RPG metric, simplified version

[kyoryu]

I'll say that this thread, among many others, has indicated to me that defining the boundary between "is <game>" and "is not <game>" is...fraught with difficulty and subjectivity. And of little actual use in practice, other than to sate the human need for putting things in nice little boxes, by force if necessary.

I agree with that 100%. When doing things like that, you really need to ask yourself why it matters.

I do think that the difference between "is game X and is not game X" is a little less fraught than "is not a <category>".

I mean, there certainly is a point of differentiation at which we can generally say "yeah, that's a different game", but it's a heap problem drawing the line anywhere before that. For me, personally, the metric I use is "what book do I pull out first when looking for guidance on something game related? That's generally the system I'm going to call it." That's by no means a definition or a hard-and-fast rule, just a heuristic.

I tend to go more inclusive than not. That's a good dividing line, along with "if someone likes <game> will they like this as well? If they don't like <game>, will they also dislike this?" If those don't match, it's probably migrated sufficiently that calling it <game> doesn't add a lot of value. So I guess I draw the line based on "is it valuable to call it this, or does it draw people to wrong conclusions?" rather than any kind of "purity".

[KorvinStarmast]

The communication is pretty clear to me - yes, you should muck with things.

Which is also clear in the Original Game in the preface to Men and Magic on page 4. DM's are expected to muck with things.

If you do muck with things, understand that if you muck with too much, your game will stop being understandable "as D&D" to someone that is used to playing with a game that is more in-line with the system as presented, and as such the ability of those players to converse about the shared hobby will be impacted.

yeah, that's how it comes across in the DMG to 1e. (And in a variety of articles and opinions published previous to that tome being released).

People can disagree with this, but it still seems pretty far from the "play it exactly as written or you're doing it wrong" characterization that is often given.

Correct.

I suspect that's becuase prior to 1e, people were modifying D&D in vastly significant ways, to the point where you really couldn't talk about common experience.

False. We all played D&D and we all learned from each DM what was different in their game. Con play and tournament play were a different animal (but it is what seems to have fathered modules, which then became a revenue stream).

I mean, Star Frontiers and Gamma World were released as separate games, not sourcebooks, despite having a lot of similarity mechanically to D&D.

And Met Alpha, and Boot Hill ... the list goes on.

The "D&D can do everything" mentality seems to come from the fans, not TSR/WotC.

Correct. And it's a strawman repeated by a lot of uninformed people.

But I've NEVER believed the claim that D&D could run anything, it was always clear that this the game's reach exceeding its grasp.

I get your first clause, but your second clause leaves me hanging. The game itself works well.

Shortly: the common rules framework is for player convenience, so they don't have to essentially learn a new game for every setting and every campaign.

Correct. It it worked well enough.

That never meant all content in the books is fair for every game, available spells and magic items have always been meant to be vetted on per campaign basis.

Correct.

Gygax got a lot of undeserved flak for saying people going way outside rules of his game were no longer playing his game. Both as a basic observation and as opinion of a product manager, it made perfect sense. Still does.

Correct.

Games are defined by their rules, change the rules enough and you get a different game.

Before D&D, you can claim that this is true. Arneson's Blackmoor campaign (that in time evolved into D&D) to a great extent broke that paradigm. That was part of what made the game so popular and why it caught on so quickly. It was wide open. It was not limited by rules. (Kuntz' recent analysis of this is worth a look, though his writing style is ponderous).

I don't recall ANY edition of D&D EVER establishing a setting-first approach, ever, at any point.

Besides the Blackmoor campaign itself (proto D&D) and maybe Greyhawk, I agree. Each DM was to grow their setting as play progressed, with their own unique vision and unique variations on what was in the three little books. (Using Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival as a tabula rasa for the wilderness/world exploration phase was not a bad hack, but it was also not necessary. My first DM used a piece of poster board with 2x2 blank squares, a grid, drawn in with pencil and a straight edge. We began in one square where there was a town. We had to explore to find the entrance to the first dungeon we ever delved into. It took a few squares before we found it.

Note, this would take more than a few lines of lip-service claiming that it's setting-first, it would require the overall text of the rules to support that approach.

Which the original game did not.

Instead, it has always had an implicit setting built in.

I am not sure what you mean by that, in terms of 'implicit setting' since any world was only given expression by how the DM built it.

... but Gygax emphasises importance of the dungeon master's vision of their setting (or "milieu", which is the word Gygax uses) several times throughout the ruletext. What you call D&D's implicit setting, is not a singular thing at all. It's a number of constants posited across settings. The room to have distinct settings is quite expansive.

Bingo.

[Willie the Duck]

Relevant quotes from the 1e DMG:
...

Sure. In the 1E DMG. My point was that Gygax was not consistent on many things. Probably not overly important to this conversation so I will drop it.

I'm old enough for a mix of pre-AD&D and AD&D 1e to be my original exposure to D&D.
But I've NEVER believed the claim that D&D could run anything, it was always clear that this the game's reach exceeding its grasp.

Right, there should have been some form of 'as early as, or earlier' in my estimation. As in distinct from people who started with 3e+ and grabbed knowledge of earlier works retroactively.

I don't recall ANY edition of D&D EVER establishing a setting-first approach, ever, at any point.
Note, this would take more than a few lines of lip-service claiming that it's setting-first, it would require the overall text of the rules to support that approach.
Instead, it has always had an implicit setting built in.

What the game says and has said, and what player metagame says and has said, are two different things. Both for published settings and settings of individual game masters, using game mechanics as first principles for setting building has never been the norm.

1st Edition AD&D books, which directly tell you in Gygax's own words how the game is imagined to work, quite clearly establish the setting-first approach, while also explaining what the purpose of common rules across settings is meant to serve. Shortly: the common rules framework is for player convenience, so they don't have to essentially learn a new game for every setting and every campaign.That never meant all content in the books is fair for every game, available spells and magic items have always been meant to be vetted on per campaign basis.
...
My AD&D books are paper and inside a box, so I can't quote them as conveniently as kyoryu above, but Gygax emphasises importance of the dungeon master's vision of their setting (or "milieu", which is the word Gygax uses) several times throughout the ruletext. What you call D&D's implicit setting, is not a singular thing at all. It's a number of constants posited across settings. The room to have distinct settings is quite expansive.

I think there can be room for overlap in these views. D&D has some level of an implied setting in that monsters are treated as species instead of one-offs (enough that they can show up on random appearance tables), spellcasters have great (immediate) power that is constrained by limited use, that treasure is worth risking life and limb and conveniently located in dangerous areas, etc. It also generally hasn't had a huge amount of core, non-supplement (and integrated into a cohesive whole) worldbuilding tools outside of map-generation. Certainly not on the level of modifying central conceits of the game and then adjusting downstream effects (ex: in some of those 2e greenbound splatbooks I referenced is was suggested that not all armor or magic would be available, but few if any rules suggestion for how to handle the lowered amount of healing available or lower total AC spread, etc.). That said, with some rather thorny limitations (spellcaster's great power/limited use, groups needing reason to adventure being a few tricky ones), there is a lot of room for those things to be done. Firearms, space travel, alternate spellcasting systems, low-magic, higher magic... there's a lot of tweeks to D&D that have occurred --many of them working as well as the game as a whole does (YMMV). I think the the primary divergence in position is how much the system has to provide how-tos before it can be said to facilitate such things. This seems to be another case of does something need to exhibit a certain degree of something to qualify, and I certainly have no vested interest in it. Certainly there are many other games which have less implied setting (/implied central conceits) than D&D. Many of them even bill themselves as universal systems (rarely really working for all styles, but usually a large swath).

