D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

If that leads them to reject surviving 100' falls but not dragons, then something suspect is going on.

This was kind of my point...and why I find these conversations so frustrating.

To give an example of the latter, they are saying "I reject F because W' is unrealistic in that respect". They haven't accepted that F has been properly established as an exception in W' and therefore it ought to be as it is found in W.

Edited to expand a bit on my point above.

The problem is that these "the proper ways" for this stuff are never established. Ever. They're never brought up. They're completely tacit. But these rules are enforced upon everyone else, as though they must be universal and obvious.

Which, naturally, they aren't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nothing is 100% when it comes to the rules. Very, very, very, very, very, VERY rarely I will ask for a roll and then realize in the middle of the player's roll that I should have just made it an auto success. In those rare occasions if the roll succeeds, no harm no foul. If it fails I will tell the player that I made a mistake and it should have worked, so I'm ignoring the roll and ruling it a success.

If it goes the other way, which happens about once every 3-4 years, I'll give the player the shot at success the roll gave, even though it should have failed.

But you would not hide this, as you've said. You would instead say something like, "Oh, I shouldn't have asked for a roll, that just happens."

Regardless, what you're saying here is that you made a mistake. I don't see how "very rarely, I make a mistake and thus have to do a thing" makes any comment at all on whether the rules are binding. Instead, it seems to me that what this says is "the GM really should follow the rules, and when they flub up and fail to do so, it's on them to fix the problem".

 

[clearstream]

Are they? You keep asserting this, but I don't agree.

The limit definition of the derivative is a set of instructions for finding a thing. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is an action you can perform. Both of them are abstract, but there is a clear difference between the two. The former doesn't actually tell you any specific effects. It tells you the concept you're pursuing, and what abstract-layer processes that concept requires; it's on you to figure out what, if any, actions can possibly achieve that concept. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is an algorithm which, if you follow its instructions, always tells you every prime number from 2 to whatever prime number is smaller than your chosen stopping point.

Both of them aren't things you can physically point to, but one actually is a tool; the other is a set of instructions for how to find tools yourself.

Let's agree to disagree.

 

[clearstream]

The problem is that these "the proper ways" for this stuff are never established. Ever. They're never brought up. They're completely tacit. But these rules are enforced upon everyone else, as though they must be universal and obvious.

Agreed that "the proper ways" for this stuff are often not articulated.

I'm don't understand the "enforced upon everyone else" part? Who is enforcing what, upon whom? Given I choose say Earthdawn as the game I am playing, and given that in the fiction (in W') Lochost is the Passion of rebellion, change and freedom, who is to gainsay me and enforce that Lochost's absence from the real world (W) or some imaginary world they have in mind (their W'') makes them "unrealistic".

I really feel it is one of the most fundamental terms of fiction that so long as we are in the fictive mode, what is established to be true in our fictional world is privileged over what is true in the real world. But someone could demand that some category of facts in the fiction conform with their (likely unarticulated) meta-representational rules. One principled way to resolve such demands would be for them to articulate their meta-representational rule with a view to our agreeing to apply it to the fictional world (i.e. W')... but I can't see what enforces my agreement to that in the context of the voluntary activity of play. Alternatively, they could ask what has been established about W' that overrides W, and I should be able to answer.

In short, we would need to talk about it, and do so using specifics rather than hypotheticals. Hypothetically (i.e. with no W' defined) everything should conform with our real world (W). But that is bootless, as we're only in a fictive mode if we are pretending something is true that is not true.

 

[clearstream]

because it's a game, it should be designed to be entertaining as a game, in addition to and separately from its realism, historicity, etc.

Why?

And could I not find its historicity entertaining?

 

[Emerikol]

Just to chime in here on this entirely new topic...

The idea of suspension of disbelief is that some baseline exists. It doesn't mean that if you can knock people out left and right ith a single punch that you can also accept leaping across chasms no human could possibly leap or falling 100 feet and surviving.

It's like a dial. You set your baseline. What offends some does not offend others and vice versa.

For me, I don't like dissociative mechanics even though I do accept dragons. I'm fine with magic doing things because that is part of the implicit agreement beforehand. The world has magic. I do not want martials doing similar things without some magical explanation. We all debate these things but the reality is some game styles just don't feel right to us and we don't enjoy them. The same is true for others. And I do put D&D on a pedestal as far as play goes. It's not like playing a board game. If it was then I'd not like it nearly so much. Roleplaying is special because it has immersion that board games don't.

