Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7934183" data-attributes="member: 4937">[USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER]: So, you make a good point.  If we take a game like soccer or baseball, and if we read the rule book, we'll find that the overwhelming majority of the rules are actually defining the equipment that the game is played with and the field that it is played on.   If you read the rules of Major League Baseball for the first time, you might be surprised to discover that only a tiny fraction of the rule book has anything to do with the process of playing baseball.   In fact, most of the rule book is devoted to describing the circumstances in which play is to take place - as if you picked up an RPG rule book and it spent 30 pages on who should bring snacks and what sort they should bring.RPG rule books for the most part give no exacting guidance about the field of play or even the type of play that is to take place in the session, so you are right that we can't expect a dungeon or a dragon in a game of D&D the way we can expect a diamond in baseball. In point of fact, the field of play is left entirely up to the imagination of the participants, and could be literally anything.So what then can we expect? How do we know if someone is playing D&D? Well, for that we have to look at what the rules do describe.Well, first, there will a secret keeper, usually a human Dungeon Master who is a participant in the play but has a special role as secret keeper and judge.The other participant(s) will have a character, who represent the avatar they control within the game. And the character will have attributes represented by mathematical values.The secret keeper will describe a fictional setting that your character is a part of.And you and the other participants will take turns speaking to the secret keeper. The most important thing you can say to the secret keeper, and the one thing the game really cares about, are propositions to alter the fiction - or to be formal about it to "change the fictional positioning."When you propose to change the fiction, one of three things will happen. Either the secret keeper will say, "No", or they will say "Yes", or they will say, "Roll a D20, add a specific number from your character sheet, and report the result." If you observe the game long enough you'll eventually discover that that roll of the D20, usually with a modifier added to it, is being compared to a target number, and if your total is equal to or higher than that number, then the change you want to make to the fiction or something quite like it will probably happen. But if your modified roll is below that target number, then it probably won't.  Critically, regardless of what happens it's usually the secret keeper that explains the results of your proposition.   Also critically, it's usually the case that you make the proposition before you roll the die, and the the outcomes are described after the die is thrown and the result known.  And you can continue to make observations of this sort and eventually you will be able to report, "Yes, we are playing D&D".What this tells us is that the game of D&D is mostly a collection of rules for achieving agreement between the participants with respect to a series of changes in the fiction. But the actual process of playing the game is as much or more about the fiction than what the rules describe. Above and beyond the rules, there is a whole bunch of ideas about the sort of things that might populate the fiction - like say orcs - but none of those things are essential to the game being D&D. What RPGs tend to cover in all of their hundreds of pages are either aids to brainstorming fiction, or else the equivalent of the tiny section of the rules of baseball that describe what players actually do to resolve whether someone gets around the bases and scores a point. The rules are usually silent on most of the things that sports rules care very deeply about.It is therefore absolutely true that the event of play each table performs is unique in a way that baseball match isn't.   But there are still some commonalities between those tables so that we can tell they are playing the same game.</blockquote>

Verification