The stances are nothing to do with the aims or structure of the game, but are descriptions or classifications of how a player is conceiving of the game at the time when they make decisions about the imagined action/attempted use of their character.
And in this it begins with the preconceived notion that the game includes imaginary characters thus moving it from playing a game to creating a story.
I take it you believe any non-character performing game doesn't have stances? People can treat lots of stuff as a game or puzzle (operating within a mathematical pattern). Playing a game means treating something like a game.
OK, but what I am struggling with is how the DM knows that Goblin dung will be found if sought. You say that the DM makes no choices, so they must presumably have some way to discover unequivocally that goblins either do or do not produce dung. How do they do this?
DMs check the map and key for any dung within range of the PCs senses. If there is dung in the game without the players creating it (probably unknowningly) via attempts, then it was tracked on the field of play from before the campaign even started. (Yes, that would be all the dung in the all the multiverse that has so far been generated, but if its in the generation rules...)
Perhaps it might be clearer if you could say - at least in example - how the DM might know that goblins either must or must not have dung associated with them in a specific game?
It's a result of the design when the board is generated. I'd say living things tend to expel waste, so objects/systems named under life probably all include such. Why have the world work that way? I think mostly for ease of understanding between players. You could apply the term beforehand to anything else in the game, if you really wanted. 4-fingered hands are "dungs" if you want.
I assume that the player does not know "what dung is" in the context of the game; in fact, they do not know whether such a thing exists in the game at all.
Players can communicate in spoken work with DMs. It doesn't have to be clarified all the time. But yes, players don't know exactly what it means relative to game design until they start messing around with it. Like you and I don't know
everything about how a knight in Chess works, but we've learned something by playing Chess with them.
So, they describe what they are looking for until it is settled what they mean by "dung". Which is when we run into trouble, since the DM has not considered the presence or absence of dung, specifically, so must rely on something that implies such existence or non-existence - my question is, what is that "something"?
The Players through the DM-led Q&A clarification are informing the DM how to construct the game element within the rules of the game. The DM is drilling down on their descriptions based on what he or she needs to know to assign it to pre-existing game rules/code.
You might (based on previous cases) say it's a "code" the DM has set up before play, but I cannot conceive of a code that might cover all such possibilities. Is there a rule such as "any element the player looks for is present"? How does this work?
No. This isn't "My PC look fors a secret door, so we roll the die to see if we put one there". This is "You do the Watusi, a dance right? So how does this dance go? Maybe you could show me."
And with the demonstration the dance can be encoded into the game, be seen, learned, changed, affect other design.
Right - this is why I am stumped as to the nature of the "code". That it can be so comprehensive as to obviate any need for choice I find very hard to comprehend - some sort of description or example might help, here.
Which is sad because telling you the algorithms I use or think of using for D&D would be like telling you the one for Chess, Checkers, Rubik's Cubes, or even Suduko. It's a permanent walkthrough making the game not about learning, but about following the pre-provided path. Not something I'm willing to do. Honing a good rule set for D&D is a lifelong journey for some DMs.
Why should "what you want" come into it, here? The DM is making no choices after play starts; are we talking about including scent as a feature in the code before play commences?
Yes, prior to play. And what's appropriate is the DM understands as coverage enough for at least the basics of the role playing (classes) supported.
If so, what do you do if a player tries to use scent and you have not decided to make it an important element in the code? Do they simply fail because it's not included? How does the code imply what the outcome of using scent is in cases where it wasn't chosen for inclusion as an important element in the code at game setup?
Instead of scent let's use Smargling (which I assume isn't anything but a nonsense word) The player wants his PC to be able to smargle. "What's that?" asks the DM and Q&A begins. Of course the player may say something like "flarfelling the snoogle while boknelo valango hangs over top", but sharing a large overlap of language with players is necessary for play. Slamming the DM with repeated attempts that need further and further clarification is one way of stalling a game and may lead to house rules, but I've never seen the need.
This is all very opaque, to me, because as far as I can see the inclusion (or not) of scent as an "important element" is irrelevant if the code must imply answers to all possible questions anyway. Since the code implies answers to everything, how can one element be more important than any other?
The game doesn't include absolutely everything. It simply covers large portions of class-appropriate designs provided for players to role play through via game play (i.e. improve at their class like a Chess player can improve at Chess).
