Search results

This might be the first time we've agreed on anything this whole thread. :) To wit, when faced with a pacing problem where it's unclear how the players will do things and in what granularity (as opposed to a question about what the characters will do), asking the players to declare a tentative...

I will occasionally introduce jargon to avoid ambiguity. E.g. if people are having a semantic argument about whether sandboxes are good, and it appears to be that much of the disagreement is not substantive but rather an argument over what the term "sandbox" refers to, I might prefer to define a...

[never mind, better not to get involved]

Because it leads to you calling 'complete' things which have glaringly obvious incompleteness to them, and when called on it your only response is to say stuff like "by that standard all RPGs are incomplete, so that can't be true" instead of "ah. I only meant complete w/rt such-and-such limited...

Yes, absolutely. Cyclic initiative is deeply misguided. It's the root cause of issues like player boredom which game designers try to patch with kludges like legendary actions, but the real solution is quite the opposite: have the players talk to EACH OTHER instead of just to the DM, and then...

Absolutely, that's why I'm skipping it myself. I just wanted to answer your question about what lusory means, and provide some context on where it comes from.

Pemerton isn't using it in its generic sense; he's discussing a specific take on play from a guy named Suits who was attempting to define what makes games games. But the word "lusory" itself just means basically "gameplay-related". What makes it confusing is that the word is being hijacked as...

[oops, inadvertent post]

Lusory (adjective): of or relating to play.

Cooperative multiplayer games with a high degree of interactivity (a.k.a. one-sided games) have certain pathologies that don't happen in multi-sided games (and vice versa). For example, when everyone is on one team, there's an incentive for and tendency towards "quarterbacking" where one player...

Hmm. I would say that's a bizarre way to use the word "complete", but that doesn't prove they're not using it that way anyway. It's possible.

Mmmm. I must confess that I'm not a fan of Suit's framing--it's not totally wrong but it's ultimately one guy's perspective on a complex subject--and I have zoned out and skipped over all of the "lusory attitude" posts in this thread. To me, if I said "lusory attitude" I would be talking about...

And yet, the manner of opening should logically affect what happens when the hatch is open. If the hatch is being opened via a rope-and-pulley system from a distance, it doesn't make sense for a gelatinous cube to land on the pullers (who aren't nearby) or for sewer water to deluge them. A good...

What seems to be going on here is that you equate action with DungeonWorld's concept of "move", whereas I'm speaking of the underlying action in the gameworld. Setting up a block and tackle/pulley system in order to apply extra strength to opening a sewer hatch is an action, undertaken by a...

I say, "In chess, XYZ." You say, "In chess, XYZ." But you say it as if you think you're contradicting me. What's up with that. I'll try one more time: in chess, if rules(state, move) is a function returning state'. Notice that move is an input to rules. For example, given the state "white has...

It would be interesting to see what happens at a table where players selectively ignore the GM's statements. GM: Bob, the cyclops throws a building at you. Take 20d20 damage. [Rolls] 234 damage. You're an ink strain on the rock. Bob: That's not fair. I have Blink. [Rolls] I teleport 15' out of...

I cannot imagine why you are telling me this true but immaterial fact. Did you think I said otherwise? I did not. Player action is an input to the game state transformation function (function: mapping of input to unique output).

Thanks for engaging substantively, Manbearcat. I want to make sure I know where you're coming from on the idea of new rule-like things that still don't count as rules. Since I'm not familiar with Dungeon World terminology, could we examine the same situation (opening a sewer hatch) from the...

Does the 1st edition DMG pg 110 count? Emphasis mine.

This is both factually incorrect and immaterial: 1. You can still have an infinite cardinality of game states even in a board game. Consider a chess board that's infinity x infinity instead of 8 x 8. (Played with coordinate notation instead of or in addition to a physical board.) 2. Even if...