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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7842748" data-attributes="member: 71699">I think he unintentionally shows why the game must be fabulist and not realist. Say we look at what might be his most robust example - opening a door. The intuition pump he draws on is as follows. A) It is plausible that several kicks from an average person should open a good wooden door, so B) working back from that outcome, assigning a 10% chance per kick is good high-level simulation. The general form of his claim seems to be - given A) an outcome is plausible then B) a model that yields that outcome is reasonable.He neglects to explore the chosen model's other features, however. A simple probabilistic model entails that we have flatly the same chance of opening the door on kick one, as kick one thousand. We could never open that door! Suppose I take one-thousand average NPCs and stand them before one-thousand good wooden doors. In the model, all the NPCs are identical and all the doors are identical.The NPCs all take one kick, and about a hundred of them open their doors while the rest do not. If it is really true that NPCs and doors are identical, then I might decide that their kicks are not identical. That may feel plausible as indeed I do see different numbers on the dice representing kicks. Someone could note here that it's not very plausible that a thousand NPCs and a thousand doors are undifferentiated... but in the model that is certainly true.So I take my "one-kick" hundred or so, and face them with another set of good wooden doors. Around ten open their doors with one kick. The rest do not. Not satisfied, however, I have left the rest of my NPCs kicking away and discovered that a few of them can't get their door down even by their ninth kick!So I mix those "nine-kick" failures in with an equal number of my "one-kick" wonders, and let that group have another go. It seems plausible to predict that my "one-kick" wonders will beat out my "nine-kick" failures. I'm so confident I offer 4:1 odds on that outcome. You can guess the result.Alexander can respond that the simulation captures enough to be meaningful, and that NPCs, doors and kicks are obviously all different, but only in ways that are unnecessary for the model to capture to do its work at the table. Perhaps there were personal histories of previous encounters with doors, faults in the wood, and kick-abetting methods going on such as jemmying or prising? I'm pretty sure Alexander doesn't want to say a DM should never narrate such possibilities.Entertaining that, we say that what is modelled is that an average person has a 10% chance per attempt of applying some method to get a door open, which could include noticing something about the door. In 5th edition, a DM can decide to engage Wisdom or Intelligence if they think that is what is going on. Alexander might object to bringing in such abilities, as he just argued that what the model plausibly simulates is kicking down doors using Strength. But the form of his argument forces him to concede point, as we started by agreeing with him that if some outcome is plausible then the model yielding that outcome is reasonable. It sure seems plausible that someone notices a fault in a door, and that allows them to open it with expedition, and it is true that the model can yield that outcome perforce it is reasonable.That then points directly at fabulism because the reasonableness of the model is being tied directly to our subjective, somewhat shady personal sense of what is plausible. The door is in truth being opened symbolically... magically! We know that because identical game events can be narrated in different ways.  Alexander proposed one narrative that he personally found plausible, yet there are multitudinous narratives that could be plausible to some group; and no matter how implausible Alexander might find another group's narrative, the mechanic can yield those outcomes. We might eventually think of asking - what is it a model of, exactly?We are in the world of fabulism because players can describe a plethora of approaches to their DM, who can, if they wish, allow a waggling of fingers or twitching of an eyebrow to have a chance of opening a door. The fact is that we don't really have a simulation of reality, but only a workable rule for letting characters get past things that block their path. We might notice that - being a good mechanic - it leads us to narrate in a certain way... yet crucially it does nothing to prevent us narrating in other ways. And as I have suggested above, those other ways could well be as plausible.</blockquote>

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