Players characters evading direct questions

[Talakeal]

Or, third option, there are math problems that are too hard for you or your players to solve optimally, math problems which can be used to make a roleplaying game.

You seem to be stuck on the literal definition of the word optimization. Optimization cannot exist in reality. Much like "perfection" or "infinite" it is a concept, not something that actually exists. That doesn't mean that people don't use it all the time in day to day speech. Hell, there are entire RPG boards dedicated to "optimization". Wouldn't your time be better spent arguing with them than with me?

But again, this is a purely semantic argument. If you prefer, substitute "the path which they perceive to have the highest ratio of reward to risk" rather than "optimal path".

Here is an example of how it's done for Tic-tac-toe.[/URL] You won't find one for Chess, because one cannot, in practice, be calculated.

If you need the opposing player to reveal what they are doing beforehand in a perfect information games, that's an admission that you cannot actually process all the information in the game to acquire optimal strategy.

Really, it would seem to me you don't know the difference and cannot distinguish between a game having perfect information and a gamemaster handing out a solution. I say the former, you think of the latter - with various corollaries, such as you not realizing that game master might not know the optimal solution to their own game, or that players might be able to win with sub-optimal strategies because the game master is playing sub-optimally without realizing it.

Ok then, why bring it up if it is clearly unrelated to the topic at hand?

The suggestion was that I tell them what the NPCs do and do not know and what information will get them to react in the way the players want them to.

Would it have been appropriate for me to respond "Well, the players already understand the rules of Changeling, therefore they already have perfect information about the scenario and could not possibly benefit from more information!".

No, we don't know that. You are suffering from a failure of imagination: you are thinking of a module that is ONLY difficult because of hidden information, and becomes trivially soluble with perfect information. You are then using that to conclude that perfect information would make any module trivial. That doesn't fly. The design space for modules, or game scenarios really, is open-ended. You said perfect information makes a game into a math problem, but forgot that math problems range from "can be understood and solved by 1st grader" to "makes professional mathematicians cry".



These all posit a comparison between the same scenario played with and without perfect information. All of these claims fail in the same way: the answers aren't, and cannot be, actually known without specifying a scenario. They also all illustrate that you fail to understand the argument:

Taking less damage, finding more treasure, having easier fights or solving more mysteries, none of these are "optimal". "Optimal" refers to the most favorable, or the set of most favorable, strategies. A perfectly informed strategy can have all kinds of improvements over a less-informed strategy and still fail to be optimal. Because, you see, even knowing all those things, one still has to crunch the path for obtaining those treasures, meaning Travelling Salesman Problem says hello again. How much time - real time - do you actually hand your players to plot an algorithm and calculate permutations?



This is just baseless supposition on your part. You don't know how a hidden information versus perfect information variants of the same scenario play without analyzing specific scenarios. You also cannot say anything useful this way about scenarios made to be played with perfect information from the get-go. Sure, they might play differently... in what way exactly? Again, the design space is open-ended. Such games can be anything.

For a concrete example, you can actually go play Fog-of-war Chess and compare your experience to playing normal Chess. Does the experience differ? Yes. Are there strategies that are decent in the former but weak or pointless in the latter? Definitely. Are they so radically different that a player who enjoys one, would not be able to play and enjoy the other? No, not really.

Yes, of course you can come up with some hypothetical game / scenario where all of the normal assumptions don't apply. I admitted as much in the post you are responding to.

Who cares? What does that have to do with the discussion at hand?

Why bring up increasingly inane hypotheticals that have nothing to do with RPGs that actually exist?

Heck, you accuse me of spherical cows, but at this point you're argument hinges on non-Euclidian hyper-cows.

I think if this was an issue at my table I'd probably think about radically simplifying and not including cant and language in ways that can cause confusion. When I've seen games devolve into people staring at their phones it's often because something is happening deep in the weeds that someone (or multiple someones) just doesn't care about.

I envy you.

Most of the people I know have their phone at more or less 24/7 regardless of the activity.

So... in character, have you given them a reason to not trust the seelie as a group? Out of character, have they been taught that the GM's running of the world isn't trustworthy? Because clearly there's something incentivizing this behavior.

Not really. Although the pookha in their party teaches that lesson pretty well.

Talakeal, historically, places too much emphasis on the "Challenge" aesthetic, to the extent that he isn't having fun unless his players think his game is too hard. So it's not surprising to be able to evaluate a statement as, "modules are too easy".

While that is technically true, it is misleading as it is putting the cart before the horse.

I find games with no realistic possibility of failure or requirement to put thought into it to be boring and not really "games". Generally, adventures I design have about a 5% failure rate, with individual encounters havng about a .5% failure rate. Note that these are not TPKs... TPKs are all but unheard of at my table.

The problem is that my players (mostly Bob) have self-esteem issues so that they blame their failures on someone else (either the GM or the module or another player) because the idea that their actions (or even the dice) contributed to the failure is inconceivable. Combine that with a miserly attitude where they (again mostly Bob) refuse to use consumables and insist on stripping every list bit of treasure and XP from the adventure (including what is clearly optional side content) and it creates issues.

Note however, this is not something unique to my table. I have absolutely seen this same behavior from them at other tables, and I have absolutely seen them complain that modules are too hard (and sometimes I agree, see my multiple rants about Delta Green modules with absolutely impossible to guess victory conditions).