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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6726999" data-attributes="member: 42582">That seems like a plausible reading of his comment.With these, on the other hand, I want to counter-nitpick.At this point, "code-breaking" seems to have just become a synonym for "reasoning".I agree that the frictionless corridor in WPM assumes that the players have some sort of contextual familiarity with a particular trope/idea. The same is true of all the old chess rooms, the metal/electricity/magnet/lodestone tricks and traps, and so on. Plus many door traps and pit traps (some of the more baroque examples of latter even depend on familiarity with the particular FRPG-ism of the pit trap).But they still require GM improvisation or non-algorithmic adjudication: for instance, if you write some sort of wacky electricity trap into your dungeon, when the players start trying to circumvent it by wrapping their hands in (hopefully insulating) cloth or using 10' poles or whatever, you are going to have to deal with those efforts.Some of that involves shared tropes, and to that extent from the player side can degenerate into "playing the GM". But a lot of it is about understanding and adjudicating fictional positioning - eg if the players are going to use a 10' pole wrapped in cloth as an insulated trap-prodder, the GM has to adjudicate how much cloth they can get from tearing up their cloaks, how hard it is to wrap it around a 10' pole etc.In the thread I forked from,  [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] was describing this as the "freeform" aspect of an RPG. The way I think of it is this: in a  RPG, unlike in a boardgame, fictional positioning matters. And sometimes - in fact, often - adjudicating the fictional positioning requires non-algorithmic judgments on the part of the GM.I think an interesting and hugely important feature of the Vincent Baker-influenced games that  [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] has mentioned (I don't play much "powered by the Apocalypse", but am currently running a Burning Wheel campaign) is that they have found a way to try and regiment the adjudication of fictional positioning: namely, it is factored into the framing of action resolution, as an input into a relatively structured and abstract system of action resolution (eg in BW, it forms part of the negotiation around obstacles and advantage dice as well as intent-and-task), and then the actual outcome is determined purely by rolling the dice to chooses between the player's preferred outcome and the GM's alternative narration of failure.In my view (and somewhat ironically, given that  [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION] derides them as non-game storytelling), this is a huge part of how these games are able to have the sort of focus-on-the-fictional-stakes aspect that Campbell describes, without degenerating into either playing the GM or adversarial GMing. They are much less hostage to that sort of degeneracy than were earlier systems that hadn't benefitted from this design insight.Classic D&D certainly didn't have this sort of apparatus for regimenting the adjudication of fictional positioning, and (but for a brief attempt with 4e's skill challenges) it still doesn't. So GM adjudication of fictional positioning not just in framing but in actually determining outcomes remains pretty crucial. From the GM side, this is why advice repeatedly stresses the need for the GM to be neutral - the GM should be trying to reason within the fiction without fear or favour towards the players. From the player side, this isn't code-breaking in any special sense. It's just reasoning about the fiction as if it were real.All true.For present purposes, what I want to point out is that extrapolating from causal logic is not "code-breaking" in any meaningful sense of that term. It is just reasoning - what I have called reasoning about the fiction as if it were real. The idea that this can take place without the GM having to engage in improvisation is completely implausible.Just to stick to my insulated-by-wrapping-a-10'-pole-in-torn-garments-electricity-trap-prodder: even if we gloss over  Manbearcat's point about physical/biological anomalies so as to accept that the GM and players are on the same page about how electricity traps and insulated prodders of them work, there is still improvisation required. Eg the GM might have to decide the % chance that the insulating cloth comes unwrapped, that the whole thing catches fire from a spark resulting from arcing electricity, etc. If the players have declared that they wet their cloth in water so as to dampen the prospects of fire on the pole, then the GM further has to improvise the balance between the fire-dampening properties of wet cloth and its increased electrical conductivity.The game doesn't, even in principle, have any rules for making these adjudications, and can't - because there is no in-principle limit on the number of moves that the players might make by exploiting the fictional positioning of their PCs.This is why I regard the invention of abstract scene-focused resolution - which uses fictional positioning only to shape the details of the dice pool and the consequences that the dice choose between - as such a breakthrough in RPG design. It's very hard for me to envisage going back from that.</blockquote>

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