D&D 5E The Illusion of Experience Points that Everyone Disbelieves

[howandwhy99]

And the path they take is decided by what, fairies?

Roleplaying games can indeed be viewed as "every possible thing that could happen in them, ever" - the classic cone starting at "now" and expanding into the future but all visible now. But for any instance of play, the game group will follow only one thread through that "pattern". And which thread they follow is resolved (note the word) using a set of rules. Typical rules are: (1) players decide what actions their characters take, (2) the GM decides the nature of the world around them, and (3) impersonal but uncertain choices of path are decided by random chance. A fair bit more elaboration is usually given. These are resolution rules: they resolve questions of "which path do we take?"

Making a strategic decision in a game isn't a game mechanic. Game mechanics are the game element designs which create variability in a game. A grid board is a game mechanic. A player making a decision about where to move a game piece on it isn't one.

Again, there are no resolution rules in games as games are not about two or more people trying to tell different, conflicting stories and using the "storygame mechanic" to see whose gets added.

All the sense I get out of this is to wonder whether the "Big Model" you read was even related to the one I read. The one I read makes no prescriptions on game mechanics at all. I can see that you might object to the "shared imagined space" if you play in a very strict pawn stance, but even then play will generate stories (as a byproduct) and even then there will be a shared imaginary pattern (given by the rules - just as there is in chess, otherwise you could not discuss alternative possible moves).

There are no "stances" in games. That whole line of thinking is ridiculously biased from Forge "theory". And there is no "shared imaginary pattern" either in as there is no such thing as a separate mindspace we all send our brains out to join in. That whole thinking of "shared story clouds" is horrible theory, bad metaphor, and not realistic in the least for what happens in RPGs. What we actually each have are our own imaginations. The referee knows the code behind the screen in his or hers, albeit with the help of charts, maps, and other materials. The players each decipher that code in their imagination to achieve objectives. That's game play for D&D.

If either rules or pattern are missing entirely there can be no game. The rules allow the players to make decisions and communicate with (and about) the pattern. The pattern takes away complete determinism and makes the resolutions in the game meaningful; if there was only one path, there would be no decisions to make. So D&D, just like all other games, requires both.

Yet in D&D the mechanics of the game are specifically hidden from the players and never told to them. The known rules to the players are not the code the referee is using. The players can attempt to have their PC do anything. This isn't trying to get their "story" added to the "cloud". It's learning through play the underlying code of the fantasy world and mastering the game, specifically within the role they've chosen (i.e. class). What this means is players can actually play D&D as a game just like millions of online RPG players play CRPGs as games rather than practices in puppetry arts. (Actually, I love the puppetry arts, but lets not confuse putting on a group show with videogames).

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Again, there are no resolution rules in games as games are not about two or more people trying to tell different, conflicting stories and using the "storygame mechanic" to see whose gets added.

But there is in an RPG. The default for D&D has been that "two or more people trying to tell different, conflicting stories" is decided by the DM. He can allow Player A's version to add to the story, Player B's, or scrap both versions and insert his own.

Yet in D&D the mechanics of the game are specifically hidden from the players and never told to them. The known rules to the players are not the code the referee is using. The players can attempt to have their PC do anything. This isn't trying to get their "story" added to the "cloud". It's learning through play the underlying code of the fantasy world and mastering the game, specifically within the role they've chosen (i.e. class). What this means is players can actually play D&D as a game just like millions of online RPG players play CRPGs as games rather than practices in puppetry arts. (Actually, I love the puppetry arts, but lets not confuse putting on a group show with videogames).

You keep asking people to expand their views on what a game is, yet you've shown to only recognize your own version of "what a game is." I don't know who you're trying to convince, because I don't think anyone here actually disagrees with you about what you define as a game to be elements of a game. The rest of us just believe that they emcompass much, much more and that your personal viewpoint is too limited and not the de facto truth that you claim it to be.

 

[pemerton]

I can see that you might object to the "shared imagined space" if you play in a very strict pawn stance

Even pawn stance RPGing requires the "shared imagined space".

Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain are two of the best-known of D&D modules. If anything counts as RPGing, or playing D&D, then playing those two modules does.

One common event in WPM is dealing with the frictionless corridor so as to avoid the super-tetanus pits. One common event in ToH is mucking around with the infinite-arrow secret doors.

First, note that, in the previous two sentences, I am talking about imagined things - neither the corridor, nor the pits, nor the arrows, nor the doors, exist. Yet I can't describe the game play without talking about them - whether I'm playing in pawn or any other stance.

Second, there are no mechanics in any edition of D&D that tell you how to lift a door from its hinges, or how to manoeuvre down a frictionless corridor. All resolution of such efforts, in those modules, requires the participants - with the GM in the lead - imagining the fictional situation, and then imagining the PCs doing the things that the players describe them doing, and then imagining the likely outcome or outcomes, and then choosing one of those (perhaps by assigning likelihoods to them and rolling a die - this is Moldvay's suggested technique).

The best formal description of the reasoning process I have just described is couterfactual reasoning beginning from a stipulated description that is known not to be true yet is treated as true (ie imagined) for the purposes of the reasoning. Hence the need for a shared imagined space, regardless of stance.

I'm pretty sure that you, Balesir, don't disagree with any of the above. But for reasons that completely baffle me, [MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION] seems incapable of distinguishing between basic elements of formal logic and linguistics developed over the past 100-odd years since Frege, and some bugbear he has about literary theory which is completely unrelated to any of the above, and has no bearining on the analysis of typical play of WPM or ToH.

 

[Balesir]

Making a strategic decision in a game isn't a game mechanic.

Since when, and according to whom? Of many mechanics used to construct a game, "a player decides" is a fine one. Almost essential for the activity to be a "game", in fact (although, arguably, games like Ludo or Snakes & Ladders are games with no player decisions).

If you are going to start dictating what terms mean you really need to justify that. Every turn in chess there is a mechanism dictated by the rules for deciding which piece moves and which of several legal moves it makes - the player decides. *Why* the player decides as s/he does is, perhaps, not part of the mechanic, but the fact that the player does get to decide is stipulated by the rules and is absolutely a mechanic.

Game mechanics are the game element designs which create variability in a game. A grid board is a game mechanic. A player making a decision about where to move a game piece on it isn't one.

Why not? Justify this claim, please. Just as not all of the rules of many games are written down (but are assumed), not all mechanics avoid player action. In fact most actually require it.

Again, there are no resolution rules in games as games are not about two or more people trying to tell different, conflicting stories and using the "storygame mechanic" to see whose gets added.

Look, I understand you have a deep and abiding bias against whatever it is you imagine the folks at the Forge to have said, but could you possibly place that aside and seriously consider how daft this argument is, please? Everything involves constructing stories - everything in life, not just in games. It is fundamental to communication. The simple act of speaking or writing for another's comprehension involves having shared or agreed or at least extremely similar imagined models of what one is talking about. If I talk to you about an "elephant", unless I have a picture in my mind of what an "elephant" is that is shared with you in the sense that it is similar or identical to the picture you have in your mind of what an "elephant" is, we are not going to be communicating effectively.

At the most basic level, games are about "I win", "No, you don't", "Right, let's play the game to resolve who wins and who doesn't". Your insistence that this isn't so is approaching blind stubbornness, quite frankly. Try to leave aside for a moment your loathing of anything you imagine to be related to the Forge (hint: this isn't) and actually read what I'm writing. I have said this several times now, and you have denied it every time with no justification, no counter-argument and no form of reasoning whatsoever. Just because you state it does not make it so. I have provided a list of examples and explanations. Any game must incorporate some conflict, or there is no "game" to be had. Any such conflict is resolved as the play of the game, ergo every game must have a conflict resolution mechanism (or, perhaps more generally, it is a conflict resolution mechanism).

There are no "stances" in games. That whole line of thinking is ridiculously biased from Forge "theory".

