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: 9577797" data-attributes="member: 42582">To me these two things - Ogres, and carpentry - seem quite different.Hit dice are not a part of the fiction. They're a game mechanic for assigning hit points and attack bonuses. All that there is, in the fiction, is ability to endure in a fight and ability to hurt others in a fight. You can step up the AC and step down the hit points, and preserve the ability to endure in a fight. You can step up the attack bonus and step down the damage dice, and preserve the ability to hurt others in a fight. No particular way of doing this is truer of, or less true of, the fiction.A parallel would be resolving a fight in D&D via some single opposed check. It might be tricky to work out a fair way of doing this. But it would not be "more gamist" than the standard resolution system - there is nothing more "realistic" about dividing time into 6 second intervals and doing hit point ablation over those intervals, than resolving it all at once.On the other hand, the fact that someone becomes a master of a craft is a state of affairs in the fiction. If that happens although the person never practises the craft, then that is a bit weird. The fact that D&D's PC build rules can produce this outcome is another reason why I don't regard them as a general framework for world-building. Maybe for some reason this exceptional person - the PC - is a master despite having barely practised. But NPC master carpenters will have attained that state by dint of practice - which is something the PC build rules don't model or reflect.I tried to drift AD&D in this direction in the latter part of the 1980s. It was fairly hard work and the success was mixed at best. After playing one session of Rolemaster at my university RPG club, I went out and bought the rules, learned them, and then started GMing RM. I GMed a weekly RM game for 9 to 10 years, which then became fortnightly for another 9 to 10 years (19 years in total; two different campaigns, one about 8 years and the other about 11 years).I don't see D&D as satisfying simulationist demands.EDIT: [USER=7029930]@AnotherGuy[/USER] - just to let you know I edited my post after you reacted., to add some more thoughts prompted by your post.</blockquote>

Verification