Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8167311" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Simple, but not simplistic (it is extremely complex).  I'm terrible at being simple and to the point, but the best explanations encompass both of those things.  Like you said, the gist is correct, and that is the point here.Which is an aside.  An interesting aside (when "would" a character know the right answer...how is that determined), but still an aside.It is not incorrect.  It is exactly what is happening under the hood.  You can add the caveat "through the lens of their character" as you like.  It doesn't change the fact that the PLAYER is trying to suss out what the relationships and collisions of all of the setting elements are conveying (decipher the picture).After that solve (or lackthereof) has occurred, some players will proceed to attempt to declare an action declaration that the feel is well-represented by their prior characterizations of their PC.  Some will just eschew that and proceed based on their solve (or lackthereof) and subtly map their new characterization of their PC based on that.Whether any given GM has an expectation of what the players are going to do isn't salient here.  You extrapolate from your setting and perform your cipher duties.  They may solve correctly, they may not (as apparently the players in your game that thought they were headed for amicable parley but instead endured the TPK against the Thieves Guild did not).  The reason why I brought genre logic up is because this gets folded into "extrapolation and modeling."  But when and to what degree is the moving target that becomes a problem if you're a player trying to decipher a picture.  "Is this thing going to happen because its a highly inferable naturalistic outgrowth of x + y...or is this other thing going to happen because its the prototype of genre logic application here...or is this third thing going to happen because its some kind of marriage of the two?"I did a huge thread in the D&D 5e Forums 5 years ago on this trying to get GMs to expose their handling of endgame DCs from a Genre Logic vs/meets Naturalistic Logic perspective.  It_was_a_train_wreck.  Precisely because of what I'm talking about above.  Imagine being the players in those games trying to infer DCs and attendant risk:reward in action declarations?On your 1st sentence, my point is that sometimes lack of skill by the player isn't actually lack of skill.  Its referee error or system issue or some combination.  On the second two sentences, I couldn't agree more.On your 2nd paragraph, couldn't agree more.  In fact, I would go further.  Moldvay Basic is a million times better than Expert because the sandbox of the dungeon is beautifully constrained, the play loop for it elegant and coherent and consistent, and all of this leads to a delving experience that holistically integrates the premise of play with all the resolution machinery.  Then Expert tried to port this from the dungeon to the wilderness + city and it became profoundly unwieldy (because one of these things is not like the other...).Development of hexcrawling and extra-dungeon sandboxing procedures needed a different model.I have...no idea why you made this leap.  I was talking about the 3 failure points inherent to style of play.  Given that I've run a bajillion campaigns in my life, it would be odd of me to denigrate them.  So I'm just going to move on to the next one as I don't know what happened here!We're all just random gamers with more experience than some and less than others.Well that escalated quickly!So let me get this straight.  You think all the words I've put in this thread (you can go back and look them up...there is a lot!) and this latest post, which merely attempts to clarify what two posters were trying to get at when they were referring to their issues with "simulation"...is somehow a personal attack on you?  Or some kind of hubris by me?  Some kind of declaration by me that one of the primary ways (probably the majority) I've gamed is crap?  Is that it?  If it is, I feel like we're having a disconnect that proves my Pictionary analogy correct!  It can happen.  But what I see on this messageboard at large (and in the wild) are GMs with borderline contempt for their players when this happens.  That isn't the lens I would tell new GMs (certainly not what I would project on a messageboard for players as aspiring GMs) to look through when evaluating why/how something went wrong.  GMs, in my opinion, need a hell of a lot less hubris, a hell of a lot more self-awareness, a hell of a lot more accountability, and more willingness to consider offloading some of their cognitive workload onto system or onto players.I've been participating in this thread since the beginning and I've put a staggering amount of word count into my contributions (you can put that word in quotations if you'd like).  I've given up on reading most posts for about the last 2 weeks because its gone down rabbit holes I'm not interested in and I'm getting general ENWorld fatigue.  So you'll have to forgive me for being the big jerk with all of these continued inaccurate assertions  who has missed what you're talking about.I discussed this at length upthread with [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] (and maybe [USER=7016699]@prabe[/USER] ?).  Whomever I discussed it with admitted this is the trickiest pickle of all:How does a GM present a model that is inferable (deterministic for our purposes here) while simultaneously injecting sufficient dynamism into the system to keep things interesting and non-sterile (stochastic for our purposes here).Lets go back to your TPK with the Thieves Guild.  If you re-instantiated that 1000 times, would you have had it go down like that every single time?  What might you have changed and why?</blockquote>

Verification