Well also, if I recall, directly addressing someone after banning them actually allows them right of reply to some extent. Pretty sure that precedent is long set. So by doing that I'm pretty sure he lets me make this post.The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Ah, the classic "reply to someone then ban them from your thread" tactic. Gets 'em every time.
OK so Dean's reply is "interesting", but not what I was looking for.
I asked whether it was best to ask for help with something without describing it and while misleadingly describing something else. I think that's very important for basic coherency of communication on the den.
I asked whether "what do people think is cool?" is the place to be 2 years into a project. I think that's important to understand where this project is even at.
And I asked what these "Translations" are, because I think that's important to have any idea what suggestions people actually want to make to feed into this... "process"?
I still don't have answers on those. Instead what I got is an unexpected contradiction.
Previously almost the only description of the project itself was something I'm entirely in favor of. Rules Transparency and integrated in setting character knowledge of and interaction with game rules. Something I think is a great GMing technique and have been promoting since so long ago on the Den it would be hard to find it even with Google cache. Though it seems an odd choice as the primary design point for an entire system rather than just a thing you do as a GM with any system, as after all "the characters know what levels are" isn't telling us much about the nature of the game rules themselves.
But now we get this contradictory text about UI and Physics Engines. Which first of all, doesn't seem to pause to tell us how this interacts with the testing "Translations" process in a way that actually helps. But is once you strip it bare of some unfortunate incorrect conflations to computer games basically one of the most Grognardy of retrograde design philosophies out there.
The idea that some rules. The real rules that actually do things are the domain of the GM only, and that the players are stuck in a shallow fraudulent play pen separated several steps away from the real rules that they do not know or directly interact with is very, VERY old school Gygaxian sort of stuff. And directly in opposition to any ideas about transparency and world integration.
So essentially at this point I know... less... about what Dean is trying to achieve here. While still not getting the answer to my actual questions about how he was trying to achieve it.