You say the gameboard "can easily includes goblins and dung" - but why does it? The DM is not making choices, but the gameboard "can easily" include these things?? It either does include them or it does not. The DM doesn't decide this by choice, so how does s/he decide it, if it is asked about by the players? "Previous game states" might tell you whether already established game elements (goblins, say, and a cave) interacted. Let's suppose for example that the goblins were present in the cave (in the sense of game pieces in a board location) at some previous time. But these elements and their relationship will not tell you whether goblins poo or not. What part of the code relates to that??
DM rolls for monsters, items, hit points, ability scores, terrain, dungeons, all number of game elements thereby generating game structures. Adventures and campaign settings can be added to if the players want, but the DM still needs to convert all the material they comprise prior to their inclusion.
I'd say if goblins are included, their dung is probably following close behind. Check ecology articles for possible rules for this.
I don't understand the assertion. Nothing in the Monster Manual has anything really to do with mathematical game theory, as far as I can see. In what sense are you saying that it does?
In that these are game constructs in a geometric manner with numerous traits also relating to further mathematical relationships. How those are balanced and how they affect game play is directly relevant to game theory.
In other words, game content only has meaning in the context of the game and is subject to continuity and consistency requirements in that context? As far as I know that is true of all the games known as "roleplaying games". So agreed, I suppose. I don't really see the point being made.
I think that's a good interpretation. My point is the number of relationships being tracked from beginning to end of a campaign can get astronomical in number, vastly more then in Chess. By this the game provides players the opportunity to play what the DM relates as a game (what some have called "gaming the fiction" when it comes to storygames).
I am interested, also, and have been for some time, but I never manage to penetrate through to what you really mean. There always seems to be some essential point missing. As I mentioned above, I wonder a little if this is all simply some sort of elaborate game that you are playing with us all, deliberately missing out key information to have us baffled (but guessing at what it might be).
I wouldn't do that, though I admit my own understanding of D&D changes over time (which I assume is the norm). That I follow my own interpretations and trust my own research and question those I trust and struggle on in my own journey (not to "proclaim the truth" to the world) is me marching to my own drummer. But the further I get taken away from common practices the more current language and ideas appear almost obscenely uniform and totally out of touch with prior ideas. And then current ideas are all too often conflated with "all game design ever". As if stances or drama/fate/fortune, etc. were part of people designing games through all history.
I find as I study philosophy after philosophy (not game philosophies usually) I don't feel the need to find the "right" one. But I've met many a person past their eyeballs in one or another philosophy and unwilling or perhaps unable to look outside it. I don't want to be stuck within any edifice (or community) that is so certain of its understandings it won't listen to outsider opinions.
Wait - how do you know that "whittling" is a possibility? D&D rules, for example, only characterise knives by their ability to hit various targets and the damage they do. How do you deduce "whittling" from this? Is an inanimate object defined partly by its hit points? If the character successfully "hits" the branch for just enough damage to reduce it to the correct hit points for a spork, do they successfully make a spork? That can't be it, because the spork was not predefined in the game. So, again, I'm baffled as to what code can imply "whittling" and thus allow player-described "sporks".
Structural integrity, shape, weight and mass, slashing damage, crafting subsystems for fine detail, and stats included in all of the components making this stuff up - like those defining the corpses of trees. All of it comes into play, though perhaps just in aggregate. But that's sort of what I do. You might do it differently, something like auto-damaging when slashing wood. You might have blade sharpness and blade material regularly a significant factors.
Including all this isn't nearly as difficult as the above sounds. The DMG doesn't cover everything, but if we want something in the game, it must be in the game's design.
The bit I'm missing is not how DM and player both know what a spork is - it's how it is deduced that a character playing piece with a knife playing piece and a broken branch playing piece may "whittle" to create a spork. It's not a game element that has been introduced, here, so much as a new rule, as far as I can see. So this mysterious "code" must be some sort of engine for manufacturing rules. Can you describe or illustrate via example how it does that?
Game structure, which the rules are part and parcel of. If "whittling" isn't covered already (like from slashing damage), it would need to be added. Whittling is more of a specific form of slashing. Allowed the opportunity to attack without difficulty we can cut away at the shapes of the game component in question (again, with many dependent factors). Shape is basically what most definitions of spork come down to, but also size (volume), material, perhaps sharpness, and so on. Definition can get very high, but it doesn't have to. Most of the design of the rules of D&D & AD&D are about aggregating large variables into easily manageable design. Dig down and things get much stranger, but basically you can smash for 1d6 kill 'em points.
I assume this "base design" is the same as the "code"??
