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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8167217" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I think these responses are mostly missing the point of what [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] and [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] are talking about. It gets back to what I was talking about waaaaaaaaaaay up thread.If the primary play loop is centered around:1) GM looks at card (setting notes).2) GM draws picture, attempting to deftly telegraph what is on card based on principled constraints (if you just tell the players the right answer then there can be no skilled play).3) Players attempt to solve the puzzle.When this kind of multi-dimensional Pictionary serves as the primary means of action resolution mediation for virtually all arenas of conflict outside of combat, any given instantiation of play is vulnerable to:1) GM extrapolation of setting collisions with PCs and modeling of events (THIS is the simulation component...and it doesn’t matter whether genre emulation is a part of it or not...in fact that could make things more fraught) will diverge from another GM’s modeling or even from themselves on a different day/year.2) The GM may draw too opaque a picture, rendering it indecipherable to the players attempting the solve.3) Cognitive load and the wear and tear of daily life over the course of many weeks will have an impact on the bandwidth of GM and players when a multi-month-spanning series of pictures is being drawn and solved for, leading up to one huge gambit (where all the prior pictures we’re supposed to be inputs).Those are three significant failure points built into the model; modeling/extrapolation error + cipher error + multiple input assimilation along with the wear and test of time.Most of us here have been doing this for 30+ years. I’ve spent 5000 + hours running or watching “trad” games. WAY more than the overwhelming # of GMs on this planet.The number of times things go wrong in a campaign that GMs want to chalk up to “my players are dense and reckless” when it’s actually 1 or more of these 3 things (and the players will tell you so if you ask them in confidence) is legion.And this doesn’t touch on the “interesting situations” question (which I brought up upthread):How do GMs protect against sterile modeling/extrapolation where nothing unexpected happens when PCs and setting collide? How do you protect against an endless array of deterministic models (particularly when you’re trying to draw pictures that can be inferred by players so the can solve puzzles!)?</blockquote>

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