I'll say that this thread, among many others, has indicated to me that defining the boundary between "is <game>" and "is not <game>" is...fraught with difficulty and subjectivity. And of little actual use in practice, other than to sate the human need for putting things in nice little boxes, by force if necessary.

I mean, there certainly is a point of differentiation at which we can generally say "yeah, that's a different game", but it's a heap problem drawing the line anywhere before that. For me, personally, the metric I use is "what book do I pull out first when looking for guidance on something game related? That's generally the system I'm going to call it." That's by no means a definition or a hard-and-fast rule, just a heuristic.

I'm reminded of a debate I've seen any number of times -- is Shadowrun a cyberpunk game? To some, the answer is 'sure, it's cyberpunk, but with magic and fantasy tropes' and to others it is, 'of course not, it has magic and fantasy tropes, and thus must be something else.' Does it change anything, other than the nice little boxes? Of course not, but boy howdy is it a hill to die on for some.

[PhoenixPhyre]

D&D has implicit setting constraints, but that's different from an implicit setting. Except 5e has an actual setting--the multiverse. Which is something I'm very not fond of and have ripped up and torn out entirely.

And the D&D constraints are actually pretty weak, at least most of them.

[Telok]

I mean, Star Frontiers and Gamma World were released as separate games, not sourcebooks, despite having a lot of similarity mechanically to D&D.

The "D&D can do everything" mentality seems to come from the fans, not TSR/WotC.

Well if you're listening to WotC they seem to be publishing D&D as "Forgotten Realms: the RPG". If D&D stops being able to reasonably do things other than FR:RPG... well, at least it might go from a 800 pound gorilla to a 600 pound gorilla.

But its all off topic any ways.

More on topic: I think you have to evaluate a system based on its published rule set without assuming any special or exceptional DM or player skills. A good set or roleplayers could rp Monopoly well just because it doesn't say not to rp. This isn't about a system having rules about rp, but if the system breaks rp (or perhaps rp breaks the system) by causing game (or chararter?) failure states when rping.

Starfinder, the game with the spaceship issue example I used, is balanced on the party having gear & spaceship equal to their level (+/- a little little wiggle room). Its rules say "do space combat encounters" and "combat encounters use party level +/-2 foes". Its rules also say that putting a nicer bed in you cabin, installing a big screen t.v. with a bunch on movies, or adding door locks on the spaceship costs points & reduces the ship's combat effectiveness. If you make the decision to go to a primitive planet for dinosaur hunting it can cause problems if you level up too much doing it.

Now a good DM who understands the math & unstated assumptions of the system can break with how the books say to run the game. They can alter hp, ac, damage, of the stock monsters or use significantly underlevel encounters. But if they didn't get the unwritten assumption memo then they won't. They might, as with our first SF DM, not even realize that the party is under wealth and therefore under geared.

So there's a question: do the characters know, in character, that they leveled up three times this month and anything they fight will be level appropriate (following what the game book says to do here) causing them to out level their gear? Do they know that anything the run into in space will have bigger/more guns than anything they've ever seen because they spent a month punching dinos? Do they know that putting a nice bed and a t.v. in their cabin reduces the total value of guns & shields the ship can mount?

I suppose if you assume that the in character universe runs like the Oots webcomic then its all true and "in character" never runs afoul of the rules the system gives you.

Hmm... dunno. That got all rambley and disjointed. But SF by the rules requires metagaming its space stuff or else going in for lots of TPKs unless the DM knows how to (and that it needs to) fix it.

Edit: actually, what are the fail states? Probably important.

[Max_Killjoy]

I am not sure what you mean by that, in terms of 'implicit setting' since any world was only given expression by how the DM built it.

Implicit setting: things that the rules and text of a game imply about the world the game is set in... assumptions that the game makes about the setting even if it never says them out loud.

Take 5e for example. 5e's rules imply a setting where study of arcane lore, self-discipline, bloodlines, pacts with powerful entities, relationships with spirits, and even sincere oaths, all grant some form of extra-normal power. They imply a setting where experience actively transforms a farmhand into a demigod over time. They imply a setting where magic comes in discrete little premade black-box packets with reliable effects. They imply a setting where monsters are "species", not one-off creatures -- it's not THE sphinx, it's A sphinx. Etc.

These are things that are either true about the setting, or that form a decoherence between the rules and the setting.


----

Should have linked these earlier, as I think they're useful to the discussion of "what is an RPG?", at least as an example attempt to untangle that question.
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress...ytelling-games
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress...a-brief-primer

[KorvinStarmast]

Implicit setting: things that the rules and text of a game imply about the world the game is set in... assumptions that the game makes about the setting even if it never says them out loud.

Take 5e for example. 5e's rules imply a setting where study of arcane lore, self-discipline, bloodlines, pacts with powerful entities, relationships with spirits, and even sincere oaths, all grant some form of extra-normal power. They imply a setting where experience actively transforms a farmhand into a demigod over time. They imply a setting where magic comes in discrete little premade black-box packets with reliable effects. They imply a setting where monsters are "species", not one-off creatures -- it's not THE sphinx, it's A sphinx. Etc.

OK, thanks for that analysis/clarification. Not sure I buy all of it but I do see what you were referring to.

The DM is not required to have each kind of sphynx in their game world.
If they only have one, and it's an androsphynx, then that is The Sphynx in that world.

[NichG]

Cognitive dissonance is a feeling founded on a person trying to hold two or more contradictory beliefs, so any measure of it ends up counting contradictions. There is an apparent contradiction in the situation you describe, and there very well could be an actual contradiction, depending on how rest of the situation is detailed. There are also details which would solve the contradiction, and thus remove cognitive dissonance, such as flying armies being so new the top brass hasn't had time to adjust yet.

I'm confident this holds even when talking about Quertus specifically.

Contradictory beliefs and contradictions between things which are rules legal are different categories though, with the former being much larger than the latter. Your argument about distinctions and what you 'should' care about as based only on the latter. But contradictory beliefs can include for example anything derived from the rules, any counterfactual situation you might choose to evaluate or imagine on the basis of reading something, gut feelings or intuitions arising from ways of thinking which are your choice and aren't imposed by the rules, conflicts between your own goals in going to play the game and things the game asks you to take as goals, etc.

I don't either want to span the entire space of all possible sources of cognitive dissonance with a measure, since many of those things will depend on uncontrolled factors. But I think there's a relatively controlled superset of 'the rules are literally inconsistent with each-other' and a subset of 'general sources of dissonance'. That set corresponds to the situations in which different elements of the game disagree about how you might make decisions on behalf of the character you're playing as. E.g. when the fluff suggests Balors are superhumanly intelligent and describes (but does not require) a specific standard operating procedure for Balors in a fight that, because of the derived implications of applying the mechanics, is tactically incompetent. While the person playing the Balor is allowed by the rules to choose to play them differently than the standard operating procedure and is just as well allowed to imagine Balors as smart but, say, overconfident (so it's not a 'hard' contradiction within the rules), it is something that forces them to make a metagame choice as to what aspects of the world as presented they're going to shore up and what they're going to go against.

