[I think there's a small typo in Bren's post because a dagger that does 1d4+2 can do 3 points of damage, which is less than 4. But let's assume the dagger does 1d4+3.]

Quote from: Bren;895250This same argument regarding the finite but known nature of luck points applies to finite but known hit points as well. The lack of a 1-to-1 relationship between hit points and health is psychologically less obvious because players rarely are able to choose to spend hit points (though there are exceptions). Loss of hit points usually is something that happens to characters rather than something they choose. So the discrepancy is somewhat concealed.

But the predictable exhaustion of a limited, but known resource has no real world analog.

I agree. Note, though, that is true only if we stipulate that the character sees his world the same way we see ours. There doesn't need to be a real world analog. There just needs to be a correspondence between the player's understanding of the mechanics, and the character's understanding of the world. (A classic case is the Vancian theory of spell slots as laid out by Gygax in AD&D 1e.)

There's also a matter of abstraction and "design for effect": the individual elements of the mechanics may not map perfectly to the game-world, but the overall effect of the mechanics on the player's decision-making may be the same as the effect of the overall situation on the character. In this case, we recognize that the purpose of "roll to hit"/"roll damage" is ultimately to derive the probable effect of an attack as a function of attacker skill & strength, and weapon weight. The player who sees a 100% chance of losing all remaining hit points if hit by a dagger hasn't necessarily lost all hope--the attacker still has to hit. In terms of effect this is analogous to the character feeling that they still have the option of fighting rather than surrendering or running away. There will still be edge cases but we're most interested in the congruent relationship between player-perception, player-agency, and mechanics on one hand, and character-perception, character-agency, and "the world" on the other. This tends to mitigate the "harm" to IC-POV caused by imperfect simulation of detail in intermediate procedural steps.

Still, it's easy to come up with examples where a purely ablative hit point system fails to convincingly translate real-world risk, depending on the system. Certainly in old-school D&D, the player of a medium-level fighter doesn't have to worry at all about being caught flat-footed by a single archer. We can try to think of a good in-game reason for the character not to feel threatened--maybe characters have a tangible sense of of their invulnerability due to Destiny. Alternatively, we can look at hit points as a representation of the conceit that "heroes don't die that way". This is an OOC POV.

So far I've given several ways of dealing with instances where the player's relationship to the mechanics appears not to be congruent with the character's relationship to the world. To recap:

• Posit that the character's world works differently from ours, and more in line with the mechanics.
• Double-check the impact of the mechanics as a whole on player agency. If the overall effect gives the player the same agency & limitations as the character, then the problem only affects representation of minor details.
• Accept or embrace the fact that the mechanic is OOC. (Or just ignore the whole issue, if IC POV doesn't matter to you.)

There's another obvious way: change the rules. Sometimes people do this through GM rulings, sometimes by writing or adopting entirely new rules sets. In some games, there's practically no fixed maximum to the number of hits a character can endure. For example, in True20, as long as you keep making your Toughness saves, you're okay. Even where it's mathematically impossible to make the save, a natural 20 will keep you on your feet. Harnmaster 1e is similar in that the only definite effect of wounds is a penalty to further actions--most anything more, like loss of a limb or death, is subject to a kind of save.

In conclusion, if you posit a fictional world whose internal physics & causality are the same as ours, True20 or Harnmaster do a better job of enabling IC-POV when it comes to your critique about wound effects. (But there's a cost in terms of procedural complexity, especially in HM.) Overall, we can argue whether a given mechanic is realistic or not, and what the inhabitants of a given fictional world would suppose to be the laws of their existence. The point is that if the mechanics match up with the characters' perceptions & understanding, you have IC POV or as Justin calls them, associated mechanics. If the mechanics give players an agency that's either greater or more limited than the character's, then they work from an OOC POV and they're dissociated to some degree. By greater I mean that they let the player opt to do things that the character can't control. By more limited, I mean that they force the player to choose in ways that the character might not have to--to paraphrase an example from one of Justin's essays, they might force a football receiver to choose whether to make a one-handed catch in the first half or to "save up" that feat for the second half.