 

[Umbran]

This is just one approach. I've seen (particularly round the 4e edition wars) people arguing explicitly and passionately in favour of process simulation over the actual outcomes. It's what the entire "disassociated mechanics" argument is based on.

Folks can argue whatever they like. But...

"Yeah, I put together this amazing simulation of all the processes that tinfluence weather. I have carefully crafted every component of the water cycle, atmospheric circulation, solar radiation and albedo, simply everything!

It says that Nevada gets 347" or rain a year, and the Atlantic ocean has dried up, but it is a perfect simulation of weather processes!"

...is not convincing. I don't care how "accurate" you feel your simulation steps are, the output still has to match what you are trying to simulate, or the thing is not a good simulation.

Admittedly, simulation was my academic area of study, so I have a particular take on it.

For that matter when it comes to results most good narrative games from Fate to Apocalypse World give pretty good results - but most self proclaimed sim fans in my experience really dislike Fate.

With respect, you asserting that narrative games would give good simulation results does not make it true.

Of course this all ties in to my reading of GNS that Ron Edwards understood N because it's what he wanted, understood G and was trying to get people to see it as cool even if not their thing - and just lumped everything else under S and while he was correct in some cases in his explanation S is a massively overstuffed category.

Yeah, well, I'm not a fan of Edwards. I find most of his specific and particular arguments to be at best disjoint from actual players and playing of games. The bulk of his writing on game design theory to me seems to be... pretentious, obfuscatory, self-indulgent twaddle.

(My apologies to fans of Edwards if that offends them.)

I find GNS theory has some practical utility and connection to reality if I discard the bulk of what Edwards himself said, and stick to mostly natural-language takes on those words.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Agreed that "the proper ways" for this stuff are often not articulated.

I'm don't understand the "enforced upon everyone else" part? Who is enforcing what, upon whom? Given I choose say Earthdawn as the game I am playing, and given that in the fiction (in W') Lochost is the Passion of rebellion, change and freedom, who is to gainsay me and enforce that Lochost's absence from the real world (W) or some imaginary world they have in mind (their W'') makes them "unrealistic".

But that's not at all the sort of situation I'm referring to. I'm referring to the thing we were discussing--someone rejecting some W' because it contains some particular F (or, more commonly, a set or type of Fs), and as a result, demanding that we get W" instead, which will take away anything in W' that this person doesn't accept.

Because that's what happens in these conversations. Like...all the damned time. It is, in fact, the precise logical structure behind arguments like why a certain edition of a certain very popular roleplaying game is rejected, with the frequent argument that it would have been great if it wasn't labelled as an edition of that game. In other words, because a certain set of Fs which offend a particular group of people was present in a certain W', that model is denied to have any validity at al, unless it is excluded from that group's sight.

I really feel it is one of the most fundamental terms of fiction that so long as we are in the fictive mode, what is established to be true in our fictional world is privileged over what is true in the real world. But someone could demand that some category of facts in the fiction conform with their (likely unarticulated) meta-representational rules. One principled way to resolve such demands would be for them to articulate their meta-representational rule with a view to our agreeing to apply it to the fictional world (i.e. W')... but I can't see what enforces my agreement to that in the context of the voluntary activity of play. Alternatively, they could ask what has been established about W' that overrides W, and I should be able to answer.

In short, we would need to talk about it, and do so using specifics rather than hypotheticals. Hypothetically (i.e. with no W' defined) everything should conform with our real world (W). But that is bootless, as we're only in a fictive mode if we are pretending something is true that is not true.

Okay.

Then I'll stop using hypotheticals.

If you were correct, and W' were always privileged over W, it would be impossible for someone to say "4e isn't D&D" and "4e would have succeeded if it weren't called 'D&D'". Yet people do. Still do. To this day.

It is quite clear to me, from the way people actually do behave, that they either don't actually have a consistent thought process to begin with and are genuinely acting without full rationality (not super surprising IMO), or it is simply not true that W is always, guaranteed, superseded by W'. Take your pick; I don't really care which of those you favor, though I had presumed you'd prefer the latter as it doesn't require jettisoning the W/W'/F model.

 

[Enrahim]

I guess I just don't understand how we can have anything that accepts the "FKR" approach without being full-bore.