It has bugger all to do with "Forge theory" - it goes back way before that on RGFA. And it applies to board games and sports just as it applies to RPGs. You may only accept one specific stance as "valid", but you do not, alone, get to decide what is and isn't true. Once again, put aside for an instant your huge grudge against what you imagine to be "the Forge" (which stances in games has nothing to do with) and actually read what we are talking about.

And there is no "shared imaginary pattern" either in as there is no such thing as a separate mindspace we all send our brains out to join in. That whole thinking of "shared story clouds" is horrible theory, bad metaphor, and not realistic in the least for what happens in RPGs.

Clear your mind of bigotry and loathing and forget all about the Forge for a minute. This has nothing whatsoever to do with sending brains anywhere. It has nothing to do with "story clouds" (whatever they may be). It has to do with the understanding we must have in our minds in order to play a game. Those understandings must be largely shared in common, otherwise, as with the elephants, we will not even be able to communicate (which, ironically, may very well be what is happening at this very moment...)

In the case of chess, for example, I must view the same board and piece set-up as my opponent does, and I must view the rules of chess the same as my opponent does, or we will be utterly unable to play chess. If one of us holds the view that bishops may make a knight's move, and losing a queen means you lose the game, it's not going to end well. The model of chess that we have in our minds must match - hence the shared, imaginary model. This gives us, also, the same view of possible future moves - the potential "paths" through the game you described earlier. If we do not share those (imaginary - they haven't happened, yet) models of the future, we cannot sensibly discuss the game or its possible development. Shared models of how things are and stories of why they got that way are fundamental to our ability to comprehend and communicate about the world around us. To say that one, specific activity "does not include them" is just ridiculous.

What we actually each have are our own imaginations. The referee knows the code behind the screen in his or hers, albeit with the help of charts, maps, and other materials. The players each decipher that code in their imagination to achieve objectives. That's game play for D&D.

Of course we all have our own imaginations. But unless we share common models of the game and the current in-game situation (i.e. "where we are in the pattern"), then we are not playing the same game. In fact, it's arguable that we are not even inhabiting the same universe. If the imagined models are radically diverse, we will not be able to communicate; all we will hear coming out of each other's mouths is gibberish (OK, this is getting scary...)

Yet in D&D the mechanics of the game are specifically hidden from the players and never told to them.

In that case the players cannot play the game. They have no basis on which to do so. They have, literally, no model on which to base any communication whatsoever. This is a ludicrous postulate.

Luckily, I have literally never seen any RPG played this way. The players always have some knowledge of the rules. Sometimes they are in a helpfully labelled "Players' Handbook" so that they know where to find them.

If the players are really to make decisions in the game without any knowledge of the rules, I suggest replacing them with a random number generator. It will have much the same effect, but will avoid wasting some poor bugger's time.

The known rules to the players are not the code the referee is using.

You keep calling that GM's campaign design a "code"; this is uselessly obfuscatory - generations of players have called it a "campaign design" - can we not do the same?

There are lots of ways to do campaign design; setting out a sandbox "world" for the players to explore and then keeping it secret from them until they explore it using their playing pieces is a perfectly serviceable one, but it's not the only one.

The players can attempt to have their PC do anything.

Right - except that the vast majority of potential "things they could do" they will fail at. Telling the players a good chunk of the rules helps a lot, here, because we don't waste a load of time futzing around establishing what the most basic rules are. What's more, it helps to communicate up-front that there actually is some rhyme and reason in what they succeed at and what they fail at - that it is a rule that the GM won't just make up outcomes at random regardless of the player's input.

This isn't trying to get their "story" added to the "cloud". It's learning through play the underlying code of the fantasy world and mastering the game, specifically within the role they've chosen (i.e. class).

So your suggestion seriously is that I start as a Cleric, say, ignorant of what a "Cleric" is, ignorant of what bodily form my character possesses, ignorant of what objects might exist in the world, ignorant of the existence of such things as "spells", never mind which ones my character might be able to cast, ignorant of what sort of society (if any) my character lives in and ignorant of what the possible aims in the game setting might be? How the heck am I supposed to play in this scenario? Do I have to explain to you what the character does in oder to learn to walk? What do I have to do to communicate with the other players - do we have to have our characters formulate a language from scratch in order that we may have them talk to one another? Do we have to explain how we go about formulating a language? The whole notion seems to me to be absurd.

