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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7742165" data-attributes="member: 996">I think a lot of the Game Theorizing falls into that category once it gets to the transition from theory to application.   That reminds me:  LARPs could also get a lot closer to what you're looking for.  I don't like that way of playing, and I particularly don't like it being used as a pretext to exclude large portions of the game from mechanical resolution.  I mean, seriously, if it were actually consistently applied you'd lose half the stats and more than half the skills... I've acknowledged the distinction.  I don't consider puzzles, traps, combat or perception checks or INT/WIS/CHA to be 'tricky edge cases.' In one sense the player doesn't - he makes game choices.  Those drive the in-game ("in the fiction/narrative/game-world-reality/whatever") choices we imagine being made by the character.  Between the two are layers rules, abstraction, & visualization that can be perceived as a vanishingly thin semi-permeable membrane or a brick wall, but they're there, and they action on the other side is still driven by the player (unless there's "illusionism" going on, in which case they're driven by the DM) giving him "Agency."   A DM can drop hints for the players, or for the characters.  The latter will depend on the character's noticing & understanding them.  So if there's a hint in the form of an inscription in a cryptic arcane language, that depends on a allusion to the teachings of an obscure cult to make sense of, telling the players "there was an inscription there saying #al-zprh'vr'nn atl-n'gliii et-h'ram# I can't believe you didn't pick up on that," wouldn't be at all fair, while giving them arcana checks (or letting them cast Read Lang) and religion checks to figure it out might be more productive.  OTOH, if you describe the BBEG as looking a whole lot like a boss from a video game you know some of the players enjoy, they just might figure out what kind of attacks he's going to throw and/or be vulnerable too or something, well, that's the former, and some might object to it as meta-gaming or genre-bending.Like I said, the player has control of the character, they make game decisions for it, from decisions the character could not easily be imagined to have any conceivable control over (I'll be a an elf and put the 14 in CON and the 18 in INT and dump STR) to some they certainly should, if not necessarily in the same terms (I'll use my 2nd level slot to cast Sleep on the Orcs).IMHO, though, the player should never substitute their RL abilities for the character's imagined abilities in the guise of 'making decisions,' nor be penalized for lacking knowledge their character should have when making game decisions.  If a character doesn't have a clue how to build a fire, the player shouldn't get away with describing the actions he learned in the boy scouts to get a fire started, his character should just cope with the cold & dark.  If a player with no clue how to build a fire is playing a ranger, and says "I guess I should build a fire" not only should he be allowed to, but if the DM figures building a fire in the spot he's in would be a bad idea (start a wildfire, loosen the snow on the branches of the tree above causing a minor avalanche that douses the fire, attract undue attention) he should explain the better place to build that, because the character would know that - or call for a check if he figured the character would /probably/ think of it...Really, it's stuff that so obvious it'd be a non-issue, if the early days of the hobby hadn't produced games that left large swaths of character abilities undefined and/or depended on 'gochya' challenges that turned on whether the player was alert to something the DM said or had encountered (or read about) a monster or trap or cursed item or what-have-you, before, and those hadn't, in turn, left such a deep impression on the community.</blockquote>

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