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Actually, I think the first example about the ears is a great case for precisely this kind of undesirable influence. In the kind of game, it might be given to a player to know that information, but not to establish it, and especially not to establish it as part of gameplay. You can imagine that...

This is the same line I tried earlier, suggesting it was incorrect to present modifiers that would be used this way as representative of "skill." That didn't seem to go down well, but maybe you'll sell it better. D&D General - [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

I think it's best practice to use "they" until the matter is clarified, both to avoid getting it wrong and also to avoid assumption from uncertain secondary characteristics.

As apprehensive as it makes me to throw the term into any of these conversations... This is exactly why I've pushed for a mechanical understanding of immersion; of we understand immersion to be about actively trying to achieve the conflation you're discussing here, to push character decision...

I'm drawing a parallel between dismissals of player guided exploration as "mere color" and the no true Scottsman dismissal of simulation, and claiming one cannot justify both arguments. I'm not sure this is relevant, in that the exact threshold of necessary detail about the situation is capable...

It's a question of the level of fidelity/resolution into the fictional setting. I don't think there's universal agreement on what precise label of retail is necessary for sufficiently shared fictional understanding; I generally find 5e much too imprecise about this, but the popularity suggests...

Color can't be both a criticism of the insincerity of player added detail, and also the reason simulation is impossible. The rocks are below the level of granularity of the abstraction. As long as the action of climbing is fixed, the ability to determine the difficulty of the climb from the...

I've never found this argument persuasive, and I don't like the camps it sets up. There's no need to cede the grounds of system to other agendas.

Honestly, I find the scholar fills the same space more comfortably anyway.

Sure, but that's just a design problem you can work through. If you accept the thing to be abstracted as presenting a design constraint, then it's just down to sorting our how precisely you want to model one big attack vs. several small attacks and so on.

It's down to what's being abstracted, right? Spells fill an area and might be partially avoided, swords connect or don't. The real issue there is AC being used to determine whether an attack "missed" or not. Frankly, I'd expect more pressure to go the other way and explore some kind of dodge...

I think there's a little more than that going on. Your example above uses goal essentially as a clarifying question about the situation, not as a load bearing part of resolution. "Ask for more details, then declare an action" vs. "negotiate the ultimate impact of your action" are different play...

I just don't see it. It always comes back to "I'm imagining a world, and filtering it through these rules for players to interact with" and "no you're not, you're doing some other thing." There's not much point (and, understandably, not much interest) in taking any criticism about how one is...

But the output of the rule using the modifier is not an evaluation of the character's skill (necessarily, if it's color, it might be)? That suggests the modifier is poorly labeled. Not labeling it as skill, and suggesting instead that skill is a potential color component of the evaluated...

You know, if it was clear that the modifier wasn't representative of skill, perhaps even going so far as to primarily explain modifiers as a function of luck, I imagine this would be an easier sell. If you demote character skill to color explicitly, the underlying change in system is much clearer.

I proposed this kind of thing earlier, and I've been thinking about it since. I think it solves a little better for player agency than it does for sim concerns. You have a clear optimization case, and it ensures players will have enough space to make decisions to interact with and mitigate...

I'd push for clarity on what is meant by "illusion" here. To my eye, this is "illusory" only the same sense that the entire enterprise is. We're obviously engaging in fiction; striving to generate the fiction independently of the players within some parameters makes the output no more or less...

I think there exists a confluence of what you've called neotrad and neosim here, where the process of character and setting creation is intentionally muddled. I'm put in mind if the occasional bits we get in the talkback podcasts for Worlds Beyond Number, where the cast discuss putting together...

I think of it more as Paper Mario: Impressionist Edition.

Unless you're actively in combat or a dangerous environment, that 3.5 character is presumably taking 10. With any positive Strength score, a creature invested at all in Climb (even just the 4 ranks at level 1) will not be rolling. If they are under pressure, the worst case scenario is they make...