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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8167860" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, in fact if we start to examine 'likely' and 'unlikely' as concepts we will run into huge problems right away. The real world contains an uncountably vast array of possible outcomes of situations. Simply by application of basic mathematical logic we can derive that the probabilities of all these outcomes are thus individually infinitesimal. Fundamentally nothing is likely, and nothing is 'more likely' than anything else. Likeliness emerges only at the level of our own cognition, where we 'bin' things together and say "well, all these outcomes are, for my purposes, nearly the same." Now you can start to say "this bin is bigger than these other ones." However, you can see that this is actually subjective. In fact it is a well-known (to physicists) fact that even the entropy of a system is a subjective value which is observer-dependent for basically the same reason.So, when we say that we are 'figuring out what is likely' even in the real world, we are establishing our cognitive biases at a very basic level. In the game world this vast array of possible outcomes never exists to start with, so we're simply left with our judgment as to how some bins might hypothetically be constructed by some observer. There are really large amounts of judgment here, and very few firm guidelines to follow. Its easy to say "oh, you fell down the 40' shaft and landed on a stone floor. Here's the sorts of likely outcomes of that." but as soon as things get more complicated, we either just defer to dice, or make something up that supports one or another set of criteria (agendas).</blockquote>

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