Basically, while it's not an inevitable contradiction in the end, it is something that forces the player of that balor to carry the load of preventing it from being a contradiction.

[Quertus]

This thread seems to be a Quertus quibble about roleplaying games, but here's an angle that hasn't been considered: If you're making a non-zero amount of decisions that aren't in-character, it's for a more appealing story than the entirely in-character decisions version of events, and from that angle, perhaps storytelling games is a better way to describe it.

That said, it's very clear that that's not what this is about, so this shall be my only post in the thread.

Agreed, there are many reasons why it is entirely likely that not 100% of all actions will be taken in character; “because it’ll make for a better story” is one such consideration.

At the risk of flattening spherical cows into chopped up elephant bits to lie rotting on the distant shores of mixed metaphors, imagine if one could *measure* how often a system requires you to choose between the “in character” choices and the “good story” choice, and claimed that as a metric for a game’s suitability to be played as an RPG.

I agree with that 100%. When doing things like that, you really need to ask yourself why it matters.

I do think that the difference between "is game X and is not game X" is a little less fraught than "is not a <category>".



I tend to go more inclusive than not. That's a good dividing line, along with "if someone likes <game> will they like this as well? If they don't like <game>, will they also dislike this?" If those don't match, it's probably migrated sufficiently that calling it <game> doesn't add a lot of value. So I guess I draw the line based on "is it valuable to call it this, or does it draw people to wrong conclusions?" rather than any kind of "purity".

Yeah, tbh, I really don’t and didn’t care about being able to say “chicken” or “not chicken”, except that people kept saying, “4e isn’t D&D” (and the surrounding arguments were.… horrifically suboptimal), which got me to evaluate just what 4e was and wasn’t. I’m much more into the metric than where the line is drawn.

However, I think that there’s some noticeable groupings, like the “0% of decision points should be expected to survive contact with the players” of a choose your own adventure book.

[Cluedrew]

You think that your comments deserve discussion?

As I am trying to find things to contribute to the discussion, yeah I think they at least deserve discussion as to why it is a red herring. (And if it is not a red herring but a previously unforeseen issue, I will try and fish that out.)

Your own subjective experiences are only valuable in the context of my metric for measuring how reliable a witness you are, or how much you roleplay. They have no bearing on the metric itself.

I had just deleted a speech about confounded variables and replaced it with "Please elaborate." (and I would still like you to elaborate) when someone told me about an xkcd comic. It not relevant but the first one I found when looking for it is also about confounding variables. I took that as a bit of a sign. I'm more optimistic than that but I don't believe that the set of instructions you have given so far are resistant to biases.

So, let's dial back to the most uber obvious example: the choose your own adventure book format.

Pick one of your characters. Doesn't matter the setting - I'll do my best to make this setting agnostic.

Ready?

"As you are traveling along, using whatever ground transportation makes the most sense for your character and the setting, you come to the setting equivalent of a stoplight (person with the authority to tell you to stop, perhaps?), telling you to stop. There is mild cross-traffic at this intersection, but it is very slow moving, and there is a hole in traffic big enough for several of you to pass through easily."

What do you do?

Come up with your in character response, and then we'll see if it's one that the system accepts as valid, or whether you have to metagame in order to continue playing.

Sure, I give it a shot. I'll pick Brandon, the Sorcerer of the In-Between and one of the "kingpins" of the occult underworld. Battles depression, anger management issues and OCD.

So onto the scenario, he lives in a modern world, so probably just a car and a traffic light. He waits for the light to change.

Yeah, tbh, I really don't and didn't care about being able to say "chicken" or "not chicken", except that people kept saying, "4e isn't D&D" (and the surrounding arguments were.... horrifically suboptimal), which got me to evaluate just what 4e was and wasn't. I'm much more into the metric than where the line is drawn.

I still think that a larger collection of games that fall on other sides of the line from where we expect then just 4e would help a lot.

Also 4e is D&D because that is how ownership of a brand works. The more reasonable statement is: "4e didn't capture what I enjoy about the other editions of D&D."

[Vahnavoi]

Contradictory beliefs and contradictions between things which are rules legal are different categories though, with the former being much larger than the latter. Your argument about distinctions and what you 'should' care about as based only on the latter. But contradictory beliefs can include for example anything derived from the rules, any counterfactual situation you might choose to evaluate or imagine on the basis of reading something, gut feelings or intuitions arising from ways of thinking which are your choice and aren't imposed by the rules, conflicts between your own goals in going to play the game and things the game asks you to take as goals, etc.

I don't either want to span the entire space of all possible sources of cognitive dissonance with a measure, since many of those things will depend on uncontrolled factors. But I think there's a relatively controlled superset of 'the rules are literally inconsistent with each-other' and a subset of 'general sources of dissonance'. That set corresponds to the situations in which different elements of the game disagree about how you might make decisions on behalf of the character you're playing as.

What are you trying to measure again? Temperature, or someone's ability to measure temperature? Because relationship between contradictions and cognitive dissonance is the same. If I want to measure how much cognitive dissonance a game might cause in absence of any specific player, I'm going to count contradictions within rules of that game, because those rules are the statements the game asks you to believe.

I'm not going to count contradictions caused by breaking those rules, because those contradictions are something the game asks you to NOT believe. I'm not going to count contradictions caused by arbitrary additional assumptions, because the game doesn't ask you to believe those, and because they are uncountable.

If I have a specific player, I can stop counting contradictions myself and focus on contradictions found by that player, because their ability to spot contradictions is what causes their cognitive dissonance. But while this is useful if I want to calibrate my game to that player, it runs the risk of calibration error. The player might not be attentive enough to catch some contradictions, they might see contradictions where there are none because they are unable to correlate every rule in their head, they might imagine contradictions based on additional assumptions that are nowhere in the rules. The cognitive dissonance of a player is only useful when it stays within limited distance of what the rules of the game being measured say. Once said dissonance escapes too far, it is no longer useful - it's like trying to measure temperature with a broken thermometer.

Which is also why you want to give that player rules of a game as its meant to be played, instead of weird half measures. Your thermometer needs to be connected to the thing you want to actually measure. Or, to go back to soccer for a moment, if a player suffers cognitive dissonance due to a goalie touching the ball with their hands, because I only explained the part of the rules which say the game is about kicking the ball with their feet, that's on me, not the rules.

E.g. when the fluff suggests Balors are superhumanly intelligent and describes (but does not require) a specific standard operating procedure for Balors in a fight that, because of the derived implications of applying the mechanics, is tactically incompetent. While the person playing the Balor is allowed by the rules to choose to play them differently than the standard operating procedure and is just as well allowed to imagine Balors as smart but, say, overconfident (so it's not a 'hard' contradiction within the rules), it is something that forces them to make a metagame choice as to what aspects of the world as presented they're going to shore up and what they're going to go against.

