Orion vs. Lobster; how I think; rhetorical devices

[Orion]

@PhoneLobster,

Upon reflection, I have decided that it is worthwhile for me to respond to some of the objections you've raised in the "context" thread, but for several reasons I've decided that I'd rather do it here than there. [*]I think there's a good chance that any back-and-forth between us is likely to go long, and I don't want it to drown out the rest of the conversation or disincentivize other posters from staying up to date on that thread. [*]I also think it has the potential to imperil my forward momentum. I'm willing to spend a non-zero amount of effort defending what I've said up to now, but it is very important to me that I keep moving forward and breaking new ground without letting myself get caught up on early battlefield's. I'll get into the reasons for that in a moment.[*]My explanation needs to go to a meta-level; it looks like you perceive to be making more and stronger claims than the claims that I intend to be making; I'm hoping that this thread can serve in part as a guide to the interpretation of the other thread, so i'd rather they weren't commingled.[*]Finally, in this thread I'm going to have to get personal in a way that will leave me fairly vulnerable. I would prefer to keep the personal stuff segregated from my actual work output so that I can walk away from this if I need to, or at least choose when and how to engage with it.

How I Think:

As a thinker, I'm at my very weakest when I try to limit myself to dealing with one topic or idea at a time. I'm not good at working things out step-by-step systematically. I'm not good at finishing one task before moving to another. I'm especially not good at justifying my intuitions in the moment that they come to me. I do tend to be good at holding many ideas of options in my head at the same time. I tend to be good at spotting relationships and interactions that other people might miss. I tend to be good at rapidly shifting focus between tasks, at seeing connections between parts of a system, and at combining tools from multiple disciplines.

When I have a multi-step project I often like to follow a "thread" that cuts across what someone else would perceive the steps to be. If I needed to design a vehicle with 6 parts i'd start by writing down a few details about fuselage, then jump to working out what that implied about the engine, then go from there to what that implied about the drive system. Often I'll "spiral" through a sequence like that for multiple iterations. I also like "shuttling" back and forth. If you asked me whether I'd prefer to design my classes and then write a setting for them or write a setting and then design classes for it, i'd say, "Neither. I'd prefer to design a couple classes, then extrapolate an implied setting, then think about what other classes that setting would require and then how those classes would change the setting. . ."

My most exciting insights usually feel like glimpses into deep structures that relate 3 or more seemingly distinct spheres of action or inquiry. These are never easy to explain to anyone, especially since they don't come to me verbalized. The unit building blocks of my thinking are often verbal, but spatial metaphors do a lot of work for me also. When I say that I "see" "connections" between ideas, I often mean that I literally see a strand of webbing in an imaginary manifold between symbolic representations of a half-dozen topics. This can make the working-out of my own thoughts a somewhat convoluted process. I might start out by intuitively perceiving a systematic interaction between three parts, but it's only through the work of putting it down into words that I can start to gather the details which (I hope) will confirm the intuition and flesh out how it works. Explaining these insights to anyone else's satisfaction is a yet bigger challenge. If the insight is based on a synthesis of previous concepts drawn from multiple topics, I need an audience that is familiar with all of those topics and the way I approach them before I can expect them to be able to evaluate my new idea. Building up the vocabulary to even engage with the proposal is a non-trivial issue. So, when you say things like

You should have titled this "ideas Orion has about stuff" . . . it's your bizarre fantasy that they fit under the roof of one label.

or

I'm sorry but this is basically nonsense, especially the choice and repeated use of "embedded" as jargon utterly unrelated to the plain meaning of the word, and then having it change in meaning to suit whatever you are saying as you progress.

All I can say in the moment is that I'm sure it looks that way to you now. I've been going around getting all the pieces on the board so that I can go on to do what I actually want to do, which is to show my audience that all these things are connected to each other in non-obvious ways. I'm working out some of those connections as I go, and I know from the outset of these projects that the vaguest/most "umbrella" terms that I use probably won't survive to the end. Words like "embedding" were never intended to make it into anyone's permanent lexicon. They are intended to tip my hand and show you which topics I intend to link together and act as place-holders for the more useful & specific concepts that will hopefully emerge from this project. Obviously, you do not at this moment have any particular reason to take my word for it when I tell you that all these things really are connected, but I think the best I can do is to push forward on that thread into some applications. I am talking about it here because I expect this to be a recurring tension. Most of my future projects will be about convincing people that seemingly-unrelated things are actually connected by deep structure, and I will probably have to spend some time setting up the board before I can reveal the connections. I can only hope that in the future I will have merited a more charitable reception.

[Orion]

Rhetorical Devices vs. actual models.

Sometimes when I'm looking for an expedient way to explain something I end up doing something that looks like I'm proposing a model but really shouldn't be taken all that seriously.

