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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9614794" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Just going to fire off some thoughts/clarifications/rejoinders as we have a pretty significant amount of daylight between us:ON RANDOMNESS:I'm going to tag [USER=7044566]@thefutilist[/USER] here rather than replying to his post to me as some of what I'm saying here engages with his response.Though my post you replied to doesn't enumerate the entirety of what I would be conceiving in such a system (which would either be Torchbearer flat-out or kindred), I want to be clear that your conception of such a system would be (a) short-shrifting the layered and longitudinal decision-space (giving significant expression and consequence to both tactical and strategic play) inherent to deciding to cast the equivalent of an Alarm spell while (b) also imagining an increased signature on play of fortune resolution ("randomization"...which also isn't total randomization as the decision would entail mustering currency, possibly proactively generating toll on character, while simultaneously engaging with advancement scheme in a thoughtful way).  I don't mean to point at you directly, but I definitely feel like there are some confounders to your sense of how this comes together holistically in various games.  For example:* Various forms of Poker feature the randomization of drawn hands, drawn cards, and blind hole cards (which may be blind to opponents or even blind parts of a hand that you are to play).  My sense is that your hypothesis on these kinds of games should be that skill is mostly noise and randomization is the signal.  Even in relatively "simple" (not simplistic) games of Poker, this is just not true and results bear that out.  Better players win more than worse players and the best players in the world and at the table dominate.  You'll see a very stray rogue win by someone who isn't on the level of a great or world class player, but overwhelmingly tables are won by better players and the long haul of strategic play over time absolutely bears out that better players (and certainly world class ones) dominate results.* The game you're imagining (some kind of deck building game akin to MtG or something) has a host of consequential, randomized elements that you're eliminating from your scenario and its analysis.  These include (i) match-up, (ii) starting hand drawn, (iii) early game draws, (iv) resource for ramping and "curving out", (v) opponent's own (i-iv) which lets them interrupt your sequences/curve-out/meta-scheme, and even (vi) fortune resolution within play (some novel cards/games feature dice rolling along with the other layers of play).  Yet, like Poker, these random elements don't swarm over the Skilled Play valuation of games individually and certainly over a sequence of games.  Controlling for ridiculous match-up problems, it is a fairly trivial matter to suss out poor players from good players and that only increases as you move toward a tail (the elite and world class players are profoundly better than average players and examination of play easily susses that out).ON GMING SIMULATING COMPETITIONWhile it isn't in your face as a physical randomizer like fortune resolution, I also think you're significantly short-shrifting the significant signature of randomness that is (even an expert) "GM simulating competition" in the way you're imagining.  To unpack that "in the way you're imagining" (presumably here, based on this conversation and prior ones), I presume you're referring to (i) mental modeling of extraordinarily complex systems, (ii) articulating the complex systems' dynamics to amateur and expert player alike in such a way that those players can functionally perform their OODA (Observe > Orient > Decide > Act) Loop based on the GM's description of fictional positioning, then (iii) employ some kind of principled opposition regime in a way that sufficiently corrects for personal bias while engaging with and deploying (this GM's perception of...which also must be functionally conveyed to players) fictional positioning & simulation scheme-derived countermeasures.I can't possibly convey the depths of my skepticism that this GMing and play paradigm won't inject play with a randomness element that significantly outstrips any conceived Skilled Play signal (particularly in contrast with the first form of play as in Torchbearer).  My take is simply that deriving skillfulness of play in this proposed paradigm becomes extraordinarily fraught because of the following reasons:* I've never seen evidence that humans are capable of mentally modeling extraordinarily complex systems in a way that is either sufficiently accurate to be gameable moment-to-moment or consistently coherent with respect to their ability to convey long term regimes of causality in such a fashion that is gameable longitudinally.  Complete reliance upon fictional positioning derived from this modeling is a fantasy, a unicorn, imo.* Inherent to the above bullet point isn't just the mental modeling requirements; the expertise, the cognitive load, the necessary mental bandwidth, the ability to detect and correct for personal bias.  Equally as important is the ability to very effectively communicate extremely complicated information sets to both amateurs and other experts.  And not just communicate...but communicate in such a way that presents a consistently stable and rich gameable environment.  Again, imo a fantasy...a unicorn, imo.There are probably 5ish areas where I would qualify as an expert.  Two of them are physical.  Merely communicating with other experts (in which we are presumed to share similar knowledge sets and common language) is already difficult enough.  Now add in the requirement to generate and communicate a gameable space?  Woof.  Now throttle to folks in which I don't share a similar knowledge set or a common language of understanding (amateurs or thereabouts)?  Double woof.IMO, something (like codified rules, principles, and procedures) has to do the work to create a functional User Interface for us.* That personal bias component?  Multivariate and just enormously fraught.  Among those many are (a) the social layer and (b) competing gameplay priorities, both of which can also be broken out into many subsections.  On (a), you have so many parts of this from social pressure regimes (direct and indirect, spoken and unspoken, aware of and oblivious to) to entrenched social cohort dynamics to various personal traits around disagreeableness and approaches to conflict.  On (b), this is a huge area of problem in the TTRPG world since forever.  I've broken this out so many times and in such excruciating detail that I'm not willing to do it again.  I think people know what I'm talking about here.  Any game that is possessed of specific storytelling imperatives (whether it be the GM's or AP's unilateral imperatives or consensus-based imperatives or social pressure-based imperatives) and/or is pressured by pacing imperatives or real-world temporal imperatives (like at a Con or even a home game that "wants some juice" before end of session) becomes a problem when competing with Skilled Play imperatives (and compete they will...not every moment, but they absolutely will collide and compete for control over moments and thereby trajectory of play).  I'm not even going to get into (c) intrapersonal vs interpersonal Immersionist dynamics, but that is another can-of-worms here.[HR][/HR]Anyway, that is a lot of stuff to engage with.  Net TLDR:* Randomness is loaded everywhere, even when not a piece of ephemera.  And it can be "corrected for" and/or it can be rendered only a small parameter in play.* I don't believe governing play via the vessel of mental modeling and fictional positioning conveyance can yield a consistently functional and coherent Skilled Play paradigm. For [USER=7044566]@thefutilist[/USER] , with respect to Narrativism, I will agree that it can work to a degree.  However, I would say that management of fictional positioning and negotiation of fictional positioning whereby some unilateral ("GM decides") or multilateral (negotiated consensus) derives outcomes of conflicts is not satisfying play for me.  I would say that in this paradigm you are balancing on an extraordinarily precarious fault line moment-to-moment; one slip and you lose the necessary dynamic of all participants being surprised by play's trajectory and risk character evolution being an outgrowth of (let me call it) "determinism creep."  Those are both anathema to Narrativism.I hope this entire post doesn't come across too strongly...I've been thinking about how to post these thoughts without coming across as too direct and just douchey...but that is the best I've got.  If too direct and douchey, I'll just go ahead and wear it!</blockquote>

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