What this means is players can actually play D&D as a game just like millions of online RPG players play CRPGs as games rather than practices in puppetry arts. (Actually, I love the puppetry arts, but lets not confuse putting on a group show with videogames).

I can, indeed, approach playing a tabletop RPG similarly to the way I play CRPGs, but neither is even remotely like the bizarre "figure out what you are and how the world functions" you have been describing. Every CRPG I have ever played comes with a manual that explains the basic rules of the game, as well as the keyboard and/or mouse controls and what they do. By the time I start playing (often after a tutorial with further explanation) I know most of the key capabilities and characteristics of my PC and/or the whole party of characters. I don't know what is "out there" in the world, for sure - but I know some general outlines (there are towns and villages, it's vaguely medieval technology, there are monsters) and I know that what is there is decided ("designed") by someone else involved with the game (the programmer). To say that I know "none of the rules" is simply wrong. I know enough to operate with a modicum of competence in the game - and that is quite a lot!

In summary, I'm very happy to play RPGs as pure "games" - to manipulate the character using the rules as a guide through a game world in order to achieve some selected ends ("victory conditions"). What I don't agree is that this requires me to start from some inane state of "total innocence", ignorant of the game rules and of the game world in general. There is no particular reason you could not push play in that direction - though I have stated why I think it would be counterproductive to go to the farthest extreme with it. But it is far from the only way to play an RPG as a game. Ignoring storygames for the minute - that's not what I'm talking about. You can give the players a set of functional rules, design a setting for them to play in and play D&D 4E as a game. I know because I've done it. My 4E group is not big on storygames, or on immersion etc. (in general); they oftentimes play just to beat the bad guys* and get the loot. But they know all the character rules - that's what enables them to play the game making actual reasoned decisions, not random guess ones.


*: Defined as any creature in the game that opposes them in getting the loot...

Edit/P.S.: [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], I crossposted with you, but I think we are saying similar things...

 

[pemerton]

I crossposted with you, but I think we are saying similar things...

I agree with you about all the "ignorance of code" stuff. I'm not even sure how that's meant to work - apart from anything else, there are (to the best of my knowledge - I'm not much of a logician or mathematician) formal proofs that show that if the only data you have is a finite set of points, then there are indefinitely many rules that will generate that dataset.

You are working with a more liberal notion of "story" than I am. I am prepared to allow that, in playing ToH or WPM, the notion of "story" has little work to do. Yes, participants describe imagined events - mostly in the form of actions their PCs take (for players) or consequences that happen to those PCs (for GMs), but this is not story in any rich sense of that term. (Much like a weather report is typically not much like a story in any rich sense of the term - contrast "It was a dark and stormy night . . .")

But what I think is fundamental to RPGing, that differentiates it from boardgaming - and on this point I think [MENTION=4892]Vyvyan Basterd[/MENTION] is in agreement - is that the game situation is defined first and foremost not in mechanical terms (ie by reference to the formal rules for taking "moves" in the game) but by describing an imagined situation ("You are standing in front of a hill that looks like a skull. You have heard that the treasure of the lich Acererack is within.") In a boardgame like Cluedo or Talisman, in a computer game, in many wargames, that stuff is just fluff - it excites the imagination of, and enthuses, the participants, but you don't have regard to it in actually playing the game. But in an RPG that stuff matters to the game - hence we have a notion of how things are in the gameworld , which it itself relevant to making "moves" and thereby playing the game.

When people say "In an RPG you can do anything you want," this is the feature (in my view) that they are getting at: that the imagined fiction actually matters to resolution. (This is also why Justin Alexander and others characterise 4e as a tactical skirmish game, I think: they believe - wrongly, in my view - that fictional positioning is irrelevant to 4e resolution.)

The reason I keep mentioning modules like ToH and WPM is that, much moreso than a module like the Sunless Citadel or even a classic like the G-series, they make this feature of an RPG obvious. A bog-standard dungeon crawl like Sunless Citadel or Against the Giants can be played as a skirmish boardgame if you want to. Diplomacy probably won't be an option, but many players of those modules don't want it to be anyway!