The distinction between "fluff" and mechanics is once again pointless. You get the exact same contradiction in freeform roleplay when someone states their character is intelligent but then fails to act the part. Natural language statements of a game situation and mechanized mathematical statements of a game situation are both rules. The contradiction exists because conflicting descriptions exist in the same priority order. Your example solution adds an additional detail to explain the contradiction away, but it can as well be solved by abandoning one description as false, based on which would sacrifice the least.

There's a lot I could say about this particular type of problem, but I don't want to get sidetracked by examples.

Basically, while it's not an inevitable contradiction in the end, it is something that forces the player of that balor to carry the load of preventing it from being a contradiction.

Well duh. Processing rules is work. For a game meant to be run by and played by humans, some human has to do the work. As the rules grow weirder and more numerous, the less humans there are who can do that work and play that game to begin with. But that conflict's properly described as human ability versus game design, not fiction versus rules, nor fluff versus crunch. When a player starts suffering cognitive dissonance because they can't correlate all the rules, can't remember all the details that would explain the game situation etc., that's when you've hit the limit of your meter. "Soft contradictions" of this type tell you more about the player than the game.

[Telok]

Which is also why you want to give that player rules of a game as its meant to be played, instead of weird half measures.

I wonder if this is a big part of the core issue. Not just communicating the rules and fiction, but how they match & how to use the rules to benefit the fiction. Also, maybe a little more honesty in advertising, but thats unlikely.

Starfinder gets billed or proposed to groups as a sci-fi space & spaceship fiction game. It isn't. Its modified D&D/PF with guns & magitech that comes with some spaceship board game rules.

SF, once you're playing, is level gated. Characters can't get higher gear than level+2 by the rules. A hover truck is 7000 credits but as a level 5 item a 2nd level character can't get one. Doesn't matter if you have seven million credits, level 2 can't buy even an old used hover truck (PC only rules of course, CR 1/8 dirt farmers can get them). There are some vague suggestions about characters not having the contacts or the right permits to buy one, but the rules also say you can't even build one if you have all the parts & tools untill you're high enough level.

Now none of that stops you from roleplaying in the game. But

[KorvinStarmast]

Also 4e is D&D because that is how ownership of a brand works. The more reasonable statement is: "4e didn't capture what I enjoy about the other editions of D&D."

Well put.
I think that "feels like D&D" is (was) one of those value assessments that informs the response to any edition of the game.
FWIW, when I first began 5th ed a lot of it didn't 'feel' right to my AD&D muscle memory.
I adapted.

[Quertus]

As I am trying to find things to contribute to the discussion, yeah I think they at least deserve discussion as to why it is a red herring. (And if it is not a red herring but a previously unforeseen issue, I will try and fish that out.)

I had just deleted a speech about confounded variables and replaced it with "Please elaborate." (and I would still like you to elaborate) when someone told me about an xkcd comic. It not relevant but the first one I found when looking for it is also about confounding variables. I took that as a bit of a sign. I'm more optimistic than that but I don't believe that the set of instructions you have given so far are resistant to biases.

Sure, I give it a shot. I'll pick Brandon, the Sorcerer of the In-Between and one of the "kingpins" of the occult underworld. Battles depression, anger management issues and OCD.

So onto the scenario, he lives in a modern world, so probably just a car and a traffic light. He waits for the light to change.

I still think that a larger collection of games that fall on other sides of the line from where we expect then just 4e would help a lot.

Also 4e is D&D because that is how ownership of a brand works. The more reasonable statement is: "4e didn't capture what I enjoy about the other editions of D&D."

Nobody (that I saw) was making that more reasonable statement about 4e, leading me to have to come up with “4e is D&D (but not a roleplaying game)” on my own. And, being lazy, I didn’t appreciate having to put forth the effort.

But even my statement is incomplete, being shorthand for, “when measured with my metric, 4e crosses the line I set, which may be arbitrary.” Or something.

But 4e has nothing on a choose your own adventure book.

Speaking of which.… so, suppose you look down at your list of options, and find that “just sit there” isn’t among them (in this case, it isn’t, because it’s divided between *2* of them). The system says that Brandon, the sorcerer of the in-between cannot choose to do what you believe he would do.

If what you would choose to do in character is reasonable for that scenario, and reasonable for the fiction, but the system just straight up says “you can’t”? Then you have to choose differently, for metagame reasons, imposed by the system. Or maybe even choose something very uncharacteristic for the character to do.

There might be other times that you have to choose differently, for metagame reasons. Like when you don’t want to be “that guy”, or even the table has a “no PvP” policy. But trying to measure the difference between how often those come up in different systems, how much the system is to blame for those particular OOC actions, will likely always remain the domain of spherical cows.

So, the question you’re asking at each decision points is the bane of prep-heavy GM’s: what could the PCs do at this point? What could it be in character to do?

A “choose your own adventure” format gives a hard ban to anything that isn’t on their explicit white listed actions - which occurs at 100% of the decision points. So a choose your own adventure format has a score of 0% suitability to be played as an RPG - none of the choices can be made without potentially needing to metagame “choose differently in order to continue playing”. Every decision point has that hard stop, and earns a 0% rating.

Starfinder, apparently, requires you to upgrade your ship else TPK every couple of levels. And to upgrade it in particular ways. At a guess, that’s probably between 1%-5% of the decision points where the system requires that your actions must be made with starship upgrade metagame considerations in mind, rather than in roleplaying stance.

My choose your own adventure happens to have two “just sit there” options: sit there and look around, or sit there on cell phone / with radio / book / etc (investigate environment vs drown out environment).

But, probably more importantly, I think that “confounding variables” is the opposite of relevant to the simplified metric that this thread is about (the full metric, maybe). Because the simplified metric is, well, simple: count decision points, evaluate when logically possible actions that characters might attempt are prohibited by the system (and, in the more mathy version, how inefficient the “in character” actions can be compared with the optimal (“Determinator”) actions). The suitability of the game to be played as an RPG is, according to the spherical cows Simple metric, the fraction of choices that can be made in character (and, in the mathy version of the simple metric, the fraction of that fraction you get when you measure the relative effectiveness of reasonable actions to optimal actions).

Roleplaying is making choices. How well built other characters’ personalities are, what caricatures are in the party, even who you’re playing with - these don’t generally affect the decision points, or your ability to make in character decisions at those points (“fade to black” and such notwithstanding); even when they do, they aren’t a property of the system, which is the only thing that my metric is measuring. I’m not sure how else to explain their red herring status.

[NichG]

What are you trying to measure again? Temperature, or someone's ability to measure temperature? Because relationship between contradictions and cognitive dissonance is the same. If I want to measure how much cognitive dissonance a game might cause in absence of any specific player, I'm going to count contradictions within rules of that game, because those rules are the statements the game asks you to believe.

For any question of game design, I absolutely care more about perception than any sort of purely logical measure. If a game technically contains zero hard contradictions but a large portion of the players say they experience dissonance playing it, I care about the latter not the former when trying to design that game to be better.

Psychophysics is a field. Everyone may have variations in how they perceive feelings of heat and cold but you can still find predictive commonalities and quantify that experience and so on. The point of 'take the setting, take the mechanics you are aware of as the player, reimagine the setting as if the characters knew what you know' is that it's an easy way to force yourself to evaluate for that experience without having to encounter it in play, especially if e.g. you're familiar with the LitRPG genre where authors explore in detail the question of how living within an exposed system of rules might shape behaviors differently, since then you can have a mental checklist of alternate cultures and say 'would this happen?' for each.

