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

[EzekielRaiden]

The way I see it, the former is a fairly direct prerequisite for the latter.

Irrelevant. That the production of baking powder, white flour, and refined sugar is prerequisite for baking a cake has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not a particular cake recipe is wisely-constructed or not. Prerequisite things certainly do come first. That doesn't mean they have any bearing on subsequent applications.

In some cases - mostly to do with things like faux-historical cultures, pantheons, etc. - I'm more than happy to let the "faux" piece do most of the work as it serves to more put those faux-cultures on the same footing as the non-Human cultures, pantheons, etc. that we invent from nothing. It also allows me to have faux-cultures from different historical eras present in the same setting (very Xena-like, in that way) and not have to worry so much about being accurate to period. Thus, my setting has faux-war-of-the-roses England at the north end of the sea, faux-Caesar-era Rome to the west, faux-ancient Greece to the east, and faux-even-ancienter Sumeria to the south.

That said,, if some historical factoid wanders by that I think is really cool I might include it

Okay...but the point remains, in order to employ this argument, you are having to grant that, at least some of the time, entertainment value trumps fidelity, whatever thing that fidelity might relate to (physics, history, biology, whatever).

But in other cases - mostly to do with physics and physical things - the closer the underlying base gets to Earth-reality, the better. From there, it's a relatively simple matter (at least, I've found it so) to tack the physics of magic on to that to make a consistent foundation such that evrything works consistently. Mundane animals are another place where Earth-like works just fine: a robin here is a robin in the setting, ditto for things like cows and elephants and salmon; mostly for ease of DM-side description and player-side relatability.

Ah, but now you have fallen into the exact trap I was warning you about: Why is this privileged but other things aren't?

You have to actually defend that. If you have granted "sometimes, entertainment value is more important than fidelity", you must defend why this case is special, why this thing requires the maximum fidelity possible, while other things don't. Or, more commonly, why an extensive list of exceptions to fidelity are okay, but a different extensive list of exceptions to fidelity are not okay, which is an even taller order than the previous!

 

[Don Durito]

If there is a strength to Free Kreigspiel I think it is less in the approach itself than in the weaknesses of the typical rpg approach.

Like if you want to know what are the chances that my character without a background in hunting can catch a rabbit for dinner - a judgment that it's about 20% is probably not actually any more or less plausible than whatever a rpg skill system puts out (except by accident). So I can see why you might think - what do we need this system for?

Where I see issues is in consistency. But I guess if you don't want to focus on dense subsystems like combat than it could work (especially if you are engaging in a lot of tracking and recordkeeping).

I find the idea of the 'Expert' judgment in rpg terms a bit odd. I run historical games in medieval and renaissance Europe and I know I enough that I can could probably be considered an expert - at least for rpg purposes (Not claiming academic expertise - just a very broad knowledge) - and I honestly think I would have no idea how adjudicate most things that might happen. (Eg the characters want to bribe the officers of the provost of Paris - how difficult would that be - I have no idea off hand). I tend to feel that the more you know the more you are aware of all the things you don't know - and I'm glad I have a system to fall back on.

Really realism is just the avoidance of what you know to be unrealistic. You can't avoid the things you don't know are not realistic.

 

[clearstream]

Okay. Now: How do we then make sense of a claim such as "I reject F because W' is unrealistic."?

It strikes me that my example of mice in Narnia bears on this.

Suppose I reject sword wielding mice in Narnia because Narnia is unrealistic. I can hardly be saying it isn't true that in the fiction C S Lewis authored set in his imaginary world of Narnia there are sword wielding mice.

Therefore I am not rejecting F (sword wielding mice) in W' (Narnia). Nor am I saying anything about Narnia that isn't already known (it's unrealistic.)

Really realism is just the avoidance of what you know to be unrealistic.

Were C S Lewis to have avoided what he knew to be unrealistic, he could not have imagined Narnia. Sword wielding mice are not real, but to access the fiction of Narnia I pretend they are real. The "fictive-attitude" is one of pretending what I know to be false is true. To avoid what I know to be realistic is to abandon that attitude.

