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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9042920" data-attributes="member: 82106">Sure, they take DRAMATIC LICENSE, and neither is a movie a simulation. Its a story. I don't think the two are closely related categories at all. I don't have a negative attitude, I just literally do not think that the stuff we do in RPGs is in any way shape or form related to simulation in any formal sense. And as I've said many times, I don't really object to the use of the word in respect to some basic 'local' aspects of RPG realism, the word 'simulation' after all has an informal meaning. What I see however is some of the people with whom I regularly interact on this forum trying to maintain that what they're doing has some actual rigor, that it is something MORE than plausibility, or that it can meaningfully constrain any but the most immediate and local aspects of the fiction.The problem is, look at the sorts of stuff that some people are claiming to fall into the realm of 'simulation', like demographics, geography, weather, politics, etc. These are not things you can approach with paper and pencils, or even large heavily-funded government 3-letter agencies for that matter!It is not I who am setting any impossible standards. I'm simply pointing out that calling what GM's do, generally speaking, in terms of laying out the events of play has ZERO to do with simulation, nothing whatsoever. Its about as much a simulation as a lion is a grapefruit. I'm not twigged about .1 degrees of jack, I'm pointing out that the entire usage is a monumental category error right on the face of it!See, I knew you were going to say this, that "the realistic way is a geometric damage progression", but if you actually look at the statistics on the outcomes of falls, you will see that neither procedure produces anything really resembling the real-world lethality of falls! The web site I just now consulted on this claims that falls of 50' have about a 50% survival rate (this is obviously real-world, so ordinary people without some sort of magic or high level hit points, etc.). Falls from 70' are about 90% fatal. This obviously varies by surface and whatnot, as well as the health of the person falling. There is however, NO known height from which a fall will be 100% fatal (well, actually, sure, a fall from 100 miles will cook you but people have survived falls of more than 30,000 feet). So I would argue that none of the systems you are mentioning is even faintly realistic, and the whole geometric vs linear thing means little. If anything the linear allocation of damage may actually be MORE reflective of reality, as it offers some probability of longer falls doing minimal damage.Yet I never found that GURPS generally gave me any great sense of its injury systems being very realistic either. I mean, they produce fiction that encompasses a larger range of what people experience in real life, but that's about it.Meh, back in the day Steve and various of the other people from Metagaming would show up with playtest material at our club. They did a lot of RPG playtesting, though that was 5-6 years before GURPS was published. I don't recall a lot about the mechanics of those things. At the time Melee and Wizard were already out there, and I have the impression what they were working on was pretty close to that, though not the same as the TFT rules that eventually got published. Still, GURPS is in many ways pretty beholden to the ideas of TFT. I won't claim I've ever had a real conversation with Steve, but my impression is that he's much more of a board gamer and that his approach to RPGs, as such, is much like AH's was, to treat the thing as basically a wargame. As a consequence, I personally never found GURPS to be at all to my tastes, even back in the days before narrativism was really a thing.</blockquote>

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