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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8249364" data-attributes="member: 6790260">To me, "gamble" means absolute no-control roulette-wheel stuff--and also very, very strongly implies "the house always wins." I just...can't see D&D as gambling, and can't structure "I am wagering my ability to keep playing." I play for the story, the discovery. The very idea of it being a "wager" is just alien to that; like saying that reading a book at night before bed is a wager to see if you get to keep the book or have it stolen by gnomes when you fall asleep.The problem is, humans are damn near infinitely better at generalized pattern-matching than computers. Computers are insanely good at very fine-detail detection and storing vast quantities of data, but almost unimaginably bad at drawing conclusions from data. Where it is trivial--indeed for some a game--for us to speculate on how disparate parts could fit together into something interesting, a computer is often incapable of such reasoning.I mean, consider that famous (infamous?) text-generating software, GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2), the one that was able to make surprisingly cogent paragraphs of text based on minimal prompts. In order for it to generate something that merely looked good over the course of three paragraphs, it had to be trained on literally millions of scraped webpages. Anything longer than about 20 sentences and you start seeing the cracks, where it becomes obvious that a human didn't write it (e.g. talking about unicorns with six horns). This is one of the most advanced "random generation" tools humanity has ever made, and it can't even write a five-paragraph essay as well as a human child can. Now, of course, generating content randomly within a computer program is a much, much simpler task syntactically (structure) and semantically (meaning), but it is still very difficult to do. Even just guaranteeing an error-free structure, e.g. where every "outgoing" road from one block connects to an "incoming" road on the next block takes a LOT of effort.Or, to use a reversed analogy (where computers are identifying things, rather than creating them): A computer trained to tell the difference between dogs, cats, and birds is incapable of even conceiving what a horse is. It will classify that horse by how its fine structure elements fit into its dog/cat/bird hierarchy, and it will give the best fit that it can. That computer can have a 99.999% accuracy at identifying the stuff it's trained to do, and yet have literally no better than chance (and possibly worse than chance) accuracy for identifying literally anything it wasn't trained to do. Computers simply lack the human ability to generalize, form abstractions, or analogize, and lacking those skills makes them shockingly bad at generating anything that "makes sense," unless you do an awful lot of work first.I suppose that's fair, but I would put forward that there is a term: fouls. That's why they have a name, one that is different from cheating.Under the right circumstances, I may allow it to go forward--but only because I can see a way to address it in reasonable fashion. Or, as previously said, because the player has embraced it. None of my players have yet (well, other than one who I talked out of it), but if they grew tired of playing a specific character, I'd work with them to build a suitable exit from the game. Retirement, death, whatever makes sense.I don't permit the dice to have results that wouldn't be enjoyable for us as players (counting myself). But "enjoyable for us as players" does not mean "always happy sunshine puppies and rainbows." The phrase DW uses is, "Be a fan of the characters," and this is elaborated by comparison to being a fan of a character in a book or TV show. If nothing bad or wrong or weird ever happens to the character, it's going to be less enjoyable than if those things DO happen. But if I'm anxious about, or (even worse) certain of the characters dying off, I just tune out. There's no point in caring if you know it's going to be taken away from you; may as well just never invest in the first place so it won't hurt when it happens.So, since I decide what options the dice are allowed to spit out, I exclude the results that would ruin the fun, but not the ones that would make the process worth my time as DM. Wish fulfillment is like caramel, tasty but both empty and liable to leave you queasy if you take too much at once. A savory meal may not give you that instant gratification rush, but it's filling, it sticks to you, it satisfies. And that meal will almost surely involve bitter and sour things alongside the sweet and savory--but they'll be bitter and sour in the right proportion to make a good meal. That's what I'm doing; controlling how much bitter and sour end up in the finished product, and saying, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't say every beer should be as heavily hopped as a double IPA. Maybe it's good that people who want a refreshing semisweet radler can get one."It also means that you're, as noted, throwing someone's faults in their face before God and everyone. Again, to the best of my knowledge, most people on the receiving end of this kind of statement prefer to discuss problems or misbehavior relatively privately. Some then like to make a joint statement (to, as you say, avoid "he said, she said" issues), while others prefer to just move on without "kicking up a fuss," as it were.If we were IRL friends and you (for example) waited until a group lunch to tell me, "So, I really hate it that you never show up on time to things like our game, you gotta cut that out," I would be very upset with you. I would feel you had intentionally shamed me in front of friends, no matter how true your statements might be, and that you were acting rather hostilely toward me. If you had instead taken the time to speak to me privately, and said, "So, I really hate it that you never show up on time to the game, I need you to cut that out," I would feel that you cared more about addressing the problem than about making a public scene of my dressing-down.And that's one of the ways people can just be really bloody different. I'm a very private person. I don't like being thrust into the spotlight. (Yes, this has made DMing interesting. I'm still not sure I'm used to it.) Being forcibly thrust into it, and not only that but in a way that specifically highlights my faults/errors/problems, is basically guaranteeing that I'm going to shut down and try to escape. And, again assuming we were IRL friends, this would do some pretty serious damage to our friendship. Not unrecoverable, but bad enough that I'd be seriously considering just breaking it off there. I get that you despise the idea of duplicitous double-talk, of people twisting something out of context, and that ensuring that something has witnesses forestalls such tactics. But, again, I am extremely surprised that "I only call people out in front of groups of friends, so there will be witnesses" has never caused harm to any of your relationships.After I wrote most of that, it occurred to me that this was probably what you meant. And yes, I generally expect my players to not bring that in. It's not always easy, but we manage.I wasn't so much talking about the PVP, as the "as long as it stays in-character" phrase. Because "I'm going to have my character jump into lava, because you told me my character won't die," is pretty blatantly out-of-character reasoning for a behavior. Why does the one OOC thing not qualify, but the other is perfectly okay?As for the PVP itself, (1) I encourage my players to find reasons for their characters to get along, because I just do not want to deal with the headache of PVP, and (2) given that I explicitly do not run games for Evil characters, any internal conflicts that arise are expected to be handled in nonviolent ways, or at the very least non-harmful ones. (Knocking a dude out because he won't listen to reason right  this second is about as "violent" as I'd allow.)Yes, this does mean that I'm telling my players, "Please don't play belligerent characters likely to come to blows with each other." Not one person has ever complained about this in the dozen-ish players I've had.And that is quite fair. I have kept exactly what happens to the dead mysterious (and have not fully nailed it down myself, so that I have to improvise when the time comes). The players know there's a Spirit World, superimposed over their own, where both abstract and dead spirits linger before going...elsewhere, but no dead person who has been resurrected has been able to say anything about what that "elsewhere" is. I do feel, though, that "you DO remember something...and you're not sure why you do, when nobody else ever does" is an AMAZING story hook for a character, something that could drive months or years of adventure. Sort of like when I introduced the notion: "There are demons and devils, wizards have whole libraries of information about them. But angels? There's no proof they've ever existed, other than ancient religious texts that can't be verified." That has been a simmering plot for some time now, and I know quite well how much this piqued the players' curiosity when I said it.That sounds lovely! I don't know if I'd do that precise thing, but that's in the ballpark. Make the death, resurrection, and return to normalcy a story unto itself.</blockquote>

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