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Actually I chose My Life With Master to talk about because My Life With Master has a game board in this sense, has stats that are very important and are raised and lowered through skill checks and those stats ultimately produce the outcome at the end of the game. Something like Primetime...

TORG did some of that, though it was relatively tame: the Connection card let you declare that there was a contact of yours in the area, subject to GM approval. Primetime Adventures has no GM, and anyone can declare anything not about another PC, subject only to a random draw if someone else...

I don't understand; if the player says he's going to jump down on the goblins from above, it's not the GM's job to adjudicate what dice need to be rolled to make the attempt?

I'm convinced you don't know what you mean when you say game playing is code breaking, or at least can't explain it coherently. Yes, there is. NPCs can die just like in any other game, which has effects on the game world, and that's tracked on your theoretical game board. Then there never...

Don't care about intellectual property. Afghanistan, East Timor, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, Somalia, and Turkmenistan is the entire list of countries that haven't signed either the Berne Convention or...

So isomorphism was the correct word. RPGs are not games for the purposes of combinatorial game theory, as they involve randomness. If you can find a way to express such a simple game as poker as a code, go ahead, but I'm pretty sure that's beyond anything that anyone has studied. In My Life...

Really. Then the question is why do you think that's interesting here, and does "game theory" in this sense have anything to do with RPGs? Great, you've asserted something. Stop making assertions and argue the case. I can draw a continuum between OD&D and Torg and Amber and My Life With...

What does it mean for a game to be a code? Does it mean we can translate Nim into a code, apply code decryption techniques and translate that back into a solution to the game? No. I think there is consensus that RPGs include storytelling. What of it? Instead of complaining about them, make a...

It also made D&D 3.x sell big. I seriously doubt that the D&D revival with 3.0 would have been nearly as big if they didn't have third-party support, adventures and monster books for every taste. D&D 5 doesn't have the amount of product coming out previous editions did, and third-party support...

What does OCRed images of book pages have to do with anything? A proper PDF uses the text directly from the original files, and if you know what you're doing, taking the preprint files and producing nonOCRed PDFs should be trivial. OCR should only be used if you don't have the original...

Isomorphic means they are fundamentally the same thing. I just gave you several examples from the rulebooks where they stated as expectations, not strategy. How come now being universally agreed upon is a good thing? I didn't say they should tune out any voice that rejects the certitudes...

Nope. The terminology is established here, since it's been 30 years since the first roleplaying games without classes, and there's no disagreement that GURPS is a roleplaying game. That statement is simply false unless we use your idiosyncratic definition, in which case it's trivial; you can...

How should I have written this? I have no clue what I should have written so you didn't interpret it as me being against fudging rolls ever. I literally wrote "I don't have a strong stand against fudging die rolls"; I don't know how to make it any clearer that I don't have a strong stand against...

I feel you're strawmanning me here. I literally wrote "I don't have a strong stand against fudging die rolls". I've been discussing very clearly the concept that the game is to be rigged, not only so that the PCs can't lose, but they can't win dramatically, not the occasional fudging "to ensure...

Just because you think the players don't know doesn't mean they really don't. I don't have a strong stand against fudging die rolls, but luck is part of the game. Given a choice between knowing that no matter what we do, the BBEG will stand for 4 or 5 rounds, and knowing that depending on luck...

Having sat through classes in cryptology and played many games, I have no idea what you mean by that. You could say they're both generalized computing problems, which I might contend in the case of games, but they aren't simply isomorphic. I think this is a silly argument; the disagreement...

Ick. As a player, I find it makes me miserable when I feel like nothing the PCs do matters; we do incredibly awesome, and the DM fudges for the monster, and we do incredibly horrible and the DM fudges for us. Why do we spend all this time playing out the battle if all the dramatic results are...

And if forced to split that up on the hoary old roleplaying versus rollplaying, I'd put it on the rollplaying side. It ignores the motivations of the characters, instead worrying about out of character motivations. (One could call it "playing more foolhardy characters", but that's not how you...

I get that you're being sarcastic, but I completely fail to get what point you were trying to make behind that sarcasm.

Yes, I think that Pathfinder is on one hand more similar to D&D 3.5 then any other member of that group, as a simple matter of mechanics. On another hand, its players are most similar to D&D 5's as customers of an in-print game, and thus likely not the source of people who are a steady stream of...