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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 6591089" data-attributes="member: 386">I thought that was what the discussion was about:For me, (ii) means that it's an uninformed decision.  The last line ("And so the players make an essentially random choice, with one of the choices meaning auto-fail.")  really sounds like an uninformed decision.That's clear.  The only point I want to make is that I believe an uninformed choice is not a "real" choice in terms of the game.  I agree that uninformed decisions can have meaningful consequences; but from the player's perspective, if you don't have the information required to make a decision, in what way is the player going to think or feel that they made a decision?  It'd be like playing soccer without knowing whose team anyone is on or what net you're trying to defend.  Striking the ball or tackling someone is just as likely to be the right decision (given the goals of soccer) than not.  Do the players in this game have any agency?  I'd say very little: the only question is if you want to play to a tie or gamble with a 1-0 result.For me I think this ties back into the idea of a naturalistic world and how to maintain that while still allowing players to have agency (making informed decisions that affect the outcome of the game).  For example:  when designing random encounter tables for an area, do you weight the results so that the "more expected" result appears more often, or do you make each encounter as likely as another with the aim to make each encounter interesting?  There was discussion earlier in the thread about how to determine how long it would take to cross the Free City of Greyhawk.  I'd use a weighted random encounter table for various neighbourhoods, main streets, and back alleys.  "Street festival" or "traffic jam" may be a common result on the main street, while "cutpurse" or "backstabber" may be a common result in the back alleys; this creates a (mildly) naturalistic world but also gives the players a choice: risk getting slowed down in the main street or an attack in a back alley?</blockquote>

Verification