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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6353787" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's not the question at all.The rules of 4e are used by the players of the game as a common ground to answer questions about what happens in the shared fiction when participants are disagreeing over what new elements are to be introduced into it. But they are not simulationist mechanics, and they were being explicitly excluded by the post that prompted  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s OP.In particular, Hussar was responding to this:Because the rules are tools for answering questions about the fiction, however, they can't be separated from it. When the rules say that Batman can only throw 3 Batarangs per day, that is a statement about the fictional world. That is a claim about the rules that goes beyond their role in providing a common ground for regulating the fiction. It also imputes to them a particular role in determining the content of that fiction (roughly, any constraint that is part of the rules must correspond to some sort of ingame causal constraint). 4e's rules don't play this role.Hussar was also responding to this:The rules have no authority over what Batman chooses to do, only over the results of his decisions.This is a specification of a distinctive way in which the rules might regulate the creation of the fiction: namely, they do not regulate action delcarations by players, only the adjudication of the outcomes of those action declarations. No rules for any edition of D&D have ever exemplified this, because they all include combat action economies that ration action declarations in a way that are independent of the results of prior action declarations. (At the moment I'm playing a DungeonWorld PbP. DungeonWorld is different from D&D in this respect, as it has no action economy, or at least not one that I've discovered yet. It's fully fiction-first.)In 4e the rules have a lot of authority over what a player can choose to have his/her PC do. In addition to the basic action economy, there are all sorts of acquisition and rationing rules around action points, power use, hit point recovery, etc.This doesn't make 4e any less of an RPG. (Nor is D&D, other editions, any less of an RPG than DungeonWorld even though the latter is more fiction-first than any edition of D&D that I've experienced.)How can Hussar or I be wrong about how we play the game? If I assert that in my game PC hit points are primarily a metagame device for tracking the momentum of victory - if you're losing hp faster than your enemies are its running against you, and vice versa its running your way - then who are you to say that I am wrong?If I state that, in my gameworld, "luckiness" is not an ingame property, but rather that abilities like hit points, rerolls etc take place at the metagame level, and that in the game they reflect nothing more than coincidence or "good fortune" - ie random chance happening to run the PC's way - then in what way am I wrong?You can play hit points as real within the fiction if you like - a "luck shield" which gets hammered away until eventually it is worn down and the final hammering actually hammers the PC's body (I would note an oddly different "luck shield" from that provided by a luckstone or a prayer spell or whatever) - but the rules don't mandate such an approach. And it wasn't the approach intended by the original designers, so it's hardly as if the approach that I (and Hussar) prefer is in some way deviant.But done well it would make the game a lot more palatable to traditional purist-for-system players, who want the resolution processes of the game to reflect, in some tenable if approximate fashion, actual real world processes of fighting with swords. The original version of wounds/vitality was authored by Roger Musson over 30 years ago, and published in White Dwarf as "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive". He is quite overt about his purist-for-system motivations: part of his objection to the standard D&D combat system is that hit points try to mix the physical and metaphysical, which Musson compares to trying to mix oil and water.In his system "hit point" loss corresponds to exhaustion, from dodging blows - and he explains how other acts of exertion, including spell casting if so desired, might be modelled in terms of hit point loss. Wounds correspond to actual physical injury - and they inflict action penalties and a chance to die. And can be coupled with a hit location system if desired.This is all about making the game more palatable for traditional purist-for-system sensibilities.</blockquote>

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