Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
Yes, just on other people first. You're trying to refute a very basic point about empiricism by a bad faith argument - an idea can be phrased in a way that makes it sound absurd, while leaving the question of whether it can be functionally implemented entirely open.
Perhaps splitting hairs (but this is the Playground, do we expect anything but the highest levels of pedantry? ), but I'm not refuting the idea per se - I think it's fine in the general case, but it happens to be of questionable value to my absurd example, or (as I explained) to the example from the OP. I agree that a single example of playing through backstory does not give me experience with the wide range of outcomes possible from playing through backstory; however, it does give me the portion of the experience specifically relevant to using a meatgrinder to generate backstory.

Or, you know, that's my claim.