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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8933217" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>So now we're back to "can a person reasonably simulate a fictional world in their head, and tell you about it when asked?"</p><p></p><p>Which frankly, I'm just willing to take as a given, because you can't get any of that juicy gameplay otherwise, and I've yet to see a better technology for doing it. Other mediums have sharply more limited axes of interaction. </p><p></p><p>It is significantly different to decide there is an ancient signal beacon guarded by giants, and to decide there is an ancient signal flare guarded by giants in response to a climb check. The former presents a board state a player can make meaningful decisions about, and the latter does not.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>That's quite a bold take. Jumping from "building a fictional setting and simulating all the non-PC members is Player Y's responsibility" to "therefor, Player Y decides the outcomes of all actions" does not follow for anything but the most skewed take on that relationship. Once you've created a setting, you don't need to make any more decisions about it, you can just let the players declare actions and let the game resolve them.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>There's an interesting design question there. The gameplay loop I'm looking for requires the board state's changing in response to a player's actions be entirely mechanically mediated. If the player is to have the ability to more or less efficiently navigate to a victory condition, then the board has to exist in a knowable state the whole time and the effect of each action has to be known.</p><p></p><p>Within those constraints, I don't see a problem with setting rules on the GM's worldbuilding, you'd just need to do it before play began. You'd end up with something like a particularly proscriptive setting/dungeon building guidebook.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I was presenting it as an absurdity, that assigning all responsibility for fictional results to the GM would necessitate.</p><p>My model would offload that interaction to the rules. They should be able to tell me the results of any action I declare (within reason, eventually you're likely to run into an unavoidable edge case, but the frequency with which it occurs in heroic fantasy is routinely overstated). I expect a GM to determine, for example, that a wall is made of stone, for any of number of reasons; naturalism, extrapolation from an established setting, because they recently read an article about quarrying procedures in antiquity, it doesn't honestly matter.</p><p></p><p>That the wall is made of stone then creates a vast network of game information about that wall, some of which the DM may even have had in mind, and much of which I don't expect them to have given much thought. The climb DC of an unworked stone wall is X, the hardness of stone is Y/inch (which produces the derived statistic "time to break wall with an adamantine dagger is Z), the spells Meld with Stone, Stoneshape, Transmute Stone to Flesh all have interactions unlocked, goliaths and dwarves new perception/combat actions available, the necessary strength to remove stone quarried with that adamantine dagger is Q and on and on and on.</p><p></p><p>The decision produces a pretty astounding amount of points of interaction, and the GM should not (and probably can't) consider all of them before determining the nature of the wall, but the process for resolving any of them will not involve the GM making a decision after that.</p><p></p><p>With only a little cheating on causality (did I know the precise thickness of that wall, before the players pulled out that adamantine dagger? No, but I can simulate the state I was in when I decided the wall was stone, step back to worldbuilding mode for a moment and figure it out) a GM can create a board state that will yield a bunch of different outcomes, of variable values in response to a bunch of different declared player actions. There are lines of play to interact with this wall that might be better, or worse, and players will pick something. Probably just walking past the wall.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I honestly have no idea how this has anything to do with the point I was making, and don't know how to respond to it. </p><p>The important thing I'm trying to convey is that there are multiple lines of play between the living elemental trying to kill you and the dead elemental the player wants, and that their decisions can be better or worse in getting from point A to point B, increasing or decreasing the likelihood they get there. Combat is a poor example, because it's part of the game that forces you to engage in gambling and has a generally pretty binary board state and victory condition without bringing in morale rules, but I went with it because we all more or less understand the optimization case it presents.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8933217, member: 6690965"] So now we're back to "can a person reasonably simulate a fictional world in their head, and tell you about it when asked?" Which frankly, I'm just willing to take as a given, because you can't get any of that juicy gameplay otherwise, and I've yet to see a better technology for doing it. Other mediums have sharply more limited axes of interaction. It is significantly different to decide there is an ancient signal beacon guarded by giants, and to decide there is an ancient signal flare guarded by giants in response to a climb check. The former presents a board state a player can make meaningful decisions about, and the latter does not. That's quite a bold take. Jumping from "building a fictional setting and simulating all the non-PC members is Player Y's responsibility" to "therefor, Player Y decides the outcomes of all actions" does not follow for anything but the most skewed take on that relationship. Once you've created a setting, you don't need to make any more decisions about it, you can just let the players declare actions and let the game resolve them. There's an interesting design question there. The gameplay loop I'm looking for requires the board state's changing in response to a player's actions be entirely mechanically mediated. If the player is to have the ability to more or less efficiently navigate to a victory condition, then the board has to exist in a knowable state the whole time and the effect of each action has to be known. Within those constraints, I don't see a problem with setting rules on the GM's worldbuilding, you'd just need to do it before play began. You'd end up with something like a particularly proscriptive setting/dungeon building guidebook. I was presenting it as an absurdity, that assigning all responsibility for fictional results to the GM would necessitate. My model would offload that interaction to the rules. They should be able to tell me the results of any action I declare (within reason, eventually you're likely to run into an unavoidable edge case, but the frequency with which it occurs in heroic fantasy is routinely overstated). I expect a GM to determine, for example, that a wall is made of stone, for any of number of reasons; naturalism, extrapolation from an established setting, because they recently read an article about quarrying procedures in antiquity, it doesn't honestly matter. That the wall is made of stone then creates a vast network of game information about that wall, some of which the DM may even have had in mind, and much of which I don't expect them to have given much thought. The climb DC of an unworked stone wall is X, the hardness of stone is Y/inch (which produces the derived statistic "time to break wall with an adamantine dagger is Z), the spells Meld with Stone, Stoneshape, Transmute Stone to Flesh all have interactions unlocked, goliaths and dwarves new perception/combat actions available, the necessary strength to remove stone quarried with that adamantine dagger is Q and on and on and on. The decision produces a pretty astounding amount of points of interaction, and the GM should not (and probably can't) consider all of them before determining the nature of the wall, but the process for resolving any of them will not involve the GM making a decision after that. With only a little cheating on causality (did I know the precise thickness of that wall, before the players pulled out that adamantine dagger? No, but I can simulate the state I was in when I decided the wall was stone, step back to worldbuilding mode for a moment and figure it out) a GM can create a board state that will yield a bunch of different outcomes, of variable values in response to a bunch of different declared player actions. There are lines of play to interact with this wall that might be better, or worse, and players will pick something. Probably just walking past the wall. I honestly have no idea how this has anything to do with the point I was making, and don't know how to respond to it. The important thing I'm trying to convey is that there are multiple lines of play between the living elemental trying to kill you and the dead elemental the player wants, and that their decisions can be better or worse in getting from point A to point B, increasing or decreasing the likelihood they get there. Combat is a poor example, because it's part of the game that forces you to engage in gambling and has a generally pretty binary board state and victory condition without bringing in morale rules, but I went with it because we all more or less understand the optimization case it presents. [/QUOTE]
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