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

[Lanefan]

Yes, really. There are a couple other variables of course like the friction imparted because of the amount of chalk on my cue tip and how fuzzy the tip is.

But as far as the 8 ball going in the corner pocket? It all comes down to that momentary connection of cue tip and the cue ball. How well I determined optimal trajectory, calculated the spin I impart or do not? All of those come down to some combination of skill, mental and physical aptitude, and variability caused by the fact that I am imperfect analog biological being.

Sometimes after the shot I may realize my aim was just off or I calculated angles wrong, misjudged whether or not I could get that 8 ball past the 2. Most of the time it's some combination and I have no clue.

But when I'm making the shot? I'm just trying my best to get that 8 ball in the corner pocket to win the game. Whether I succeed or not relies on a wide range of factors that determines whether or not i hit the cue ball correctly in order to make the shot.

What this ignores, though, is the idea of there being external factors that ruined what otherwise would have been a perfect shot. An imperfection in the table rail that caused a slightly off-angle rebound. An unnoticed bit of potato chip on the table that slightly altered the course of your white ball. Something unusual about the chalk on the cue this time. That sort of thing.

And when put in game terms, that represents the "luck" factor that's also present in the d20 roll along with the skill piece.

 

[AlViking]

What this ignores, though, is the idea of there being external factors that ruined what otherwise would have been a perfect shot. An imperfection in the table rail that caused a slightly off-angle rebound. An unnoticed bit of potato chip on the table that slightly altered the course of your white ball. Something unusual about the chalk on the cue this time. That sort of thing.

And when put in game terms, that represents the "luck" factor that's also present in the d20 roll along with the skill piece.

I was assuming the perfect table because it avoids the whole "The GM invented that loose rock after the failure so it's not a simulation!" argument. But in my experience there are a lot of shots that are nearly identical setup that I make 9 out of 10 times. As much as I would like to blame the table as long as it's in good repair and kept clean, I really can't. Much like I'd like to blame snow snakes for my downhill skiing falls, I wish I could blame the table. My missing 1 in 10 times is really just as simple as me making a small error because like everyone else I'm not perfect.

 

[pemerton]

I love this.

That's good - thank you!

I particularly love this because there are plenty of things that happen in "process" sim play that are absolutely in the vein of D. Almost all descriptions of weapon attacks end up working this way, for example.

Yeah, this is the sort of thing I have in mind in talking about how demanding Sorensen's principles are.

Edwards is sensitive to this issue, too, in his simulationism essay (and to be honest that's probably where I learned to think about it clearly in the context of RPGs, as opposed to the philosophical analysis of counterfactuals). He gives the example of the hit location roll, which typically is made after the attack and parry have been resolved, but reaches back into the past to give us additional information.

Rolling for hit locations in RQ projects back into the past. The furious melee freezes while unengaged creatures move. What players do around the table does not necessarily enforce a timeline for the imagined world. In the world of Glorantha, combat doesn't freeze or rewind to earlier moments.

Right. Which is why initiative and action economy are such big deals in process sim design.

It's no coincidence that Rolemaster has two rules for resolving Fireball (its ordinary rule, reiterated across editions and a statistical variation on that rule found in War Law and used for larger skirmishes and battles); but has endless variations on its initiative rules and action economy, across the editions and published in the Rolemaster Companions.

At my own table, in my 19 years of playing RM, the initiative issue - where the breakdown between simultaneous/continuous resolution and the initiative rules would manifest itself - would come up from time to time. We called it "initiative purge", and regarded it as a deficiency. But various modifications made to our own initiative system over the years didn't fully eliminate it - Edwards is right to note it as a challenging technical issue.

Interesting, RM does not have the RQ hit location issue, because it doesn't do attack, parry, damage in time sequence. In the fiction, the attack is made - and then we pause the fiction while attack and crit (which determines location) are rolled - and then we restart the clock and find out what happened in the fiction. That didn't cause any issues in our play, unlike the initiative purge.

 

[pemerton]

"Hopes being accurate" doesn't make sense.

I mean, it can: "I hope you bought me a bicycle for my birthday. Oh, you did? My wish came true!"

Exactly. A conjecture. Not a hope.

These two situations are very different: "OH, runes. I think from what I know from before that it might be some map. Hope I am right. Let me try to decipher them." and "OH, runes. Wonder what they say? A map would have been really nice now, fingers crossed".

Your description made it sound like a hope. If it was indeed a conjecture, that indeed might change everything.

----‐---------------
Edit: I went back, and found that the original formulation actually used was "guess"

However in trying to find this I also see that you have repeatedly refered to it as "hope". Maybe most importantly when you introduced this example into this thread:

This likely contributed to confusion, if you indeed have meant conjecture all the time.

