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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Enrahim" data-source="post: 9706387" data-attributes="member: 7025577">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 hypothesisThe 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 hypothesisI 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.</blockquote>

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