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

[Faolyn]

Except that can NEVER be the answer. The player is forbidden to add anything to the game world. So, while the character knows the answers, it MUST come from the DM. Nothing about the game world can ever come from the players.

That's how this apparently works. The DM is the SOLE source of narration in the world. The players are not allowed to add any information.

This is apparently how simulation systems work.

Well, I've never advocated for that, so I don't actually care how simulation systems are supposed to work.

And as I said in my previous post, the only appreciable difference between a sim game and a narrative game is whether the results were decided by the writer before the game was published, or afterwards by the GM and/or players. And you can tell Max that, if you like.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

"Sorry Dave, you've put a lot of work into this setting but it's not what I'm feeling right now. I'll catch you for the next campaign"

Which, as usual, completely ignores the social cost of this choice.

Rejecting someone's offer is not free....because of the social contract.

 

[Maxperson]

Which, as usual, completely ignores the social cost of this choice.

Rejecting someone's offer is not free....because of the social contract.

Is the social contract easy to ignore or not? You've called it useless for keeping the DM from being Thanos to his players, but here you say rejecting someone's offer is not free because of the social contract. This seems to be inconsistent arguing.

 

[gban007]

One way to achieve the "no isekai" feel is for the players to contribute to the setting. That's something that I've taken to be pretty uncontroversial for a long time. Another way, not completely unrelated, is to use strong references/tropes in the setting that the players can identify and hook onto. The relation between the two is that, when relying on tropes/references, the players have to be able to have their input into what a trope means, or what meaning a reference carries. (Eg if the setting is Vikings, then the players as much as the GM have to be able to contribute and build on their ideas about Vikings.)

Similar to the tropes view, I like to play in established settings like Middle Earth, Star Wars, Forgotten Realms or Warhammer where GM and players would ideally have same knowledge / input on what is around / can refer to same documents outside of specific adventure mysteries as such.

 

[Enrahim]

There is no luminiferous aether.

This is exactly what the relativity theory settled.

Even if there were, by its own theoretical claims, you cannot see it if you're inside an enclosed space. That would be like saying you could see the drag on the water in your fishbowl from the Earth's motion around the sun.

Ever heard about the Mickelson-Morley experiment? That was a local experiment.

Coriolis effects are (much like the Unruh effect) undetectable at human scales. They're something like one ten-millionth of the acceleration due to gravity. Many people think the Coriolis affect applies to things like bathtubs and toilets, but it doesn't (or, at least, it does but it's legit invisible beneath much more salient factors like the product design.)

Tell this to an artilerist.

Unruh, centripetal forces again can only be observed if you can see outside. If you cannot look outside to see the point of rotation.

Tell this to a washing machine.

(Edit: The last one might actually be true if we assume Mach's principle, and that as such these are actually gravitational frame dragging effects. But that is not the common paradigm of talk, so I am hence disregarding that as what you tried to say)

 

[Enrahim]

I'd much rather, in a simulationist leaning game, that the DM's narration was actually connected to the fiction of the game than whatever justification they can pull out of thin air.

Edit: Me too... so?

Funny how there appears to only be two options. The idea that the DM uses the tiny kernel of information provided by the system to build an outcome that makes sense apparently isn't simulation, but, the DM completely making stuff up with zero input from the system is.

No. The point argued is that both are simulations

Edit: The contested question is if these pieces of information provided by the system supports or hinder the simulation. And that entirely depends on the quality of those kernels of information and the context of what is being simulated.

 

[Don Durito]

I don't think I really agree with Hussar's strict criterion in theory but I think he is onto something in practice.

It is very hard to feel that anything is satisfactorily simulated if it is overly abstracted.

This is why simulationist systems are so often a juggle between too complex and complex enough.

 

[Lanefan]

It doesn't. Like that's literally a thing that doesn't happen. It's a function of the design of the toilet/bathtub/etc. Coriolis effects at that scale are so vanishingly small they simply can't be observed without carefully-constructed laboratory settings. As in, the effect of gravity alone is ten MILLION times stronger than the Coriolis effect.

It's possible you're making a joke here, I can't tell, but...yeah. The water doesn't swirl preferentially in any direction when you flush a toilet as a result of the Coriolis effect. It's a toilet-design thing.

Perhaps, but the effect was first noticed on cruise liners crossing the equator which would have been using the same equipment all along, so ???

 

[Lanefan]

I was referring to the descriptions you have given, multiple times, that you have so precisely nailed down the physiological, sociopolitical, economic, geographical, and ecological characteristics of your campaign world that there literally isn't any place you have not already fully pre-defined. Many of them, as I understand it, are places the PCs have never received any information about whatsoever, but you already know every detail there is to know about them, other than perhaps individual specific names of minor government functionaries or the like.

I think you've mixed me up with someone else on this one.

There's loads of places in my setting that I haven't fully defined. Some of those places are vaguely defined e.g. I know there's a great big faux-Chinese empire to the far south but other than the names of a few big cities nothing's been defined about it at all yet; and the city names are only so I'd have something to put on a map.

And I don't even know the names of minor government functionaries in the city the PCs generally use as their base. There's about 40,000 NPC people in that city and I might at the most have named fifteen of them.

 

[Lanefan]

Interestingly, I can't stand the isekai vibe as a player.

What is the isekai vibe?