Rules =/= Physics

Why do people believe this, Veeky Forums? It's always struck me as strange, so many people seem to just take it as read, making the assumption without any need to state that they are or explain why it's relevant, and it's just never made sense to me.

Why would you treat the rules of the game as if they were tangible, in setting laws equivalent to the laws of physics? What system tells you this is true, and what benefit do you really get from it? All it really seems to lead to is bizarre, unintuitive mechanics glitches people attempt to exploit , or people taking a rule and applying out of context in an attempt to prove that a system is bad.

RPG rulesets are abstractions. No matter what game or rule it is, you will be able to find ways to apply it to things within the fiction of the game that don't make sense. That's also irrelevant, as rules are generally written with a specific context and use in mind. That a rule fails to properly function within its given context is worthy of criticism, but people arguing on those lines rarely ever seem to give the rule in question the benefit of the doubt in that respect.

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>Why would you treat the rules of the game as if they were tangible, in setting laws equivalent to the laws of physics?
But who the fuck does that? And how? Give some examples, please, OP.

Something I've seen quite a bit on Veeky Forums is various people criticising mook/minion rules which reduce unimportant combatants to simplified statblocks which go down easily, or even to a single hit.

I've seen people go on about how it doesn't make sense and how strange it must be to be one of these people, living your entire life on the verge of dying or critical incompetence, completely ignoring the logical leap they're making, trying to connect a combat abstraction of an antagonists capabilities with how they operate in other facets of their life.

And then there's the various stupid things like the peasant railgun or the locate city nuke.

This, I always kneecap my opponents in football with a baseball bat, but somehow these fucking referees kick me out because I'm not playing by the rules. Fuck them, rules aren't physics, I don't have to follow them.

The peasant railgun and locate city nuke don't even work RAW.

>tfw right now in PF I have a character that moves at mach 1 and it's useless for anything that isn't deliver a message
Srly, arrows hit me even when I'm 10 times faster thant them

...What?

That isn't even remotely what OP is complaining about. This is about the people who buy a 10 foot ladder, split it in half, and sell the pieces as 2 ten foot poles for a profit.

Why do that when you can wall of metal then fabricate?

Peasant railgun.

Because you can split poles from level 1 with no investment beyond the cost of a ladder.
Daggerspam requires you to buy a pair of high level scrolls and have the ability to use them.

Que?

Does not work RAW.
Or RAI.
Or at all, unless your GM slavishly follows rules to inane results then immediately throws the rules out for the conclusion.

Because ladders can be bought at first level. Both stem from the same thing though, players acting like something in the rulebook is some immutable element of the world that couldn't feasibly change based on the situation or actions.

If you buy enough ladders and sell them as poles, the prices will shift eventually, or it may just become impossible to harvest enough wood for the ladder demand, or sell 10 foot poles when everyone already has 2.

Movement speed will always be a problem on ropgs because it's just broken as a concept from a certain point onwards, as in, if you're fast enough you should be pretty much untouchable and able to fuck around with anybody because they can't retaliate at all, which is why most of the time it's limited to its most mundane applications.

This happens in movies too.

The 4e minion rules are a specific example used to criticise the game. The idea that this mighty epic level orc, if given minion stats, will therefore drop over dead if they accidentally cut themselves while cooking, or would die instantly from any ten foot fall. That's an actual argument I saw put forth within the last week.

Might be because I don't play low level 3.PF games, the system isn't very suited for it.

I'm not even asking for high speed reaction (though my reflexes are twice high as the rest of the group) i'm just saying how people can target me when I'm moving at mach1? or how are arrows able to fucking catch me. Fucking wizards have blurr and wind wall that makes them hard to be hit and ignore arrows and stuff, why I can't get something like that when I'm moving at the speed of sound?

Yeah, I don't really either, but those are mainly examples.

It's still just the concept of treating the rules in the book as something that could never have logic applied to them when used in a strange situation.

> if they accidentally cut themselves while cooking

There's no rules in the game for cutting yourself accidentally, no fumbles of critical failures for any task or skill, ergo this would.never happen.

>Die from any ten foot fall

He'd get a save to avoid falling it, if he fails that then it

You mean like most people would most of the time? Remember he gets a save to prevent it so failing that means he got unlucky and so it's a bad fall that kills him.

Another error in this is assuming 0 hp = dead, which in 4e is explicitly not true.

D&D webcomics.

You, if you want to be really obtuse about game rules...
Think about death. Games often present it as a bad thing, to be avoided, etc. Many games give you penalities as you approach it and have clear cut rules to define when a player dies.
But they never say what happens when a character dies. There isn't anything explicitely ruling out that a d&d 3.5 character can't keep walking, attacking and doing stuff after death.
By the "Rules As Written", a death character should be able to act as a living one.

Of course, try to propose THAT at your table and watch as the DM throws the book at you (possibly literally).

The locate city nuke is arguable (and good god, have people argued about it), but yeah the peasant railgun just doesn't work.