Before a campaign can begin the DM must create a map, a result of generating with the code. Past history, but also projected futures and all of the nearby area, creatures, items, ideas, even personality and feelings for NPCs. That's a lot of answers to start session 1, but very little is needed in detail for a single session past that. The maps grow session to session as players come within reach of edges given the common pace of a session based on players speeding through content. (Remember DMs needing to stop early because you reached something not yet made?)
All determined before play, I assume?
I've talked about the Magic system, Combat system, and Cleric system before as sort of integrated games for players to focus their role playing in (by their own sussing out). So yeah, almost all the rules in the game to directly support role play. But their design is also about ease of running, game balance, following commonly lauded designs of the day, etc.
If I close my eyes and imagine a chessboard that I have seen I don't have a fiction; I have a memory. But if I then imagine that I move a piece on that board, I have a fiction. The line between memory and fiction is wafer thin, but if you tried to claim one as the other in a court of law I cannot imagine that it would go well. Our imaginations can conjure images of objects that we remember - that we have experience of - or that are described to us, but when we make those objects do things that they have not, in fact, done, it's a fiction. When the objects do not exist in the real world to begin with, this is doubly so.
By that definition alone I'd say yes, the players are firmly engaging in fiction then, but then so are we right now as we are discussing ideas between ourselves in relation to an actual reality. In the same way the DM must have an actual code, a drawn map behind the screen and therefore isn't expressing fictoin. Even if the terms of the game are perhaps immersion-inducing for some. Just if I was playing WoW for a blind kid, I still have qualms about calling the act fiction and much less fiction creation.
Could a DM run the whole game from memory without the drawn map? It's too much to ask anyone to remember. The maps are made for ease, but also potentially massive complexity for challenging game play. It's about design elegance, but not necessarily requiring total DM memorization without a back up. That a DM recalls info without looking because he or she simply doesn't need to count the length of squares of the wall again doesn't make drawing the line on the battlemat expressing a fiction IMO. Taking action as a creature with a mind isn't exclusively expressing fiction. Where do you draw the line here? When may we control our language rather than let others declare over and over the "better" understanding?
I'll grant you it is difficult to determine when fictions are realized. That this is a blurry distinction. Imagine gold-backed currency for instance, and all the tracking of it in the stock exchange alone. Our ideas aren't fictions when we declare they are corresponding to an exterior world. I think those maps count, though you may want to quibble about what I shorthand.
With the game elements, once defined, it's clear. What isn't clear is the transitions. How does the DM know that characters can whittle wood? How does the DM know that goblins poo? If neither of these actions has been previously set up in the game as capabilities of the game pieces I don't see how this works with a "code" that is not a fiction.
It's difficult to answer your questions without talking specifically about different designs I've thought of and tried. I think key to understanding transitions is that the game is "moving" in block time (think Einstein's theory) Yes, they both have to be set up beforehand, but typically I've found humans (and near human counterparts) are among the most detailed aspects of the game as elements go. They're also the default race played and the most readily at hand to discover content. So yeah, dung is probably in there for some.
A chess queen can "take" another piece by moving into its space, but the player cannot decide ad hoc that the queen whittles a knight beside her into the shape and capabilities of a bishop. To have rules that covered such actions, you would need some model of the "queen" piece that described her capabilities not as a list or precedence ordering, but by analogy with something the players of the game have experience of (so that they know its capabilities without a specific listing of them all). Characterisation by analogy seems to me to lead us directly to a fiction - but you explicitly say that this is not what you are talking about. Do you see why I am so baffled?
This isn't analogy. And while it is very much about capabilities these are not known to the players, but roughly. For "new" content it is more about constructs of constructs. The spork is defined in predetermined shapes. "Damaging" shape to shape isn't a difficult process to cover in game mechanics. I'm sure you could imagine some. By some description PCs are "whittling" goblins into sporks during combat, but combat tends to include more dynamic opposition than carving a stick.
Not listing endless abilities is actually what makes D&D easy to run. Having vast variation possible for interaction within existing game elements makes it awesome (some computer games do this well too, think Minecraft). A player doesn't know the deep meaning of a character's abilities just as a Chess player doesn't know all the meaning of the queen even though the ability appears to be simply grid movement. It's still far too much, but the learning makes play thrilling.
More to the point, it has no rules for adding things that have not to date been defined by the rules; id est, it does not have rules for creating new rules.
