D&D General Explain Bounded Accuracy to Me (As if I Was Five)

[Lanefan]

To me, it feels fair to claim if game designers openly state design goals and let some design goals cause other design goals to not be met that the designers prioritized some goals over others.

Indeed; and the question then becomes whether that prioritizing was done by the designers' own choice or was caused by external influence.

If it was done by the designers' own choice then sure, rail away at those designers: they brought it on themselves.

If it was done due to external influences (e.g. corporate directives) then the designers are largely not at fault, and don't deserve to be yelled at.

 

[Vaalingrade]

And for me, the games that do care about training are better for it.

While I've seen games that made training interesting, fun and valuable, I've never seen a D&D-alike ever do that. It's usually a bookkeeping task, money sink, or time sink. Usually all of them.

 

[Lanefan]

So, that sounds great. Unfortunately, we, the public do not reward them for honesty. We only reward them for saying what we want to hear, honest or otherwise. We, collectively, don't give them incentive to be just honest - we incentivize them waffling, dodging, and prevaricating, because of how incredibly toxic we can be when we don't like what we hear.

The way to prevent that toxicity, of course, is to ensure that "the honest truth" and "what we want to hear" are one and the same.

In other words, put the consumer first.

 

[Lanefan]

While I've seen games that made training interesting, fun and valuable, I've never seen a D&D-alike ever do that. It's usually a bookkeeping task, money sink, or time sink. Usually all of them.

To the bolded: so what?

Still makes the game better IMO.

 

[Vaalingrade]

To the bolded: so what?

Still makes the game better IMO.

For adding bookkeeping and a time/money sink or in spite of it?

 

[Lanefan]

For adding bookkeeping and a time/money sink or in spite of it?

Bit of both.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Bit of both.

We can hang out, but we must never, ever game together, Lanefan.

 

[Lanefan]

We can hang out, but we must never, ever game together, Lanefan.

I'd come to the same conclusion a while ago. But going for a beer sometime sounds good.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Thing is, a person (or a game character) only has so much time to spend; and it becomes a matter of prioritizing whether to spend that time getting better at what you're already good at or trying to get better at what you're not good at. Should Peter Paladin spend his downtime learning how to sneak, or would that time be better spent becoming more proficient at Paladinning? To me the answer is obvious: become better as what you're good at and leave the sneaking to Sally Stealthfoot.

And yes, passive learning is a thing, but it tends to take more time than the length of most in-game characters' adventuring careers to produce any real results.

Enhh. It depends on what level of learning you're talking about.

A person who knows nothing about golfing can pretty quickly learn things like what the different clubs are meant to do, things to look out for on a hole , some basic swing mechanics, etc.

Same way with most things. You might not be able to make a Michelin star meal, but spend a week or two back of house at a restaurant, and you'll probably have a decent idea of how to season and grill a steak, dress a salad, and make some pasta.

Mastery of some things might take years. Advancing beyond complete incompetence can take days or weeks. This is well within the adventuring timescale.

(And this is not even considering that characters are often traveling with premier experts within these fields. Like, if I was on the road with a couple of PGA players, and occasionally we had to play golf as a team to survive, since they want to survive too, I'd expect that they'd drop some hints here and there for me to pick up)

 

[DEFCON 1]

We can hang out, but we must never, ever game together, Lanefan.

Of all the people I've engaged with on the boards, I've always suspected that @Lanefan was probably the most opposite of me in terms of not only how we play the game, but also how we run the game, and enjoy the game. Which makes them the person I'm actually most interested in seeing how they play out of all the people here... if for no other reason than to just see if our styles could actually mesh while sitting at the table together and it's only the messageboard talking about the "philosophy" of roleplaying and RPGs that makes it seem like we're further apart than we are.