Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8921145" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Uh, not at all--when one is presenting one thing as a fallback baseline and another thing as a loftier goal to pursue, the fallback baseline better be actually more achievable than the loftier goal, or the whole argument falls apart.It is! And that's why humans being so bad at it is such a problem.You're straight-up comparing apples and oranges though. You're comparing "inconsistent but cooperative" against "consistent and cooperative." Of course having two good things is better than having just one! The actual relevant comparison here is "inconsistent but cooperative" and "consistent but uncooperative." And yes, I will absolutely take inconsistent but cooperative over consistent but uncooperative basically any day of the week when it comes to DMs. The former is a friendly human. The latter is a jerk human.In other words...the rules cannot actually just be suggestions. They have to be actually quite robust--and ignoring them has to be a really well-motivated, justified, important deviation.Which is what I've said pretty much forever, and yet people constantly push back against it.And yet how many DMs do in fact only rely on memory? How many DMs failed to actually play AD&D because their memory simply didn't retain the rules written in the book?People talk a great game about "invisible rulebooks." How is that compatible with "written records and pictures"? And how about the many, many things we never write down for one reason or another? Those things are almost always super important, especially from someone claiming that the rules are suggestions (not that you did, at least not in this conversation, but the topic has been broached.)Do you deny that humans are social creatures who suffer mental health issues when they attempt to avoid socializing? Do you deny that, for example, sports leagues exist, where a very large number of people agree to do some very unnatural things?It isn't perfect by any means. But we do quite a bit better at cooperating, across a wide variety of leisure activities, than we do at being consistent especially when it comes to mathematics, probability, logic, and adjudication.</blockquote>

Verification