The significance of "hope" is for action resolution: very roughly, on a success the hope tends to be realised; on a failure, it tends to be dashed. As I've also posted, this is as true for an attempt to kill an Orc or climb a cliff (in D&D) as it is for an attempt to read strange runes (in my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy hack). The generality of the point arises from the fact that success (and thus failure) is relative to a standard/goal, and in the case of a player's action declaration in a RPG it is there intention for the action (formulated in accordance with whatever the rules of the RPG being played permit) that sets that standard/goal.

I also posted this, way upthread: D&D General - [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting. As well as setting out the PC sheet, I made the following observations:

Does this character know about dungeon runes? Either in general, or what these particular runes are likely to say? He's a Solitary Traveller, and a Cunning Expert. In a game that is deliberately playing on classic D&D tropes, Cunning includes the thief's traditional ability to deal with traps and read strange writings. As per the MHRP rules (p OM96),

Experts are a cut above the rest, having had extensive experience and practice using skills in this field. If you’re an Expert, you know the theory and application of the skill set, probably have contacts in the field of study, and can recognize others with this level of training just by observation.​

Just as the AW player gets to express their character's familiarity with the slave traders - they use human ears for barter - so the Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy player gets to express his character's familiarity with the sorts of strange runes that are found in dungeons inhabited by (inter alia) Crypt Things.

It's not identical - MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic and AW are different games, that use different techniques for PC build, for framing, for declaring actions, and for resolving those declared actions. But taking the AW notion of "crossing the line" and just declaring that the runes example does so is (in my view) too simplistic.

I've reiterated them once or twice since that posting.

 

[pemerton]

Simulation aims to mechanically represent the significant contributing elements that exist in the fiction. By omitting important elements such as difficulty of the task the simulation becomes much weaker.

This is one meaning of "simulation" in RPGing. It's not the only one: see eg @clearstream's posts in this thread. It's not the meaning that Sorensen uses either.

 

[pemerton]

A conjecture in d&d is either supported by actual fictional details or not.

You speak about "D&D" as if it's a single thing. But it's not.

Here is an example of D&D play, that I've already posted in this thread in reply to you; it has exactly the same structure/process as the runes example:

The PCs erected a magic circle around the Mausoleum of the Raven Queen, in order to prevent anyone from entering it and potentially learning her true name (backstory here); then rested; then scried on the tarrasque, which they knew to have recently begun marauding in the mortal world, identifying its location and noting that it was being observed by maruts.

<snip>

The player of the eternal defender had already noted that, when I read out the description of maruts and their contracts earlier in the session, the only being actually mentioned by name was the Raven Queen. So he predicted (more-or-less in line with what I had in mind), that the maruts observing the tarrasque would be there at the behest of the Raven Queen (who is served by three of the five PCs), to stop it being interfered with.

When the PCs then took their Tower to confront the tarrasque, that was indeed what they found. Upon arriving at the tarrasque's location they found the tarrasque being warded by a group of maruts who explained that, in accordance with a contract made with the Raven Queen millenia ago, they were there to ensure the realisation of the end times, and to stop anyone interfering with the tarrasque as an engine of this destruction and a herald of the beginning of the end times and the arrival of the Dusk War.

<snip>

I wasn't sure exactly what the players would do here. They could try and fight the maruts, obviously, but I thought the Raven Queen devotees might be hesitant to do so. I had envisaged that the PCs might try to persuade them that the contract was invalid in some way - and this idea was mentioned at the table, together with the related idea of the various exarchs of the Raven Queen in the party trying to lay down the law. In particular I had thought that the paladin of the Raven Queen, who is a Marshall of Letherna (in effect, one of the Raven Queen's most powerful servants), might try to exercise his authority to annual or vary the contract in some fashion.

But instead the argument developed along different lines. What the players did was to persuade the maruts that the time for fulfillment of their contract had not yet arisen, because this visitation of the tarrasque was not yet a sign of the Dusk War. (Mechanically, these were social skill checks, history and religions checks, etc, in a skill challenge to persuade the maruts.)

The player of the Eternal Defender PC made only one action in this skill challenge - explaining that it was not the end times, because he was there to defeat the tarrasque (and got another successful intimidate check, after spending an action point to reroll his initial fail) - before launching himself from the flying tower onto the tarrasque and proceeding to whittle away around 600 of its hit points over two rounds. (There were also two successful out-of-turn attacks from the ranger and the paladin, who were spending their on-turn actions in negotiating with the maruts.)

