Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6303039" data-attributes="member: 3192">And in this it begins with the preconceived notion that the game includes imaginary characters thus moving it from playing a game to creating a story.I take it you believe any non-character performing game doesn't have stances? People can treat lots of stuff as a game or puzzle (operating within a mathematical pattern). Playing a game means treating something like a game.DMs check the map and key for any dung within range of the PCs senses. If there is dung in the game without the players creating it (probably unknowningly) via  attempts, then it was tracked on the field of play from before the campaign even started. (Yes, that would be all the dung in the all the multiverse that has so far been generated, but if its in the generation rules...)It's a result of the design when the board is generated. I'd say living things tend to expel waste, so objects/systems named under life probably all include such. Why have the world work that way? I think mostly for ease of understanding between players. You could apply the term beforehand to anything else in the game, if you really wanted. 4-fingered hands are "dungs" if you want. Players can communicate in spoken work with DMs. It doesn't have to be clarified all the time. But yes, players don't know exactly what it means relative to game design until they start messing around with it. Like you and I don't know everything about how a knight in Chess works, but we've learned something by playing Chess with them. The Players through the DM-led Q&A clarification are informing the DM how to construct the game element within the rules of the game. The DM is drilling down on their descriptions based on what he or she needs to know to assign it to pre-existing game rules/code.No. This isn't "My PC look fors a secret door, so we roll the die to see if we put one there". This is "You do the Watusi, a dance right? So how does this dance go? Maybe you could show me." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> And with the demonstration the dance can be encoded into the game, be seen, learned, changed, affect other design.Which is sad because telling you the algorithms I use or think of using for D&D would be like telling you the one for Chess, Checkers, Rubik's Cubes, or even Suduko. It's a permanent walkthrough making the game not about learning, but about following the pre-provided path. Not something I'm willing to do. Honing a good rule set for D&D is a lifelong journey for some DMs.Yes, prior to play. And what's appropriate is the DM understands as coverage enough for at least the basics of the role playing (classes) supported. Instead of scent let's use Smargling (which I assume isn't anything but a nonsense word) The player wants his PC to be able to smargle. "What's that?" asks the DM and Q&A begins. Of course the player may say something like "flarfelling the snoogle while boknelo valango hangs over top", but sharing a large overlap of language with players is necessary for play. Slamming the DM with repeated attempts that need further and further clarification is one way of stalling a game and may lead to house rules, but I've never seen the need.The game doesn't include absolutely everything. It simply covers large portions of class-appropriate designs provided for players to role play through via game play (i.e. improve at their class like a Chess player can improve at Chess).DM rolls for monsters, items, hit points, ability scores, terrain, dungeons, all number of game elements thereby generating game structures. Adventures and campaign settings can be added to if the players want, but the DM still needs to convert all the material they comprise prior to their inclusion.I'd say if goblins are included, their dung is probably following close behind. Check ecology articles for possible rules for this.In that these are game constructs in a geometric manner with numerous traits also relating to further mathematical relationships. How those are balanced and how they affect game play is directly relevant to game theory.I think that's a good interpretation. My point is the number of relationships being tracked from beginning to end of a campaign can get astronomical in number, vastly more then in Chess. By this the game provides players the opportunity to play what the DM relates as a game (what some have called "gaming the fiction" when it comes to storygames). I wouldn't do that, though I admit my own understanding of D&D changes over time (which I assume is the norm). That I follow my own interpretations and trust my own research and question those I trust and struggle on in my own journey (not to "proclaim the truth" to the world) is me marching to my own drummer. But the further I get taken away from common practices the more current language and ideas appear almost obscenely uniform and totally out of touch with prior ideas. And then current ideas are all too often conflated with "all game design ever". As if stances or drama/fate/fortune, etc. were part of people designing games through all history. I find as I study philosophy after philosophy (not game philosophies