Now you've tried to wedge two styles of game play that are not actually related to liking call backs, onto a scale of liking call backs or not. Given them shit exclusive labels and GNSed hard talking about "types of gamer".

Then you try and talk about leveling up, bring in more not very useful artificial labels

I can see why it looked like I was proposing a systematic approach to player psychology but I'm really, really not. I was definitely being a bit sloppy about explaining what I was up to, though. So let's clear that up a bit.

I'm NOT saying that the particular divisions I made are derived from factor analysis or that they have construct validity. I have no rigorous reasons for splitting the player-space along those axes instead of doing it along any number of equally-valid axes. I'm NOT saying that they have inter-rater reliability (that one player would be assigned to the same category by multiple objective observers). I'm especially NOT saying that they have any kind of permanence. I have no way of knowing whether someone who acts like a "solver" in one campaign has a stable personality trait of "being a solver" or whether they might flip to acting like a "builder" in a different campaign.

All I'm really trying to do is use the human affinity for narrative to make it easier to visualize the answer to a question. Someone asked me what the "high-context" way to do something would be, and that's not a straightforward question. There's only one way to have NO context, but any number of ways to have SOME context. There are different kinds of context you can use in a game, and so there are going to be different "high-context" ways to handle any topic. So I knew the answer was ultimately going to be "it depends on what kind of context your players are interested in exploring in your game."

I decided that the best way to get that across would be to use examples, and the easiest examples to process are basically narratives with characters. It is easier for people to visualize a hypothetical player with the persistent trait of caring about a certain kind of context, than to visualize a generic player in the contingent state of caring about one kind of context. It's also possible to discuss the issue with fewer words by slapping little labels on things. So instead of talking about "what you should do if you're in a situation where the most interesting part of your campaign's context happens to the dynamic interactions between your multiple enemies" I can talk about "what you should do if you're running for Solvers."

You could easily pick a different set of arbitrary dimensions to divide players up with and probably generate a different set of useful heuristics.

[Orion]

You've really hated on

You talked a bunch about liking

My thread, really, really is not a list of likes and dislikes. There is a definite upper limit to how much context a game can even afford to deal with. You are probably going to want to skip some types of context to make room for the ones that you care more about, if your game cares about context. Not all games need to. I'm especially interested in encouraging people to design using certain types of context that I think are currently under-utilized. But I have nothing against playing low-context games. In fact, there are already plenty of low-context games that I enjoy! I'm less interested in low-context design right now because I already have good low-context games to play. I also think that thinking about context will be a useful exercise even for people who don't actually use any. If you choose to go no-context, and you're consciously no-context, then you can actually exploit the freedom that you buy yourself when you jettison that context.

So, i don't think "unembedded" things are bad. But I do think "full embedded" things are best? Also no. Actually a lot of my favorite ideas are the ones that I listed in the middle, although not always. "Full embedding" wasn't a very good phrase, and I knew that when I used it, but I didn't have a better option available. I wanted to name a certain thread that I had intuitively perceived but wasn't yet able to describe. I'm not 100% there yet but I think it was mostly about "legibility." In any event, the fully embedded things were never supposed to be better, just to resemble each other in certain ways that will be unpacked later.

[Foxwarrior]

You might want to try being more... poetic? Poetry is good for conveying the sense of an idea without having a complete idea to convey, right? So that people can let the gist of what you're getting at wash over them instead of struggling to understand the unfinished thoughts in a literal way.

[PhoneLobster]

Orion, I don't want to be mean. But, can you really look over this thread here and actually believe you've said... something?

You've mostly made a bunch of rambling irrelevant non-statements surrounding what are basically a few un-supported one line denials that what anyone could plainly see was obviously the case in the prior thread... just wasn't for no particular reason that could possibly be explained.

So I'll just latch on to this. I also identify myself as someone who is good at identifying hidden patterns and relations.

I have used this ability to notice a few things.

1) A lot of people identify themselves as someone who is good at identifying hidden patterns and relations.

2) Especially in TTRPG design.

3) Relatively few of them seem to have any grasp that pattern identification is not a purely positive trait. It has some pretty disadvantageous risks associated with it.

4) People get carried away with their pattern identification and start doing the game design equivalents of obsessive compulsive sorting and raving conspiracy theory very easily.

I could go on at length. I could try and give you some warnings and advice under various fun headings like "beware category wank" and "actual humans will not fit into your crappy stereotypes" and "if you cannot relate directly back to practical game play you have achieved nothing" and "If you refuse to make a value judgment your judgement might lack value" and also "Do not defend your meta-wank design philosophy with a meta-meta-wank design design philosophy."

But I think that's probably a bit pointless, and to some extent falling for the same compulsive wank that I'd like to warn you off.

You should be able to consider my simple point about pattern matching risks, apply a little humility and pattern matching of your own and look at your own posts and see the problem staring you in the face.

