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Feels like we're about to do the immersion discussion. Let's please not do immersion. It's clear to me that nothing is to be gained in addressing the the quality of the resulting experience, especially not in terms of its authenticity. My point is that we should be focused on the tenor instead...

I don't think it makes a lot of sense to partition this off into sides, given it looks like there's at least 4. If it helps, I'm solidly in the "a mystery is about deduction from a fixed set of facts" camp, but I think it's significantly more important to look at what that means for the players...

So, I've been checking in and out, because this whole thing is wild, but it seems to me that this has been rather too focused on the "nature" of mysteries and mystery narratives. The whole question of whether something is a "real mystery" is rather beside the point of the activity we're doing...

I'm none of these people, but I'm definitely in the other camp, so I'll take a shot. It's obviously conditional, and starts with the same question: What is the player's goal? Are they trying to apprehend a criminal? Is this entirely a forensic exercise into something that's already happened...

It's certainly real deduction though. Like, Clue's gameplay is certainly weird, and I think you can get better deductive structures in other games, I'd look towards Awful Guests or Mystery Express for similar weight games with better deductive loops, but you are absolutely using systems to learn...

I'm not sure "we" is a coherent group here. I'm solidly against the rule zero concept in a way others in that same category probably aren't, for example, and I'm only reluctantly about simulation. It's not the point, just a byproduct of creating dynamic situations that allow for broad player...

Here's some stuff I've said about ludic agency that I think might be driving at the point you were making @thefutilist Dealing with agency and retcon (in semi sandbox) D&D 5E - How do you define “mother may I” in relation to D&D 5E? I offered I think my pithiest definition was here: Dealing...

I've written some stuff about "ludic agency" before to try and differentiate this divide before, but I'm not sure that's your precise concern. I'll try and find some representative definitions from those discussion I can link later.

I simply don't recognize that as agency. If a choice can be seamlessly replaced with a die roll, it's meaningless and should not have been offered to me. I'd even go a step further and say trivial optimization cases (particularly if all information is open upfront) also don't offer any real...

Unless there's some further possible action you could take to gain more information, then I don't see a difference between a player making a choice and rolling a die. Agency requires better than random level impact. Consider the card game War, which has no agency (and is fact deterministic from...

....was I supposed to? I quibble pretty aggressively with how "gamism" is conceptualized in the first place, and I mostly disagree about what immersion is with people who like it a lot. I don't think I'd be nominated for whatever debate you're casting me in.

What? No you don't. It's quite possible you have no agency in any of those situations, if there was no way to know anything about what was behind the door in the first place. The last example you gave just ensures that's the case. There's no meaningful difference between a choice with a random...

I checked out a little bit when we starting throwing around immersion as I've long since settled on a perfectly workable technical understanding of the term and don't really care what anyone else is doing with it*, but this bothers me, precisely because it's a poor use of "game." My critique of...

I've gone back and reread True Sorcery recently, and wow am I full of nostalgia. I always wanted to try a game built around that casting system, and it honestly looks unthinkably heavy for anyone I play with now. I just don't think I could even sell my friends on why you'd want to mess with that...

Fundamentally, 3e is a massive design task. I just don't know that anyone wants to do it again, for what is now a tiny and shrinking corner of the market. It made a lot more sense when its assumptions were normative.

See, this is a perfect example of the problem, as I think several of those things are incompatible with the underlying 3e design ethos. You might be able to represent role as a general set of levels and/or prepared feat packages, but definitely not as templates, and I'd hold NPC/PC design parity...

I'm sorry? You seem to have just randomly appropriated a term someone else defined to make a specific point? The whole point of that example was demonstrating that it would be unsatisfying and unpleasant to abstract the specifics of the two proposed situations down to a die roll, and instead...

I've never found this argument compelling, because you can get usually get far enough on what's ruled out to have a gameable state. If nothing else, whatever the GM comes up with to defeat your alarm this time is something you can prepare for next time, and at the very least they'll have to make...

Scaling feats are absolutely one proposed solution that floated around. Other ideas included simplifying prerequisites down to strictly necessary features (like spellcasting or ranks in a relevant skill) and then just tying them to level. The idea there being you'd present level appropriate...

That we're not particularly good at it has really no bearing on whether it's useful and produces interesting gameplay, especially when there is literally no other alternative. Moving from "the player's ability to learn about the fictional situation is flawed, because the GM's creation and...