[icefractal]

The delta between 'playing purely based on the rules' and 'playing purely based on the fiction' seems like a reasonable metric, but I don't think a simple "% of decisions" is going to give useful results.

Obvious fail case - a campaign where the players only get to make one choice, but that choice is entirely IC - is that a perfect 100% RPG?

Quality of choices needs to be considered over just quantity. If we consider these two games:
A) The process of buying cold-weather clothing was entirely IC, but the strategy against the frost dragon was driven by OOC factors and was extremely unintuitive IC.
B) The process of buying cold-weather clothing was abstracted in a way that doesn't really make sense IC, but the strategy against the frost dragon was entirely driven by IC logic and the rules supported that with no disjunction.

Even if there were technically more decisions involved in buying the cold-weather gear, those aren't the decisions which had the most impact, had the most screen time, or had the most importance to the players. I think most people would consider (B) the superior RPG if they considered "acting on IC-logic" to be an important quality.


And to add an additional factor, when we talk about Determinator vs IC-Player ... which IC? Because someone who's familiar with a system can make a character who's thematically consistent, makes entirely IC-based choices, and is only a little less effective than a Determinator. So can someone ignorant of the system, if they happen to make the right choices by luck. But, they could also make the wrong choices, resulting in their character being vastly less effective than a Determinator.

So are we basing it on the best case, or the worst? Because the worst is almost always going to be a large delta for any crunchy system. In fact by the "worst case" metric, 4E might score better than 3E because you have less flexibility in char-gen and thus less ability to make a mechanically-awful character. That leaves best or "average", and the latter is extremely subjective. Maybe a good metric would be to consider the different RPG% for each different type of character concept possible in the system and then average those ... which sounds like an impossible amount of work to do accurately.

[Cluedrew]

Nobody (that I saw) was making that more reasonable statement about 4e, leading me to have to come up with "4e is D&D (but not a roleplaying game)" on my own. And, being lazy, I didn’t appreciate having to put forth the effort.

But even my statement is incomplete, being shorthand for, "when measured with my metric, 4e crosses the line I set, which may be arbitrary." Or something.

How about "4e does not capture what I enjoy about role-playing games"?

Speaking of which.… so, suppose you look down at your list of options, and find that “just sit there” isn’t among them (in this case, it isn’t, because it’s divided between *2* of them). The system says that Brandon, the sorcerer of the in-between cannot choose to do what you believe he would do.

What are the two choices? (Thought this was one of the two obvious choices in that situation.)

But, probably more importantly, I think that “confounding variables” is the opposite of relevant to the simplified metric that this thread is about (the full metric, maybe). [...] Roleplaying is making choices. How well built other characters’ personalities are, what caricatures are in the party, even who you’re playing with - these don’t generally affect the decision points, or your ability to make in character decisions at those points [...]; even when they do, they aren’t a property of the system, which is the only thing that my metric is measuring. I’m not sure how else to explain their red herring status.

That's entirely the point though and why I think this is not a red herring. The reason this is worth discussing is because I believe that these are not what your metric is supposed to be measuring (the whole objective measure of a system thing) and believe it could be.

Let's say that you are heading down the dungeon hallway and at the end of there is some decision point that can go either way. So in this snippet we have a 1/1 or 0/1 response. But let's say as you are heading down the hallway and a party member turns to you, says something and you reply in character. Suddenly the outcome is 2/2 or 1/2. If you have picked a line then these changes will push some systems over it. (Also where is the line between 0 and 1?)

Your own subjective experiences are only valuable in the context of my metric for measuring how reliable a witness you are, or how much you roleplay. They have no bearing on the metric itself.

Please elaborate.

[Vahnavoi]

Psychophysics is a field. Everyone may have variations in how they perceive feelings of heat and cold but you can still find predictive commonalities and quantify that experience and so on.

I don't disagree with that, my point is that among those commonalities is physical temperature for feelings of hot and cold and contradictions for feelings of cognitive dissonance. You'll be measuring those if you want useful measurements, they're the "physics" half of psychophysics.

The other point is that human psychophysics - the in-built mental schemas we have of how the world works - are of limited accuracy. Real physics are frequently counter-intuitive to humans, observing the real world to a degree where you can say you "know the rules" is enough to cause cognitive dissonance in majority of humans. Indeed, I would go so far to say that the only reason most humans don't live in constant state of cognitive dissonance, is because they lack the brainpower to keep all statements of what they believe in mind at once, and thus don't notice contradictions between them unless something specifically calls them to attention.

The corollary to that is that if your game is meant to model some complex world, real world and real simulations of physics very much included, you'll have to live with some players feeling dissonant despite you doing everything right. For some genres (cosmic and existential horror, for examples), them feeling dissonant is proof that you're doing everything right.

For any question of game design, I absolutely care more about perception than any sort of purely logical measure. If a game technically contains zero hard contradictions but a large portion of the players say they experience dissonance playing it, I care about the latter not the former when trying to design that game to be better.

Caring more about perceptions means you can make your game rules wild nonsense in those areas your players aren't meant to perceive. It also means you can largely abandon rules as simulation - the overarching purpose of your rules is to create fiction that appeals to perceptions of a player. Simulation is only useful as a tool when and where it serves that purpose better than alternatives.

Examples of these principles in practice are abundant in modern computer games, which save work by performing all kinds of trickery - graphics are only rendered when they are within player's field of view, objects cease to exist when they are out of range for interaction, the world outside bounds of a game area is a featureless void, so on and so forth.

I, too, care about what my players feel, but lessening the feeling (in this case, dissonance) is not automatically the direction for "better". See above point about genres.

The point of 'take the setting, take the mechanics you are aware of as the player, reimagine the setting as if the characters knew what you know' is that it's an easy way to force yourself to evaluate for that experience without having to encounter it in play, especially if e.g. you're familiar with the LitRPG genre where authors explore in detail the question of how living within an exposed system of rules might shape behaviors differently, since then you can have a mental checklist of alternate cultures and say 'would this happen?' for each.

I don't agree that this is an easier method than just counting contradictions or just playtesting the game, and I don't think it is particularly useful, hence this line of arguments. Using LitRPG stories as reference points strikes me as particularly awful. Do tell if you have any such story in mind which stands up to even obsolete hard sci-fi, like, say, works of Jules Verne.

[martixy]

I endorse everything Vahnavoi said above.

In addition my personal experience has been that striving for consistency / avoiding contradictions has the emergent effect of reducing dissonance to the greatest degree. In all media I've had the opportunity to experience - books and movies included.

Btw, have we agreed yet that Quertus's metric is subjective? (There's a novel's worth of text in this thread that I'm not about to exhaust completely.)

[NichG]

I don't disagree with that, my point is that among those commonalities is physical temperature for feelings of hot and cold and contradictions for feelings of cognitive dissonance. You'll be measuring those if you want useful measurements, they're the "physics" half of psychophysics.