If you cannot do that you are either actually kinda bad at pattern matching, or so far gone with it that you are vanishing into the rabbit hole of minor paranoid delusion.

You don't have to be the GNS guy again. No one should be the GNS guy again, not on any noticeable scale. That sort of stuff isn't helpful, least of all for yourself.

[OgreBattle]

Your Shadowrun simplified was easy to grasp, ever think of adding to it?

[PhoneLobster]

Just wow Orion, apprently rather than engaging with anything I have said any time at all. You made a whole thread to (pretend) engage me and when I offered any response... you didn't. Instead you've decided to panic and pull your galaxy brain turtle head in and name ban me from your nonsensical rambling thread?

WTF is wrong with you? Your one remotely substantive attempt at defense, that you refused to stand by or defend in this thread, was a completely nuts claim you have secret visual hallucination pattern matching super powers that cannot be explained and you should just be trusted when you declare large groups of things to be the same thing.

I don't like this, I feel like I'm bullying you because you and your idea are such incredibly weak targets, (hell after this thread I'm just a little worried about your mental health) but your idea is genuinely bad nonsense, it IS an attempt at your own brand of GNS, it genuinely needs to be criticized and harshly because that sort of thing really should not be the accepted standard here, or really anywhere for TTRPG design.

I've spent more effort than I like trying to tell you to calm the fuck down and ground yourself. To attempt to look on your own "deep thoughts" with an ounce of rational critical self assessment and you haven't done it have you? Not even god damn slightly have you? You have instead run from it as hard and fast as you can. I'm assuming with half formed tears in your eyes.

Have. Some. Fucking. Humility.

That's ME telling you that. Why the hell do I have to be the humility guy? No one was going to pick me for that role. But, apparently, your sheer level of hubris makes me the humility guy. And apparently humility guy is banned. Because you decided that here in the den, YOUR ideas need to be sheltered from criticism.

You understand why this is bad? Right? You understand that pulling your tail in and running without engagement like that isn't just bad for you, it's bad for your idea, bad for it's thread, and bad for the health of the community here in general. Do you grasp ANY of this?

[Dean]

Nah, defining terms and ideas in a design space is valuable. GNS isn't bad because someone created terms and defined them as a means to discuss ideas.
Gamist, Narrative, and Simulationist could be valuable terms to use in a discussion about RPG's. Like Id, Ego, and Superego they create a framework for discussion. The problem with GNS, like Freudian psychology, was then to try to define the world entirely within those terms and declaring that those terms made up some kind of holy trinity the encompassed the space. The mistake comes in when, instead of using terms to create shared terminology to describe the space, they declare the space is defined by the terms.

Orion isn't doing that. He made up a term, described it, then wants to speak about it. That's sensible and can add value to conversation.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I just wish I could understand half of what he's saying in either thread...

[Grek]

I think that PL can safely be ignored here. He's just doing his 'nothing that I didn't have a hand in creating can possibly be good' song and dance from half a decade ago in response to what amounts to some extended musings on various metrics by which a TTRPG adventure modules could be judged, how game systems limit the design space for modules and ways ways that a hypothetical TTRPG system could be written in order to encourage specific outcomes in terms of those metrics. This isn't Orion climbing up his own ass with terminology, it's systems design 101 where you try your best to spell out what results you want the system to accomplish before you sit down and start trying to write some rules. Yes, a lot of it is finger pointing at the moon 'I don't know how to describe the thing I'm talking about explicitly, so here's a thousand words gesturing at the thing, please help me formalize this' sort of writing. But the second page gets into some actual nuts and bolts, including a straight up wishlist at the current end of the second page. That's not being the GNS guy. That's doing TTRPG design 101 in a totally reasonable (if slightly inarticulate) way.

The first metric of comparison brought up is 'embedding' which I agree is a stupid name, but which does convey a useful notion of how much you want to let path dependence influence module-to-module interactions. The default answer from 3.5 module authors is to have as little path dependence as they can manage, because 3.5 makes path dependence hard to balance. If you make it so that the DM's choice of whether to run the 'Glories of the Elf Wars' module vs the 'Spines in the Mines of Brines' module at 3rd level has a strong impact on the equipment characters will possess going into the 5th level Mirrormazes module, you can't make anything in the Mirrormazes contingent on anything from the 3rd level modules, because you as a designer have no idea what those characters are actually going to have. Even if you read all of the 3rd level modules written to date, the DM might have written their own homebrew module or picked up a book of modules released after your module was published.

So instead you focus on including challenges with solutions contained within the module itself (ie. scroll of plant control available when there's going to be a shambling mound encounter), plotlines which have at best cosmetic effects on future modules (you can swap out questgiver names based on the winner of the Elf War, but you can't make a dragon encounter exist or not exist depending on if the characters slew that dragon when it was still a wyrmling) and on reward economies in which gear acquisition is largely independent of the specific content of the adventure, often in the form of magic items being crafted or purchased instead of found. All of that is a valid way to do modules, but the question is whether this is the only way to do modules. And so Orion sketches out some ideas on what a hypothetical TTRPG rulset would need to include or disinclude for an alternative answer to the question of path dependence to be viable.