(I'm not here presenting any conclusion, just flagging some considerations for thought.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It strikes me that my example of mice in Narnia bears on this.

Suppose I reject sword wielding mice in Narnia because Narnia is unrealistic. I can hardly be saying it isn't true that in the fiction C S Lewis authored set in his imaginary world of Narnia there are sword wielding mice.

Therefore I am not rejecting F (sword wielding mice) in W' (Narnia). Nor am I saying anything about Narnia that isn't already known (it's unrealistic.)


Were C S Lewis to have avoided what he knew to be unrealistic, he could not have imagined Narnia. Sword wielding mice are not real, but to access the fiction of Narnia I pretend they are real. The "fictive-attitude" is one of pretending what I know to be false is true. To avoid what I know to be realistic is to abandon that attitude.

(I'm not here presenting any conclusion, just flagging some considerations for thought.)

Again, how does this explain people's actual behavior?

Because the actual behavior I see is not simply that W' is problematic very specifically because it conflicts with W. It is that W' must be eliminated and replaced with the alternative W" that does not have the Fs alleged to be invalid, specifically because the replacements, cal them Gs, are taken from W and only from W, not, in any way, from the initially-asserted W'.

In other words, W is privileged over W' in order to assert that the alternative W" should always be used instead. This is not possible if we are presuming that it is always true that W' is privileged over W in all possible states of affairs. There could never even be the start of such an argument, specifically because the (claimed) absolute superiority of W' over W entails that W cannot ever, for any reason, be used as a reason to argue against W'.

 

[clearstream]

Finally, we don't really need R at all. All that's doing is making a hypothesis out of the assertion of (possible) false dichotomy, which is unnecessary. Further, some of these hypotheses are at least logically connected, even if not dichotomous. For example, if Enrahim's "strong FK hypothesis" is false, then it cannot be the case that their "strong amateur FK hypothesis" is true, as the latter entails the former (but not vice-versa); if it is not the case that any given expert is guaranteed to produce a superior result (by whatever metric; not disputing that specifically right now) when compared to a rule-system, then it cannot be the case that any given amateur is guaranteed to produce a superior result when compared to a rule-system.

There are multiple people at the table. Each could satisfy different hypotheses and that could vary subject to subject and moment to moment.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There are multiple people at the table. Each could satisfy different hypotheses and that could vary subject to subject and moment to moment.

Okay. I don't think we need a hypothesis to tell us that taste varies.

 

[Don Durito]

Were C S Lewis to have avoided what he knew to be unrealistic, he could not have imagined Narnia. Sword wielding mice are not real, but to access the fiction of Narnia I pretend they are real. The "fictive-attitude" is one of pretending what I know to be false is true. To avoid what I know to be realistic is to abandon that attitude.

(I'm not here presenting any conclusion, just flagging some considerations for thought.)

Yes. Not being realistic is not avoiding the things you know to be unrealistic.

 

[clearstream]

Okay. I don't think we need a hypothesis to tell us that taste varies.

I'm not speaking only of taste, although that does vary in ways that matter. I'm speaking of expertise/authorial-expertise subject by subject relative to the rules and one another, and of uneven priority of subjects (if we're playing simulatively in Rokugan, expertise in that world would matter more than expertise in QM.)

 

[clearstream]

Yes. Not being realistic is not avoiding the things you know to be unrealistic.

You're agreeing then, that this abandons the pretending of things to be true that aren't true that is necessary to imagine fantasy worlds at all?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm not speaking only of taste, although that does vary in ways that matter. I'm speaking of expertise/authorial-expertise subject by subject relative to the rules and one another, and of uneven priority of subjects (if we're playing simulatively in Rokugan, expertise in that world would matter more than expertise in QM.)

Okay.

I don't think we need a hypothesis to tell us that (a) taste varies and (b) different people know different stuff.

I mean, I've literally been arguing that different people know different stuff this entire time. My whole spiel about Aristotelian physics and the nature of lockpicking was literally that writ large.

It's not a hypothesis. It's a statistically-demonstrated fact.