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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6302113" data-attributes="member: 27160">Well, I come back from running D&D for a weekend and find this thread has gone down some very odd forks (or sporks <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />).One I find myself intrigued by (again) is    [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION]'s conception of what an RPG is/should be. Alas, I find I can make little more sense of it this time around than ever before, but, a sucker for punishment, I'll keep trying.I don't really understand this, since the Big Model is not really related to mathematical Game Theory in any way. It's more of a classification schema than a theory, actually, and like all classification schemas it begs the question regarding whether there are classifications omitted. I would be perfectly content to answer this question "yes", so let's continue on the basis that what you are trying to advocate for is entirely outside the classifications given by the Big Model, and that hence the Big Model is irrelevant to the discussion.I don't know whether Kevin Hardwick intended to pervert games to always be narratives or not; do you have any evidence that he did? As a point of information, the "Roleplaying Stances" were initially described in mid-1995, well before The Forge was even created, on rec.games.frp.advocacy - see <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/rec.games.frp.advocacy/d4wBk52C4N4[651-675-false]" target="_blank">here</a> for the relevant thread.The stances are nothing to do with the aims or structure of the game, but are descriptions or classifications of how a player is conceiving of the game at the time when they make decisions about the imagined action/attempted use of their character. The system of classification may, once again, be incomplete - but it is explicitly flexible enough to admit of additional classes, and indeed has seen at least two added since the original description. The stance "pawn", for what it's worth, pretty accurately describes me when I engage in many types of game in which I control one notional "piece" - various board games, card games and so on. If the very act of classification enrages you, however, let's again assume that we are talking about some previously unnoticed excluded classification.OK, but what I am struggling with is how the DM knows that Goblin dung will be found if sought. You say that the DM makes no choices, so they must presumably have some way to discover unequivocally that goblins either do or do not produce dung. How do they do this? This is the big missing piece that is preventing me understanding what exactly you are advocating every time you attempt to do so. Are the discussions on this board themselves a game? Are we supposed to find out what in tarnation you are talking about by playing the game? Or is there something you are just assuming and not bothering to tell us because it's "obvious"? I just don't know. Perhaps it might be clearer if you could say - at least in example - how the DM might know that goblins either must or must not have dung associated with them in a specific game?I assume that the player does not know "what dung is" in the context of the game; in fact, they do not know whether such a thing exists in the game at all. So, they describe what they are looking for until it is settled what they mean by "dung". Which is when we run into trouble, since the DM has not considered the presence or absence of dung, specifically, so must rely on something that implies such existence or non-existence - my question is, what is that "something"? You might (based on previous cases) say it's a "code" the DM has set up before play, but I cannot conceive of a code that might cover all such possibilities. Is there a rule such as "any element the player looks for is present"? How does this work?Right - this is why I am stumped as to the nature of the "code". That it can be so comprehensive as to obviate any need for choice I find very hard to comprehend - some sort of description or example might help, here.Why should "what you want" come into it, here? The DM is making no choices after play starts; are we talking about including scent as a feature in the code before play commences? If so, what do you do if a player tries to use scent and you have not decided to make it an important element in the code? Do they simply fail because it's not included? How does the code imply what the outcome of using scent is in cases where it wasn't chosen for inclusion as an important element in the code at game setup?This is all very opaque, to me, because as far as I can see the inclusion (or not) of scent as an "important element" is irrelevant if the code must imply answers to all possible questions anyway. Since the code implies answers to everything, how can one element be more important than any other?I replaced the term "multiverse" with "gameboard" in all instances, here, to be perfectly clear that we are not talking about a fictional multiverse, since that seems to be a real bugaboo.You say the gameboard "can easily includes goblins and dung" - but why does it? The DM is not making choices, but the gameboard "can easily" include these things?? It either does include them or it does not. The DM doesn't decide this by choice, so how does s/he decide it, if it is asked about by the players? "Previous game states" might tell you whether already established game elements (goblins, say, and a cave) interacted. Let's suppose for example that the goblins were present in the cave (in the sense of game pieces in a board location) at some previous time. But these elements and their relationship will not tell