The next two metrics of comparison are 'scope' (new content entering the story) and 'permanence' (old content becoming relevant again). While these aren't direct opposites - old content coming back up doesn't mean new content isn't also being introduced at the same time, it just means the new content exists within the context of the old content - it does funge against the same soft setting bloat limits for your campaign world. If you keep adding new stuff without having old stuff become irrelevant or outright ceasing to exist, you eventually reach a state where neither the GM nor the players can keep track of the full implications of any new event. Which in turn leads to plot holes and inconsistencies and is generally not very good to let happen. You might notice that permanence and embedding are basically the same thing here - if a story is highly embedded, it also has high permanence. The inverse isn't strictly true (you can have a high permanence campaign world in which the old content elements have only a narrative impact rather than influencing the resolution to various challenges), but for the purposes of figuring out whether your campaign setting has a expiration date and needs a finale episode to keep the Old Content lovers happy, you can basically treat them as basically the same thing.

Which in turn brings us back to the original point of embedding: that prior editions have already explored the unembedded/low permanence design space pretty thoroughly, which tends to be unsatisfying for players actually do want to have the impacts of their old adventures to keep coming up over and over again. Which in turn suggests that maybe it is time to try investigating ways to make RPG rulesets more friendly to highly embedded adventure module design in hopes of giving those audiences something that scratches that particular itch, or at least finding some low hanging fruit that can be ported back into the context of D&D. At this point Orion diverges into a bunch of ideas for what a high context ruleset would actually look like in terms of a wishlist of features as well as a list of things that are explicitly not wanted. I don't really feel the need to go through all of that besides remarking that yes, you should absolutely have one of these lists before you start writing up an RPG, because that is the metric by which you judge if your rules are doing a good job or not. Again, this is systems design 101, and not 'category wank'. If it was category wank, Orion wouldn't have been able to ground this whole concept in terms of ideas about crafting systems and retinues.

[PhoneLobster]

Grek, like most attempts at interacting with Orion's nonsense you are reading in things he didn't actually say.

It's the old technique of vague prophecy. He rambles like fuck with a lot of vague irrelevant nonsense and then lets YOU try and form meaning from it.

He never presented multiple metrics. He presented an argument that they are ALL just ONE "axis" a single metric each end of which was increasingly mutually exclusive to the other.

He didn't present scope and permanence as NEW metrics he did however at one point mistake scope and campaign bloat for the same thing while trying to explain how they fit on the scale of "embedded" by splitting players into multiple categories of inexplicably exclusively liking things that most players like and dislike a grab bag of all of.

You are treating it in the same way that people often misunderstood and misrepresented GNS, you are feeding in your own definitions and claims and defending them instead of what he actually said and believes. It's an easy mistake to make when someone talks such a huge volume of nonsense as Orion is talking here. But you should be better than falling for such a simple ruse.

[MGuy]

Half a decade ago PL criticized other people's materials by pointing out failure points and demanding that they address them. Now PL is pointing out that Orion's musing jump all over the place and don't work towards a better understanding of anything. Past and present PL's commentary has been aggressive but, in my opinion, good since the value of PL's criticism can be found by asking one's self if it is first valid. If it isn't valid then it's good to be able to identify how it isn't (for instance I didn't think his insistence that Orion was saying A/B was good/bad was valid given what was presented). If it is valid, which in this context I would say it is, then you can see where you went wrong and try to fix it.

What Orion has in this and the other thread are vague thoughts. Very vague. Where at the beginning of it I thought I knew what he was on about at this point it seems like he's trying to take things that don't necessarily have much to do with each other and cram them in some kind of broad variable slider. I do not know right now what the 'point' of what Orion is trying to get at is and I think that is evidence of a massive failure.

Edit: Also I don't get the point is in making a separate thread to engage with your biggest critic only to then not do so. I do not know what Orion's problem with PL's criticism is because it is not clear here or in the other thread what he thinks PL is wrong about outside of the fact that he's not saying anything is necessarily good or bad. I agree that while I could probably guess at what Orion might like/dislike from how he writes about it I don't think it matters for what he's doing now but I'm also no closer to understanding what the use of all this is supposed to be anymore.

