D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[Thomas Shey]

So here is a thought for you to interact with.

When you're a lead climber, there is kit that you pack out. Now this isn't offloaded onto automaticity in the way that (say) a morning drive might be (such that you get to work and you experience the peculiar cognitive state of having no recollection of the duration of the drive)...but when you're tenured and capable, the second nature of it becomes not terribly far afield once you've organized and packed out and put on and deployed your kit enough times.

Same thing goes when you're on the wall/face and you're developing (in real time) or deploying beta (the charted course/procedures/techniques necessary to ascend a climb). Now this development and deployment of beta is effectively "consulting your accumulated memory/knowledge" or, in D&D parlance, "a knowledge check."

All of this is to say that if you're tenured and capable, the cognitive state of pulling from your kit the thing you need (because you know you packed it) and pulling from your memory/knowledge the thing you need to ascend this climb (because you've metaphorically "packed it") is experientially pretty close to the same thing.

Transition to D&D Adventurer or a Blades Crew member. Is there really a huge swathe of daylight between these folks adventuring or heisting and a lead climber working a wall/face?

You can very much argue not (though I'd argue unless the heists are very consistent in what tools they need that there's some differences--and if they aren't, then it questions the need to fill after-the-fact. I think the differences are enough there that, in fact, that's usually what justifies the after-the-fact fill mechanic), but my argument here is that knowing what's in your kit is less uncertain than whether you will know the answer to a knowledge check, because your "kit" in the latter case is intrinsically more incomplete (unless its a very narrow and basic subject, in which case there should be no check in the first place.) One is far more deterministic from the get-go with people who's kit is literally life or death (and where its often pretty consistent from one time to the next).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If you think that's parallel to people who literally can die from having forgotten to pack something, I really don't know what to tell you.

I think what @pemerton is saying is that being told what you know by the GM is not at all like knowing something for yourself, and it breaks immersion, for him. I'm not sure how that relates to the pack comparison.

As for people packing carefully, sure there are some specific situations you can come up with, but they are pretty darn specific. Nor does it address the 'cloudiness' of what items in RPG inventory systems generally represent. Is my Iron Ration in a wooden box, wrapped in paper, leaves, nothing? Maybe I want to know, and at that point some sort of check is a VERY likely process.

 

[pemerton]

If you think that's parallel to people who literally can die from having forgotten to pack something, I really don't know what to tell you.

If you think I (and my colleagues) don't know what we know, I don't now what to tell you. Why is it important that players should always know what is in their backpacks (because, in your view, that emulates being a survivalist) but irrelevant that (say) the player of a wizard PC have an experience completely different from actually being a serious scholar?

my argument here is that knowing what's in your kit is less uncertain than whether you will know the answer to a knowledge check, because your "kit" in the latter case is intrinsically more incomplete (unless its a very narrow and basic subject, in which case there should be no check in the first place.)

And my question is, are you saying this as a scholar, or are you just making it up? Because it does not correlate to my experience at all, nor to what seems to be the experience of the other scholars I interact with. We know what we know. That's fundamental to being able to do what we do.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If you think I (and my colleagues) don't know what we know, I don't now what to tell you. Why is it important that players should always know what is in their backpacks (because, in your view, that emulates being a survivalist) but irrelevant that (say) the player of a wizard PC have an experience completely different from actually being a serious scholar?

Why? Because I have a rather in depth knowledge in a couple areas, and have helped researchers in others and, no, they don't always know what they theoretically could about elements of their specialty, because the specialty is too large. So I'm absolutely not accepting the premise that people always know everything relevant in their field, just to make it perfectly clear.

And my question is, are you saying this as a scholar, or are you just making it up? Because it does not correlate to my experience at all, nor to what seems to be the experience of the other scholars I interact with. We know what we know. That's fundamental to being able to do what we do.

Then, bluntly, I'd suggest your fields are narrow and very specific. I served as both a medical and legal librarian for a number of years and it wasn't a coincidence that I had people who were well thought of in both fields in doing additional research on topics regularly--because their fields were too large for anyone to cover all of them, and I'm not talking about "law" or "medicine" as broad strokes, but things as narrow as "cytology" or "commercial real estate law". That didn't mean there weren't certain common elements anyone in their field wasn't going to know (which is why I made the comment up-thread that a simple die roll without other controls doesn't represent checking to see what someone knows very well) but there were absolutely things that one of them might know and another not, and it had nothing to do with their level of training but simply that it was going to be difficult for any one person to know everything about even those subfields.

So, no, I don't buy into "Because you're defined as an expert in X, you're going to always know and/or remember everything about X". If that's your premise, ours are fundamentally at odds.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So, no, I don't buy into "Because you're defined as an expert in X, you're going to always know and/or remember everything about X". If that's your premise, ours are fundamentally at odds.

At the risk of speaking for @pemerton, that isn't what he's saying at all. He's saying he's quite sure that he DOES know some things, and DOES NOT know other things.

So, lets make an analogy, my character is a monster expert. He's not going to know everything about every sort of monster, but he's going to be darn sure he knows all about local orc tribes, and generally about 'orc stuff'. It wouldn't feel authentic for this 'orc expert' to be rolling dice about orc knowledge, because IN CHARACTER the player should be confident about what things he does and doesn't know.

The further claim is that some sort of a system like say Burning Wheel wises produces a feel of this situation, because the player says "I propose that I know that Orcs of the Red Hand Cult have a certain tatoo." Success makes this a fact, and the character always knew it. Failure doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong, but maybe the orcs in question in this case are not members of that cult. Maybe their members of a different cult that the character isn't knowledgeable about. Or maybe her reason for wanting to know cult affiliation is not actually useful, it doesn't advance the character's intent. Now we have a character which knows what it knows, and isn't being TOLD what it knows, but there's no such thing as the character "knowing everything", and what they don't know may be what challenges them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

At the risk of speaking for @pemerton, that isn't what he's saying at all. He's saying he's quite sure that he DOES know some things, and DOES NOT know other things.

