Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6587904" data-attributes="member: 27160">OK, my confusion here is that I don't see how this is a situation where judgement is appropriate. I don't mean it's "wrong", but I see judgement as something that is appropriate where there is some sense that there are right and wrong answers - or, at the very least, where there is one or more "right" answers. If I trust someone's judgement to pilot a boat through a storm, I trust that they will give the best chance of the boat not sinking, for example.In the case of "is dashing straight for the prize boldness or recklessness?" however, I don't see that there is a "right" answer. It's not a decision amenable to judgement; in the real world it would be essentially random which turned out to be true, however much value-judgement we choose to apply with the inestimable benefit of hindsight.I actually think that, to me, a random determination would be preferable to some individual applying "judgement" to this situation.OK, so what I said about "exploring the GM's personality and preferences" is essentially what is happening? How does this equate, then, to a "neutral" world? That would seem to me to be a contradiction.Hmm, it's quite possible that some heuristic would be involved, sure, a bit like when <a href="https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/the-situation-of-reason-2/" target="_blank">judging stockings</a>. If you read that article, though, it seems highly unlikely that the decision process equates in any meaningful way with that which might be expected of the characters in the imagined situation. The myriad informational cues to be subconsciously evaluated by the players are not really comparable with characters in the situation imagined for the PCs. The decision might be based on some sort of expectancy cue picked up from the GM, a left-right bias in the players' minds or something based on recent availability (i.e. some recent, anchoring choice made successfully one way or the other). I don't think any of that enhances the fidelity of the game world, though, or even really relates to it.Aha - I see. OK, this, too, is interesting. Let me try out a hypothesis:Might it be that the players' choice is actually acting a bit like a random number generator, here? It exists to "randomise" the game world for the GM? This would make the decision to roll the die in spite of the pre-existing plan quite directly analogous to "fudging the dice", in the sense that the GM is getting a result s/he doesn't like and is then re-rolling?Some of the rest of your post (which I'm not quoting, as it doesn't raise anything new to say on my side, but it was an interesting read) suggests to me that this might be the case, and I can relate to it through one particular favourite computer game of mine - Crusader Kings II (CK2). CK2 is, or perhaps "originally was" would be more correct, a grand strategy game of the medieval age in which one plays a dynasty of lords (counts, dukes, kings and/or emperors) running their courts and lands. The degree to which vassals, courtiers and families are characterised and developed, however, make it a roleplaying game in many, many ways. As one player put it, "when you discover that your second wife is plotting to kill your eldest son so that her son will stand as heir and you have to decide whether to admonish, imprison, banish or execute her, tell me you are not roleplaying!"CK2 is an extraordinary (and fun!) game, but there is no question of GM "drama objective" or heuristic bias - all the NPC decisions and world events are the output of a random number generator, at the end of the day. But is this sort of "impartial" game play what you are after? The setup and probability ranges are clearly "partial", in the sense that they are designed specifically to generate an interesting game, but the moment-to-moment decisions are purely algorithmic.</blockquote>

Verification