[Sunwitch]

GNS at least has the advantage of sorta describing various things that different players will be looking for, in some degree, when they come to an RPG table; as much as it collapses on itself if it's thought of as a discrete, exhaustive or particularly substantive list of different "kinds" of RPG players. the thing with "embedding" as a concept is that it seems to actively conflate different variables of what people might be looking for in an RPG that are better understood in concrete, simple terms and abstracts them into a typology that seems impossible to apply to really anything?

like, i'm someone who prefers preconceived character advancement (i guess that's "unembedded"), the PCs as fluent and contextual actors in the setting (seemingly "embedded"), power sets that operate similarly between campaigns (seemingly "unembedded"), and serial rather than episodic campaign structure (seemingly "embedded"). i don't see the relationship between these things. and maybe i've misinterpreted what you're trying to do here, but... i'm actually not sure what it is you're trying to do in the first place.

sometimes, a framework of ideas and concepts can help facilitate understanding, but sometimes it can inhibit it. sometimes one can get so caught up in their own abstractions that they become self-referential and they fail to mean anything anymore. if you're having a hard time communicating things to other people - and this is something i've had to learn myself! - that might actually mean you've lost the plot and you need to reel it in. i think there are momentary places where people are finding some things you're saying important, but only in isolated situations where maybe what you're talking about has less to do with these categories than you've laid out. rather than obsessing over these weird categorization schema you've kinda conceived and tried to fit aleatory characteristics of players into, i think it's worth being more pragmatic about what all of this is supposed to actually do. because right now i'm pretty stumped!

[OgreBattle]

I understand it as...

Embedded = You need X specific thing to advance in this mission. X is an option not all characters have.

And then an 'unembedded' mission is doing what the game expects everyone to be capable of, like walking on dry land down stairs into a dungeon to deal hitpoint damage.

So then a module, adventure path, and so on should inform players you need X to advance, you need underwather breathing, you need flight. But then the Big Thinking is on how to convey this in the game, and how to have character progression in such a game.

---

I think GNS was based off a reading of Roger Caillois's "4 types of play", so I like using this format:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Cai ... as_on_play

Games are fun from...
- Roleplay, what you are pretending to be
- Chance, the unknown like a treasure chest or dark dungeon
- Skill, getting better at the game be it character building or making choices or execution under time pressure
- Vertigo/Visceral emotion, the feeling of a game like rotting zombies being gross, a dog jumping through a window being startling, tiddies being nice

[Sunwitch]

I understand it as...

Embedded = You need X specific thing to advance in this mission. X is an option not all characters have.

And then an 'unembedded' mission is doing what the game expects everyone to be capable of, like walking on dry land down stairs into a dungeon to deal hitpoint damage.

So then a module, adventure path, and so on should inform players you need X to advance, you need underwather breathing, you need flight. But then the Big Thinking is on how to convey this in the game, and how to have character progression in such a game.

i feel like problems shouldn't be so restricting as to have precisely one way of being solved, but if this is the case (which i don't think it is - very little of orion's initial post or extrapolation had to do with whether one option that a group might lack should be the basis of a mission's advancement), it should be specified. it should also be re-named, because that has nothing to do with "embedding" and even less to do with "context". there's all kinds of equivocating going on in the original post that's really spurious in this regard, and i think it ends up meaning a ton of independent if tangentially related variables get conflated as if there are almost one-to-one correlations between them. the move toward casting this as "rhetorical" that orion's making now just seems disingenuous, as does the effort to reduce it to a problem of supposedly incommensurable "ways of thinking"

[PhoneLobster]

I understand it as...

Your definition of embedded requires you to ignore easily more than 95% of Orion's definition of it.

Lets take your definition of embeddedness. how the hell does that mesh with Orion's other text, like I don't know, just for a start the utter insanity that was his text on embeddedness and Rewards?

I don't get how people do that. I see a giant pile of nonsense with a few bits of sensible buried in it and I call it nonsense, the nonsense over-rides the sensible. Especially when the sensible is only name drops on the determined and unswerving train to crazy town. Orion never stopped to discuss ANYTHING actually meaningful about level appropriate challenges, because it was never about that, they were just a place to stop, a real thing to mention, a named dropping way to try and leach credibility from something that actually is credible.

But I guess a lot of people like to pick the bit they like and ignore the overwhelming nonsense including direct contradictions of their preferred bit.

To me I see that as an abdication of intellectual rigor and a psychological weakness that inhibits good game design or even coherent discussion of it. The easy way out that lets you not actually think and means you never have to feel bad about being critical because your methodology pretty much prevents that from almost ever happening. Everything looks good when you ignore the bad bits.

[Sunwitch]

I don't get how people do that. I see a giant pile of nonsense with a few bits of sensible buried in it and I call it nonsense, the nonsense over-rides the sensible. Especially when the sensible is only name drops on the determined and unswerving train to crazy town. Orion never stopped to discuss ANYTHING actually meaningful about level appropriate challenges, because it was never about that, they were just a place to stop, a real thing to mention, a named dropping way to try and leach credibility from something that actually is credible.

this is just it. orion's post engages with a whole lot of things that are real considerations of RPG design and play but only in short spurts and with no coherent unifying theme, despite acting like it's all supposed to be about this single concept of context or embedding or whatever. then later it all goes off into really hypercube-grade weirdness with a bunch of supposed archetypes like "solvers", "builders", "scope" and "permanence" and like... i don't know how we got there. it seems like these are ideas that seem to make sense as related when yr just doing a whole bunch of idle a priori hypothesizing without really considering how it plays out in any kind of practical scenario

[Grek]

Edit: Also I don't get the point is in making a separate thread to engage with your biggest critic only to then not do so. I do not know what Orion's problem with PL's criticism is because it is not clear here or in the other thread what he thinks PL is wrong about outside of the fact that he's not saying anything is necessarily good or bad.

