Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8308805" data-attributes="member: 71699">Yes, I do. Making infinite decision spaces far more tractable is a good way to put it. I was mulling to myself this morning that maybe we have principled-fiat and unprincipled-fiat. It's funny that the second term sounds suspect - like malicious-fiat or degenerate-fiat - when all it might mean is fiat exercised without bounding the decision space up front.I like that principled-fiat does not have to mean by-my-principles or by-your-principles, only by some-principles. Have some principles and your decisions during play are more tractable. It becomes pragmatic to talk about which principles are more effective, which contain difficulties, what results given principles are likely to deliver, and so forth. It's easy to see how that discussion pays off.Well, what one wants to happen is extrapolation* from the principles. There probably wasn't a trend of wands bouncing down shafts to extrapolate from, but there should have been a trend of complications that made it predictable the wand would do something inconveniencing.Fiat may be best seen as a multi-dimensional construct. I can constrain a dimension so as to be able to extrapolate along it, even while being unable to extrapolate along others. With the wand, the constrained dimension might have been convenience or availability: it was going to become less available (including I think, unavailable). Unconstrained was the consequent fictional positioning. It might have shimmered out of existence for a period, it might have shorted and sparked for a period, it might (and did) relocate in the imagined volume of space, it might have ended up in another creature's hands, the owner might have experienced some ill-effects or block on use... we don't know what that will be, but we know for sure that it will be inconvenient (and only that, rather than terminal).Each principle ought to be giving us one or a few dimensions along which we can fairly extrapolate. My "dimensions" topology might be replaced by "questions" language - so that principles are helping us extrapolate the answers to questions that the game system is telling us we ought to answer.One can quibble that a bit. If we arrange a history of decisions along an axis of extrapolation, we can predict that different observers will have differing strengths of agreement with each decision counting as a fair extrapolation. An example might be something you wrote further up - what counts as an instance of impartiality?*I'm happy to accept "extrapolate" as a way to differentiate between principled and unprincipled fiat. If that seems useful to you?</blockquote>

Verification