But ToH or WPM can't be played that way. For the players to interact with the situations those modules throw up, and for the GM to adjudicate them, everyone has to imagine what it would be like (for instance) to be a flying thief on a rope poking and prodding at this or that, or how hard it is to remove dungeon doors from their hinges and surf them down a frictionless corridor. Reasoning from that collectively imagined state of affairs (the "shared imaginary space") is fundamental to playing those adventures. Which of course has absolutely nothing to do with "story-gaming", but has everything to do with D&D as it was designed and played by Gygax and Arneson.

 

[howandwhy99]

Since when, and according to whom? Of many mechanics used to construct a game, "a player decides" is a fine one. Almost essential for the activity to be a "game", in fact (although, arguably, games like Ludo or Snakes & Ladders are games with no player decisions).

If you are going to start dictating what terms mean you really need to justify that. Every turn in chess there is a mechanism dictated by the rules for deciding which piece moves and which of several legal moves it makes - the player decides. *Why* the player decides as s/he does is, perhaps, not part of the mechanic, but the fact that the player does get to decide is stipulated by the rules and is absolutely a mechanic.

Game rules are the repetition that helps create the patterns that are those games. Game pieces moving through that pattern have options because of the divergences within the pattern. These are the game mechanics, those divergences created by the specific rules. A game is the code as created by the game mechanics, not players choosing an option to take when people play it. Actual choice making isn't necessary for a game to be played or computers wouldn't be able to play it. For example, Chess has many options that are built into it by the effect of its mechanics, the rules, of the game. Players follow those within the game's manifested pattern. That's rule following, the defining part of playing a game. They do not need to think to take those actions. They do not need to make decisions to play it. Perhaps they believe they have only one option in a given case based upon their current understanding? Perhaps they have no understanding and just happen to move the piece within the rules? That's fine. It's still playing the game.

Look, I understand you have a deep and abiding bias against whatever it is you imagine the folks at the Forge to have said, but could you possibly place that aside and seriously consider how daft this argument is, please? Everything involves constructing stories - everything in life, not just in games. It is fundamental to communication. The simple act of speaking or writing for another's comprehension involves having shared or agreed or at least extremely similar imagined models of what one is talking about. If I talk to you about an "elephant", unless I have a picture in my mind of what an "elephant" is that is shared with you in the sense that it is similar or identical to the picture you have in your mind of what an "elephant" is, we are not going to be communicating effectively.

At the most basic level, games are about "I win", "No, you don't", "Right, let's play the game to resolve who wins and who doesn't". Your insistence that this isn't so is approaching blind stubbornness, quite frankly. Try to leave aside for a moment your loathing of anything you imagine to be related to the Forge (hint: this isn't) and actually read what I'm writing. I have said this several times now, and you have denied it every time with no justification, no counter-argument and no form of reasoning whatsoever. Just because you state it does not make it so. I have provided a list of examples and explanations. Any game must incorporate some conflict, or there is no "game" to be had. Any such conflict is resolved as the play of the game, ergo every game must have a conflict resolution mechanism (or, perhaps more generally, it is a conflict resolution mechanism).

Let me be very clear: there is no story element to games. Or even to life. Not necessarily. Your declarations of such a belief is bringing your own religious tendencies into this thread and it's not appreciated. Please set them aside.

"Stories" are a cultural bias other cultures do not necessarily have. Do not conflate existing within a storytelling culture with "how everyone must behave" our you will only end up trapping yourself within that culture. Maybe that sounds good to you? But it isn't "the way things are", so please quit trying to tell everyone else what they are "really" doing.

Again, the "Storygame Mechanic" of resolving conflicting narratives is irrelevant to games and game design. It is useful for storygames. It isn't relevant to RPGs. Heck, even conflict isn't really some inherent aspect of stories. That's just literary theory. Stories don't necessarily have conflict at all. In fact, I would suggest that's something only living things ever have.