My turn to nitpick an analogy I guess, but no, that's incorrect. Feeling of hot and cold is primarily detecting heat flow, not physical temperature, at least below 110F iirc. That's why things like wind chill, humidity, etc factor in.

Similarly, focusing on logical contradictions for cognitive dissonance is the tail wagging the dog. Definitions don't determine experience, they are our attempt to try to bound parts of it so it can be discussed. But if you were to tell someone 'the thing that bothers you isn't actually a contradiction', you'd be abusing your definition

I, too, care about what my players feel, but lessening the feeling (in this case, dissonance) is not automatically the direction for "better". See above point about genres.

As I said before, 'should's are personal. I don't need to convince you that optimizing this is universally better. If it captures what Quertus feels is wrong with 4e well enough to identify how to change it, it's already done it's job. If it captures the tastes of a subgroup of players who do tend to roll out the implications of mechanics as the way they understand a game world, even better.

Does that mean that it's a good fit for someone looking for high drama method acting, or someone who doesn't want to interact with anything other than the mechanics? No, it's not trying to be that.

I don't agree that this is an easier method than just counting contradictions or just playtesting the game, and I don't think it is particularly useful, hence this line of arguments. Using LitRPG stories as reference points strikes me as particularly awful. Do tell if you have any such story in mind which stands up to even obsolete hard sci-fi, like, say, works of Jules Verne.

LitRPG is not supposed to be an ideal to reach for in this case, it's supposed to help increase contrast so you don't subconsciously heal the gap between the way things are presented to work and the way things are presented to be. Basically, being aware of LitRPG stuff helps you beta test from a different mindset than you might take as an author (where of course things make sense to you, you came up with them).

It's like a lot of critical methods. You ask specific questions because it forces you to be aware that they require answers. Would this guy really choose to learn X spell if he could literally see the list of all spells on leveling up and pick one to learn? Does it make sense that 'getting a rare spell' is a meaningful motivation for wizards of that's true? Etc.

[kyoryu]

Btw, have we agreed yet that Quertus's metric is subjective? (There's a novel's worth of text in this thread that I'm not about to exhaust completely.)

... sort of?

There's an objective bit to it, that I think is insufficient to explain the observed behavior. Specifically, yes, you can look at a game and weigh how many decisions are made in character vs. not in character.

There's two issues I have with this:

1) What one considers in-character is, itself, subjective. Are martial dailies in character? Depends on who you ask.

2) Certain out-of-character things seem to matter more than others. For many people, spending minutes plotting out precise paths or doing lookup charts on calculations is just fine, but something like a Declaration in Fate completely ruins "roleplaying" for them.

I do think that, overall, the more time you spend in your character's head the better for "roleplaying" - provided you have internalized the mechanics sufficiently.

[Vahnavoi]

My turn to nitpick an analogy I guess, but no, that's incorrect. Feeling of hot and cold is primarily detecting heat flow, not physical temperature, at least below 110F iirc. That's why things like wind chill, humidity, etc factor in.

I'm pretty sure if you want to accurately describe heat flow, physical temperature makes an appearance sooner or later. Additionally, humans used their sense of hot and cold as measure of temperature before figuring out physical temperature, which is more relevant to my analogy. The real takeaway which applies to points made by both of us is that psychophysical measures are complex variables which can be broken down to simpler variables. It's bad news for Quertus, though, because it means simplest metric that captures everything he wants, probably isn't all that simple.

Similarly, focusing on logical contradictions for cognitive dissonance is the tail wagging the dog. Definitions don't determine experience, they are our attempt to try to bound parts of it so it can be discussed. But if you were to tell someone 'the thing that bothers you isn't actually a contradiction', you'd be abusing your definition .

A better description of abuse would be "there is no contradiction, so you can't feel cognitive dissonance". It would also be me contradicting myself, given I've explained that cognitive measure is not perfect measure of contradictions - it's possible to not feel dissonance despite presence of contradiction (because you can't process all the statements to spot it) and possible to feel dissonance despite absence of contradiction (because you can't process all the statements to solve it).

As I said before, 'should's are personal. I don't need to convince you that optimizing this is universally better. If it captures what Quertus feels is wrong with 4e well enough to identify how to change it, it's already done it's job. If it captures the tastes of a subgroup of players who do tend to roll out the implications of mechanics as the way they understand a game world, even better.

Does that mean that it's a good fit for someone looking for high drama method acting, or someone who doesn't want to interact with anything other than the mechanics? No, it's not trying to be that.

The "shoulds" I'm trying to convince you of exist because I'm convinced you, Cluedrew and especially Quertus can save work by cutting out pointless extra steps, given your goals. Though I'm fairly sure you know that even given different terminal goals, instrumental goals can be congruent, meaning my personal "shoulds" might still work for you.

LitRPG is not supposed to be an ideal to reach for in this case, it's supposed to help increase contrast so you don't subconsciously heal the gap between the way things are presented to work and the way things are presented to be. Basically, being aware of LitRPG stuff helps you beta test from a different mindset than you might take as an author (where of course things make sense to you, you came up with them).

It's like a lot of critical methods. You ask specific questions because it forces you to be aware that they require answers. Would this guy really choose to learn X spell if he could literally see the list of all spells on leveling up and pick one to learn? Does it make sense that 'getting a rare spell' is a meaningful motivation for wizards of that's true? Etc.

Without a specific example of a LitRPG story serving these purposes particularly well, I have no idea how to evaluate your claim. Given examples of the genre known to me, pretty much any non-fiction on critical methods, game design, world building, and whatever the subject of your game is supposed to be, are a better use of one's time.

[Quertus]

The delta between 'playing purely based on the rules' and 'playing purely based on the fiction' seems like a reasonable metric, but I don't think a simple "% of decisions" is going to give useful results.

Obvious fail case - a campaign where the players only get to make one choice, but that choice is entirely IC - is that a perfect 100% RPG?

Quality of choices needs to be considered over just quantity. If we consider these two games:
A) The process of buying cold-weather clothing was entirely IC, but the strategy against the frost dragon was driven by OOC factors and was extremely unintuitive IC.
B) The process of buying cold-weather clothing was abstracted in a way that doesn't really make sense IC, but the strategy against the frost dragon was entirely driven by IC logic and the rules supported that with no disjunction.

Even if there were technically more decisions involved in buying the cold-weather gear, those aren't the decisions which had the most impact, had the most screen time, or had the most importance to the players. I think most people would consider (B) the superior RPG if they considered "acting on IC-logic" to be an important quality.


And to add an additional factor, when we talk about Determinator vs IC-Player ... which IC? Because someone who's familiar with a system can make a character who's thematically consistent, makes entirely IC-based choices, and is only a little less effective than a Determinator. So can someone ignorant of the system, if they happen to make the right choices by luck. But, they could also make the wrong choices, resulting in their character being vastly less effective than a Determinator.

So are we basing it on the best case, or the worst? Because the worst is almost always going to be a large delta for any crunchy system. In fact by the "worst case" metric, 4E might score better than 3E because you have less flexibility in char-gen and thus less ability to make a mechanically-awful character. That leaves best or "average", and the latter is extremely subjective. Maybe a good metric would be to consider the different RPG% for each different type of character concept possible in the system and then average those ... which sounds like an impossible amount of work to do accurately.

