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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 9635376" data-attributes="member: 6795602">Well I don’t think knowledge or lack thereof  about how something works makes that something arbitrary vs not.  But I would agree that knowledge can provide a lever one can at times manipulate.  That of course assumes players don’t have principles that often restrict them from using that lever. (You see this in d&d games where some players know trolls need to be killed by fire but they make up actions with character knowledge only, or when they know a particular choice is not the best but they do it anyway for roleplay reasons. Etc.)And for narr games, they have their own explicit principles that will also get in the way of players pulling such levers.  The major difference of opinion really being that because narr games make their principles explicit in the game text that they can include those principles when talking about gamefulness as if they were part of the game itself, whereas the opposite opinion is rendered for principles (no matter how binding) that are not explicitly part of the game text.  My take would be that principles no matter the source must be included in any gamefulness or gameful state analysis.  That’s because principles function as constraints on what would be the best move, and thus limit the space of potential gameful moves.In some sense this is an argument that a game like d&d as written is not a complete game.  That in order to be complete we must take into account any real constraints on the actual move space at playtime. An example, a friend is much better at basketball than me. To make our games more interesting we make a rule that he cannot use his dominant hand to touch the ball, and if he does it’s a turnover.  Maybe that’s best called a house rule. But regardless, when it comes to actual play that houserule is part of the game we are playing.</blockquote>

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