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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zak S" data-source="post: 6579497" data-attributes="member: 90370">Yeah there are lots of ways to talk about ideas in meaningful ways without substituting opinion for fact:The "assume everything not obviously fact is opinion" rule is a really bad rule in internet RPG discussion.There are many times in RPGs when it's unclear whether the speaker thinks what they said is fact or opinion.Like when someone goes "The magic rules as written are unplayable" they might mean:(objective) "following the rules doesn't lead to any clear result--there is a paragraph missing in the book or something and even the designer would admit that further information would be needed to play using those rules."(subjective) "I don't like the magic rules."…another classic example is anything in a ruleset referred to as a "mistake". Mistake can mean:-(objective) An actual <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />-up made by the author that does not actually meet the author's genuine intention, which they might even cop to.-(subjective) The person reading doesn't like the thing in the game.…all useful conversations start with objective facts (even if they're assumed) and can only move to opinion after that.Another area is when the possibility of hard data exists. When someone goes "people more intuitively grasp percentile systems" this is actually sociologically provable. When someone says "people more intuitively grasp (their favorite game)" we don't know if this person means they did research and it's a fact or they are just guessing that.Thus it's extremely important to identify whether you're talking to someone who actually mistakes their subjective experience for an objective fact. 90% of the unnecessary argument on the RPG internet is because people don't mark the difference between what they suspect and what they believe to be fact. Then other people react by doing it back and…suddenly it's all noise.The problem is:There is often no way to make a game "better" for one audience without simultaneously making it worse for another.Unless you can either:-describe a third way that satisfies both partiesor-successfully define one of the two parties as irrelevant and not deserving entertainment…then you don't have grounds for "better".It's better to use arabic rather than roman numerals to express numbers in D&D. You can survey the audience and find that out, I'll wager.Other things: not so much. You risk confusing the argument desperately when you exchange "bad" for "didn't work for us" or "I am guessing it wouldn't work for ____ audience but I have no proof"</blockquote>

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