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Yet the player did. Thus the player and character decision spaces were divergent. Like I have been saying for pages and you keep baselessly denying.

It is not. Yes there is. The conjecture causes the reality rather than the reality causing the conjecture.

We use skills to settle what is not settled all the time. The difference is does the character have causal capability to settle the matter in the fiction, or do they have such only in the rules. In convincing priest case it is clear that a character could talk to a priest and convince them, and...

No it is not, or at least not any more than the player ability to accept any fact presented to them. Like I said earlier, either the spell levels are diegetic in the setting, or they aren't. It is about the relationship between the rule and the fiction, and that certainly can be determined...

In my experience players wanting to do flat out impossible things simply is not a thing that happens. In rare cases it does, it is almost always due some sort of misunderstanding about what the situation is, and then the correct course is to clarify the matters.

Yeah, me neither. (OK, the last one might have some meta justifications going for it sometimes.)

Yet in your game Einstein indeed would cause things to be as he postulated. You cannot just reverse the causality and pretend that it doesn't matter. Also, do experts in your game always postulate things beneficial to them? I bet that most of the time they do. Because the players know that...

Because in the latter case the character action causes the outcome in the fiction and in former it doesn’t.

I think the core fault line is whether one wants to try to correlate the player decision space with the character decision space or not. If one wants to do so simulative mechanics might not be the only way to get there, but they certainly help, as they model things that are diegetic and thus...

I mean yeah, you'd think. But every time someone says that "personally I don't like a narrative game due this difference" then certain people will go for thousand pages trying to claim that there is no actual difference!

What is happening that there is a die roll that determines whether the thing succeeded or failed followed by description of the event of success or failure. Almost all skill checks and similar work like this, and there is not anything retrocausal about it, the narration and the dice roll are the...

You break the sim by drawing acausal odds from stats that supposedly measure diegetic things.

Yes there is. But the player deciding what their character hoped, made that decision based on information that the mechanics can make that hope to become true even though the character in the fiction has no power to cause this. The specific knowledge is not just that the fiction is authored...

Anyway, the topic. When designing rules for a game and wanting to keep them simple, one needs to identify when making something more complicated is "worth it." I was recently contemplating D&D variant that had less HP, AC was just evasion type defences (avoiding to getting hit) and armour was...

Sure. They're only boring. Though I have to say, whilst I like tieflings, over-abundance and normalisation sorta threatens to make them boring as well. Like one Hellboy is cool, but if the literal devilspawn are just common and unremarkable part of life in the fantasy world they have lost the...

Sorry, still not seeing it. Obviously the test can establish whether the character was distracted, at the moment of the test. There is nothing retrocausal about that. The causal disconnect in the rune case is massive and quite impactful, like I have explained several times. It literally makes...

Yes, you can easily be both iconic and boring. Like Superman.

I am not quite sure what sort of retrocausality you see happening here. I don't see it. The events that could be noticed, the noticing (or lack of it) and the roll all happen basically at the same time. That we cannot practically do and describe all of them at once doesn't indicate any...

Yeah, kinda same for me. It is frustrating how these discussions go: "I think I'd prefer a tad more simulationism than a game X offers" "How curious you play game Y then, which is not perfectly simulationistic in all aspects. You hypocrite!" It might be the Edwardsian fallacy of incoherence...

Yeah, it gets muddy if you do that, so I don't. Hit is a hit that connected and caused some harm. Damage is actual injury, though it might be very slight. HP are still weird, but it at least we can maintain some level of coherent connection between the fiction and the rules this way.