The invoker/wizard was able to point to this PC's successful solo-ing of the tarrasque as evidence that the tarrasque, at least on this occasion, could not be the harbinger of the end times whom the maruts were contracted to protect, because it clearly lacked the capacity to ravage the world. The maruts agreed with this point - clearly they had misunderstood the timing of celestial events - and the PCs therefore had carte blanche to finish of the tarrasque. (Mechanically, this was the final success in the skill challenge: the player rolled Insight to see what final argument would sway the maruts, knowing that only one success was needed. He succeeded. I invited him to then state the relevant argument.)

The player succeeds in a roll to intuit the final argument that will sway the maruts, and thereby wins the skill challenge; and then the player authors the argument. This happened in a D&D game.

To reiterate - in that example the player's action declaration is "I identify what final argument will sway the maruts". The Insight check is then made, and succeeds, and so the PC identifies that argument. The player then authors and states the argument in question.

If not (as in the runes example)

The conjecture is supported by details in the fiction, in the sense that the character, being relevantly experienced, notes those details and arrives at a conjecture. Those fictional details aren't narrated by anyone. In this respect it's not unlike a D&D combat - we assume that the PC and the PC's opponent are thrusting, dodging, parrying etc, and that each character is noting and responding to those details; but we don't actually work out what they are and narrate them.

Likewise when a climbing check is resolved, the character presumably plans a route, tests various holds, etc but those things aren't actually narrated and if someone asked "What route did the PC take to get to the top of the cliff" no at the table is able to answer, although in the fiction there obviously is an answer.

the single detail that the conjecture was made by a supposed expert isn’t the relevant fiction, it’s that a supposed expert made a wild guess based on no evidence at all other than a gut feeling. In this case the expert status of the conjecturer is unrelated to the truth of the conjecture.

Just as the player of the climbing PC doesn't need to be able to explain how they identify and traverse their route - that is subsumed in the character being a skill climber - so the player of this PC doesn't need to be able to explain how they arrive at a conjecture as to the nature of the runes - that is subsumed in their being a Solitary Traveller and Cunning Expert.

In the case where the conjecture is based on relevant fictional facts, then an expert is more likely to form the appropriate conjecture.

All I see in your post is that you are insisting that certain cognitive tasks should be resolved differently from certain other cognitive tasks, and physical tasks: that those cognitive tasks need to be resolved by the player of the PC actually performing the cognitive act, rather than offloading that to the resolution system. (I say "certain cognitive tasks" because you don't require the player of the climbing PC to actually plan a route up the cliff prior to then rolling to resolve their physical effort.)

In a RPG that focuses on (i) the GM presenting puzzles and mysteries of various sorts to the players, which (ii) the players then try and solve, you insistence makes sense. But those are not the only RPGs around, and they are not the only ones that can involve simulation.

 

[pemerton]

For a mechanic to be "diegetic" it is required that all input to the mechanics is diegetic (in-fiction elements, knowable by people in the fiction) + a randomiser.

This seems to exclude some fairly common mechanics, like (in D&D) casting a spell be crossing it off your list of memorised spells, or (in D&D) moving X squares where X is a number established (as part of the build process) as the character/creature's movement rate, or (in D&D) pushing over a statute if N points of STR are applied (this one was fairly common in old modules).

Tweet calls these resolution processes "karma" (contrasting with "fortune" which involves a randomiser; and "drama" which is resolution merely by talking without any associated mechanic, say (in D&D, quite often) "I walk down the corridor" or "I open the door).

 

[pemerton]

Cunning Expert sounds like someone who might be able to read runes, but how does being a cunning expert make it more likely that some guy inscribing runes ages ago is going to inscribe what he hopes to be there?

As I already posted,

The inference, If X is a disputed proposition of physics, and Einstein conjectured it to be true, then it is more likely to be true than one might otherwise suspect is sound. Einstein doesn't cause it to be true: but his genius as a physicist means that his conjectures tend to track the truth.

 

[pemerton]

wouldn't the people in Pemerton's setting eventually figure out that actualisation actually works, and what they wish and fear is greatest determining factor for outcomes?

The players already know how the resolution system works. They've played the game, they know the rules. It's not kept secret from them.

 

[pemerton]

Look, I keep asking questions. Rather than say something like, "this question is wrong and it actually works like XYZ," he only says this question is wrong" and that's it.

I've posted, upthread, how Marvel Heroic RP works. It's not mysterious.

Like, I don't ask you about the scene distinctions that you use in your D&D games. Because I know that you don't use them. But you keep asking me about stuff in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic play that only makes sense if you are assuming play along the lines of conventional D&D or CoC or other games where the GM feeds the players "clues" so that the players can then infer to the true state of the GM-authored backstory.