you whether goblins poo or not. What part of the code relates to that??I don't understand the assertion. Nothing in the Monster Manual has anything really to do with mathematical game theory, as far as I can see. In what sense are you saying that it does?Gah - multiple negative confusion... Let me try to lessen the negatives to see what you are saying - please correct if I get it wrong:"Everything in the game is content that can be perceived or interacted with only as being tied into the entirety of the game board through all game time."In other words, game content only has meaning in the context of the game and is subject to continuity and consistency requirements in that context? As far as I know that is true of all the games known as "roleplaying games". So agreed, I suppose. I don't really see the point being made.I am interested, also, and have been for some time, but I never manage to penetrate through to what you really mean. There always seems to be some essential point missing. As I mentioned above, I wonder a little if this is all simply some sort of elaborate game that you are playing with us all, deliberately missing out key information to have us baffled (but guessing at what it might be).So players should not know whether a game element they look for was something you previously considered or is something that you are invoking the code to deduce the properties of? I can see that, at least - no reason they should know, really.Wait - how do you know that "whittling" is a possibility? D&D rules, for example, only characterise knives by their ability to hit various targets and the damage they do. How do you deduce "whittling" from this? Is an inanimate object defined partly by its hit points? If the character successfully "hits" the branch for just enough damage to reduce it to the correct hit points for a spork, do they successfully make a spork? That can't be it, because the spork was not predefined in the game. So, again, I'm baffled as to what code can imply "whittling" and thus allow player-described "sporks".The bit I'm missing is not how DM and player both know what a spork is - it's how it is deduced that a character playing piece with a knife playing piece and a broken branch playing piece may "whittle" to create a spork. It's not a game element that has been introduced, here, so much as a new rule, as far as I can see. So this mysterious "code" must be some sort of engine for manufacturing rules. Can you describe or illustrate via example how it does that?I assume this "base design" is the same as the "code"??All determined before play, I assume?If I close my eyes and imagine a chessboard that I have seen I don't have a fiction; I have a memory. But if I then imagine that I move a piece on that board, I have a fiction. The line between memory and fiction is wafer thin, but if you tried to claim one as the other in a court of law I cannot imagine that it would go well. Our imaginations can conjure images of objects that we remember - that we have experience of - or that are described to us, but when we make those objects do things that they have not, in fact, done, it's a fiction. When the objects do not exist in the real world to begin with, this is doubly so.With the game elements, once defined, it's clear. What isn't clear is the transitions. How does the DM know that characters can whittle wood? How does the DM know that goblins poo? If neither of these actions has been previously set up in the game as capabilities of the game pieces I don't see how this works with a "code" that is not a fiction.A chess queen can "take" another piece by moving into its space, but the player cannot decide ad hoc that the queen whittles a knight beside her into the shape and capabilities of a bishop. To have rules that covered such actions, you would need some model of the "queen" piece that described her capabilities not as a list or precedence ordering, but by analogy with something the players of the game have experience of (so that they know its capabilities without a specific listing of them all). Characterisation by analogy seems to me to lead us directly to a fiction - but you explicitly say that this is not what you are talking about. Do you see why I am so baffled?More to the point, it has no rules for adding things that have not to date been defined by the rules; id est, it does not have rules for creating new rules.Wait - what world? We are not talking about the real world (since it has not been dung-less for a long time!), and there is no fictional world because games do not involve fictions. What does that leave? Exclude both real and fictional worlds and logic seems to demand that there is nothing left?And, if the game were previously dung-less, how do we give the dung we apparently now have attributes? How do we know how it relates to the other game elements? What does this "code" look like that implies everything that "dung" is in the game without any pre-existing reference?Card and board games can obviously be understood using mathematics. Ball games are a rather different case. Despite    [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION]'s assertions, we (can) have no absolute evidence that the real world follows a fixed set of rules. We have models of the world that seem to fit the observed behaviour as far as we can discern, for sure, but it is one of the greatest strengths of the scientific method that these are not - and cannot be - claimed as absolute truth. If some observation of the real world demonstrably does not fit with scientific theory, then it is not the real world that is wrong... This makes scientific theories substantively different from "rules".</blockquote>

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