NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9708691" data-attributes="member: 42582">Generally, at least where knowledge is concerned, expertise can be judged against an external standard (even expertise in a skill - eg an expert pianist - can probably be judged against an external standard, but I put that case to one side in this post).The fact that an author has authority over what they write doesn't make it appropriate, without more, to also describe them as an expert, except perhaps in some loose or somewhat metaphorical sense - they can't be wrong, but that's not because what they say is likely to be correct but rather because they enjoy a power of stipulation.Free kriegsspiel works as a training tool - to the extent that it does - because the referee has expert knowledge and intuition about how events will unfold  in a battle situation. That's what makes it different from mere storytelling.There can be external standards other than reality, too. And if a RPG establishes or presupposes some external standard (real or fictional) that it is supposed to answer to, then - unlike the process that you, [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER], described - the people playing it will not simply construct their conceptions of what is possible or appropriate in the fiction by reference to the game rules. They might think, for instance, that it is silly that a warrior can easily survive a 100' fall from a dragon. Given that many RPGs have presented themselves as answerable to an external standard in this sense - typically, a list of inspirational media - I don't think RPGers who depart from your process in the way I've described are doing anything wrong.Another issue that can come up arises from the fact that, <a href="https://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/isabout/2020/05/14/observations-on-gns-simulationism/#1-an-internal-understanding-of-simulationism" target="_blank">as Tuovinen puts it</a>, that some - perhaps much - RPGing involves "intensely detailed perspectives that sometimes surpass the means of traditional, non-interactive mediums." What will be experienced, in those perspectives, needs to be decided - if the game play is to work - but often can't be inferred from the reference material to which the game is supposed to be answerable. Particularly when that reference material departs from reality, so that the sorts of inferences that would work in real life don't work in the fiction.For instance, to the best of my knowledge no episode of Star Trek shows us what happens when two character sit down together to work through the special relativity thought experiments as their ship accelerates to warp speed. But that can come up in a Star Trek RPG. What do those characters think and experience? The reference materials won't answer this question, and what the best answer should be is probably not uncontroversial, and is almost certainly not obvious.The same thing will happen with the snake: in a RPG set in the world of Sherlock Holmes, what happens if the players have their PCs look up an encyclopaedia entry on the snake in question, or have their PCs go to the place where the snake comes from and try and find specimens of it?A further issue is that most RPGing has a fairly definite structure, which establishes asymmetrical responsibility for introducing fiction but requires the participants to converge on the same fiction. So, whereas a group of friends sitting around making up new Earthsea stories can freely discuss among themselves what does or doesn't seem to fit with the reference fiction, the structure of RPGing does not foster this sort of discussion (as is illustrated by some posts in this thread), and too much of this sort of discussion can spoil the RPG experience (eg because the player loses the pleasures that come from occupying the player participant role).Here's an example from my own actual play (of Classic Traveller - the scenario was my adaptation of Shadows):Here's another example:I think this sort of back-and-forth between participants, including compromises by experts (like my engineer friend) to permit the game to proceed, is in practice about the best that is possible.But part of what makes it feasible, at my table, is that we are not playing in a "solve the mystery" or "beat the scenario" sort of way. If we were, that would put much more pressure on things. And I have had play experiences, in the past, where it was that sort of play, and where disagreements between players and GMs about what makes sense in the fiction did sour the play experience.</blockquote>

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