In the past, PL has completely derailed threads by trying to argue against what he sees as bad game design. Stepping in early to shoo PL out of the thread where you're trying to actually workshop a concept is probably smart. From there, I can only assume that this thread was posted to save face by offering some rebuttal to PL's arguments instead of just "Please leave." But I also have no idea what Orion expected to happen when PL inevitably replied here. It's not like anyone on this forum has the good grace to actually back down.

[Orion]

So far the most important takeaway lesson for me here has been PL's recommendation that I embrace humility. I made a token effort in that direction, but I should have been way more explicit at the beginning that I was basically at the "thinking out loud" stage of development and that a large chunks of the early posts would probably have to be discarded as false starts and dead ends. That's what I was trying to imply with my little disclaimer about not knowing if certain definitions were tenable and the possibility of rearranging things, but I should've been way more transparent about that. If anyone feels that I wasted their time, I apologize for that. I inadvertently dug myself in deeper on this thread with my comment about setting up the pieces. The idea I was trying to get across was something like "I need to finish getting all the dross out there before I can sift it for gold," but when I consider how it would look to a reader I can see that it looks like a claim that it's actually all gold.

I've used a similar creative process in the past to generate final products that had value to other people, but I've never done it in public before. I normally wouldn't go public with something this raw and I probably won't do so again. In this case I happen to have thought up the concept of "embedding" during a chat and posted a few paragraphs about it. Someone asked me to blog it somewhere so they could refer back to it, but I don't blog so I offered to make a thread instead. A couple of readers got sufficiently into it to prod me about updating faster, so I kept pushing forward. I find Sunwitch's posts very helpful. Being told that I'm being confusing and it's unclear whether there's any value in my thread is useful feedback. The suggestion to do a lot less classification and schematization and a lot more exploration of actual scenarios is actionable feedback. Being told that I do have "short spurts" of coherence and being told which segments seemed more coherent is useful feedback.

I'm confused by the idea that I'm somehow refusing to engage with PL. I banned him from the other thread because the whole point is to engage with him in this thread. It doesn't make sense for me to have two back and forths with him on separate threads simultaneously. And it's not like he was still a high-effort poster in the other thread. His last post there asked us to imagine him calling each part of my post nonsense because he was too tired to write it out. I figure we can all save some effort and just imagine him posting that after all my future posts. In this thread I've already been engaging with PL on several of his points, mostly by agreeing with them. For example we've agreed that real players do not conform to schematic personality types and that proposing type systems isn't useful. We've agreed that "fully embedded" doesn't mean anything. Most of the rest of his contributions to this thread are things that I can't meaningfully respond to, at least at the moment.

Like, if Sunwitch comes in and says "some individual observations seem valid, but lots of others look like nonsense, and it's not clear that there's any connection between the valid parts," I could ask her to name a couple of valid parts and see if I could justify how they're connected. Or I could consider scrapping the big project and writing a smaller piece fleshing out the worthwhile parts. PL, on the other hand, rounds the whole thing up to nonsense. That's a reasonable move to make as a reader. It's fine to say "much of this is wrong, it might all be wrong, I don't recommend anyone taking it seriously." But it's not a reasonable position to take in a dialogue. If he says "this is 100% nonsense," the only options to respond I can think of are either to say "Nu-uh. <100% is nonsense," or to wait until I can produce a clean enough version that it's clearly not nonsense and then post that one. I did the first one, telling PL that it may look like it's all nonsense but I believe there is something of value. And now I'm working on the second, trying to make something with way less jargon and fewer digressions that argues for the important connections that I want to argue for. I'll post it when it's ready. (I'm also not going to "engage" with the discussion of whether I'm a paranoid obsessive with tears streaming down my face, because there's no possible way I could come out of that looking more dignified)

[Kaelik]

I would recommend in any future posts or restructuring that you begin with a statement of what I as a Player, DM, or game designer am supposed to do with any of this.

Each post I start reading and then half way through my eyes glaze over and I realize that I still have no idea what this is supposed to be accomplishing for whom, and then I go read something else instead.

If everything you said was "true" of "false", in the whatever sense that grouping things at levels of abstraction can be said to be true or false, I see no way that truth or falsity would change any actions of any person.

