception here, nor any sign of a rule creating an undesirable result.  Now, if in your game world, you only waved at dogs or slaves and this would have been a mortal insult, then you better either pause and explain that isn't how greetings are done or make them make some sort of Knowledge check to see if the character knows that.  Otherwise, this is a Nitro Ferguson world.Ok sure, but then you have to accept a lot of DM reading as being inherently part of the game.  Also, unless you are playing with a lot of people with common real life experiences, you'll probably be wrong.</blockquote>

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