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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6433216" data-attributes="member: 42582">When you say "a good game should ignore the real world" I think you mean something like "a good game, during play, should not take metagame considerations as an input into decision-making".But I was talking about The Forge's analysis of game design and game procedures. And these clearly are designd with thre real world in mind: as you say, you design for a desired audience. (Eg 4e is designed on the assumption that people in the real world are prepared to spend an hour or more resolving a single combat encounter.)But once we recognise that we are designing for an audience, we can also recognise that some audiences want metagame considerations to be an input into decision-making during the course of play. D&D has always been open to this: as I've quoted upthread and pointed out again in my previous post, Gygax expressly canvasses this on pp 9 and 110 of his DMG. In particular, Gygax canvasses ignoring or overriding random rolls in order (i) to open up interesting possibilities (eg fudging secret door rolls during exploration) or (ii) to avoid framing skilled players (and their PCs) into excessively vicious random encounters or (iii) to narrate the defeat of a skilled player's PC as something other than death.Such metagame-motivated procedures are not foreign to D&D. And they don't pose any risk of fourth-wall breaking silliness. The GM doesn't say "The elf finds the secret door because I think you'll find the stuff behind it fun". The GM says "After a thorough search, your keen elven eyes spot a faint crack in the wall . . ."</blockquote>

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