Quote from: rawma;895293So you persist in pretending that luck or fate points cannot be awarded for background or deeds, and must come from beyond the "4th wall" or as loot from a dead orc. Why? If you understand that allies and favors come from something in the game world other than a dead orc's boots, why did you pretend in your first reply to me that that was the only place fate points with an in-world interpretation could come from? If you are arguing against a particular implementation of luck and fate points, then you should explain how it works and what you object to, rather than persistently misrepresenting what I'm talking about. I'll be happy to explain my own thoughts further and give examples from games I've played, if you actually want a discussion

I think the misinterpretation goes both ways and then some. I didn't pretend that the only way proper immersive way to find fate points was in a dead orc's boots. What I did was to not pretend to agree with your statement that using a scroll was the same (or not different, which is pretty much the same thing) as using a fate point.
I am not adverse to the concept of fate points. Many games use them, and many games use them well. Other games don't.
As you've said, a fate point could be seen as that special oomph granted through the blessings of a god, by tapping into mystical resources, innate McClaneness or what have you. It still isn't a magical scroll with a pre-determined inscribed spell, and is a poor mechanical representation of the number of favours owed by your 3rd cousin.

Quote from: Arminius;895366[I think there's a small typo in Bren's post because a dagger that does 1d4+2 can do 3 points of damage, which is less than 4. But let's assume the dagger does 1d4+3.]

Not a typo. Just a mistake. My bad. I'm glad you were able to understand the point I was trying to make despite my error.

QuoteSo far I've given several ways of dealing with instances where the player's relationship to the mechanics appears not to be congruent with the character's relationship to the world.

Agreed. The connection to something happening in the real world is why Force Points in WEG D6 Star Wars are somewhat associated. Much like hit points in most game systems.

QuoteThere's another obvious way: change the rules.

Agreed. In a previous post I suggested a change to how bennies work as a way to better align the mechanics to the game world reality.

I didn't see anything in your post to take issue with. My point in the last post, was simply that hit points have some of the same problems that LUCK points (or other such things) have. Some of the same methods work to make either more aligned with the nature of reality of the game world.

From what I've read, hit points were invented when Arneson's early Blackmoor players balked at the one-hit-kill combat system he was using.

But I don't know if he just treated them as "negate one hit" or when the game moved to the idea of weapons causing a random number of "hits". However I think it's pretty clear that HP were originally grafted onto the system as luck points, only to be revised pretty rapidly into the hybrid luck/skill/meat points found in Greyhawk and 1e. And then over the years people keep reinventing ways to further "associate" them.

Quote from: Jimbojack;871159One of the things we aim for in our games is making the combat feel real and the violence feel dangerous. To that end we have some of the most realistic and punishing damage tables out there, both for swords and such (SoS) and for boolets (CotV)

Personally, I believe your issue is here and not with luck points. You might have too much "realism" and investment on the damage tables and that invites you to leverage them in the game. In my opinion damage is the least relevant element in a realistic and dangerous combat game. Skarg listed some very good tips, I'd recommend you follow them.

Quote from: Arminius;895438From what I've read, hit points were invented when Arneson's early Blackmoor players balked at the one-hit-kill combat system he was using.

The invention is slightly before my D&D time, but that does align with Chainmail mini combat's 1 hit, 1 kill  as well as the 4 hits to kill a Hero, 8 to kill a Superhero from the Fantasy section. Which then changes in OD&D to 1d6 hit points per fighter level and 1d6 hit points damage on a hit.

Quote from: baragei;895383I think the misinterpretation goes both ways and then some. I didn't pretend that the only way proper immersive way to find fate points was in a dead orc's boots.

Yes, you did:

Quote from: baragei;894295So it is supposed to go like "You search the dead orc high priest and find 16 GP, a+1 mace, and (make a perception-test) two fate points hidden in his boots"?

What was the point, if you understood that resources are acquired in a lot of different ways? A mage's use of their own spell in particular is not acquired or reacquired that way in any game I can think of.

Quote from: baragei;895383What I did was to not pretend to agree with your statement that using a scroll was the same (or not different, which is pretty much the same thing) as using a fate point.

I said "not different" in that (emphasis added):

Quote from: rawma;894276It's not different from using a spell or a scroll in D&D to cause something to happen; a resource is consumed and so not later available.

... they consume a resource, not that every aspect of all three is identical. If saying you use a fate point is non-procedural, then saying you use a spell or a magic item should also be non-procedural (I was seeking clarification on how one thing is procedural and another isn't). The later response from Arminius clarified that he objected to fate points being outside the character's world view, an objection you seem to share. But if you have to advance your opinion through dishonest snark, maybe you should reconsider whether your objection actually has good supporting arguments. If it does, making those arguments seems a much better use of everyone's time.

And there's something else. Using a spell and using a scroll in D&D are already different, even beyond whether they're recovered by looking in a dead orc's boots. Sure, in hindsight, it would have been much better to mention any of the much more different resource usages that occur in D&D 5e, many of them not magical, but past experience tells me that moving too far ahead of early D&D/OSR practice opens up a different range of missing-the-point criticism.

