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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8649105" data-attributes="member: 71699">I was mulling this and felt we could generally observe the following difference between types of system (comparing two specific RPGs as examples)<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In 5e, rolls are oriented to supposed facts about the game world. Probabilities are strongly modified by what that aspect of the game world is supposed to be like. Frex, the distinction I indicated between the question of what was true, and what the ranger knew about what was true.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In Stonetop, rolls are made to agree what to add or change to fiction or system. Probabilities are not strongly modified by supposed facts about the game world. Frex, rolling for Know Things sorts between alternatives for what GM is bound to tell you. There's not that distinction between what's true and what you know to be true.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In both games, players can favour some sorts of actions by choosing to have better modifiers connected with them. Frex, in both player could choose to favour Int-based actions.</li> </ul>The picture is of course far more complicated than that, with many exceptions and some overlaps. However, generally speaking one can observe something like<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In 5e, rolls test against a supposed external world. I can call that "Compare-roll-with-world."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In Stonetop, rolls test for what to add to the game state. I'll call this "Use-roll-to-index-result."</li> </ul>I'm not saying anything here is suprising or novel (hopefully it is not!) I am also not saying either is better, they're distinct. That distinction does mean that any description of 5e resolution, for almost any game sub-system, is going to follow the compare-roll-with-world template.In another thread I proposed the definition that a simulationist design is one whose models and rules preponderantly take inputs and produce results including fiction, correlated with references; so that we know when we say what follows that our fiction accords with the reference, and the imagined inhabitants of the world can have knowledge corresponding to its rules.I think one can modify that in an interesting way (well, interesting for me.)  A physicalist design is one whose models and rules preponderantly take inputs and produce results including fiction, correlated with a supposed world. That translates an aesthetic proposition into a metaphysical proposition.Players could find compare-roll-with-world easy to grasp, not based on their aesthetic interests in simulating a world, but based on their intuitive assumptions about what it is like to inhabit a world. I think it is something like this that has been making it hard for me to just opt in to the HCS interepretation (even though as you can hopefully see, I can argue myself nearly there!)</blockquote>

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