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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...

That would be a fertile area of investigation; we could do more of that, and less of trying to find the angle that allows us to declare it's all made up and doesn't matter. Personally, I think there's two things going on. First, reactive checks are generally treated differently than proactive...

Right, I'm probably in the only deconstructions superhero bucket. You can find me 10 years ago claiming that superhero stories aren't appropriate for games; at the very least I know I've complained about Batman/Superman pairings as unplayable. I'm pretty comfortable putting subjects/genre...

I wanted to jump back to this point, because I think it's where a significant element was moved outside the thing under question. The whole point about constraints on what outcomes are possible is that it allows the player to have preferences and exert themselves toward achieving them. One of...

Right, which is why I narrate all player actions as the outcome of a small army of bugs that follows them around, puppeting their PCs, and they nod along. :rolleyes: Do you need to enjoy congratulationing yourself for seeing through the matrix here, or could you do that somewhere else, so we...

I also found this point confusing. The point of the mechanic is to say what happens. How and why are design level questions that guide which whats are appropriate. A point of critique from the simulationist perspective is often whether the results sufficiently encode for those questions, and do...