QuoteIt still isn't a magical scroll with a pre-determined inscribed spell, and is a poor mechanical representation of the number of favours owed by your 3rd cousin.

And I never said it was any such thing, but I'll be happy to explain this all again if you still don't get it.

Quote from: rawma;895491And I never said it was any such thing, but I'll be happy to explain this all again if you still don't get it.

Thanks, but I'm good. Really!
For what it's worth, I can agree with you that using one resource is no different than using another resource when all you do is to cross them out on a sheet of paper. But there is a difference in game style and mentality between reducing your ammo count by a set amount after firing a gun and reducing your brownie point pool by a set amount to make sure the shot hits, yes?

Quote from: Arminius;895242Are you familiar with the idea of an isomorphism in math? It's like that.

Thanks - That was a good, clear explanation.

Quote from: baragei;895586For what it's worth, I can agree with you that using one resource is no different than using another resource when all you do is to cross them out on a sheet of paper. But there is a difference in game style and mentality between reducing your ammo count by a set amount after firing a gun and reducing your brownie point pool by a set amount to make sure the shot hits, yes?

Despite having seen in over and over in these sorts of threads, it still seems odd to me that there are people who don't seem to understand that there is a difference.

I think Hero Points were a good idea for the James Bond 007 RPG. They helped PCs act like "00s" and they made play flow more like a Bond movie. Using them doesn't bother me at all as they fit the genre. But not bothering me is not the same as not being different from rolling to hit or shooting the last bullet in the Walther. I thought it should have been obvious to everyone that James Bond isn't issued a set of Hero Points by Q along with his attache case and special watch. Hero points are a player resource that occurs outside the level of the game universe, not a character resource that is in universe.*

I wonder if the people who don't get that actually think that the music during the movie that the audience hears when Bond is doing something spectacular or crazy is also audible to James Bond?


* Which is why Force Points in Star Wars are different than most bennies because they represent strength in the Force which is a real thing in-universe.

Quote from: baragei;895586For what it's worth, I can agree with you that using one resource is no different than using another resource when all you do is to cross them out on a sheet of paper. But there is a difference in game style and mentality between reducing your ammo count by a set amount after firing a gun and reducing your brownie point pool by a set amount to make sure the shot hits, yes?

There's a difference between a Fighter using a Action Surge and a Wizard casting a spell and a Bard calling in a favor from a patron, both in game style and mentality, yes?

Yes, you would also probably not like it if you reduced your ammo count by a set amount of bullets after swinging a bar stool at someone, and I would agree with you. You have to know what the game abstraction means, and bullet count is a fairly easy one to understand. Maybe your bullet count could go down when you used a negotiation skill to get some information - if it abstracted trading bullets for the information (or the informant stealing them). Maybe your bullet count could go down when you escaped from a collapsing building because you dropped some when you squeezed out through a narrow opening before you were crushed. If those were regular costs for those kind of actions, the rules would be a bit weird. As a random and sufficiently infrequent side effect, they wouldn't bother me too much.

D&D hit points (as frequently discussed) are a little harder to give a consistent meaning to, especially when they start getting high; actual physical damage when you lose some, or an abstraction of your fighting skill that degrades with fatigue? If the former, how does skill make you indestructible? If the latter, why does it work for things like falling damage? I don't want to rehash the arguments, just note the dispute as an example.

I understood experience points in OD&D as a measure of how much you've done that toughens and improves you for future challenges, so you advance in level. But then you traded them to cast certain spells in AD&D; casting one more spell than ever before should make you more experienced, not less? Well, it's magic. And XP are also life force, which some undead could drain.

