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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4864650" data-attributes="member: 3820">It's easy enough to remember. Those real people are at my table every week, bringing food and drink. They all see the underlying mechanics, but we view them as an enabler rather than a millstone. If they bug your group, absolutely the best rule is to drop them, but I can assure you I'm not inflicting them on unhappy players. I'm not sure how that line of argument applies. Aragorn's player and Aragorn are not the same thing. The tendency to view the world through the filter of game mechanics isn't a common one at our table; for us, Aragorn sees orcs, even though Viggo knows they were extras. We don't have trouble with the two images blending in our heads.  I disagree. It is without the particular substance of a ruleset that encourages absolutes regardless of context, but that's just one breed of substance. I haven't seen many absolutes that are worthy of preservation regardless of context — at least as far as game mechanics go. "Treat your players like decent human beings" is the kind of absolute I tend to get behind.Most probably would be within the context of that campaign, because it's the ideal way to model them. But campaigns and campaign worlds are different things. Just because rank-and-file ogres wind up being minions when one campaign gets up to about 15th level or so doesn't mean that another 3rd-level campaign in the same world is suddenly going to find that most ogres they run into are minions. To us, the in-character perspective takes precedence over the mechanical consistency. It would make less sense to treat a 3rd-level encounter with ogres the same way as the 15th-level one. I realize this is the core point of contention, and that wouldn't work at all for many folks in this thread; I just point out what works for us, and I defend it as something that works great for us.I don't think the thread in question quite applies. I have the feeling that trying to argue for common-sense calls as a whole would give the mistaken impression that I felt the thread-starter in general was a common-sense call, and I honestly don't. I come down on the side of it being literal beyond the point of common sense, so I can't in good conscience defend it with these terms. Apologies! I'm sorry, what "1 hp minimum"? I was just commenting on the wonder of butterflies that could do 1 hp of damage and be considered "feeble." They weren't my creation, to be sure!I guess it depends on how much the player took into account his mechanical knowledge as a player in the first place. One of the reasons that I like 4e so much is that with quick and easy build-your-own monster rules, role-based mechanics, and the ease of reskinning, you can have a lot of diversity between monsters. It's really hard to second-guess what a monster's mechanics are, so you rely more on in-character observation. (Example: the necrosis-spitting mutant "bull rat" that we went up against in my brother's last game? Ankheg stat block. Which is to say, L3 elite brute with a spit attack and a grab attack. No way I could have predicted that stat block, so I had to react to what my character saw.)Too many factors to consider. The odds are certainly lower, since there are been so many different RPGs out there to cater to every potential taste in 2008, and there weren't nearly as many 25 (35?) years ago. To say nothing of the "first to market" factor — a first contact is certainly a hell of a mindshare advantage.</blockquote>

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