Either there are no rules, or there are some rules. It cannot be the case that there are both no rules and some rules.

I find that what the FKR approach is willing to include don't even look like rules to me anymore. I've tried. I really have. I just haven't ever seen anything worth actually engaging with--particularly given the absolute rejection from them that I see for anything that isn't "zero or functionally zero".

Ah, this inspired me. I think I might see an important conceptualization now that have eluded me.

First off, when I wrote my rant about the kriegspeil/free kreigspiel split, what I had in mind is what I will label the hard FK hypothesis in mind. That is the hypothesis that an expert can produce a better simulation than any rules mechanics. This hypothesis is contested.

However as is easy to point out, this hypothesis is in itself not relevant for TTRPGs, as the referee (GM) is typically not an expert - at least not in all aspects touched upon in a typical RPG. My realization is that there are (at least) two different approaches to formulating hypotheses inspired by this strong hypothesis that would be relevant for TTRPGs.

The first is to accept that the simulation might need an expert to be superior to mechanics, but to formulate the hypothesis that the loss of simulation accuracy compared with an expert is sufficiently low that any hypothetical improvement to adding simulation rules are not worth the gameplay cost of engaging with such rules. I will call this the soft amateur FK hypothesis

The other approach is to claim that the expert criterion is not required. That is that even amateurs can and do produce better simulation results than mechanics. I am going to call this the hard amateur FK hypothesis

I think a problem with talking with many of those that feel like they belong to the FKR community is that what they are actually ascribing to the soft hypothesis, while they tend to express one of the hard hypotheses as their justification. The trouble is that the hard hypotheses are making claims that might appear objective in nature, and hence a valid target for analysis and criticism, the "worth it" part make us not able to say the same for the soft.

This can invite the situation where someone make a claim about a hard hypothesis, but when engaged with relevant counter points refuse to respond and rather just dismiss the concern as the soft hypothesis make the issue practically irrelevant anyway. This can be done as the soft amateur FK hypothesis can hold even if the hard FK hypothesis is shown to be false. Might it be this pattern that is core to at least some of your frustration with the FKR community?

The same cannot be said about the hard amateur FK hypothesis. If not even experts can outperform mechanics, then surely amateurs cannot. As such the dispute around the hard FK hypothesis (which was the one I alluded to in my rant) is still relevant for the hard amateur FK hypothesis.

Personally I find the hard amateur FK hypothesis implausible in the way I have formulated it here, while I do think the hard FK hypothesis is solid for most fields of expertise. This is the backdrop fir my previous statements about FK.

I would like to propose a moderated hard amateur FK hypothesis framework: For any thing we might want to simulate in a TTRPG, a sufficiently supported autonomous referee will outperform any rigid mechanics (Edit: There might be edge case exceptions like realistic physics with known closed-form solutions). If the required support is none for all things we want to simulate this reduces to the (unmoderated) hard amateur FK hypothesis. Also important is that I would allow for simulation mechanics as a valid support in terms of this hypothesis, as long as the referee is not bound by the outcome given by the mechanic (in which case we would be in rigid mechanics territory).

Another important property of this framework is that while it has a lot of parameters (how much support is "sufficient" for each thing we might want to simulate), I believe the entire framework to be falsified if the hard FK hypothesis do not hold (I think it is unreasonable to consider the scenario of an amateur being supported to higher than "expert" level for this purpose).

It is in imagining trying to hash out the parameters of such a framework I was envisioning engaging with the hard FK hypothesis idea while not committing to the no-rule extremes of the hard or soft amateur FK hypotheses that I think characterizes (most of) FKR.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Why?

And could I not find its historicity entertaining?

Note what you cut out.

This is dependent on a person having already accepted the following argument: "It is sometimes better to use what is entertaining, even if it is highly inaccurate, than to use what is accurate." That is the simple, logical summary of the argument Lanefan made (where he used the example of depicting Greek deities: he could use the model which reflects historicity, but he chooses to use the model he finds entertaining.)

Hence, both the false-dichotomy assertion you're making, and the "why should that be so" are predicated on the argument Lanefan already made, that entertainment value is--at least some of the time--simply more important than "accuracy", which includes such things as historicity in this context (e.g., accuracy to how the real-world Ancient Greek religion was practiced, with the simple substitution that their gods very much objectively and verifiably exist, as opposed to real history, where that question is, shall we say, not quite so settled.)