GM fiat - an illustration

[AbdulAlhazred]

In math we have proven that if those axioms are true that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Us proving that didn’t create prime numbers out of the void. It just revealed their existence.

Again, as a mathematician, I find your certainty unwarranted. You are expressing one of a number of equally interesting points of view on this topic.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm not sure I agree with that. I agree that the players being able, at some point, to recount at least part of what the GM wrote COULD BE a significant part of the experience.

But they aren't recounting it. They are solving the mystery at arriving at the correct conclusion which is in his notes. The whole point is to truly solve it

Honestly, we play a lot of Magic the Gathering using the Commander format. This is a pretty non-competitive format, but you still need to play, and the process of playing fundamentally involves winning and losing, and trying to win is necessary to make the game function. That doesn't mean winning is the heart of the experience. Quite to the contrary! I won a crushing victory in a game last week, and that was certainly the least fun game we played. Nobody said 'good game' at the end. Instead the fun game was the other one that was a brutal back and forth fight which lasted 2.5 hours in which my deck just couldn't quite close the game, and eventually the guy who was way behind managed to win.

Okay fair. I don't play Magic so I have no point of reference. But surely the heart of playing is the competition to win. You are really playing to win. And your skill matters. It is a competitive game. You are playing against real cards using real cards. Let's use poker, if it doesn't really matter what is in my opponent's hand then I am not playing. My attempts to read them for signs of what they hand contains are meaningless if when the hands are revealed we roll dice to determine one another's hands

 

[Micah Sweet]

Again, as a mathematician, I find your certainty unwarranted. You are expressing one of a number of equally interesting points of view on this topic.

Equally interesting, while a perfectly valid point of view, is not the same as equally useful to all or equally accepted by all. Whether or not the layman's understanding of math is the most accurate or the only way to look at it seems irrelevant to the discussion at hand, other than to say that, like math, there are many ways to play RPGs, and all are fine.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But is not pre-authored!

And of course we can construct more complex derivations that illustrate the point - my maths is not all that strong, but an example I also gave upthread was the factors of the number that is one less that the smallest prime number greater than <insert big number here>. And obviously even within the realm of what is, broadly, arithmetic, more complex derivations are possible, and that's before we get to theoretical generalisations (eg about general properties of prime numbers).

Mathematical inference rules have turned out to be amazingly powerful!

So powerful in fact that there is a class of them, which includes all the non-trivial examples, which are self-referential, and thus can be applied to reasoning about themselves. It is thus very difficult to construe any of higher math, which ultimately entails even 'simple' arithmetic as anything but a construct of the human mind.

One need only reference the career of Alfred North Whitehead and the ultimate failure of the attempt to produce a fully axomatized description of higher math to understand the impossible nature of the task, which Goedel finally put the coffin nail into.

 

[Bedrockgames]

To me it is blindingly obvious that things like logic and mathematics have independent objective existence or at least are describing something that has. They produce similar results regardless of who is applying them. (Unless you make a mistake, which again requires that there is some objective "correct" truth to be compared against.)

I don’t think we need to get into higher level math or philosophical questions about reality to understand the idea that in life there can be a real body in the parlor and this an objective fact. I suspect those debates will bog us down. And in a game a gm can imagine a parlor with a body in it and have the players really solve the crime by gathering clues and putting them together to figure out what happened. But this will all be explained in my next book “Keeping it Real: The Ultimate Guide to Running RPG mysteries”

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't know the details of this campaign. But I think whether that is plot unfolding or puzzle being solved, or even a little bit of both, largely depends on how it is done.

Yeah, I think it is basically a distinction without a difference. That is, we could easily see an entire story arc, or campaign, in the same light as this mystery. I suspect that this is in fact how many games work. So we can see, in the mystery game microcosm, what the fundamental differences and trade-offs might be.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Eh, I don't see what works against it. Ultimately gold and XP are just boring numbers. Sure, the base structure of the game expects there to be killing things and taking their stuff, but there are a ton of contexts in which this can happen. If this context is something that the players care about, be it due its connection their character or for other reasons that make it compelling to them then that is what gives it meaning.

You may certainly play a different game, one with more depth, but the game that 1e presents rules for, and other contemporary versions, focus on 'crawls'. Problematically, once you desert that crawl format, the rules are mostly left behind, or become (as the OP discussed) much less suitable.

Again, this is the hole in older RPG design/theory/practice which was filled by modern Narrativist RPGs, which typically work a lot like TB2, though sometimes from a bit different angle.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You may certainly play a different game, one with more depth, but the game that 1e presents rules for, and other contemporary versions, focus on 'crawls'. Problematically, once you desert that crawl format, the rules are mostly left behind, or become (as the OP discussed) much less suitable.

Again, this is the hole in older RPG design/theory/practice which was filled by modern Narrativist RPGs, which typically work a lot like TB2, though sometimes from a bit different angle.

Yeah, perhaps that was an issue with the paleo-D&D, but I never played those old editions that much and I have forgotten most of it anyway. Interestingly enough I have recently been mildly annoyed with Blades in the Dark for having sorta similar issue, where certain mechanics assume you're doing a score and strangely do not function outside of it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes but they don't become real until they enter the game in one example and in the other they exist as real facts the entire time. This is a key difference if you are solving the heart of a mystery. The latter is potentially knowable from the very beginning. A player might guess it by taking a wild stab and actually be right.

I could equally guess an answer in some hypothetical Narrativist game and turn out to be correct, couldn't I?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But they aren't recounting it. They are solving the mystery at arriving at the correct conclusion which is in his notes. The whole point is to truly solve it



Okay fair. I don't play Magic so I have no point of reference. But surely the heart of playing is the competition to win. You are really playing to win. And your skill matters. It is a competitive game. You are playing against real cards using real cards. Let's use poker, if it doesn't really matter what is in my opponent's hand then I am not playing. My attempts to read them for signs of what they hand contains are meaningless if when the hands are revealed we roll dice to determine one another's hands

Right, I am just pointing out that literally determining what the answer to the mystery is may not be the actual fun and goal. It may be necessary for the game to go forward, but as with our M:tG games, getting the answer may simply be a driver, not the real goal.