It has bugger all to do with "Forge theory" - it goes back way before that on RGFA. And it applies to board games and sports just as it applies to RPGs. You may only accept one specific stance as "valid", but you do not, alone, get to decide what is and isn't true. Once again, put aside for an instant your huge grudge against what you imagine to be "the Forge" (which stances in games has nothing to do with) and actually read what we are talking about.

I wasn't going to answer this part, but I'm interested. Post references please. Where are your examples of the actor/author/director stances so endemic to boardgames and sports theory for a hundred years? And not just more adherence to the language and ideas of a single philosophy not 15 years old?

Clear your mind of bigotry and loathing and forget all about the Forge for a minute.

What are you accusing me of here? "Shared Imaginary Space" is a Big Model term. You can appropriate it for your own theorizing, but again, it's not "Absolute must-have" for a game to be a game. SIS is the fiction where players collaboratively create a story in a storygame. D&D and RPGs do not have these as they actually have existent games the players are seeking to decipher, the code that is the game, which is too often miss-labelled as "fiction". (if anything it is fantasy when it exists within the imagination, but neither codes nor stories are limited to the human imagination)

In that case the players cannot play the game. They have no basis on which to do so. They have, literally, no model on which to base any communication whatsoever. This is a ludicrous postulate.

Luckily, I have literally never seen any RPG played this way. The players always have some knowledge of the rules. Sometimes they are in a helpfully labelled "Players' Handbook" so that they know where to find them.

If the players are really to make decisions in the game without any knowledge of the rules, I suggest replacing them with a random number generator. It will have much the same effect, but will avoid wasting some poor bugger's time.

Players have the stats of their characters and all sorts of game resources in terms of equipment prior to and throughout play. Plus they can log everything they learn through play (Hence why they are called PC logs). Players generate and fill in the details of their character, the setting they would like to play in, types of adventures they are interested in, and all the rest before the game begins. Think of it like knowing how Chess pieces move and how they are arranged prior to starting Chess. These aren't at all everything you can do in the game, but they are a starting point.

You keep calling that GM's campaign design a "code"; this is uselessly obfuscatory - generations of players have called it a "campaign design" - can we not do the same?

There are lots of ways to do campaign design; setting out a sandbox "world" for the players to explore and then keeping it secret from them until they explore it using their playing pieces is a perfectly serviceable one, but it's not the only one.

The campaign world is the code as that is what generates it rather than the referee.

What's more, it helps to communicate up-front that there actually is some rhyme and reason in what they succeed at and what they fail at - that it is a rule that the GM won't just make up outcomes at random regardless of the player's input.

Of course. That's a core rule of the game since D&D was created. That the DM is never just "making things up".

So your suggestion seriously is that I start as a Cleric, say, ignorant of what a "Cleric" is, ignorant of what bodily form my character possesses, ignorant of what objects might exist in the world, ignorant of the existence of such things as "spells", never mind which ones my character might be able to cast, ignorant of what sort of society (if any) my character lives in and ignorant of what the possible aims in the game setting might be? How the heck am I supposed to play in this scenario? Do I have to explain to you what the character does in oder to learn to walk? What do I have to do to communicate with the other players - do we have to have our characters formulate a language from scratch in order that we may have them talk to one another? Do we have to explain how we go about formulating a language? The whole notion seems to me to be absurd.

walking, talking, even language rules are already in most games. It's not like there isn't code for those things in CRPGs. And creating a shared patois with your fellow play is a player strategy. A good one I might add.

I can, indeed, approach playing a tabletop RPG similarly to the way I play CRPGs, but neither is even remotely like the bizarre "figure out what you are and how the world functions" you have been describing. Every CRPG I have ever played comes with a manual that explains the basic rules of the game, as well as the keyboard and/or mouse controls and what they do. By the time I start playing (often after a tutorial with further explanation) I know most of the key capabilities and characteristics of my PC and/or the whole party of characters.

Yeah, and there in ends most of the discovery of the game for improving your character beyond "power acquisition". Fortunately D&D is simply better designed than those kinds of games.