[PhoneLobster]

In the past, PL has completely derailed threads by trying to argue against what he sees as bad game design. Stepping in early to shoo PL out of the thread where you're trying to actually workshop a concept is probably smart.

Oh look endless well poisoning because of god knows what past personal grievance still being petulantly clung on to.

I tell you what if you've decided you want this idea of Orions, presented in this way, defended in this way, to be the hill you want your well poisoning against me to die on then I'm all for it. I'll take that as a free win and dance on that hill all day long.

Like, if Sunwitch comes in and says "some individual observations seem valid, but lots of others look like nonsense, and it's not clear that there's any connection between the valid parts," I could ask her to name a couple of valid parts and see if I could justify how they're connected. Or I could consider scrapping the big project and writing a smaller piece fleshing out the worthwhile parts. PL, on the other hand, rounds the whole thing up to nonsense. That's a reasonable move to make as a reader. It's fine to say "much of this is wrong, it might all be wrong, I don't recommend anyone taking it seriously." But it's not a reasonable position to take in a dialogue. If he says "this is 100% nonsense," the only options to respond I can think of are either to say "Nu-uh. <100% is nonsense," or to wait until I can produce a clean enough version that it's clearly not nonsense and then post that one. I did the first one, telling PL that it may look like it's all nonsense but I believe there is something of value. And now I'm working on the second, trying to make something with way less jargon and fewer digressions that argues for the important connections that I want to argue for. I'll post it when it's ready. (I'm also not going to "engage" with the discussion of whether I'm a paranoid obsessive with tears streaming down my face, because there's no possible way I could come out of that looking more dignified)

OK so... you know I have said several times that you mentioned valid things in passing well before Sunwitch did, in fact for fucks sake, Sunwitch mentioned that in direct reply to me doing it for not the first time, so your suggestion that this is something Sunwitch did right and IF ONLY I had done that is... well it's a god damn insult right to my face.

In fact, god damn insult is a lot of your problem here. You've smeared me with a lot of shit starting from your first belated post "responding" to me with passive aggressive well poisoning about how gosh gee should you REALLY dirty yourself and engage with someone against whom the well has been poisoned? If I've escalated the odd bit since why the hell shouldn't I in response to your words and actions? You pull a name ban out of your ass and your like "oh he seems to be upset, I cannot understand why, he must just be naughty man, I even produced this other even worse thread where I said even crazier stuff to pretend to talk to him on..." For fucks sake man, do you really think you get to pull the sort of shit you did against me over this topic and I DON'T get to be mean to you in response?

I mean right here just now you are attributing things I said to someone else and complaining I never said them and was only ever 100% mean instead. WTF is wrong with you? Why shouldn't I say bad things about you in response to that sort of behavior? The thing you are doing is stupid and insulting. You deserve a metaphorical slap in the face along with your answer, but then you don't understand why you got one and complain that the slap is the only thing you are receiving and ignore everything else.

In the mean time. If you are so deeply annoyed at my last post on your other thread, I think that's really your problem, it was short and simple, I registered continued disagreement along the same terms as before without putting in another point by point take down. Because yeah you know what I WAS tired of talking to a confused brick wall that only ever responded with weird passive aggressive insulting shit, like by that point THIS THREAD and the bat shit crazy it opened with. But also... did you WANT another point by point take down? You did not respond well to prior ones. Do you think a short "No this is still poopy bad" is too much of a risk of "thread derailment" but somehow catching up with another several posts of line by line dissections of your bloated ramblings to point out the crazy bits would have been fine? I think, I suspect ANY response from me at that point would have resulted in you name banning me. You just didn't want criticism period, not short form, not long form, just no criticism.

While I don't think I'm prepared to accept your "half formed thought" argument, I also don't want to call it a pure "Gish Gallop" but your methodology and material, it has things in common with that. And there is a stage where point by point take downs are no longer productive against endless walls of more and more well, lets just say endless rambling.

[MGuy]

Edit: Also I don't get the point is in making a separate thread to engage with your biggest critic only to then not do so. I do not know what Orion's problem with PL's criticism is because it is not clear here or in the other thread what he thinks PL is wrong about outside of the fact that he's not saying anything is necessarily good or bad.

In the past, PL has completely derailed threads by trying to argue against what he sees as bad game design.

I don't think this is actually a 'problem'. As I said earlier the value in his criticisms are there. If I can't defend a design decision then why am I using it?

It seems the problem here is a matter of tone and what PL decided to assume about Orion with it. Which is fine. I was only confused by the lack of direct response on Orion's part since he chose to create a thread ostensibly to address PL in particular. I said in the other thread that I wouldn't tell him to engage with anyone if he didn't want to and, fair enough, I can see why he wouldn't want to in this case. I didn't think Orion would bother engaging with PL if he didn't want to but since he decided to I couldn't understand why he'd bothered making the extra thread and then decide not to engage him directly in it. My approval of course isn't necessary mind, just it helps me understand things better when they are explicit. I think enough flaming has gone on here and I'd prefer now to take a less hostile route toward addressing other members on this board even if there aren't any hard rules on doing so at present.

