Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8146461" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Full disclosure - I haven't read you guys' exchange in full so I may be veering slightly (or wholly) afield of your conversations.I have had the "either/or dramatic/thematic challenge vs plausibility test" conversation with several people on this board, but I feel like we may have discussed this in the past?  If we have, I've forgotten the meat of the exchange so maybe you'll indulge me it again?There is definitely daylight between us, so let me just spill the entirety of my thoughts on the subject and you can tell me where we differ in process or in outcome.  My process and outcome:1)  When I meet a person, hear about a person, or imagine a person, I am extremely vigilant not to rush to judgement.  I find the social trope of "first impressions" to be one of the more embarrassing facets of the modern world.  Its a garbage heuristic that the highly evolved chimps we are had to rely upon for hundreds of thousands of years because every stranger was a potentially lethal threat to the clan or a competitor for precious resources and mental models relied upon immediate utility/functionality rather than actual accuracy.  We should be well past that no (like so many other things), but we clearly are not...so we erroneously use "first impressions" as an abstract stand-in for the ridiculous complexities of any individual we encounter.  2)  Similarly, even after first impressions I look at people as extraordinarily complex organism.  You meet a 40 year old, you aren't encountering x, y, z.  You're encountering the entirety of the alphabet parameterizing a complex algorithm, each letter with its own coefficient.  The fortune or misfortune of genes.  The fortune or misfortune of being born into a healthy situation or a deeply unhealthy one.  The fortune or misfortune of environment turning on the right genes or wrong genes early on in life.  The fortune or misfortune of opportunity, of prejudice, of meeting the right or wrong peer group, of amplification of your better or worse qualities, of sickness/injury or health, of finding a life partner that fits/supports you (and vice versa), of the role of time and the piling on of each thing and how it intersects with the rest of the collage, of dozens and dozens of other things.3)  Stemming from (1) and (2) above, when I consider how any individual might act in a given situation, I instantiate it in my mind (perhaps 100 times, perhaps 1000).  The output may look like this:- x outcome 80 % of the time- y outcome 15 % of the time- z outcome 5 % of the timeNow that may be truncating the possible outcomes for a given situation (in some cases in life, it may be more than 3 likely outcomes), but lets go with that for now.  Lets just say, for the sake of argument, that any given person is as consistent and predictable as this model above (I don't agree that people are).  Y or z are minority responses/actions in a situation for this fictional person I have modeled (with insufficient granularity), but if I instantiated this exact exchange/event 20 times, 4 of those times its going to be y or z.  4)  Stemming from (3), I have the following thoughts/questions:a)  If the x outcome (80 %) is clearly the most "plausible" response in any given instantiation and "plausibility" is my exclusive credibility test...how am I ever deriving the dynamism inherent to the social animals that we are (and that elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins etc would be)?  Am I choosing x every_single_time?  If not, what am I choosing and how/why?b)  When it comes to the games I'm speaking about above, the following is the credibility test GMs are expected to follow:Is it genre appropriate and/or thematically relevant while being plausible (not most, but plausible)?If yes, use.if no, go back to the drawing board.Sometimes that mix might be x, sometimes it might be y, sometimes it might be z.  I like this process for the same reasons that I like Monster Reaction in 1e and Moldvay Basic/RC.  I'm challenged creatively to make this work while I get dynamism in encounters/interactions with other social animals + genre appropriate/thematically relevant content.  [HR][/HR]I get the sense that [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] 's own process (because it appears he/she maps his/her own process onto play because he/she doesn't believe system matters and doesn't appear to deviate in what he/she plays and/or how he/she plays it) will pretty much derive that 80 % over and over and over and the fact that this result is thematically neutral/not conflict-charged is a feature (not a bug) for [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] and his/her group because when the 15 % or 5 % results manifest in play (which are thematically relevant and conflict charged), it feels..."earned?"  "Realistic?"  Something like that?  I don't know.  And I also don't know how the 15 % or 5 % result manifesting in play is derived (if "most plausible" is the exclusive credibility test).  I'd like to hear more on that.  If this is kindred with you, I'd like to hear more on both of the italicized/bolded things as well (if true).</blockquote>

Verification