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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5996386" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think this is a very common and traditional approach to RPG play: the player asks about some aspect of the gameworld, hoping to provoke an affirmative (or, I think less often, a negative) reply from the GM, in order to exploit the content of that reply in some subsequent piece of action resolution.If you look at play advice from the mid-to-late 80s through to at least the mid-90s, it is fairly common to see discussions of the extent to which such requests/queries by the player must be "in character", and what exactly that means (eg how hopeful is my PC allowed to be in looking around the room and wondering if it contains a hidden trap door?) Those sorts of discussions seem pretty clearly focused on a question of the degree of director stance authority that players are to be permitted to enjoy.But the first one might also have got through! I mean, the whole logic of losing 8 hit points from your total, and having 70-odd left, is that it was a near thing, that grazed you only because of your cat-like reflexes. Yet the player whose PC is on 1 hp has certain knowledge that his/her PC cannot turn any more hits into grazes.I agree with Balesir here - the blood I've lost has already slowed me down, except it hasn't, because I can still move at full speed! Have full AC! etc. (Contrast Rolemaster, which has a fairly rich penalty system for fatigue, blood loss, bruising, and more serious injuries - and a correlatively rich healing system.)Suppose someone says, "Well, I explain martial encounter and daily powers as cinematic fighting styles and exploitations of the openings that present themselves. So they're not dissociative." I don't see how that is any different.Upthread Underman expressed a dislike for my suggested gonzo fantasy narration of a bard's Vicious Mockery of an ooze. Which is fine - one person's "cinematic" or "gonzo" is another person's "ludicrous" or "ridiculous"! But that you don't like the "cinematic fighting technique" explanation of encounter powers doesn't tell us much about them as a mechanic - it only tells us about you and your preferences!But in the same way that 1 attack per minute in AD&D is an abstraction, so one Rain of Blows per 5 minutes in 4e is an abstraction - an abstraction of the vagaries of combat, and positioning, and opportunities etc. Just as Open Locks being limited to 1 try per level is an abstraction, so is Rain of Blows never working after the first time that you try it.Heck, even Come and Get It can be played in this way (though that may not work so well if pits and other interesting terrain are involved - it may depend on the details). The fighter in my game mostly used a halberd, and his Come and Get It is generally narrated as a consequence of deft use of his halberd to wrongfoot and snare his opponents.I think that D'karr's hit point example equally addresses the Come and Get It issue.It comes round to the turn of the player of the fighter. The player moves her token (or miniature) into the middle of a throng of enemies, and says "I'm using Come and Get It"), and then starts moving the enemies into their new positions. How is this, as such, going to spoil anyone's immersion? The fighter - an obvious melee combatant - has moved into the middle of a throng of enemies, and they close in - what is immersion-breaking about that?Now if one or most of the enemies are archers, or ranged casters, or whatever, maybe some more fancy narration is required. In my own game, in over 10 levels of play with (unerrrated) Come and Get It, that has come up once that I can recollect (the first time the power was used, in fact). Immersion, and the capacity for immersion, survived the experience.The experience may be definable. What is in dispute is whether there is some distinctive mechanical feature. I haven't reallly got a handle on it yet, though it's connected to metagaming, to causal correlation of resolution procedure to ingame fiction, perhaps also to stance. But not in any straightforward way, because some mechanics which are dubious under one or more of these criteria (like hit points) get a pass.There is a connection here to the alleged contrast between abstraction with dissociation. I suggested that Rain of Blows, and even Come and Get It, can be treated as abstractions (of positioning, opportunity, etc) in the same way as hit points and combat turn procedures can be. But obviously there are ways of using encounter and daily powers that are not simply abstractions in that way. For example, a player of a 4e fighter might play more like the player of an AD&D wizard, carefully calculating and rationing and optimising his/her power use, just like the wizard player calculates and rations and optimises his/her spell use. And clearly that is not just abstracting away the details of in-combat decision-making.But hit points can be played in exactly the same way: a player can work out the odds of being hit or suffering various forms of injury, of making or failing saving throws, and the like, and work out an optimum plan (for engaging enemies, or for moving through a trapped area, or whatever it might be). And at this point hit points are not just an abstraction of battle fatigue. They are being calculated and rationed and optimised like any other limited resource. If you avoid doing this with hit points, in order to preserve immersion, then my advice would be that, if for some reason you find yourself playing a game laden with limited-use martial powers, avoid doing it with those powers too. If other people start playing their martial powers in that way, and it bothers you, then deal with it the same way you would deal with the hit point optimiser. Etc.Which goes back to my main contention: hit points are no less dissociated than limited-use martial powers. And whatever techniques one uses at the table to reconcile hit points with immersion, if you find yourself playing with limited-used martia powers then use the same techniques, whatever they happen to be.And if for whatever reason you can't - eg you can handle hit points as an abstraction of pantherish twists that turn strong blows into grazes, but you can't handle encounter powers as an abstraction of pantherish twists that allow, right now (but not necessarily in 6 seconds time), two foes to be struck - then I don't think anyone is trying to make you use them.But I'm not really interested in being told that, because I can perform, when necessary, this feat of aesthetic gymnastics, I'm "nearly impervious to dissociation" and am playing a tactical skirmish game loosely linked by freeform improv.</blockquote>

Verification