I think making a thread ostensibly to engage with PL then name banning him in another without a word of why could be a bad look but then things like:

WTF is wrong with you? Why shouldn't I say bad things about you in response to that sort of behavior? The thing you are doing is stupid and insulting. You deserve a metaphorical slap in the face along with your answer, but then you don't understand why you got one and complain that the slap is the only thing you are receiving and ignore everything else.

is also very unnecessary so I can understand why it happened. It's safe to say then that PL probably shouldn't be in threads deciding to go on the aggressive against a person and not their ideas based off of perceived grievances. While I do think that at times PL does get a bad rap for being, let's say, very zealous in expressing his opinions we've already had a lot of fallout due to old grudges and I'd like it if we were to go forward avoiding similar incidents. If PL were to listen to me I'd suggest he abstain from Orion's project(s) / posts going forward if he feels that the person is either not seeking criticism or has personally slighted him.

I am interested in seeing what ultimately becomes of all of this. I was the person who asked if he'd be putting it somewhere* and despite the fact that I do not know where this is going I am still interested in seeing the end result (whether or not there even is a conclusion). I've seen at least one other attest to waiting on Orion's updates. I value criticism, even harsh criticism laced with unnecessary fluff, as long as it gets me somewhere.

*I asked if he was going to post his ideas in a more cohesive form somewhere because I'm not around for every discussion in the discord and only a few things are pinned. I thought that a discussion about the value of 'context' and the role that plays in the game was a potentially interesting one to see and I am forgetful. Better it be in a place I can continually revisit to see how the idea develops than just let it be lost to time. I like hearing people's ideas even if I'm not going to personally pursue them so I encourage Orion to keep posting to his heart's content.

[Grek]

I really don't think anything I said was flaming. Or well poisoning, for that matter. His posts in the other thread have not been very helpful. See Orion's bit about him saying "just imagine me calling each part nonsense". And historically, when PL decides that he wants to call something nonsense and gets vitriolic like this, the best thing to do is to cordon that argument off into a different thread and so that you're not mixing the actual content* in with the extended arguments on whether the content should have never be posted and/or implies that the author is mentally deficient for having written it.

PL, if you feel that I've done you wrong, or misrepresented your posts in the other thread, you have my apologies. But I really do think that Orion made the right call in asking you to submit your criticism (assuming you're still interested in giving it) in a different thread where it can be responded to apart from the rest of the commentary. Not as a slight against you, but as a way of making sure that the other thread stays on track.

*Okay, let's be honest: Half formed shower thoughts put to virtual paper as a way to set them down and pick through them later.

[PhoneLobster]

If PL were to listen to me I'd suggest he abstain from Orion's project(s) / posts going forward if he feels that the person is either not seeking criticism or has personally slighted him.

You tell me how I should respond to "Hey I'm looking for validation to not engage this person based on their identity alone" and then this thread, and a name banning, and his new "I'm angry at you because you never said that thing you totally said" bullshit.

I was I think super polite to Orion for too long on this topic considering the shit he pulled. I should have torn him a new one for the insulting "should I engage" bullshit alone. I should have utterly savaged him for the insult that is this very thread the moment it appeared. But he just got to a point a little after that I think its entirely fair to let go of the restraint.

However as justified as I feel I am with being aggressive in response to his stupid bullshit, I don't think trying to remember that Orion talked nonsense and really, REALLY cocked up basic engagement with criticism and therefore ignoring him forever is particularly helpful as a forward looking decision for anyone. I also don't think it's wrong to respond in the short term to his total insulting mishandling of criticism with at least some level of hostility.

The alternative is what? That the posters on here that are most prone to producing nonsense and least capable of dealing with criticism of it should what? Get some sort of special protection free pass forever?

Maybe the problem is that we have inadvertently given people too many tools to do that with already. Maybe this is a very good example of exactly the mechanisms by which it is a problem.

[PhoneLobster]

But I really do think that Orion made the right call in asking you to submit your criticism (assuming you're still interested in giving it) in a different thread

But he didn't do that did he.

He didn't invite me to place my criticisms of his other thread here.

Even if he did that would be incredibly patronizing and insulting to do so. And not remotely justifiable since core criticism of an idea belongs in the core thread about that idea.

But it doesn't matter because THIS thread was not that invitation. This thread is just the place for Orion's meta-meta "how I think" claims which are meant to justify simply dismissing criticism on the basis of a special unique and unexplainable thought process. Go look back at his opening posts. He outright states this.

I'll also note that he makes a thread about his thought process and how it justifies his ideas, and later uses me responding with criticism of his thought process as a pretext to dismiss me for being mean. Again.