usually) I don't feel the need to find the "right" one. But I've met many a person past their eyeballs in one or another philosophy and unwilling or perhaps unable to look outside it. I don't want to be stuck within any edifice (or community) that is so certain of its understandings it won't listen to outsider opinions. Structural integrity, shape, weight and mass, slashing damage, crafting subsystems for fine detail, and stats included in all of the components making this stuff up - like those defining the corpses of trees. All of it comes into play, though perhaps just in aggregate. But that's sort of what I do. You might do it differently, something like auto-damaging when slashing wood. You might have blade sharpness and blade material regularly a significant factors. Including all this isn't nearly as difficult as the above sounds. The DMG doesn't cover everything, but if we want something in the game, it must be in the game's design.Game structure, which the rules are part and parcel of. If "whittling" isn't covered already (like from slashing damage), it would need to be added. Whittling is more of a specific form of slashing. Allowed the opportunity to attack without difficulty we can cut away at the shapes of the game component in question (again, with many dependent factors). Shape is basically what most definitions of spork come down to, but also size (volume), material, perhaps sharpness, and so on. Definition can get very high, but it doesn't have to. Most of the design of the rules of D&D & AD&D are about aggregating large variables into easily manageable design. Dig down and things get much stranger, but basically you can smash for 1d6 kill 'em points.Before a campaign can begin the DM must create a map, a result of generating with the code. Past history, but also projected futures and all of the nearby area, creatures, items, ideas, even personality and feelings for NPCs. That's a lot of answers to start session 1, but very little is needed in detail for a single session past that. The maps grow session to session as players come within reach of edges given the common pace of a session based on players speeding through content. (Remember DMs needing to stop early because you reached something not yet made?) I've talked about the Magic system, Combat system, and Cleric system before as sort of integrated games for players to focus their role playing in (by their own sussing out). So yeah, almost all the rules in the game to directly support role play. But their design is also about ease of running, game balance, following commonly lauded designs of the day, etc.By that definition alone I'd say yes, the players are firmly engaging in fiction then, but then so are we right now as we are discussing ideas between ourselves in relation to an actual reality. In the same way the DM must have an actual code, a drawn map behind the screen and therefore isn't expressing fictoin. Even if the terms of the game are perhaps immersion-inducing for some. Just if I was playing WoW for a blind kid, I still have qualms about calling the act fiction and much less fiction creation. Could a DM run the whole game from memory without the drawn map? It's too much to ask anyone to remember. The maps are made for ease, but also potentially massive complexity for challenging game play. It's about design elegance, but not necessarily requiring total DM memorization without a back up. That a DM recalls info without looking because he or she simply doesn't need to count the length of squares of the wall again doesn't make drawing the line on the battlemat expressing a fiction IMO. Taking action as a creature with a mind isn't exclusively expressing fiction. Where do you draw the line here? When may we control our language rather than let others declare over and over the "better" understanding? I'll grant you it is difficult to determine when fictions are realized. That this is a blurry distinction. Imagine gold-backed currency for instance, and all the tracking of it in the stock exchange alone. Our ideas aren't fictions when we declare they are corresponding to an exterior world. I think those maps count, though you may want to quibble about what I shorthand.It's difficult to answer your questions without talking specifically about different designs I've thought of and tried. I think key to understanding transitions is that the game is "moving" in block time (think Einstein's theory) Yes, they both have to be set up beforehand, but typically I've found humans (and near human counterparts) are among the most detailed aspects of the game as elements go. They're also the default race played and the most readily at hand to discover content.  So yeah, dung is probably in there for some.This isn't analogy. And while it is very much about capabilities these are not known to the players, but roughly. For "new" content it is more about constructs of constructs. The spork is defined in predetermined shapes. "Damaging" shape to shape isn't a difficult process to cover in game mechanics. I'm sure you could imagine some. By some description PCs are "whittling" goblins into sporks during combat, but combat tends to include more dynamic opposition than carving a stick.Not listing endless abilities is actually what makes D&D easy to run. Having vast variation possible for interaction within existing game elements makes it awesome (some computer games do this well too, think Minecraft).  