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I really don't think that's necessary, especially once you add some expected genre/structure constraints and zoom out the abstraction a little. More structurally though, I think you could absolutely have an RPG with very constrained actions as long as you have unbounded play time, player set...

To calculate the most efficient DPR trade-off once you've determined the enemy's AC, especially if you're using and extra stuff that adds on modifiers, like Shock Trooper. It's not a wild idea, though a "spreadsheet" is a bit of hyperbole for what was mostly a set of benchmarks. I definitely had...

I think that's more dogma than fact, but more importantly I think directionally wrong for design. Starting from an assumption that your game is necessarily incomplete and will be subject to adhoc rules design later encourages bad design thinking. I don't think we fundamentally disagree here, I...

I am not totally sure what point about spells you're referring to, I think I'm just missing the post looking back, but I'm not sure my point about negotiation should be bundled broadly into that discussion. I think negotiation is an unpleasant gameplay experience that eats up a lot of design...

I think there's an issue of timing at least. The sort of clarification as fictional creation you're talking about happens before action declaration and certainly not as part of resolution. I think there's also a question of contingency, though the GM closing to use a random table does complicate...

It's not a particularly valid experiment, but several of these players are also my board game friends; they routinely show up to play games without ambiguous resolution, some of similar length to an RPG session. My opinion is that this isn't a fixed preference so much as a received norm of the...

I might simply be more sensitive to it, but I routinely have players asking if they can do something, and then expecting a DC to be produced, and then possibly feeling the DC is unreasonable, or alternately succeeding on a check, and then being disappointed with how I describe their success...

I should clarify that I'm saying if negotiation is a normative process of resolution (what is the possible impact of any given check? How bad is a failure? What are the board state costs of complications/mitigiated successes?) and especially if those states aren't knowable before resolution...

I'm talking about situations, ("where is the bookshelf in relation to the table?") not rules clarification there. I'm of the opinion every ruling a GM makes is a design failure.

That's directionally a good start, but you'd also need to spell out the consequences and risks preemptively and absolutely. I suppose you could have a bundled read runes action, but I think you're losing more than you're gaining by not having a pre-specified board state.

Right, that's how I end up backdooring into the simulation question. Maybe that's the real divide, whether negotiation is to be embraced or avoided. I much prefer to cast what does have to happen as clarification instead of negotiation when possible. Better to at least try to have a consistent...

Oh, I'd argue the opposite, I associate negotiation with narrativism. I've been characterized as gamist a few times, and I've been pretty consistent in calling out negotiation as a pretty miserable gameplay experience. It's both parasitic and flattening; once you let negotiation about the...

It always seems to end up being negotiation when you get down to it. Propose an outcome, haggle over whether it's within parameters, propose a fail state, propose a mitigated outcome, throw a roll somewhere in the middle to pick one of the negotiated situations.

You're conflating intent and action here (and also pointing out the reason I'm not thrilled with systems that demand intent as part of action declaration). It's not about the desired outcome for the player or character, it's about the impact of taking an action; the persuasion case is "someone...

This seems insufficient. You could as easily port that understanding to any board game that involves dice in resolution; the point is the congruity in the fictional layer, not the gameplay. The whole reason to harmonize the two is to drag the incentives caused by the gameplay for the player into...

I think that's probably the wrong axis for that question. The relevant point is the nature of the action; in case B the relative impact of the action is similar for the character and the player (and easy to parse from common ground; we have all tried to persuade someone to help us at some point)...

Then we're missing steps. Perhaps whatever the "simulation" (probably the wrong term, but we're stuck here) thing is we're taking about rests entirely on broad fictional authority resting in one person, but even then it's obvious there are some constraints on what they can propose, and there...

Are we going to make any real attempt to get at why some mechanics cause a backlash and others don't? It looked like for a moment we might be trying to dig into that, but we seem to be back to sanctimoniously going on about GM authority again.

I don't understand this angle. All that matters is the subjective experience of the players here, not the immaterial nature of the fiction. Of course we could jump back and establish events from the distant past, and in theory we could go to any point in the timeline, but what bearing does that...

I don't really care? I'm more interested in exploring the what's and how's of what turns people off and working backwards to a design principle than I am interested in forensic review of their proposed rationales. I'm pretty comfortable with my personally principled stance on this, rooted...