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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6330547" data-attributes="member: 27160">Well, another thread of the same old stuff.Rob's blog was interesting, from a "so this is why 5E is as it seems to be" point of view, but I don't consider it "edition warring" as such. The only part of it that really gives me pause, because I think it describes a belief that I think is not only wrong but deluded in a way that is damaging to good game design, comes in this passage:Let's take a closer look at this.The idea is that unambiguous rules - axioms for game play rather than guidelines intended to inspire "rulings" - do not allow or at least do not encourage creativity, cunning tactics or character acting. They promote nothing more than the (implicitly inferior) "mathematics".Hmm.In 1995 Andrew Wiles published a proof of what had become known as "Fermat's Last Conjecture" (or "Fermat's Last Theorem"). It had taken humanity as a whole since 1637 to figure this problem out. It required supreme cleverness, incredible creativity and, yes, some pretty cunning "tactics" to solve this most tricky of puzzles. And yet, according to this blog, this could not be. Mathematics is based entirely on axioms - rules that are precisely defined independently of observed reality, even though they mirror many things that happen in reality in ways that make mathematics of considerable practical use - and gives no recourse to "rulings" whatsoever.The idea that situations - puzzles, games, whatever - that are based on firm axioms that control what may and may not be done in the activity cannot allow or even encourage creativity, tactics and cleverness is simply wrong. It is wrong both in that it is incorrect and in that it is damaging and misleading to suggest it. It leads, for example, to statements like this one:DMs cannot possibly reward "clever thinking" consistently, because they do not have any monopoly on knowing what "clever thinking" is. They reward what they regard as clever thinking. This is a different thing.The same applies to the notion that there is a "world first" approach where the "rules of the world" trump the rules of the game. The game world does not exist (except in the sense that it "exists" in the imaginations of the players - meaning that it still cannot have rules since what is in our imaginations has only such rules as the containing mind imposes upon it). What we are really saying, then, when we say "the rules of the game world trump the written game rules" is that the model that the GM has in mind for the game world overrides anything that has been communicated to the players (in the form of "game rules").In this context, what does "DM's reward clevering thinking" (sic) mean? It basically means that if your thinking happens to fit with the GM's model of the game setting (or happens to be something the GM considers "cool" or "clever"), then your thinking will be rewarded. If this is not so, tough luck. There is nothing particularly wrong with this style of assessment; individual aesthetic judgement is used in several other fields, ranging from beauty pageants and flower shows to Olympic figure skating and gymnastics. It would be good, however, to have clearly in view that this is what we are discussing, and not some sort of objectively measured "clever thinking". Andrew Wiles achieved genuine clever thinking in a way that can be assessed completely objectively, relying, as it does, on correctness against established axioms. Persuading someone that your idea is cool/appropriate, while quite praiseworthy in its way, is not really in the same league.</blockquote>

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