Apologies if this is too rambly, it's late and I'm tired. In any case, I've got some thoughts kickin' around in my head lately; I wanna see what y'all think. It boils down to this: regardless of playstyles or agendas or "Adventure" vs "Thematic" or whatever else, it is important top roleplaying that the mechanical actions of the game correlate clearly to events in the game fiction. In other words, when the game rules tell me "roll 2D6 to attack and match it to your Combat Value," it sould be clear to me and everyone else at the table that this translates to "Ichiro assumes his stance to gather chi, then thrusts his two fingers forward with a cry of 'Storm Wolf Bolt!' calling lightning down upon his foe." Or, whatever.

Now, this relationship between mechanics and description can be backed up by the rules or managed purely by the players (mostly GM, I'd say). A lot of mech-desc relationships are simple on the surface: "I attack." "OK, roll to attack." But there can be subtle difficulties. I'ts probably pretty rare that a mechanical operation has no correlation to a fictional happening of the game; the potential breakdown is in confusion over just what the correlation is. Sometimes this is just confusion over what conventions hpld sway within a particular group. . .but in my experience often this comes about from an assumption that we all know the way to do it, because it's the way. . .how else would you do it? So I think it's useful to examine.

So, looking at some games and how they handle this for common actions. . .the first systems that come to mind are relatively simple ones like Over the Edge and BESM, where there's not a lot of granularity to the rules for different types of "actions," so little chance of screw-up--it just leaves you to do all the describing without any ruleset's help. You just say "I'm doin' [whatever]" and work out what trait or stat or skill to roll, and go for it.

D&D is somewhat similar in this regard, but its subsystems, notably combat, are a bit trickier. BESM and even OtE also have combat subsystems, but relatively simple ones. D&D, otoh, is at its grainiest in combat. There are numerous abstractions that are hard to make sense of, HP being foremost among them. Does HP represent pure toughness and resilience vs. actual wounds, or a general ability to not get hit or seriously hurt? Technically I believe it's the latter, but then confusion arises since each successful attack roll is supposed to be a "hit" bypassing dexterity and armor and all. So how many D&D hits are "real" hits in terms of what's happening to the fictional guys? If you start imagining your guy getting brutally wounded with a sword every time you take a "hit," the fiction quickly derails. I had a situation once where my char was fleeing on horseback from mounted archers. As I tried to lose 'em in the forest, I was taking arrow hits, and the DM wanted to describe each arrow "hit," where it had struck me and how it was impeding movement. I was just like, "I've got 60 HP; if we treat every attack as a literal hit, it'll take over 20 arrows to kill me." (And yes, both OtE and BESM have HP, and are not immune to some of the problems that go with it. I think D&D has it a bit rougher though, 'cause of its ever-increasing HP total. In the other two, anything but fisticuffs is gonna cut you down to size pretty quickly.)

It gets hairier with wierder circumstances. Once I was fighting some acidic slime monster, and it shot out and engulfed me, trapping me inside its body. The DM (a different one) had me make swim checks, taking damage each round, until I could make the difficulty and swim free. And then, after I'd taken like three rounds of acid damage, the DM declared that I had "burned the top layer of my skin off" and was otherwise fine. I chose to play it up as if I was horribly disfigured and in pain until our druid healed me. And that's a pretty simple case. Alignment? How do you bring that into the fiction without being just plain nonsensical? (my brother handled this well the other night--when a Chaotic Evil PC complained that his cleric's Holy Smite hurt him, he responded, "you should lead a more virtuous life.":hehe: ) A Vampire's level drain? How the hell do you describe that happening to the characters?

Now, I'm not picking on D&D; I see most of these issues in my actual experience as stemming more from confusion in actual practice, than from anything the rules actually tell you to do. In the examples above, some stuff I know isn't by the book, and I'd bet a lot of other stuff too. But in many of the cases where this has come up the DM (and/or players) just seemed to assume that this was the way to do it, clear and known to everyone.

I'd suggest that D&D appears to have some occasionally problematic elements for matching mechanics to fiction. They're not necessarily insurmountable, but they require a group consensus on what this or that mechanical thing means in the story. I've rarely found that consensus to be clear by any means; either play proceeds with incompatible or at least dissonant assumptions about this (note: not necessarily unfun, just. . .suboptimal), or actions are called and resolved with little or no description of what's actually happening in the game fiction.

If we move out toward the wild frontiers of gaming, a game like Capes handles this by placing the whole shebang in the players' hands--"narrate anything you want happening." But it both constrains and enables you by adding ". . .at this time related to this conflict and evoking this ability." So you know what context you're describing the action in, and what ability your char is drawing from to take his action, and the sky's the limit from there. Dogs is similar, except that you've got a stricter structure for playing out conflicts, still matching narration to the dice--puttin' up a big raise? Describe a broad, dramatic action. Puttin' up a piddly one? Describe understated action or a weak effort. Heroquest does these systems one better by having a huge list of traits, from Trained With the Blade to Brave to I Will Always Come For You, Buttercup, and you can pick and choose off your menu to put together your action: "Handy With a Blaster" plus "Quick Draw" plus "Don't Trust Lando" plus "Hate the Empire" = "I draw my blaster and let off a wad of shots the instant I lay eyes on Vader!" All these systems have an advantage to my mind, that their mechanics work with narration, letting you set up exactly how you want your guy to be and plug that right into the actual resolution, with little chance for any "huh?" moments.

