From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Thu 18 Jun 1998 - 20:42:31 EEST
David Dunham on Paradigms and Processes, again:
> Hero Wars takes a different approach to combat than games like RuneQuest,
> Pendragon, or Star Wars. In these three, each dice roll maps more or less
> to some real world event.
Frequently "less", as I pointed out previously; descriptions I've heard
of HW do not make it clear that we're not just dealing with a case of
"even less, yet". (In fact, they imply to me that we are.)
> Hero Wars combat doesn't
> do this. You cannot point to a particular die roll and say that it
> represents your sword swing, and that because you rolled well the enemy
> took a wound. It doesn't attempt to simulate, however abstractly, the
> processes of the modelled world.
Perhaps it would be more fruitful to discuss what it _does_ do, not what
it doesn't. Would it be accurate to say that a HW die roll corresponds
to a "narrative event" in the game storyline? Making an over-large
molehill out of the distinction between Outcomes and Processes seems
not especially helpful to me without more useful notion of either of
these words is being used to denote.
> Most games [simulate a world] by abstracting
> the processes by which the world works. Hero Wars does not. This takes some
> getting used to, but I believe it does work.
Unless I've missed something, what we're at bottom talking about, with
respect to combat resolution, is representing the outcome of (certain)
fights by one die roll, rather than a series of die rolls, yes?
Slainte,
Alex.
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