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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7762550" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well now we're in the interesting territory!In RQ, being hit (in the mechanical sense) isn't an illusion of simulation. That mechanical outcome correlates to a rather specific outcome in the fiction (we know where you were hit, and have a pretty good sense of how badly you were hurt, whether your were maimed, etc). Likewise in Burning Wheel, Rolemaster most of the time, etc.In MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, which in mechanical terms is a very contrasting system to those one, there is no illusion of simulation either. If you are adversely affected then we know how (Physical stress, Mental stress, Emotional stress, or a descriptive Complication) and we know, roughly, how badly (d4 - hardly at all, d12 - almost succumbed, greater than d12 and you're out of the action).MHRP/Cortex+ won't generate as many rightwards arrows on its own, however. In RQ, BW or RM if your arm is maimed then that bit of fiction excludes action declarations like "I hack away at them with my two-handed sword!" Whereas in MHRP/Cortex+ an opponent can put a stress or complication die into their pool (ie my penalties are your buffs) but that can play as purely boxes-to-boxes until the opponent actually uses that pool to generate some new fiction. This is part of what makes MHRP/Cortex+ far less gritty than a system like RQ, BW or RM.When we get to the D&D family of games, there are generally no gritty leftward or rightward arrows in combat (unless we turn to magic). Nor are their descriptors that can be leveraged in the MHRP/Cortex+ style. There's just positioning and hp ablation. This is why I find the idea that 4e "tore away" some veil of simulation so hard to make sense of. To me, it actually increase the number of leftward arrows because it has such a wide range of condition infliction - so eg when the fighter with his polarm does Come and Get It we don't just know that he's attacking 4 gnolss, but that he's wrongfooting them with his polearm. That's more fiction than you get with AD&D.On it's own that fiction won't generate rightward arrows - in that respect it's a bit like MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. But anyone playing it as purely boxes-to-boxes is (to my mind) not exploiting the system to its full. (Eg p 42 clearly depends upon rightwards arrows.)It seems that the "illusion of simulation" may not have been much more than my mechanics use feet rather than square as a unit of measurement or my mechanics for determining how hard something is to hit include the phrase "natural armour bonus". But that's not rightwards arrows. We don't have some mechanics-independent sense of how tough a red dragon's skin is, which then lets us read off a natural armour bonus (this contrasts with RM, RQ and BW, in which the opposite is true).For my money, fiction in RPGs isn't about labels. It's about the actual processes that we use to play the game and resolve declared actions.</blockquote>

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