Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9015779" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I think this is a mistake; you're substituting the literary meaning of "magic circle" for the ludic one here. In a literary sense, the magic circle is the suspension of disbelief that allows one to engage with a story (and possible the conceits of the story) and care about non-real people and events. It is from that meaning we get the ludic sense of a magic circle, but in games, the magic circle is not primarily concerned with a fictional reality, but with fictional constraints and systems. When playing a game you submit to the systems the game requires, agreeing that victory is defined by these points, and the available actions are those specified on this reference sheet, and other moves that could be made aren't valid and other means of evaluating success don't count. You could make a case that there's a literary magic circle also at play, in an RPG concerning the shared fiction, or even in a board game, that this cube is representative of a sufficient coal to power a train over an average mainland route and so on, but the core meaning is different.There are TTRPGs I and my immediate social circle probably wouldn't classify as games, but our measuring stick is very much coming from board games. I generally think any activity that isn't trying to put participants under pressure to gauge the quality of decision making they're doing isn't a game, even it resembles them in other ways, but I think it's fairly settled ground that TTRPGs draw a bigger tent approach than I would if I was setting terms.While I agree there is a difference, I don't know that it's meaningfully derived from the number of available board states. That there are more possible states a TTRPG can be in than a game of Go, when Go has so many board states as to be well beyond human comprehension isn't where that difference emerges from. I'd look instead to the available action declarations, instead of the resultant board state. Chess is different in that it will accept significantly less inputs and the distance between the resulting board state between all the available inputs is significantly smaller than it is in a TTRPG.I don't know that these things are in conflict. Lusory attitude seems to be describing the mentality players adopt to enter a magic circle.This is the underlying assumption that always gives me pause. It requires a quite specific understanding of what "exciting and engaging" means, and focuses entirely on the question of "what happens" instead of "what did the players do?" I'm consistently annoyed that RPGs don't provide players sufficient agency to make and execute good plans, or don't have sufficiently impartial adjudication systems for player decisions to matter consistently.This is where my stance on "rule zero" diverges, in that I don't think it's serving that goal either. Instead, it mostly serves to prevent a sufficiently concrete set of rules that players can actual engage in a game, and gets away with that by pretending to cover for incompleteness elsewhere in the system.</blockquote>

Verification