Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8615553" data-attributes="member: 6696971">As one of the few gamers of Torchbearer on this website, I've been vaguely following along.  Let me just offer the following to the conversation.[USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER] , I get why you're keen on including participant cognitive states to the fictional positioning of any given instance of play.  I do.  So let me unpack that:1) Any imagined space, definitionally (because, despite it being communicated, it is imagined and therefore prone to a number of biases), must include the cognitive state (and its attendant variability) of the person imagining it.  If you're sad, inattentive, distracted, excited, etc, this is going to perturb your personal imagined space (with respect to what it might be otherwise in a different cognitive state).  Even if just subtly.2) This subtle (or greater) perturbance of cognitive state will necessarily perturb your actual decision-space or at least your perception of it.3) When you extend this to multiple participants at any given table (say 1 GM and 3 players), their individual imagined spaces is not just apt to have some drift from one imagining to the next, its a surety. 4) Consequently, the shared imagined space of the table will be a somewhat (or greater) volatile place.  So the individual decision-space in which they perform their OODA (observe > orient > decide > act) will be somewhat (or greater) at odds with each other.  One person might perceive a move that another has not been able to access because of their particular cognitive state (and its downstream effect on their individual imagined space).  And vice versa and on and on.So I get it. BUT...This formulation is not useful to conversation for a number of reasons.  The most important is that it just bakes in a level of variability...and not just variability, but a series of unknowns...that effectively makes conversation on the subject intractable. Further, every human endeavor is prone to this error at both the individual level and then proliferated at the collective level.  So its just pointless to get bogged down in this.  We communicate our best to clarify and shore up our shared imagined space such that we're as close as humanly possible to being on the same page so that we're making action declarations that sensibly address the present situation at hand in the fiction.  We just have to take that for granted in these conversations.So I not only don't see the usefulness of bringing in cognitive states (even though it is obviously a parameter here) to the discussion on shared imagined space (and related fictional positioning and decision-space), I contend that it is fundamentally a conversation-killer (and decreases the prospect of us accumulating further/better knowledge on the play of Torchbearer).  We won't get anywhere haggling over this inherent fallibility of human operating systems + communication.  Can we just assume that humans do their best to align individual imagined spaces within the limits of their cognitive capacities/communication apparatus and move on?  On to actual functional conversation about how to best play Torchbearer 2e and what that play looks like?</blockquote>

Verification