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I had in mind A New Hope as an RPG. All the players know is that hyperspace is used to travel between planets, until the moment of truth during their escape. Then the specifics are established.

They both create such explanations. It is just a question of how deep. At the surface level, explanations like "the computer has to make hyperdrive calculations" or "the runes were placed there as a map" are sufficient to guide play. If you start peeling back the layers, eventually hyperspace...

I don't think the difference is so profound. Imagine a scenario like you outlined for the runes: "As a GM, I decided to place hyperspace travel in the game. I didn't think about it too much, I just thought it would be interesting. When it become important, because the players were trying to...

I'm sure there were not problems in your game...just as there are no problems in most fantasy games. What you're talking about is the risks of a constructed world not "computing", so to say, of having internal errors or contradictions. These errors can be in the physics or they can be the...

In both cases, key aspects of the world are not defined until the players interact with them. The runes imply a history--an author, a purpose, a culture--which does not exist until the players interact with them. This produces tensions, and ultimately contradictions, with other material in the...

Is that any weirder than not knowing why the runes were created?

Why would it be weird for them to discuss a disproven thought experiment?

I did mention it several times in the thread. For example Numerous other posters have done so as well. It seems to me folks are going out of their way to read preferences other than narrative games, when the reasons for those preferences are stated, as an attack on those systems.

In your games, is it wrong for a player to say "rocks fall, Greg's character dies" without any prompt or a roll? I'm assuming so; it is not a valid move for the player to make. Am I wrong? That's what it means to say a move is wrong from the perspective of your game.

I've not seen this in the thread. I'll say it here and now: your tastes are reasonable and fun! It's nice that your style of gaming exists! Does that help?

You stated: "That would be like me telling you you're GMing D&D wrong because you're not calling for Burning Wheel-style blind declarations in combat." He explicitly said you were not GMing wrong. So you misunderstood him when you wrote that.

Agree with this. Going to add my own, which are about the...professionalization? of the DM corps. I moved to a new city recently, and in searching for games found three separate organizations running and staffing paid games. To the extent that if you are a new player, the norm for getting in may...

Huh. The social science PhDs I speak to disagree with you. Maybe it didn't take.

What happens, metaphysically, when this occurs? Is it possible to learn this power?

Another good limiting case is biography. Robert Caro's work on LBJ, for example, doesn't have "data" or "experiments" in the sense that some people desire. But it's exhaustively researched and detailed.

If you're going to be pedantic...then 1) multiple versions of the anecdote were referred to and 2) you don't need to do statistics on something to make it data (or a datum, for the pedants). Any information is data. The whole 'anecdotes aren't data' idea is just placing an artificial bound on...

It is the best way to meet new gamers in my area. At least when I'm GMing I can keep things somewhat close to how I like. It's got enough positives for me to keep doing it, but it is more community and networking. I think it depends a lot on who is in your area.

Agree with @Thomas Shey on this one. They may be poor quality data compared to some other types, but often that is all we have to work with.

It is about power creep in the new revision. I'm just making the point that more player options and power creep are inseparable. For me, yes. I think this is wise. If every DM did this well I would be happy to get more player options. I run AL games where all options are by default on the...

I don't care for balanced gameplay at all. I like systems that break balance much more than 5e does. But there are different types of balance, right? You can have a system that assumes the monsters are generally balanced with the PCs abilities, or one that doesn't. You can have classes that...