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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8626238" data-attributes="member: 42582">We don't agree on this (ie on the heavily flawed bit). I don't think Edwards's model is perfect - Vincent Baker's work on fictional positioning and "clouds and boxes" gives more insight into techniques than anything I know of from Edwards - but I do think the model is pretty powerful.Ezekiel Raiden gives some terrific examples here of how understanding - which can include the use of models, analytic taxonomies and the like - can be very useful, including for making one's way practically through the world, without being predictive in any meaningful sense.In addition to EzekielRaiden's accurate remark, the second quote here from clearstream seems to contain a non-sequitur.Weber's theory of legitimate government, and his related theory of bureaucracy, is (in my view) extremely powerful for explaining phenomena that have occurred since he wrote that work. But his theory does not predict anything. As [USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER] said, it does its explanatory work "after the fact" - ie we observe some phenomenon, we are puzzled by some of its features, its apparent internal dynamics, the sort of legitimacy it does or does not seem to engender - and then we bring Weber's analysis to bear, and things fall into place, the features become less puzzling, other things we see going that we had no intitially connected to our observed phenomenon are revealed to be consequences of it, or related to it in some fashion, etc. As a result of this, we might even have a better handle on how to engage, in practical terms, with the phenomenon. But having useful information or useful advice isn't anything like making a prediction in the sense that eg verificationist and falsificationist accounts of laboratory science have in mind.Here is the quoted definition/description of the phenomenon of incoherence: Play which includes incompatible combinations of Creative Agendas among participants. Incoherent play is considered to contribute to Dysfunctional play, but does not define it. Incoherence may be applied indirectly to game rules. Abashedness represents a minor, correctable form of Incoherence.The verb "contribute to" is not a component of a prediction, particularly when qualified by the phrase "but does not define it". No prediction is being made about when dysfunctional play will occur, nor about what will cause it if it does. A claim is being made that some dysfunctional play is sometimes the consequence, in part at least, of incoherence. That claim is too weak, isn't it, to count as a prediction? No one is suggesting that a controlled experiment might be run to test this conjecture; and - in contrast with complex claims about multiple factors of causation in (say) medicine - no one can even say what such a controlled experiment might look like, as the notion of "dysfunctional play" is not itself precise enough to be used in such an experiment. And that's before we get to the possibility of "abashedness" - any apparently-diagnosed incoherence, which appears not to contribute much to dysfunction, is amenable to being characterised as mere abashedness.The point of the notion of "incoherence" is to enable individual players, or play groups, who find their RPGing unsatisfactory in some way, to reflect on what they and their friends are trying to get out of it, and to see if there is conflict going on. A third party observer can also use the notion to conjecture an explanation of why certain apparent conflicts or difficulties occur - eg in this thread I've suggested that much of the discussion and debate among D&D players is driven by the fact that most D&D play, and the published rules for 2nd ed AD&D, 3E and 5e, straddle the relatively thin line between gamism with fairly low competition, and characters-face-problems-high-concept-sim. None of that is prediction, except in the rather banal sense that I predict that debates about "fudging" in D&D, and about how the GM is expected to manage the pacing of an "adventuring day" to answer demands around balance, resource management, etc will not go away, because those debates are driven by the incoherence I've mentioned.And the point of the notion of "abashedness" is to describe a recurring trend in the writing of RPG rulebooks, to frame things in terms that reflect the dominant game (ie D&D) or some other well-known and influential games (eg RuneQuest), even when its tolerably clear that the author plays the game in a different fashion and the game system will work best when played in that fashion. So you'll see a game that, as a whole, makes the most sense for gamist, or for narrativist, play, that neverthless contains boilerplate text about the players, via their PCs, experiencing the GM's world; or you'll see a game that, as a whole, makes the most sense for simulationist play, that includes gambling-gamist rules for random PC gen because those are copied from D&D. Calling such a game "abashed" is a way of signalling that it is easily drifted towards its profitable play mode, by (eg) ignoring the boilerplate text, or dropping the random PC gen, or whatever else. It's a term of criticism, not a way of making a prediction.EDIT: here's another example.An auto-repair manual seems pretty useful for repairing a car. Or modifying the car. Or pulling the car apart and then rebuilding it. But an auto-repair manual is not a prediction of when a car will need repairing, whether or not any particular person can repair it or rebuild it or modify it, nor even of whether any particular repair or modification will work - a person might read the manual and make a repair and yet the car still not go because there's some other factor at work that they didn't notice.And the behaviour of a car is far more regular and predictable than a group of human beings engaged in a social activity!</blockquote>

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