Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9250874" data-attributes="member: 71699">That was me, thinking about Assess in Avatar. It's easy to find examples.This is right, albeit sometimes it goes wrong. I believe that relates to what [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] was hitting with falls.fiction justifies action misleadingly appears to justify invoking a rule goes off the rails further fiction?! Folk wind up trying to figure out why the rule they invoked didn't fit, sometimes diagnosing that as a fault with the rule. That has them doing what ideally shouldn't be done, which is invoke the rule and then work out if it was justified.Rules mastery helps, which comes out of study and play. On the designer's side, lucidity and honesty helps. By honesty I mean - look at your rule and see what it does read plainly. What it does, not what you designed it to do.Thinking about this, I noticed something about constitutive rules. The general idea with them is that the constituted activity is made possible by the rule. On surface then, it could appear that constitutive rules would break the chain of justification, because the constituted activity is invoked by the rule, and not the other way around! Throwing a psychic blade and teleporting to it is constituted by the Psychic Teleportation sub-rule of the Soul Blades rule. In theory, without that rule that's not something you can do in your fiction.That last claim is very evidently mistaken. I could add throwing out a psychic knife and teleporting to our fiction if I wished, even without the rule. (This gets back to my view on how rule zero technically operates, in another thread.) The process of design involved someone imagining that fiction prior to forming the rule, and then forming the rule in order to communicate their envisioned fiction to players, regulate it, and validate it. (I have definite ideas about the role that envisioning fiction and prospectively playing, plays in TTRPG rules design.)We read the Psychic Blades rule, are inspired to say new things - such as "I form a knife with my mind, fling it through his window, and teleport to my beloved's side!" When we say them, we invoke the rule. In this case with very strong binding between rule and fiction.Perhaps it is right to observe that - The more a rule serves broad and preexisting norms, the more "almost fits" cases we get. (We possess rich reservoirs of description to draw from.) The more a rule constitutes unique fiction, the less.</blockquote>

Verification