How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Thomas Shey]

Which is fine, because in the end it is something of an educated-guessing game.

No, its really not, when the communication breakdown can end up making the "guess" badly wrong for no in-world or, character relevant, or even player-centric reason.

She's better than you, sure, but how much better? Is she barely better than you and just getting lucky with her attacks, or is she stupendously better than you but pulling her blows, or ???

I did martial arts for a number of years. It wasn't normally hard to tell someone with superior technique from someone getting lucky.

 

[hawkeyefan]

If someone blows a 105 heater by me and then comes back with an 85 slow-pitch, sure I'm gonna notice the difference. But only because I've got that 105 heater as an almost-immediate point of comparison to the follow-up 85.
What I still don't know, however, is how many of those 105 pitches the pitcher has in him before his arm starts to tire; or how good he is at disguising the delivery of different pitches, etc.

Nope. Anyone batting at a level where they'll potentially face a 105 MPH pitch can tell the difference between 85 and 105 without needing to see them back to back. They can tell the difference between 100 and 105.

This is what some of us are saying... people are capable of picking up a lot more than we sometimes think. Everything that we do that requires coordination involves our brains intuitively understanding distances and force and angle and resistance and all manner of other things.

The idea that the PCs don't "have the numbers" is an overly simplistic way of looking at it.

 

[pawsplay]

As a fighter yourself, after you've fought someone for a bit (or watched them fight someone else) you'll very likely have an idea of the fighter's competence relative to your own - she's better than you, she's roughly on a par with you, she's not up to your standard, here's what she does differently than you, etc. - but there's still not going to be any numbers attached.

If you're not yourself a fighter, gauging someone else's fighting capability this way won't be nearly as easy unless the difference is blatant enough for anyone to see.

Have you ever taken a survey where someone asked you to rate something on a scale from 1 to 10?

 

[pemerton]

I think this is possible due to Automaticity.
From Wikipedia: In the field of psychology, automaticity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice.
Examples of automaticity are common activities such as walking, speaking, bicycle-riding, assembly-line work, and driving a car (the last of these sometimes being termed "highway hypnosis"). After an activity is sufficiently practiced, it is possible to focus the mind on other activities or thoughts while undertaking an automatized activity (for example, holding a conversation or planning a speech while driving a car).

I don't know how much cycling in urban traffic you do. I do it a lot. In my case, at least, it is not the case that it does not occupy the mind. It fills the mind - that's how I've been cycling along side 60kph traffic for over 20 years and am not yet dead.

The things that occupy one's mind include the state of the road surface; the location of stationary cars, the distance from their driver-side doors, whether there are drivers in them, whether they have lights on, and other features of them that correlate to risk; the position of cars moving next to, in front of or behind one; etc.

These judgements have some similarities to what @Edgar Ironpelt describes in relation to the coordination of the visual field and control of one's body (eg reaching out to touch things), but they are more complex and (in my case) are developed in my adult life rather than as an infant.

I would expect that an experienced fighter would be able to make similar sorts of judgements. That, similar to when I am cycling in traffic, they would be taking in and correlating a whole raft of perceptual information and using it to make decisions about how they should move and act - only instead of judging the road and other vehicles, they would be judging the ground, and other fighters.

Suggesting that in a 6-second round they would take in and correlate little information - as per your post 366 - doesn't strike me as plausible at all.

 

[pemerton]

That makes no sense at all. You don't know overtly or instinctively exactly how many inches away the tv screen is. You simply see your hand approaching the screen and know when you will touch it.

This claim is not true, as a matter of the physiology and psychology of perception and control over one's bodily motions.

Similarly, shut your eyes and touch your nose. You won't miss, even though you can't see your nose.

Try closing your eyes and reaching out and touching that tv screen. If you move your hand at the same speed you did when your eyes were open, you will hit the screen harder than you did the first time, because you do NOT know instinctively or otherwise, exactly how far away the screen is. You could move significantly slower and just feel when you touch the screen and stop. That will keep you from hitting it harder, but you still are not using distance at that point.

Noting that your hand is getting close to the screen and making sure you don't shove your hand through the screen isn't measuring the distance from you to the screen. It's noting the last bit of distance before you touch the screen so you don't shove your hand through it.

I performed your experiment before reading this part of your post. Your account of it is false.

There are elements of training here. I would expect a stage magician to do a better job of reaching for things blind than I can do. Just as I am confident that I cycle more safely in urban traffic than many of the other posters in this thread.

But it is not simply the case that all one can do is watch one's hand move. I mean, if what you said was true the key to catching a ball would be keeping one's eye on one's hands - whereas every one knows that part of learning to catch is keeping one's eye on the ball!

You can't look at someone and assess(instinctively or otherwise) their armor, shield, pelt thickness, dex bonuses and magical defenses on a look.

Really? And is this claim based on your extensive experience of hand-to-hand fighting against hairy, armoured beasts? Or armoured humans? Or even unarmoured humans?

Or are you just making it up?

 

[pemerton]

What I still don't know, however, is how many of those 105 pitches the pitcher has in him before his arm starts to tire; or how good he is at disguising the delivery of different pitches, etc.

Are you a professional athlete?

I mean, I can't look at an arbitrary curve and, by intuition, identify what equation describes it. But I've had the good fortune to know some brilliant mathematicians, who I'm sure can do this.

I can speak to a doctoral student in my field for five minutes and, most of the time, work out the basic shape of their thesis. Sometimes better than they understand it, if they're still early in their research.

I assume that professional competitive athletes are able to make judgements in their fields of expertise that are analogous to those that other sorts of experts are able to make in theirs. If they couldn't, they wouldn't be where they are!

 

[pemerton]

Honestly, this looks to me like it comes down to a fundamental split:

To me, the fundamental split seems to be between those who appreciate what expert intuition consists in, and those who project their own amateur intuitions onto experts!

 

[pawsplay]

Try closing your eyes and reaching out and touching that tv screen. If you move your hand at the same speed you did when your eyes were open, you will hit the screen harder than you did the first time, because you do NOT know instinctively or otherwise, exactly how far away the screen is. You could move significantly slower and just feel when you touch the screen and stop. That will keep you from hitting it harder, but you still are not using distance at that point.

Just for kicks, I tried this, and not only was able to tap my screen, I was able to tap a couple of favorites on my browser.

 

[Maxperson]

Just for kicks, I tried this, and not only was able to tap my screen, I was able to tap a couple of favorites on my browser.

Excellent! The only problem is that Strawmen are made of straw. I didn't say that you couldn't tap the screen. You surely tapped it, but harder than you would have if your eyes were open. Or else you moved slower than if your eyes were open and tapped it just as softly.

 

[Corinnguard]

And yet they want automaticity to allow them to see someone in armor and a shield and know instantly on a look that the armor gives +4 protection, the shield is magical and gives +3 protection, the ring on the person's hand is +2 protection and that the person who hasn't even moved yet has a +3 dex bonus and just from that glance, know that the NPC has a 22 AC. Or else be able to tell that information because they can touch a computer screen without putting their hand through it.

Would this knowledge change anything for them? I mean, they still would need to roll a d20 and add their to-hit modifier to their attack to see if they would able to hit such an opponent. They would still have their share of misses, hits and 'defender defends' moments. They would also still be subjected to their opponent's attacks as the latter laughed off the party's attempts to defeat them.