Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Harzel" data-source="post: 7268812" data-attributes="member: 6857506">Oh, heh.&nbsp; I had to go back and forth among the OP, my response, and your response to understand what you meant.&nbsp; Yeah, my post wasn't real clear about what situations I was implicitly comparing.&nbsp; My first comment (counter-intuitive) referred to the fact that the two methods the OP discussed for determining the location of the statue were equivalent.But the second comment was meant to contrast the general property of both those methods (and a lot of others one could think of) - that the PCs' decisions did not affect the probability of their success - with a situation in which the PCs's decisions could affect their probability of success.&nbsp; As you have implied, that would seem to require giving the PCs more information on which to base their decision.&nbsp; I, perhaps unhelpfully, left the notion completely abstract, not attempting to describe a method that would allow the PCs' decisions to affect their probability of success.&nbsp; At minimum I guess I should have included a footnote that said, &quot;I have discovered a truly marvelous way to do this, which this post is too small to contain.&quot; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Anyway, such methods clearly exist, since you could simply tell the PCs where the statue is.&nbsp; That by itself doesn't seem so interesting, but it could be embellished by providing supplementary goals, the pursuit of which might provide an additional reward, but decrease their likelihood of recovering the statue.&nbsp; Or there could be alternative paths that presented trade-offs, decreasing their likelihood of success in one way, while increasing it in another.Alternatively, there could be clues that would narrow the scope of their search without saying where the statue was exactly, obtaining said clues itself perhaps imposing some cost.So maybe that clarifies a bit what I was thinking about.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Harzel, post: 7268812, member: 6857506"] Oh, heh. I had to go back and forth among the OP, my response, and your response to understand what you meant. Yeah, my post wasn't real clear about what situations I was implicitly comparing. My first comment (counter-intuitive) referred to the fact that the two methods the OP discussed for determining the location of the statue were equivalent. But the second comment was meant to contrast the general property of both those methods (and a lot of others one could think of) - that the PCs' decisions did not affect the probability of their success - with a situation in which the PCs's decisions [I]could [/I]affect their probability of success. As you have implied, that would seem to require giving the PCs more information on which to base their decision. I, perhaps unhelpfully, left the notion completely abstract, not attempting to describe a method that would allow the PCs' decisions to affect their probability of success. At minimum I guess I should have included a footnote that said, "I have discovered a truly marvelous way to do this, which this post is too small to contain." :) Anyway, such methods clearly exist, since you could simply tell the PCs where the statue is. That by itself doesn't seem so interesting, but it could be embellished by providing supplementary goals, the pursuit of which might provide an additional reward, but decrease their likelihood of recovering the statue. Or there could be alternative paths that presented trade-offs, decreasing their likelihood of success in one way, while increasing it in another. Alternatively, there could be clues that would narrow the scope of their search without saying where the statue was exactly, obtaining said clues itself perhaps imposing some cost. So maybe that clarifies a bit what I was thinking about. [/QUOTE]

Verification