That said, the one spot where Dogs seems to get wonky to me is in Fallout. Granted, I haven't played, so maybe in practice it works out OK, but. . .I don't get how Fallout rolls are supposed to work into the narration, since you roll fallout after the conflict, even if you take the blow in the middle. I can see for, say, brawling, just plowing ahead on adrenaline, and not noticing how hurt you are till the dust settls. But if I, say, get shot in the face, and then keep going until the ned of the conflict, how do I work the bullet wound intothe narration? I mean, with fallout for guns on a max Fallout roll you die instantly. So how did I stick through the whole fight?




So, bottom line, it seems to me that confused expectations, communicated poorly or not at all, are at root of the problem, sometimes exacerbated by rulesets that have some poor mech-desc connections. Please bear in mind that all of this is IMHO, IME, etc. and I'm not claiming any universality. In fact, let me know if this does or doesn't match with experience? Is this an issue for anyone else? Is my analysis on track? Is this worth exploring or hopelessly wrongheaded, or a no-brainer non-issue?

Peace,
-Joel

Well, broadly I think you have something.

Now, personally I am entirely happy for critical play areas to have no mechanical support at all, indeed often this is in fact a requirement on my part, a preference.  But that doesn't I think conflict with what you're saying.

Let me see if I've got this right, are you essentially saying:

Where a game deals mechanically with a situation that arises in play, the mechanic and the description of the situation should broadly align, so that in employing the mechanic one can see how it relates to that situation?  

If so, then I agree, and this for me is where much D&D breaks down incidentally.  Many of the mechanics around hit points and damage become so abstract that the mechanics and the actions drift apart from me, DiTV I find this with a bit too.

Worst of all for me personally though was playing the Puddle, a derivation of the Pool.  I couldn't relate at all my ability scene to scene with what was happening in the scenes, as the refresh mechanism and the bidding mechanic were essentially divorced from the described content of the scenes.  In the end I was roleplaying and playing a dice mini-game, but the two had little to do with each other.

Am I on the right track?  I'm afraid it wasn't as clear as your posts usually are probably because you were tired and I'm not sure I've quite got you.  Good topic incidentally.

Quote from: MelinglorAlignment? How do you bring that into the fiction without being just plain nonsensical? (my brother handled this well the other night--when a Chaotic Evil PC complained that his cleric's Holy Smite hurt him, he responded, "you should lead a more virtuous life.":hehe: ) A Vampire's level drain? How the hell do you describe that happening to the characters?

I love that alignment example, most funny, I would have had the same issues you had.

Back when I played AD&D many years ago we really struggled with level drain for precisely that reason, it was so metagame we just couldn't picture it at all in game from a character perspective.

Thanks, you're very kind to reply to this muddle. You're right that tiredness has taken a toll, plus I find that now I come to set down these ideas I'm having a hard time putting words to my thoughts. I appreciate you muddling through.

Quote from: BalbinusWhere a game deals mechanically with a situation that arises in play,

Thanks, that's a great qualifier. Yes, I'm saying that where mechanics come into play, they should complement or at least coexist with description, not impede it.

Now, to my eyes it looks like DiTV does exactly that, though I can't stress enough that I've yet to actually play it. But it seems to me that the raises and sees do in fact correspond to the nature and quality of a character's actions. Sure, you COULD put forward an 8 and a 6 and describe a weak, pathetic little attack, but why would you want to? So DitV facilitates description by letting you say, "Here's a 14 raise, I dominate you with my awesome attack of awesomeness," or "Here's a 4, I flail ineffectually at you." As I said, the after-the-fact nature of Fallout does seem to me like it would break this down in some cases, though. i've been meaning to ask Vincent about it on the Lumpley forums sometime so I'll have a better understandking of how to handle it when I do get a chance to play Dogs.

It seems like our experiences align pretty well on this problem in D&D. Hitpoints are the most common offender, though when you start geting into of the abilities for some of the wierdly specific alternate/Prestige classesthings can get super-wonky. Other systems with HP have the problem too, though not necessarily as severely. I remember recently in my OtE game a player described to me how he cuts this guy's jugular with his knife--he rolled, hit, did X damage. . .and reduced the guy to one hitpoint. The player then got mad at me 'cause the guy wasn't instantly killed. Sigh. . .

Glad you like the alignment story. It's one of the best bits of unintentional humor to grace my gaming group in years. . .

Peace,
-Joel

PS. A most humble request to the most merciful and gracious Moderator--could you pleeease fix mytopic title for me? Damn, I was tired last night. (In case it ain't obvious, it was "Mechanics and Description should be friends".)