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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6727307" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are no win/loss conditions. No predefined game objectives. That's my point.Wargamers don't have a monopoly on the use of the word game. Dictionary.com gives me, as the first entry under "game", an amusement or pastime. My daughter is undoubtedly engaging in an amusement or pastime.It's not an amusement or pastime I'd particularly recommend to anyone who's not either a child or that child's parent - but that doesn't stop it being a game!I don't understand - what I claim did happen ("the game was able to proceed with a less-than-complete ruleset, patched over by improvisation and ad hoc rulings") and you even restate it back to me ("The players had a broken game system . . . [and] played around by avoiding the glaring hole").Playing around by avoiding the glaring hole, on the basis of a gentlemen's agreement, is a form of improvisation. It may or may not be the form of improvisation that you are hostile too, but it is undoubtedly a form of improvisation.Dictionary.com gives me, for "improvisation", the art or act of . . . composing, uttering, executing or arranging anything without previous preparation. In the gameplay that I described an issue about Poland's neutrality arose in the course of play. And, without previous preparation, my friends negotiated an ad hoc way of handling it, which included, as you put it, playing around by avoiding the glaring hole. That is, to say, without previous preparation they made an arrangement. Which is to say, they improvised.Now, had that happened at the (purely hypothetical) Empires and Arms world championships, it would probably be regarded as a pretty unhappy turn of events. You might expect the organisers of a world championship to plug that sort of gap. (Though sometimes they don't: consider the famous underarm bowling incident by Australia vs NZ in 1981)I never said that. There are any number of games that cover everything that a player could ever possibly attempt. My favourite is backgammon. I'm not such a big fan of tic tac toe (noughts and crosses where I come from).All I've said is that D&D is not one of those games, and cannot be, because of the fact that fictional positioning matters to resolution.I have played thousands of hours of utterly mainstream FRPGs, mostly Moldvay Basic, AD&D both 1st and 2nd edition, Rolemaster.None of them had rules that would give the GM more than the most general guidance on how to adjudicate a PC's proposal of marriage to a hobgoblin. Saying that marriage and dowry both fall under trade doesn't take me anywhere. D&D has no trade rules in either AD&D or B/X. Rolemaster does have buying and selling rules, but they don't cover marriage and dowry even for humans, let alone hobgoblins.What does it mean to say that culture is by monster type . . . something best aggregated into a single stat block? What does a culture stat block even look like? AD&D doesn't provide any examples (unless you are talking about number appearing, % in lair, and some of the demographic information in the Monster Manual - none of which tell me anything about marriage customs).Even your description of monster hostility simply fails to connect any experience I have ever had or heard of in playing D&D. [O]nce you know all those behaviors plot them on your Alignment chart. What does this mean? How do I, as a GM, come to "know all those behaviours"? In the real world, none of this information exists in the degree of specificity you suggest for really existing human beings, despite all the efforts of anthropologists, sociologists and historians. How is it to be done for hobgoblins? What would the result look like? And how would it tell us when a 3 or 5 on the reaction dice triggers verbal aggression, and when it triggers attack?This is why I say that you describe some sort of ideal as if it were actual.Of course, if you radically restrict the scope of possible moves - for instance, hobgoblins just ignore PCs who make offers of marriage, all hostile reactions result in attack, etc - you can start to solve some of these problems. But many players of D&D, and of other RPGs, would see this as eliminating much of what is appealing about the game.Here is my rough guess for the number of players whose play of the game consisted in extrapolating from what is encountered in the dungeon backwards to the GM's technique for randomly stocking the dungeon: zero.I'm happy to accept that this is only a rough guess, and may be subject to modest variation upwards. (Obviously not downwards.) But I think it's pretty close to accurate.Hence, the number of players whose play of the game was spoiled by a referee deliberately placing an interesting room, like the Fraz Urb'luu room or the imprisoned gods room, I think was also pretty close to zero. By all accounts Rob Kuntz was one of the great dungeoneers of all time, and he seems to have enjoyed rather than suffered from Gygax's inclusion of those rooms in Castle Greyhawk.Backgammon has no "fluff". Chess, despite the evocative names given to the playing pieces, has no "fluff". Most players of D&D think that it is a strength of the game that it has what you are calling "fluff", and that that "fluff" matters to the play of the game.This is why, in Moldvay's example of play, the GM grants Silverleaf's player a bonus to the reaction roll for the friendly greeting. Because the hobgoblins aren't simply tokens on a board, like backgammon pieces or chess pawns. Part of the conceit of the game is that they are people, who care about things like friendly greetings. I personally don't call that "fluff". I call it an element of the shared fiction, which contributes to the fictional positioning of the PCs, and hence to the resolution of the players' declared actions.</blockquote>

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