Mostly because it relies on switching from game physics (prepared action to hand rod to adjacent creature ad infinitum) to IRL physics (last peasant throws rod, it keeps the momentum from travelling the distance to the peasant). It's inconsistent, basically - it turns on game physics, and then suddenly turns them off at the end to get the result they want. It's trying to have its cake and eat it too.

The Locate City Nuke, meanwhile, is mostly just argued about on two points: whether or not adding Flash Frost to a nondamaging spell is kosher, and how Locate City's seemingly two-dimensional area works.
The latter is mostly in regards to
>if they're pushed to the nearest edge, are they actually pushed to the circle's edge or are they pushed upwards/downwards in three-dimensional space?
(An edge is an edge and the given example of Line areas pushes towards the end of the line, so I disagree with this.)
but also has a side-argument of
>if it's basically a two-dimensional razor-thin thing, does its area even include all that much? Also, if it's razor-thin, how can it explicitly find underground cities?
(Locate Object has the same problem, so I figure it's semantics and meant for two-dimensional maps rather than actual in-game three-dimensional areas.)

But Flash Frost with nondamaging spells, now, that's an iffy one. Basically, here's what the feat says:
>A flash frost spell deals an extra 2 points of cold damage per level of the spell to all targets in the area.
Ignore how not all area spells target people within them - there's an example where a specific spell that doesn't still works with Flash Frost. The RAI is crystal-clear on that specific bit, and RAW seems to be semantics.
The issue is dealing EXTRA damage. Can you do that if you don't deal damage in the first place? Some say yes, some say no. Personally I've given up.

It's more that DnD is bad from a simulationist perspective than that people believe DnD rules are how physics work in universe

The worst part is, of course, when D&D tries to be simulationist anyway.

But it's inconsistently so, and not really correct when it tries in the first place.

3E is mostly the source for this shit, but 2E also got pretty bad in some of its supplements. Especially in Non-Weapon Proficiencies.

Also, of course, it's worth remembering how the 1E Wilderness Survival Guide makes environmental conditions so punishing that you're likely to die on the way to the dungeon.

Simulation for simulation's sake is almost always terrible - it has to serve a purpose to work. Most of the time in D&D the purpose has been vague, contradictory, or nonexistent.

>mighty epic level orc, if given minion stats
Why does an epic level orc have minion stats?

I once had a heated argument with a D&D 5E group about how it was possible for NPCs to be "bedridden for weeks" due to normal damage from what was essentially a dire wolf, no poison or magic or anything, in the same setting where PCs are fully healed after a long rest. I still believe this is an inconsistency in the setting. There is no mechanic (aside from blatant GM fiat) by which this particular monster could possibly inflict a wound that won't heal overnight.
This is true even if the victim goes down to negative HP, so the "HP is plot armor and only the last hit actually physically injures you" argument falls flat. When a player character is damaged by the exact same attack from the exact same monster, falls unconscious bleeding out, and is then stabilized at the last moment, a long rest is all it takes to be good as new.
So what do people in-setting think is happening? If everyone is fully healed by a long rest, the observed events can't happen. If no one is fully healed by a long rest, the observed events can't happen. The only explanation that makes sense is if a minority of people in-setting really do have this incredible regenerative ability, which they are necessarily aware of, otherwise PCs are metagaming every day.

Because monsters of any level can be used as Minions. Epic tier (21-30) has a lot of gravitas, but lesser foes are still best represented with simplified, streamlined statblocks to reduce bookkeeping in combat.

>Because monsters of any level can be used as Minions.
Okay, well, don't. Use some DM discretion. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

No? It's explicitly a thing you should do that the system supports and is a good idea. A Djinni warlord is an Epic tier threat, but there's no reason not to make use of the Minion rules for his bodyguards. They help flesh out a fight with a large number of combatants without making it a chore to run.

I keep seeing your posts talking about your mach 1 character that doesn't do shit. I dunno why, I just keep seeing your posts about it. You keep talking about it, man. I don't even frequent Veeky Forums all that much, yet I KNOW. At this point the whole Veeky Forums knows, I'd wager. It's cool, you can stop now.

The answer is that the stats of the thing change depending on the context of the fight.

For first level players, an orc this strong might be a level one solo. Then in a few levels, it's just an elite, then simply a typical monster, until finally it's relegated to being a minion.

This is simply due to how 4e's math works with things being more dependent on numerical bonuses and hit modifiers rather than just having massive pools of HP. Weaker monsters need to be altered to even hit the PCs

>why I can't get something like that when I'm moving at the speed of sound?
that's because you're playing a bad game that has shitty ranged rules because its ranged was built on top of a wargame with not so mobile blocks of troops, or inside of a dungeon. IIRC d20 games have you hit either AC or touch AC I think? Savage Worlds, a game with sensibly designed ranged combat uses a flat number thats modified by the range, cover, and, surprise surprise - SPEED OF THE TARGET for it's ranged attack roll. So, play a better game, though I doubt you can exploit SW so hard as to reach mach 1.