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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 4331536" data-attributes="member: 3192">It's not contentious to me as a Judge wouldn't be sitting on the bench, if he didn't have the authority to be there.  (if he doesn't have legal authority, he's not a judge, right?)  Judges exercising their discretion in the application of law just seems like the whole reason we have judges to me.  Where the law is clear, folks just seem to follow the rules without need of clarification.  And the whole idea that the RPG world in our own case is "gappy" is pretty unsound in my opinion.  As the fundamental design basis is upon our own world (and that has no gaps at all as far as I can see) the only real gaps a GM might have are their knowledge of how things actually work in the real world.So, sometimes he makes a mistake and thinks honey is overly flammable.  It happens.  We role with it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  It becomes an interesting world quirk and the GM learns more about real life after the fact.  And maybe we agree to change this afterward, outside the game, too.  No big thing.Good thing there are not millions of players in need of judgment calls at my table right?  My real world knowledge covers more than requiring 1000s of pages of text just to play a game.  And I don't think my notes for the world will ever get that big.I don't see how this is relevant.  We talked earlier about how the game world was agreed upon before play began earlier in this thread.  That it exists, like math exists even though Ludwig and Brouwer are dead, is not something I want to get pedantic about here.  Middle Earth exists as does my own RPG world.  Saying they don't qualify as "being real" because they are conceptual is missing the point of RPG play in my opinion.  (we aren't playing in the real world here, but we are playing a world that is real)No one gets to out and out say how the world functions as I've said before.  The GM may create more elements of it for the players to explore during game than the Players do, but neither is narrating during the game.  What you're referring to is game prep.  Stuff that happens before game so we can have a good time when we actually play.There is no paradox here.  A player writing background is prepping for the game.  The game (and "game" elements) actually starts when we sit down at the table and begin roleplaying.  Why is everyone here so determined to define roleplaying (and thereby RPGs) as something that occurs out of character.   Roleplaying is acting in character.  That's not my self created jargon definition.  That's agreed upon in normal society and in the dictionary. Are you ceasing to act in character?  If so, then yes.  This is stopping the game to tell the DM you've created more prepwork for him to incorporate into his or her own.  That's kind of a rude thing to do in the middle of a game.  Especially if you're using it to your advantage unfairly.  "Hey!  I'm actually the owner of all these jewels, by the way!"  That's bad character play as I brought up in a previous post.  Can a good GM roll with it?  Sure, but you're putting them on the spot.That's a good point and I wanted to talk about this.  When you "roll up a character" you're not getting to decide entirely what you will play on your own.  Not only does the group decide what's appropriate for the game, but dice are used to randomize each character before they are conceptualized.  I think in your aside above, you are saying Players don't get to create their own PCs.  That isn't true. While they also create them when playing the game, like you and I continually do as we live our own lives, background creation happens outside of game.If authority permits certain behavior I guess worlds can permit certain character backgrounds.  But don't those get added to the world and become the authority one has to follow when the game actually starts?  This is all getting needlessly convoluted just so some folks can claim their games are RPGs when they aren't about roleplaying - at least not directly.This is funny.  I concede that sometimes behaving in character will lead to player insights that are important to the player, but not to the character as the example you cite.  The whole "Wow! This is what it feels like to have a girl hit on me and turn her down!" is just hilarious.  That's more to do with psychological insights gained through roleplaying though.  That can be gained simply by the player playing what they judge is a psychologically interesting character.Rolemaster has endless system rules and is very much like 3E in that way.  Perhaps I didn't see enough of it when I played MERPS to really call it a rule playing game per se.  But I can't possibly see it as quick and easy to run.  Perhaps it is invisible from the players POV, but that's not as I remember it.  It's been some time since I bothered to look at the game.And character design in many earlier games, like AD&D for example, focused on in character definitions of PCs.  The 6 attributes are not rules, but definitions of how tough or strong a person is.  To hit scores gave definition to how one ranked as a warrior in comparison to others.  Damage ranges defined how hurtful a weapon could be in comparison to other weapons.  These were things in the world given definition on the character sheet so players could understand how they stood in relation to others.   Just like saying I'm taller or shorter than others with a height score.  Size has meaning in the world, but as a player I'm understanding it through the eyes of my character.By keeping these things in character, players don't need to bother with them most of the time.  Simply saying "your tough and good at hitting things" will give a kid enough information to play his character.  He's going to come up with other stuff anyways that he wants his character to be.  That any of those descriptions might also have mechanics later working unseen with them is really secondary to playing the game.</blockquote>

Verification