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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6353672" data-attributes="member: 22779">Could you expand on this?  I'm not sure what you mean.  And that's not snark, but, I think there might be something here that I'm really missing.To me, the fact that one character has 100HP and an elephant has 100 HP, has absolutely no bearing on the in game fiction.  None whatsoever.  There is no way to tell, in game, those numbers.  They exist completely outside of the reality.  There is no means by which someone in game can tell how many HP something has.The mechanics of HP and combat do not model any event.  They don't tell you anything other than a combatant is alive or dead.  If I use something like a wound/vitality system, now the model informs the narrative.  I know whether or not an attack has actually physically wounded the target and by how much.  That's a pretty simple example of a simulation.  You can certainly get more detailed than that, but, you need at least that much detail before you can actually claim you have any sort of model.I keep coming back to this.  A simulation model has to tell you how something happened.  Otherwise it's not actually simulating anything.  I could flip a coin and decide the outcome of a battle.  Is that a simulation?  Two combatants come together, I flip a coin and say X or Y wins the fight.  Now, what's the difference between a coin flip and D&D combat, other than detail?  It's still just a coin flip, albeit a much more complicated one.  Same goes with the Profession skills.  Nothing is told about how you made that money.  Who gave you that money?  What did you do?  All we know is you spent X time, and made Y money.  That's not a simulation of anything.  That's pure gamism.  There's no model there.  Spend time, add ranks (which can be added even though you've never actually DONE anything related to your skill) and you make more money.  Put it another way, what is a skill rank measuring?  Expertise in a skill?  But, how is that expertise being gained?  What does having three ranks in a given skill actually mean?  How long does it take to increase your skill?  When I use Profession Sailor, what am I actually doing?  We have no idea because there's no real model here.  All I am told by the mechanics is Time In, Money Out.  That's it.  Note, you cannot even ever FAIL your profession check.  You will automatic succeed every single time you try.  You gain half your check in GP/week, full stop.  That's not a model of anything.  If we use the rules as a guide here, every single person in a D&D world is automatically rich.  They can't ever fail.  Everyone in the world makes X gp/week if we apply the rules to the broader world.This is why I talk about how the rules really only apply to the game, and not the world.  That would be absolutely nonsensical if every single profession automatically made money.  A single rank in a profession would give you 1 gp/week automatically and even a 1st level commoner gets that.  Every single artisan is automatically successful, presuming whatever it is they are trying to make is within their ability to make it.  Every single time.That's ridiculous.</blockquote>

Verification