So, lets make an analogy, my character is a monster expert. He's not going to know everything about every sort of monster, but he's going to be darn sure he knows all about local orc tribes, and generally about 'orc stuff'. It wouldn't feel authentic for this 'orc expert' to be rolling dice about orc knowledge, because IN CHARACTER the player should be confident about what things he does and doesn't know.

That's fair--to a point. But as I note, what people remember is not deterministic. Having known something and remembering it can be a different beast, especially when its a piece of knowledge you don't use regularly. And this can even apply within areas you know well.

The further claim is that some sort of a system like say Burning Wheel wises produces a feel of this situation, because the player says "I propose that I know that Orcs of the Red Hand Cult have a certain tatoo." Success makes this a fact, and the character always knew it. Failure doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong, but maybe the orcs in question in this case are not members of that cult. Maybe their members of a different cult that the character isn't knowledgeable about. Or maybe her reason for wanting to know cult affiliation is not actually useful, it doesn't advance the character's intent. Now we have a character which knows what it knows, and isn't being TOLD what it knows, but there's no such thing as the character "knowing everything", and what they don't know may be what challenges them.

I'm agnostic on that approach, because that's more about who gets to feed into the fiction. But I still stand by the opinion that "knows everything you know in a field of skill" is on a vastly different scale than "knows what's in your field bag". Its even possible to be aware that at one time you knew the answer to a question in the former case but can no longer remember it (though that's more commonly about extremely picky things about terms or locations than general data). And in some cases, you won't know if you remember it or not until it comes up, because sometimes its associational.

 

[pemerton]

So, no, I don't buy into "Because you're defined as an expert in X, you're going to always know and/or remember everything about X". If that's your premise, ours are fundamentally at odds.

As @AbdulAlhazred has pointed out, you're misreading my posts.

You asserted that it is (moderately) realistic to roll dice to see what a character knows; and have contrasted that with a survivalist who knows exactly what they have packed. I am denying your assertion and the contrast that you have drawn on the basis of it.

 

[Cadence]

As @AbdulAlhazred has pointed out, you're misreading my posts.

You asserted that it is (moderately) realistic to roll dice to see what a character knows; and have contrasted that with a survivalist who knows exactly what they have packed. I am denying your assertion and the contrast that you have drawn on the basis of it.

Considering D&D.

It feels like the point of rolling dice to see if a character knows something isn't to simulate something that happens in your brain when you encounter a thing and your brain either registers that it knows it or it doesn't (or maybe spins awhile first, likely with some small chance of a slip where you realize you did or didn't know it).

It feels like the point of rolling dice is to see if a character knows something is to simulate that in many cases when you encounter something that you don't have have control over whether the thing you've encountered is something you know. When someone asks me to AE or review a paper, I don't get to decide if I know the authors or subject of the paper that was sent to me. When I message the person in the herbarium a picture of something in my yard to ID, he doesn't get to decide if it is one that he's very familiar with or one that he doesn't know.

Say your character studies some art form and is able to identify the work of most current journeymen in your kingdom, almost all masters of the present and past century in your kingdom, half the masters of the century before that in your kingdom and half of the current ones in the surrounding kingdoms, and a progressively smaller fraction going back in time or further away geographically. The DM hasn't planned on you going shopping for your favorite art form in the small village you are in, and decides to roll if there are any samples currently for sale. They roll that there is. Does your character recognize the creator? Why or why not?

 

[Thomas Shey]

As @AbdulAlhazred has pointed out, you're misreading my posts.

You asserted that it is (moderately) realistic to roll dice to see what a character knows; and have contrasted that with a survivalist who knows exactly what they have packed. I am denying your assertion and the contrast that you have drawn on the basis of it.

And I've stated why I think they're different. If you disagree, you do.

 

[pemerton]

Considering D&D.

It feels like the point of rolling dice to see if a character knows something isn't to simulate something that happens in your brain when you encounter a thing and your brain either registers that it knows it or it doesn't (or maybe spins awhile first, likely with some small chance of a slip where you realize you did or didn't know it).

It feels like the point of rolling dice is to see if a character knows something is to simulate that in many cases when you encounter something that you don't have have control over whether the thing you've encountered is something you know. When someone asks me to AE or review a paper, I don't get to decide if I know the authors or subject of the paper that was sent to me. When I message the person in the herbarium a picture of something in my yard to ID, he doesn't get to decide if it is one that he's very familiar with or one that he doesn't know.

Say your character studies some art form and is able to identify the work of most current journeymen in your kingdom, almost all masters of the present and past century in your kingdom, half the masters of the century before that in your kingdom and half of the current ones in the surrounding kingdoms, and a progressively smaller fraction going back in time or further away geographically. The DM hasn't planned on you going shopping for your favorite art form in the small village you are in, and decides to roll if there are any samples currently for sale. They roll that there is. Does your character recognize the creator? Why or why not?

So what you're describing here is that here and now, in play, we make a roll that tells us something about what happened in the "past" of the fiction that is relevant to the "present" situation of the PC.

Eg you're rolling to see who created the artwork. Or to see what sort of plant grew here. So why is this framed as a knowledge check? Why does the fact that the PC is now inspecting the artwork affect who created it ("quantum collapse")? Why not have a list of all the artists, and then roll to see which artist painted it. Why is the GM not deciding all this in advance and putting it in their notes? (Just like the player does for their PC's inventory?)

Talk about a "dissociated" mechanic!