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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3795063" data-attributes="member: 42582">RC, you said (and I quoted in my post):An encounter unfolds, "in any round of which the players do not know whether or not it will result in resource-attrition". This is a win/lose situation. The players know they might win; they know they might lose. They do not know which it is going to be.Here are your three sentences, rendered into a form and sequence more tractable to analysis:*The encounter is one in which, in any round, the players do not know whether or not it will result in resource attrition. *The players know they might win; they know they might lose. *The encounter is a win/lose encounter.The first sentence is what I asserted in an earlier post. It attributes a certain ignorance or doubt to the players.The second you seem to treat as equivalent, or else infer - if I've labelled as an inference what you take to be an equivalence, I apologise, but it is not always easy to tell the difference in an informally-presented passage of text, and you had in earlier post stressed your preference for "if-then" assertions.But it is not equivalent - "A does not know which of P or Q" does not entail "A knows that it might be that P or might be that Q." It may be that A does not which of P or Q, but one of P or Q is definitely true, and the other is not a possibility.The second sentence does entail the third, as knowledge of P entails the truth of P. Hence, I focussed on the step I have identified - the relationship between the epistemic situation of the players, and the outcome of the encounter, and on what I took to be the two interesting features of that relationship: the possibility of player ignorance, and the impact upon the outcome of the choices the players make within their dynamic epistemic situation.I gather you think I have behaved in some reprehensible manner.I find this puzzling. You have accused me of not understanding the nature of argument and rebuttal, of not being able to follow the logic of "if-then" sentences, of  logical incompetence in general, and (by implication, in your reply above to Jackelope King) of dishonesty.On the other hand, I have tried to isolate the character of your reasoning, and present it as clearly as I can so as to respond to it. This is the normal way in which argument proceeds. I have responded to your responses, I have indicated where I think your claims to be true or plausible, I have tried to identify the points of our disagreement. I have not engaged in any personal abuse.As far as I can tell, we have three principal points of disagreement:*You appear to think that prudent players will always lead with their per-day resources. I disagree, holding that this depends entirely on what those resources are. I have given examples to try and illustrate this. *You appear to think that encounters will not be interesting if they have no mechanical impact on the subsequent play of the game. I do not agree. It is possible to generate interest by requiring sophisticated tactical play in order to bring it about that there is no long-term mechanical impact. *You appear to deny that purely per-day resources impose obstacles to the use of non-mechanical thresholds of significance in adventure design. For the reasons I have given in earlier posts, I don't agree.A further matter which I belive, but which you may dispute (although I'm not sure) is this:*The introduction of a mix of per-encounter and per-day resources increases the range of options available to wizard PCs, increasing the range of options beyond "do nothing or deplete resources" and thereby also making it viable to reduce the power of wizard spells, thus dealing with the nova problem.</blockquote>

Verification