So, you have to know what the "brownie points" actually represent, and it may not be perfectly consistent to get a workable abstraction. Divine favor, like Jason having five Hera points, or some other form of magic? Not a problem for me (I prefer fantasy and related genres, so I can generally find some sort of acceptable supernatural representation). In D&D 5e, the Wizard who specializes in divination gets Foretelling, giving two rolls per long rest that can be substituted for d20 rolls the character observes, because the Wizard had a dream that this would happen; I don't know how else to represent that kind of precognition without some major railroading (so, the contents of the dream are unclear until the rolls are used, and then retconned to match how they were used). The points could be luck (supernatural, I suppose, but not if they're so uncommon that scientists in the game world could not conclusively prove their existence; presumably the scientists can't detect the difference between player characters and non player characters, either). They could be some form of confidence or other psychological quality; maybe the enemy missed because he hesitated and second guessed himself -- the PC projected such certainty that he could not be killed that the enemy bought into it. Or targets are normally more susceptible but tapping into that certainty relaxes you to where you can dodge an attack (cats supposedly are more likely to survive some higher falls, perhaps because they relax and take the impact better if they fall farther). But either way, it runs out, an exhaustible resource, because the PC starts to worry and doubt after using it and thinks "well, my luck's run out now", a self fulfilling prophecy. Finally, you can just use it as a stand-in for a defensive action that rarely takes place; in games where a successful attack roll is followed by a parry roll that may mean the attack roll failed anyway, and that's hard to view as a beyond the 4th wall effect. So, there's a successful attack roll, which, if the "luck point parrying mechanic" works, actually failed (the luck point parrying mechanic succeeding if the target uses a luck point and failing if not, and it's a form of stamina).

Certainly in the case of a very non-supernatural world, the use of these points should be constrained by the rationale for them. Divine favor could do anything the god can do; psychological effects can't change physical facts about the world but could affect rolls by PCs or NPCs. And, as I said earlier, like the Help action, the player should have to come up with some explanation of how using the point applied; calling them derisive names indicates you clearly don't want to do that. And you should avoid them if you can't come up with a rationale that satisfies you (don't want luck, can't see how someone can dodge a bullet); the same way some people are unable to accept it if player characters have some advantage that NPCs can't have. And they should probably be very infrequent; if they're routine to address some shortcoming of the rules, then that shortcoming should be fixed properly and not covered up with luck/fate/favor points.

I hadn't intended to write so much. Sorry to those who actually chose to read all that.

I see there is still the idea that "luck" or bennies are some not real resource in a fantasy genre, or even believed in the real world, that causes some big IC vs OOC disconnect.  A disconnect that is independent of how you narrate or arrange the mechanical aspects of situation resolution.  I'll put out there that if your fantasy RPG has magic, or any kind of magical creature, and you don't have luck your game is "unrealistic" all the characters in-game are going to wonder why they have no luck.

The belief in luck as a very real thing is the norm in western European culture, viewed over the last few thousand years.  The idea it is not real, is a very recent one, and one not even believed by all today.  I suspect it may be a very old belief in other cultures as well.  Am I the only fantasy RPG player who didn't read every old English epic or Norse saga they could get their hands on?  Luck was to my ancestors a very real thing, much more real than hit points, levels, spell slots, or improved saving throws; don't get me started on how OOC saving throws are.

Maybe it would help if you called them Hamingja points instead of luck or bennies?   You could even abbreviate them as HP.  I certainly don't have enough time to dig up books and scan them, but a bit of google foo found this nice description (with cites therein): http://norse-mythology.org/concepts/the-parts-of-the-self/

I guess you should even able to give another PC or even NPC a bit of your luck:
"The hamingja can also be lent to others during life to assist them in particularly perilous missions where luck is needed especially badly."
Kind of like a "get out of jail free" card in Monopoly.

Many ancient people's often believed that all that happened is the will of God (or the gods) and that things were predestined. This does not mandate that we design rules systems in such a way that this proves to be the case.

It is possible to rationalize any number of meta things to a tertiary meta level that actually 'exists' in terms of the simulation. We can say bennies are 'luck' or 'the force'. We can say GM fiat is "the will of the gods".

However you look at it, these things still are founded in meta principles and are ways of manifesting the will of the players or GM however we may rationalize this truth in terms of simulation.

Anyway, I don't think these things are always bad, but I think it is damn hard hard to have such a mechanic be totally immersive. Even if you assume that 'luck' or 'karma' or 'divine provenance' are real, it is hard to imagine someone being conscious of spending these things like a currency, or literally being aware that they have run out of any of them.

Looking at some of the idioms at http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/luck, "a stroke of luck", "down on luck", "have luck run out", "lucky streak", "run of luck", "down on one's luck" and "ride (one's) luck" have an element of luck as a resource that is used up.

Quote from: soltakss;896047Looking at some of the idioms at http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/luck, "a stroke of luck", "down on luck", "have luck run out", "lucky streak", "run of luck", "down on one's luck" and "ride (one's) luck" have an element of luck as a resource that is used up.

I'll grant you that, but what you won't see much idiomatic reference to is stuff along the lines of, "time to spend a luck point", or "don't worry, I have tons of luck right now!" Typically when someone speaks of "running out of luck" it is because something bad has happened, and we can replicate this experience in most any game without actually modeling luck as an in-game resource! Just give it time and it will happen.