A player doesn't know the deep meaning of a character's abilities just as a Chess player doesn't know all the meaning of the queen even though the ability appears to be simply grid movement. It's still far too much, but the learning makes play thrilling.As a game D&D is a construction. Everything possible within that construction is in the game. Just like every possible game state is part of the finite game of Chess. When players do the Watusi making arms and legs move just so they are including only the content already possible in the game. Naming it makes the act easily repeatable. Think of it like more SOP: standards operating procedures the players tell you. Though I suppose names are completely determined by players, but those are used as referents."World" off-handedly used meaning the map behind the screen. That D&D game terminology refers to so much of our world can make it confusing. The Monster Manual is easier, but check out any mundane works about swords, armor, gear, none of that is anything but a game construct on a map. And though I don't care to treat maps as terrain for discovering our real world, treating maps as the existent terrain they are in and of themselves to play in FRPGs I have no problem with. Of course treating them all as not as a miniature existence, but all existence would be pretending and for some DM's designs extraordinarily immersive pretending. But this is not necessary for role play (we need only perform the roles) and can actually interfere sometimes with playing the game (the way pretending to be someone else can lead a player to avoid playing well).Again, the Players are defining the dung to designs the DM already has game content for. That DM can then calculate out any further game statistics, if necessary. How it relates to other game elements is inherently part of pre-existing design. What it looks like I shouldn't say. My apologies.No one has hold of absolute truth when we use our minds as maps of an outer reality they are simply part of. It's the illusion that a part of a set can contain the whole. (The ironic conclusion for some PM theories here denies later Heraclitean philosophy that there are no "parts" of reality, no quantities or pieces whatsoever.)Unlike in the Sciences when something interferes with a game the game isn't rewritten to include new evidence. It is stopped, reset based on rules for dealing with stopping, and restarted. The game is math so it can reliably be studied.The rules/code of D&D in all its structure are actually every possible universe in that multiverse (as the term confusion earlier may have revealed). And players do model it, perhaps like scientists at times, with their mapping and note taking. But it's key that the rules aren't simply operations performed by people with no pasts or futures. They are the pattern of every possible game state. If drawn out they would be one tremendous labyrinthine map. And though the design of D&D falls it under Infinite Game that term does not mean infinity here and now (I say actual infinity cannot be perceived). Instead it is ongoing without conceivable end, like the natural number line or an algorithm based on such. The game simply is not fully solvable like a finite game, but is comprehensible in its always finite part as it grows moment to moment.There are limits to D&D not included of course. This makes it like any other games or sports. Things stories specifically address like evoking emotion as the goal and contrived results not the emergent the system of the games. Emotions and interference occur, but they are out of focus. For me it's easy to see how game play (discerning patterns) is not the point of storygames, but perhaps equally incidental as in games about the gaming (though also not unenjoyable).---Lastly, more clarification via Sporks and Spoons. If I need to know how many teaspoons volume that spork could hold, I would ask the player. They were the one carving (or showing the carver) this is the shape, how long of tines, whatever. If they tell me a volume outside the parameters defined by the game, I'll start pointing out specifics back. Sort of like players saying their PC is human and 900 miles tall instead of somewhere in the human range. Similarly, a player can define aspects of the game not in the game because they are covered under spans of averages. P1: "Does this spoon have a rose and vine carved on the end?" DM: "Sure, you see a rose and vine on it"P1: "Is it from the Inn of the Setting Sun?"DM: "What are you doing to find out?"Some objects are averaged and considered unnecessarily time wasting for the DM to include variation for every instance. Spoons hold 1 teaspoon and are basically of a particular shape. Can they be curved oddly? Have square scoops? A long handle? Sure, but some stats will simply remain the same without greater definition given by the players or from the adventure for whatever balancing reasons therein.</blockquote>

Verification