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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6301084" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this overall, but there is also one thing that I want to focus on.Some game mechanics mean that optimal play is reflected I the PCs having an easy time of things. Other do not. I personally prefer the latter.The problem with the former is that when the PCs are having an easy time of things gameplay tends to be less exciting. I have had this experience in Rolemaster, with scry-buff-teleport, and in AD&D also, with methodical, prep-based play being the best way to succeed I the game.One thing I like about 4e is that it often isn't true. For instance, in combat the best way for the dwarf fighter in my game to succeed is to be in the thick of things, subject to attacks from all parties. That produces excitement. The sorcerer has close burst powers, which require getting into the action to use them. Even when he makes this easy for himself, say by dropping his Cloud of Darkness, this introduces complications into the situation for the other characters (and hence the other players).Out-of-combat, too, the system doesn't reward the same sort of prep-based play as does more traditional D&D. It's not quite in the same league as some of the games that Campbell mentions, but it is noticeably different from how D&D has tended to be in earlier editions. I personally find this makes for more spontaneous and more exciting play.This all makes sense to me.By this definition can you give an example of a story game? Marvel Heroic RP, Burning Wheel, Maelstrom Storytelling and HeroWars/Quest certainly don't fit it.And I'm talking about the 1000s of things in those books that don't have game stats.Here is an example from Gygax's AD&D DMG (p 96), which predates 2nd ed AD&D by 10 years and can hardly be considered aberrant: THE LIMED-OVER SKELETON OF THE ABBOT is in this pool of water, but it appears to be merely a somewhat unusual mineral formation. Clutched in the bony fingers is the special key . . . If the remains are disturbed in anyway, a cylindrical object will be noticed, the thing being dislodged from where it lay by the skeleton. . . The pool is about 10' long and 15' wide. It is about 4' deep at its edge and 7' in the centre. There are a score of so of small, white blind fish in it, and under the rocks are some cave crayfish, similarly blind and white.That is a part of the gameworld that the PCs absolutely are expected to interact with, and it has no game stats. All we are given is a description of an imaginary state of affairs. How does one disturb a limed-over skeleton in a pool of water of the described dimensions? No game mechanics are given - it is taken for granted that the players and GM can work this out be extrapolating from the stated fiction.If a PC is trapped in the room can s/he avoid starvation for a time by eating the fish and crayfish? There are no mechanics to answer that question, either - no mechanics for calorific requirements, nor for fishing - but that doesn't mean that a player couldn't declare his/her PC making such a move. The GM would adjudicate it by reference to the stated fiction.My point is that I don't need mechanics - though I could use some if I wanted to - and that for as long as D&D has existed GMs have been resolving such situations without reference to game mechanics.It's simply not true that a player who has his/her PC spill beer on an NPC to facilitate subsequent tracking or identification is deciphering a pattern. Similarly, a player who declares that his/her PC uses an axe to chop down a door (usually taking a full turn, according to Gygax's DMG at p 97, and requiring at least 3 wandering monster checks), is not deciphering a pattern. The intention of these "moves", if made by a player, is to change the state of the shared fiction - to include a beer-smelling NPC, or to no longer include a solid door obstructing progress - so that other options are opened up for the players' PCs.And? Do you have any arguments to offer in defence of this view? If not, why are you mentioning it? I certainly don't believe it, in part because I am not any sort of postmodernist and certainly not a hardline one.All RPGs create fictions. I just quoted a fiction created by Gary Gygax as an example for RPG play. But for some reason you seem to believe that all fictions are stories. I don't know why - you have never explained this. It's obvious to me that not all fictions are stories. The law exams I sit involve fictions, but not stories. Einstein's thought experiments in relation to special relativity are fictions, but not stories.Firstly, fiction frequently references real world objects. For instance, the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle references the city of London and the River Thames. Plus commonplace objects of the time such as hansom cabs and deerstalker hats.Second, not all D&D play references a "real world nounenon". You mention the map. But Gygax's map on p 95 of the DMG doesn't include the mineral formation (just the letter "B" marking where it is), nor the special key, nor the cylindrical object, nor does it depict in any way the depth of the pool. The map doesn't tell us other petty details about the fiction either, and in fact Gygax has a range of charts and tables (on pp 217 through 222 of his DMG) for filling in such details of the fiction which can be used in the course of play. (He describes them as "MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS AND POINTS OF SEMI-INTEREST FOR CORRIDORS AND UNPOPULATED AREAS OR TO ROUND OUT OTHERWISE DRAB PLACES" and on p 221 says "these various descriptive words will serve the DM in good stead when preparing level keys or when "winging it".)First, I have never asserted that all RPG play is about rhetoric. That is a lie about me and I'd prefer you to stop repeating it - I've already asked you upthread to stop projecting your preconceptions about some Forge bogeyman onto me, and to actually engage with what I'm writing.Second, you seem to have no idea about legal education or examination. A law exam does not examine rhetoric. It examines the ability to reason about an imagined situation. Without the imagined situation - that is, the fiction - no reasoning is possible. The imaginary fact situations which students are required to engage with are called "scenarios". They obviously are not real - they are fictional. All roleplaying, as used as a training or educative or evaluative tool, involves fictional scenarios: for instance, a person pretends to be a client or a customer or a boss or a worker or whatever else is being practised within the particular roleplaying exercise.Not all strategy involves patterns. Nor do all games involve patters. Pictionary is a game, but it is not about patterns. "I spy with my little eye" is a game, but