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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9201755" data-attributes="member: 42582">What if there is a curtain hanging from the ceiling to about 2 feet above the ground? And what if it is a gauze curtain? This is something that has to be adjudicated, by reference to imagined fiction.In every case? What if it tells you that there is a door, with a bar across it? How does someone work out that that means that the door is stuck/unopenable? By exercising their imagination.Perhaps it can, but I don't know that this is typically done - eg I GMed a lot of 4e D&amp;D, drew up many pictures on graph paper, but never suspended to-scale patches of gauze and tried to simulate how a light might shine through them to render object behind visible.You could also program your video-game with a &quot;noise&quot; framework, with rules for who might hear things and how they respond, etc. But again I don't believe how that is most people adjudicate Knock. They do so by imagining things.The last time I GMed a session of Moldvay Basic, I was using the Haunted Keep. One of the rooms has a pool of water in it. The fighter carried the halfling through the water on his shoulders, so that she was not at risk of drowning. This is an exercise of imagination: it is not the manipulation of any pieces on a board (actual or imaginary as in blindfold chess); it is not the carrying out of a mathematical operation; it is deploying one's knowledge of how people can carry other people on their shoulders, and of how they might do so through a pond - like a parent with a child - and deploying that knowledge to imagine a new situation that, in dint of being assented to by all the participants, becomes part of the shared fiction and part of the new &quot;game state&quot;.This sort of thing is inherent to playing RPGs. And it was part of D&amp;D from the beginning - the player who did this in the Basic session, had she been born 40 years earlier, would have declared exactly the same action had she been playing at Arneson's or Gygax's table, and they would have handled it without any problems.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9201755, member: 42582"] What if there is a curtain hanging from the ceiling to about 2 feet above the ground? And what if it is a gauze curtain? This is something that has to be adjudicated, by reference to imagined fiction. In every case? What if it tells you that there is a door, with a bar across it? How does someone work out that that means that the door is stuck/unopenable? By exercising their imagination. Perhaps it can, but I don't know that this is typically done - eg I GMed a lot of 4e D&D, drew up many pictures on graph paper, but never suspended to-scale patches of gauze and tried to simulate how a light might shine through them to render object behind visible. You could also program your video-game with a "noise" framework, with rules for who might hear things and how they respond, etc. But again I don't believe how that is most people adjudicate Knock. They do so by imagining things. The last time I GMed a session of Moldvay Basic, I was using the Haunted Keep. One of the rooms has a pool of water in it. The fighter carried the halfling through the water on his shoulders, so that she was not at risk of drowning. This is an exercise of imagination: it is not the manipulation of any pieces on a board (actual or imaginary as in blindfold chess); it is not the carrying out of a mathematical operation; it is deploying one's knowledge of how people can carry other people on their shoulders, and of how they might do so through a pond - like a parent with a child - and deploying that knowledge to imagine a new situation that, in dint of being assented to by all the participants, becomes part of the shared fiction and part of the new "game state". This sort of thing is inherent to playing RPGs. And it was part of D&D from the beginning - the player who did this in the Basic session, had she been born 40 years earlier, would have declared exactly the same action had she been playing at Arneson's or Gygax's table, and they would have handled it without any problems. [/QUOTE]

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