Yup. Spherical cows. This is why the metric I actually used was far more complicated than the simple metric I’m discussing in this thread.

However, even the simple metric makes things like “choose your own adventure book” stand out as clearly “not like the others”.

How about "4e does not capture what I enjoy about role-playing games"?

While true, it carries less meaning than spelling out what the speaker cares about. Like saying, “it wasn’t fun” says less than Understanding Angry’s “8 sources of fun”, and saying which source you care about. Which even that is spherical cows, and provides less information than “I like dice, and dislike mood music” (both in the same category).

What are the two choices? (Thought this was one of the two obvious choices in that situation.)

Ah, guess you missed that I explained them: I ask how you wait. Wait and multitask, or wait and NOOP? Wait and read / listen to music (multitask, drown out environment), or just wait (single task focus, observe environment)?

That's entirely the point though and why I think this is not a red herring. The reason this is worth discussing is because I believe that these are not what your metric is supposed to be measuring (the whole objective measure of a system thing) and believe it could be.

Let's say that you are heading down the dungeon hallway and at the end of there is some decision point that can go either way. So in this snippet we have a 1/1 or 0/1 response. But let's say as you are heading down the hallway and a party member turns to you, says something and you reply in character. Suddenly the outcome is 2/2 or 1/2. If you have picked a line then these changes will push some systems over it. (Also where is the line between 0 and 1?)

So, my 40 point example has failed me again for the last time.

As a slight nod to this (or, at least, to what I think you’re saying), I discounted 13 of the 40 decision points as only “technical” decision points, where the system + module do not anticipate a meaningful choice. Like how, in a choose your own adventure book, one does not expect the reader to stop reading mid page, and flip to a different page. Ok, bad example, because that’s (presumably) not rules legal. Technically, players can react to deceptive text, but it isn’t the expected norm.

That is, I believe, the one concession to “it’s complicated” that I made in the simple metric, that you’re ignoring technical / no agency “decisions”.

The “turn right or turn left” bit is actually more.… uh.… difficult, if you want be difficult. Because it can change (as you were talking about) the number of meaningful decision points. As could exploration / optional content, or any other branching structure.

So, yes, even the simple method is complicated, in a way.

There are, I suppose, two ways of looking at / using it.

You can go by simple “feel”, just do a single run through, and notice where the pain points are (every single decision in a “choose your own adventure” book, certain places depending on which abstraction of HP you use, when you would metagame to “make a better story” or not be “that guy”, when you had to upgrade your ship else TPK, etc). Then properly attribute those to the system vs outside influences. You’ll have a feel for *where* the pain points are, and how often they came up in this run.

Or you can measure hundreds of sessions (actual, or virtual using branching decision trees), calculating such probabilities until the numbers stop changing significantly.

I still haven’t exactly responded well to your 1/1 vs 2/2 comment. So let me beat a little closer to the bush: the sample session I used had around 40 decision points, only 27 of which were relevant. Any time you’re measuring one or two, “noise” can be bigger than “data”. Don’t measure that. That doesn’t make for a good metric of reliable numbers (unless, after one or two decisions in a choose your own adventure book, you see the pattern, and realize “0%” isn’t going to change, no matter how many pages you flip).

However, yes, as an example, one or two is arguably more approachable than 27 or 40. Will the decisions that the party makes affect the numbers? Yes and no.

Yes, they can change the number of decision points by “reacting to nothing”.

Gah, why is this so hard? If Deku confesses his love to Picard (main characters of first two shows to come to mind), yes, that’s roleplaying, but, unless the system has “roleplaying” mechanics, the system won’t prevent that. So I’m not even looking at that (yet). Just for the things that the system does have mechanics for, what does it hard ban and soft ban? Choose your own adventure hard bans anything not explicitly on its white list. Starfinder bans not upgrading your ship every few levels. How many decisions does the system (not the other players) prompt you with in the time it forces how many decisions out of roleplaying stance, on average?

If we don’t have a module, we can get different results, like how different bodies of water produces different buoyancy results, or have different concentrations of heavy water.

But if we do have a module, where the variance in results is only really measuring how good the GM is at noticing that, when the tunnel splits right and left, the party could go right, or left, or back, or stay put, or split up, or tunnel up or down or forward, or teleport, or travel to another plane, or through time, or.…

Senility willing, I’ll insert my usual example here.

Please elaborate.

Dang. Context.… subjective experience. Ah.

If you say, “dice aren’t fun, so I’ll remove them”, you only express your ignorance of the fun others have with dice, and disqualify yourself from making such decisions.

If you say, “HP don’t model reality, because <face tank a cannonball>, therefore D&D fails”, then, at best, you reveal your ignorance about what D&D HP are designed to model (not reality, more action hero), how D&D handles wounds (not face tanking), and how D&D models face tanking (death, or coup de grace), and disqualify yourself from such discussions until you re-educate.

If you discuss subjective experiences with regard to my simplified metric.… well, there’s several possibilities. You could misunderstand the metric, you could be (dis)qualifying yourself as perceiving decision points / possible decisions, you could be (dis)qualifying yourself for understanding the fiction & the difference between choices based on fiction vs rules.… hmmm.… and there’s an unexpected “or” there, that I’ll bet is what you’re trying to get me to see. Or the system doesn’t have an official, company published module, and your results and mine could vary wildly, if we either use just a single run, or “get caught in a rut” of wildly differing expectations of what a session in the system means.

Huh. Well, *if* we get to the point where we’re getting similar results on the same content, if we get to the point where it’s clear that the model is understood by enough people, then we could run an experiment to see what the numbers look like when comparing arbitrary content. That could be fun!

[Vahnavoi]

Obvious fail case - a campaign where the players only get to make one choice, but that choice is entirely IC - is that a perfect 100% RPG?

It's not an obvious fail case at all - you could just accept it as the simplest possible roleplaying game and be done with it. There's only an issue with that if Quertus is married to a notion that the minimum amount of choices in a game has to be more than one for it to count.

[NichG]

I'm pretty sure if you want to accurately describe heat flow, physical temperature makes an appearance sooner or later. Additionally, humans used their sense of hot and cold as measure of temperature before figuring out physical temperature, which is more relevant to my analogy. The real takeaway which applies to points made by both of us is that psychophysical measures are complex variables which can be broken down to simpler variables. It's bad news for Quertus, though, because it means simplest metric that captures everything he wants, probably isn't all that simple.

A better description of abuse would be "there is no contradiction, so you can't feel cognitive dissonance". It would also be me contradicting myself, given I've explained that cognitive measure is not perfect measure of contradictions - it's possible to not feel dissonance despite presence of contradiction (because you can't process all the statements to spot it) and possible to feel dissonance despite absence of contradiction (because you can't process all the statements to solve it).

The "shoulds" I'm trying to convince you of exist because I'm convinced you, Cluedrew and especially Quertus can save work by cutting out pointless extra steps, given your goals. Though I'm fairly sure you know that even given different terminal goals, instrumental goals can be congruent, meaning my personal "shoulds" might still work for you.

Mostly what I'm hearing from you though is 'this distinction you're leveraging to analyze things doesn't technically exist because there's only ever just natural language text', when that distinction, even if potentially subjective, is one with a pretty high degree of intersubjective agreement. So that seems mostly obstructive to me, rather than actually making things any easier.

