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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9026271" data-attributes="member: 7026617">That's usually a consequence as much of bad information created by organizational bias as it is of bad assessment, though.&nbsp; We'd like to think that professional intelligence orgs wouldn't be vulnerable to that, but they very much are, and that's before political issues come in.&nbsp; At that point &quot;garbage in, garbage out&quot; has some relevance.I still stand by my opinion that its possible for a GM who takes this seriously to have more reliable information available to him that most intelligence agencies will, albeit there are still some limitations as to noise (you have to be pretty OCD to bother to pursue this sort of thing down to the level of knowing what every little organizational/sub-cultural group thinks about in your setting).&nbsp; And of course you can argue that since he probably made it all up in the first place, he's just deciding the outcome by proxy (but I think that depends at least to some degree how far in advance of the situation he made those decisions).That all said, I still must insist that there's going to be a big difference between someone with appropriate areas of expertise here in the relevant social sciences, and someone who gets everything he understands about that from fiction, assuming the GM cares to look at it through a social and/or political lens.&nbsp; (There's no assurance he'll bother, but that gets back to the fact that a lot of people who are knowledgeable in an areas will do extra lifting in those areas in the first place--I probably place more effort on religion in game setting than most people do because of my interest in that area).&nbsp; I just don't think claiming there's no difference in result relative to expertise in this area is sound, and looks a lot to me like post hoc reasoning.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 9026271, member: 7026617"] That's usually a consequence as much of bad information created by organizational bias as it is of bad assessment, though. We'd like to think that professional intelligence orgs wouldn't be vulnerable to that, but they very much are, and that's before political issues come in. At that point "garbage in, garbage out" has some relevance. I still stand by my opinion that its possible for a GM who takes this seriously to have more [I]reliable[/I] information available to him that most intelligence agencies will, albeit there are still some limitations as to noise (you have to be pretty OCD to bother to pursue this sort of thing down to the level of knowing what every little organizational/sub-cultural group thinks about in your setting). And of course you can argue that since he probably made it all up in the first place, he's just deciding the outcome by proxy (but I think that depends at least to some degree how far in advance of the situation he made those decisions). That all said, I still must insist that there's going to be a big difference between someone with appropriate areas of expertise here in the relevant social sciences, and someone who gets everything he understands about that from fiction, [I]assuming the GM cares to look at it through a social and/or political lens. [/I](There's no assurance he'll bother, but that gets back to the fact that a lot of people who are knowledgeable in an areas will do extra lifting in those areas in the first place--I probably place more effort on religion in game setting than most people do because of my interest in that area). I just don't think claiming there's no difference in result relative to expertise in this area is sound, and looks a lot to me like post hoc reasoning. [/QUOTE]

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