it is not about patterns nor really about strategy either.Furthermore, there is no contradiction between engaging with patterns and/or strategy and dealing with fictions. For instance, declaring that my PC pours beer onto an NPC, so that it will be easier to track/identify that NPC later, is a strategic decision. But it clearly involves dealing with a fiction - because the beer, the PC and the NPC all do not exist. They are imaginary.Please explain how Pictionary is about pattern recognition. Please explain how triva quizzes are about pattern recognition. Please explain how "I spy with my little eye" is about pattern recognition.These are all games. They are not all about pattern recognition. (Unless by "pattern recognition" you simply mean "cognition". In which case reading a book or watching a movie is equally about pattern recognition, given that both involve cognition.)This is ludicrous. What is happening in a game that "seeing" refers to? It does not refer to any mark that the GM makes on his/her map. It does not refer to any mark that the player makes on his/her PC sheet. It refers to an imaginary event, occurring to an imaginary person (Bob's character) in an imaginary world. That stuff is all made up. None of it is real. There is no orc. Just as in Gygax's example there is no abbot. There is a marking on a map (the letter "B") and there is a written description of an imaginary thing (the calcified remains of the abbot in the pool). If you can't imagine a calcified skeleton in a pool, you can't play Gygax's game.Notice that nothing comparable to this takes place in a game of chess. Playing chess does not require imputing imaginary mental states to imaginary beings. You don't say "White's knight sees a pawn available for capture" - it is the player who sees the pawn, and who uses the knight to capture it. In that case please tell me where the oil is located. Or the pouch. Where do they exist? Why can't I use the oil to lubricate my bike chain, or to cook with, if it really exists? Why can't I use the pouch to carry my notebooks in?The answer is obvious. They don't exist. They are imaginary. The reason that they can figure in the game, despite being imaginary, is because human beings are capable of reasoning about imaginary things. It is one interesting way in which we differ from (say) chickens.Given that I have denied, upthread, that all RPGs are storygame I don't think I'm pushing D&D as a storygame. You are the one who assume that all fiction must involve stories, whereas I have denied that repeatedly and continue to do so.I also don't know why you think that GMs are irrelevant in the game I play, given that I GM the game I play. Nor do I understand why you think that I don't need a campaign world, given that my game occurs within a gameworld (authored primarily by WotC).As for D&D being designed with 1000s of books, it actually wasn't - I played D&D for the first time with two books (Moldvay Basic and KotB) and first played AD&D with three books (PHB, DMG and MM, using Appendix A of the DMG to generate a random dungeon). I don't know when the number of books published for D&D reached the 4-digit figure, but I doubt it was anytime before the 1990s.I don't understand this at all - are you now saying that techniques of legal education and examination invented (as best I understand it) in the latter part of the 19th century are also parts of the Forge-ite conspiracy to destroy gameplaying as the world has hitherto known it?Or are you saying that the idea of roleplaying in RPGs has no connection to the prior development of such techniques by (among others) teachers of lawyers - despite having claimed the contrary in umpteen posts up to this time?My point is that lawyers, for a long time, have used imaginary situations to examine their students. Another word for an imaginary situation is a fiction - they are fictional situations. And students are expected to reason with them. Your claim that all reasoning with fictional situations must be rhetorical has no foundation, either in theory (Derrida probably agrees with you, but Derrida is wrong - the tradition that includes Frege, Dummett, Tarski, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Quine has the right of this issue) or in practice: I have marked 100s of law exams in my career to date, and most of them contain very little rhetoric but quite a bit of technical reasoning about the imaginary situations.You are the one who is caught up in dogma - that all fictions are stories, that all reasoning about fictional situations is rhetoric, that all games are pattern-recognition exercises  - none of which has any truth to it. And you also dogmatically propound your own view of D&D - which includes such non-Gygaxian notions as "the magical system" or "the clerical system" - as if it were the only true way to play the game. In previous posts you have even asserted that you know better than Tom Moldvay how D&D is meant to be played, because his rulebook makes provision for the GM resolving player action declarations by assigning a percentage chance of success ascertained on the spur of the moment, and treating the state of the unmapped parts of the fantasy world as something that my be determined by that spur-of-the-moment roll (eg a stream below a cliff to break the PCs fall).I know how Gygaxian D&D is played, and the fact that I prefer to play a different sort of game is neither here nor there.Here are some quotes from Gygax's DMG (with page references):Page 61: The steps for encounter [sic] and combat are as follows: 1. Determine if either or both parties are SURPRISED. 2. Determine distance, if unknown, between the parties. 3.  . . . determine INITIATIVE . . . 4. Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon by the party with the initiative . . . 5. Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon by the party which lost the initiative . . . 6. Continue each melee round by determination of distance, initiative and action until melee ends . . . Page 65 Use the following procedures for spells cast during melee . . . Pages 68-69 Procedures for Determination of Evasion Underground . . . Procedures for Determination of Evasion OutdoorsNow here is a definition of "resolution", from dictionary.com (Random House): a decision or determination.Here is another (Collins World English Dictionary): something resolved or determined; decision.The same website, drawing upon  Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, lists as synonyms for "resolution" the following (among others): answer, judgement, determination.As the above quotes show, Gygax's DMG absolutely contains procedures for determining the outcomes of "moves" made during play - in other words, RESOLUTION MECHANICS. The idea that there were no such things until Ron Edwards is laughable.</blockquote>

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