Without a specific example of a LitRPG story serving these purposes particularly well, I have no idea how to evaluate your claim. Given examples of the genre known to me, pretty much any non-fiction on critical methods, game design, world building, and whatever the subject of your game is supposed to be, are a better use of one's time.

Worth the Candle has good examples of in-character optimization behaviors resulting from ove character having a visible stat system, and others around them being invested in their leveling choices. It also has 'does progressing mental stats change your personality' questions, as well as questions about intimacy in relationships which could have been shaped by e.g. a Charisma stat.

Beneath the Dragoneye Moons has cultural practices around who is allowed to advance their character at all (with progressing level beyond what social status allows being worth a death penalty in one culture, with parents and priesthood having the right to pick a child's base class in another) and has the ability to detect another's class lead to implied targeting behaviors along the lines of 'gank the mage'.

Stuff like Primal Hunter has the whole 'if you are rewarded XP only for killing things, society looks really different as a result' angle.

Wandering Inn has the angle that perceiving a structured rule system behind the world implies agency, and it might not be friendly agency, so you have characters giving the side eye to bits of the system that have obvious incentive structures behind them or refusing to accept class levels from their actions when offered them. You also have stuff like a character realizing they can pick their class and using that to pick 'Emperor' even though they have no connection to the nobility, knowledge of the precise multiclass progression tradeoff being a secret of the existing in-power nobility, how people deal with having individual characters in their society who are just completely outside of the norm in durability or ability to commit violence, impacts of the large range in attainable personal power on tech level and things like commerce guild structures...

There's also Sylver Seeker where the system is literally a hostile thing added to the world between when the MC was killed as a lich and when he reformed, and you have the conflict between his pre-system ways of doing e.g. magic and the post-system way that people expect things to work. Sort of explores the line between magic as the consequence of utilizing a collection of knowledge and experience in manipulating forces and magic as a toolbar of buttons you can press.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's bad news for Quertus, though, because it means simplest metric that captures everything he wants, probably isn't all that simple.

I am reminded of something from H.L. Mencken
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

[Vahnavoi]

The actual thing I'm trying to make people hear is that the distinctions I'm criticizing are category errors and hence don't lead to useful analysis. "Fiction versus rules" implies fiction cannot itself be game rules, which is false. "Fluff versus crunch", in the way it is typically used, has two different meanings, and people equivocating between the two leads to a conclusion that the format in which rules are given (natural language versus formal notation, usually math) decides rule priority, which is also false. It doesn't matter if there's high degree of agreement over what the distinction is, because my issue isn't with subjectivity, my issue is that the agreement is over the wrong thing.

Suppose there are two kinds of berries from two different plants which are both red. Due to how words are constructed, it's easy to get two words or concepts, "thisberry red" and "thatberry red". It is equally easy to get people to agree that these concepts refer to two distinct colors. Why? Because there is a difference in category:plant, it's easy to assume there is also a difference in category:color. Even if actual color analysis shows the ranges of red color these two kinds of berries can be overlap perfectly, people can die on weirdest hills to argue that not only does a difference in color exist, it is also super meaningful. Don't be those people.

[NichG]

The actual thing I'm trying to make people hear is that the distinctions I'm criticizing are category errors and hence don't lead to useful analysis. "Fiction versus rules" implies fiction cannot itself be game rules, which is false. "Fluff versus crunch", in the way it is typically used, has two different meanings, and people equivocating between the two leads to a conclusion that the format in which rules are given (natural language versus formal notation, usually math) decides rule priority, which is also false. It doesn't matter if there's high degree of agreement over what the distinction is, because my issue isn't with subjectivity, my issue is that the agreement is over the wrong thing.

The thing is, the format in which rules are given does often decide rule priority in practice. And even beyond questions of priority, it determines how people will interface with the rules. People behave differently after 'roll initiative' is called than when chatting with an NPC. In a sort of purist sense it's true that they don't have to or 'there's no reason from the point of view of the rules that they should behave that way', but they in fact do. That matters, because it's what you'll actually encounter when you go to play the game at a table rather than having pure theorycraft discussion.

[Cluedrew]

Btw, have we agreed yet that Quertus's metric is subjective?

More or less. I am not at complete confidence, but like 9/10 or 19/20. Then there is the added issue that even if it turns out to be objective, the group it describes are definitely not role-playing games. In the worst case it may not describe anything of significance to anyone who is not Quertus. That though is much less certain.

Ah, guess you missed that I explained them: I ask how you wait. Wait and multitask, or wait and NOOP? Wait and read / listen to music (multitask, drown out environment), or just wait (single task focus, observe environment)?

Well I wasn't trying to buy time. I'll go with wait and watch.

So, my 40 point example has failed me again for the last time.
[...]
Senility willing, I'll insert my usual example here.

You know what, if after my next point is addressed you want me to come back to this I will but mostly I think it factors into the next issue.

Dang. Context.... subjective experience. Ah.
[...]
Huh. Well, *if* we get to the point where we're getting similar results on the same content, if we get to the point where itÂ’s clear that the model is understood by enough people, then we could run an experiment to see what the numbers look like when comparing arbitrary content. That could be fun!

You missed one: Your metric has broad subjective inputs so if any two significantly different people use it they will get significantly different results.

I don't see how the metric has the properties you say it does. Which doesn't account for a lot on its own, either of us could be wrong, but also no one else in this thread seems to get in. Also, we have been going on a good deal longer than even the 6 page tier 1 discussion (not in this thread alone, but across the 3 or more threads) and how you have been discussing it has made me worried on occasion (Here you are basically stating you are operating on a basis of confirmation bias in this regard, you are not accepting input that doesn't match what you expect.). So I want to cut through as much cruft as possible and go straight to the source. I want the full instructions for the complete metric to determine if a system is a role-playing game. And then I will might spend some time just thinking about if I can follow them directly without interpretation (of the instructions or the results) before actually thinking about where it leads.

[Vahnavoi]

The thing is, the format in which rules are given does often decide rule priority in practice.

Which format decides is based on rules of the game as agreed upon and enforced by participants of a game contract. Failure to realize this, such as due to the mentioned equivocational fallacy, creates false analyses, such as the idea that freeform roleplaying has no rules because it's, well, free in format ( or rather, free-er, but that's an argument for another day). Or the idea that one format always takes priority regardless of game. Or inability to spot the paradox in "use character viewpoint fiction, not rules" when there are games where the rules enforce using the character's viewpoint fiction.

And even beyond questions of priority, it determines how people will interface with the rules. People behave differently after 'roll initiative' is called than when chatting with an NPC. In a sort of purist sense it's true that they don't have to or 'there's no reason from the point of view of the rules that they should behave that way', but they in fact do. That matters, because it's what you'll actually encounter when you go to play the game at a table rather than having pure theorycraft discussion.

Your example is plain wrong. There IS a reason from point of view of the rules for people to change their behavior: I am giving them a warning signal because the game situation is about to change. And there ARE different formats in which I can give the same signal to trigger the same behaviour, for example "prepare for combat". Beyond your example, I'm not sure what you're even saying - remove the example, and what's left reads like something you already should know I would trivially agree with.