I don't know what is "out there" in the world, for sure - but I know some general outlines (there are towns and villages, it's vaguely medieval technology, there are monsters) and I know that what is there is decided ("designed") by someone else involved with the game (the programmer). To say that I know "none of the rules" is simply wrong. I know enough to operate with a modicum of competence in the game - and that is quite a lot!

You make inferences about rules you believe are there. They aren't necessarily. And PCs in D&D have their stats listed for the players to know. But all of those detailed game elements are abstracted into stats so they can be discovered and learned through play, not by reading a character sheet. Chess doesn't tell you every move possible for a pawn either. That may sound like an awful lack of information for you, but it is done as that is the exciting and fun thing about games: That one discovers more and more of the pattern as they play.

You can give the players a set of functional rules, design a setting for them to play in and play D&D 4E as a game. I know because I've done it. My 4E group is not big on storygames, or on immersion etc. (in general); they oftentimes play just to beat the bad guys* and get the loot. But they know all the character rules - that's what enables them to play the game making actual reasoned decisions, not random guess ones.

As game design goes, 4e has a solid exceptions-based combat skirmish game design. It's pretty significant and enables some serious game play to be had by the players. But it dropped the ball when it came to a game that was the generation of an entire multiverse of game mechanics. D&D isn't a combat game. 4e substituted a skill "system" (not any kind of game system at all) and put storygame theory design front and center. That's what 5e is doing to with its Check System; it's quitting on the game design and the benefits games offer and trying to keep things light for what story lovers can handle. Of course it's going to offer more optional rules too, so we'll see how malleable it may end up being as we go along.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Actual choice making isn't necessary for a game to be played or computers wouldn't be able to play it.

Completely disagree. Although the computer is not making those decisions, the programmer certainly did when he wrote the code.

"Stories" are a cultural bias other cultures do not necessarily have. Do not conflate existing within a storytelling culture with "how everyone must behave" our you will only end up trapping yourself within that culture. Maybe that sounds good to you? But it isn't "the way things are", so please quit trying to tell everyone else what they are "really" doing.

I think all of us would love to hear an actual example of a culture wihtout storytelling. Others have asked you this before, and you always avoid the question.

Again, the "Storygame Mechanic" of resolving conflicting narratives is irrelevant to games and game design. It is useful for storygames. It isn't relevant to RPGs.

This is your pown bias, as many have shown the relevance over and over to their games. You don't get to declare relevance across the board.

What are you accusing me of here? "Shared Imaginary Space" is a Big Model term. You can appropriate it for your own theorizing, but again, it's not "Absolute must-have" for a game to be a game.

No one, except you, is declaring any absolutes for a game to be a game. Others have referenced games that don't have the elements you rail against. We've even said you can play an RPG without those elements. The argument is against your insistence that these elements never exist within a game.

 

[Balesir]

Let me be very clear: there is no story element to games. Or even to life. Not necessarily. Your declarations of such a belief is bringing your own religious tendencies into this thread and it's not appreciated. Please set them aside.

"Stories" are a cultural bias other cultures do not necessarily have. Do not conflate existing within a storytelling culture with "how everyone must behave" our you will only end up trapping yourself within that culture. Maybe that sounds good to you? But it isn't "the way things are", so please quit trying to tell everyone else what they are "really" doing.

OK, I'm out. I have asked you straight out to provide one iota of example or justification for this ridiculous assertion but all I get is "It's so because I say it is". It's not possible to discuss rationally with that.

It's nothing to do with religion (I don't have one) and, although I am not a linguistics expert, none of several languages or cultures I am acquainted with lack any concept of cause and effect (and thus stories), so please provide an example; I am agog to discover people who have no concept of causal reasoning. Otherwise, goodbye.

 

[Umbran]

Clear your mind of bigotry and loathing...

I wonder how often I have to write this in big letters....

DO NOT MAKE IT PERSONAL. ADDRESS THE CONTENT OF THE POST NOT THE PERSON OF THE POSTER.

Whatever this discussion was before, it is now about egos and reputation (as a "bigot") rather than anything about games.

If this is what the thread engenders, I'm not inclined to leave it open any longer.