As a game D&D is a construction. Everything possible within that construction is in the game. Just like every possible game state is part of the finite game of Chess. When players do the Watusi making arms and legs move just so they are including only the content already possible in the game. Naming it makes the act easily repeatable. Think of it like more SOP: standards operating procedures the players tell you. Though I suppose names are completely determined by players, but those are used as referents.
Wait - what world? We are not talking about the real world (since it has not been dung-less for a long time!), and there is no fictional world because games do not involve fictions. What does that leave? Exclude both real and fictional worlds and logic seems to demand that there is nothing left?
"World" off-handedly used meaning the map behind the screen. That D&D game terminology refers to so much of our world can make it confusing. The Monster Manual is easier, but check out any mundane works about swords, armor, gear, none of that is anything but a game construct on a map. And though I don't care to treat maps as terrain for discovering our real world, treating maps as the existent terrain they are in and of themselves to play in FRPGs I have no problem with. Of course treating them all as not as a miniature existence, but all existence would be pretending and for some DM's designs extraordinarily immersive pretending. But this is not necessary for role play (we need only perform the roles) and can actually interfere sometimes with playing the game (the way pretending to be someone else can lead a player to avoid playing well).
And, if the game were previously dung-less, how do we give the dung we apparently now have attributes? How do we know how it relates to the other game elements? What does this "code" look like that implies everything that "dung" is in the game without any pre-existing reference?
Again, the Players are defining the dung to designs the DM already has game content for. That DM can then calculate out any further game statistics, if necessary. How it relates to other game elements is inherently part of pre-existing design. What it looks like I shouldn't say. My apologies.
Card and board games can obviously be understood using mathematics. Ball games are a rather different case. Despite Umbran's assertions, we (can) have no absolute evidence that the real world follows a fixed set of rules. We have models of the world that seem to fit the observed behaviour as far as we can discern, for sure, but it is one of the greatest strengths of the scientific method that these are not - and cannot be - claimed as absolute truth. If some observation of the real world demonstrably does not fit with scientific theory, then it is not the real world that is wrong... This makes scientific theories substantively different from "rules".
No one has hold of absolute truth when we use our minds as maps of an outer reality they are simply part of. It's the illusion that a part of a set can contain the whole. (The ironic conclusion for some PM theories here denies later Heraclitean philosophy that there are no "parts" of reality, no quantities or pieces whatsoever.)
Unlike in the Sciences when something interferes with a game the game isn't rewritten to include new evidence. It is stopped, reset based on rules for dealing with stopping, and restarted. The game is math so it can reliably be studied.
The rules/code of D&D in all its structure are actually every possible universe in that multiverse (as the term confusion earlier may have revealed). And players do model it, perhaps like scientists at times, with their mapping and note taking. But it's key that the rules aren't simply operations performed by people with no pasts or futures. They are the pattern of every possible game state. If drawn out they would be one tremendous labyrinthine map.
And though the design of D&D falls it under Infinite Game that term does not mean infinity here and now (I say actual infinity cannot be perceived). Instead it is ongoing without conceivable end, like the natural number line or an algorithm based on such. The game simply is not fully solvable like a finite game, but is comprehensible in its always finite part as it grows moment to moment.
There are limits to D&D not included of course. This makes it like any other games or sports. Things stories specifically address like evoking emotion as the goal and contrived results not the emergent the system of the games. Emotions and interference occur, but they are out of focus. For me it's easy to see how game play (discerning patterns) is not the point of storygames, but perhaps equally incidental as in games about the gaming (though also not unenjoyable).
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Lastly, more clarification via Sporks and Spoons. If I need to know how many teaspoons volume that spork could hold, I would ask the player. They were the one carving (or showing the carver) this is the shape, how long of tines, whatever. If they tell me a volume outside the parameters defined by the game, I'll start pointing out specifics back. Sort of like players saying their PC is human and 900 miles tall instead of somewhere in the human range.
Similarly, a player can define aspects of the game not in the game because they are covered under spans of averages.
P1: "Does this spoon have a rose and vine carved on the end?"
DM: "Sure, you see a rose and vine on it"
P1: "Is it from the Inn of the Setting Sun?"
DM: "What are you doing to find out?"
Some objects are averaged and considered unnecessarily time wasting for the DM to include variation for every instance. Spoons hold 1 teaspoon and are basically of a particular shape. Can they be curved oddly? Have square scoops? A long handle? Sure, but some stats will simply remain the same without greater definition given by the players or from the adventure for whatever balancing reasons therein.
