It is not necessary, for anything I said, that Keltham should “know” that “he is inside a roleplaying game”. (I don’t think it’s even true, in-story, that “he is in a roleplaying game”, so there isn’t anything for him to “know”, in that case.)
I did not say anything about ‘a class of fiction whose key feature is “person familiar with game X suddenly transported into an instance of game X”’. What I said was:
“person find himself in world which is governed by rules of tabletop roleplaying game, must now exploit those rules to survive/win”
I will also note, even aside from your mischaracterization of my point, that your protestations are substantially subverted by the fact that the characters in Project Lawful are constantly talking about people’s ability score values, their Sense Motive and Bluff and so on, etc. Yes, there are in-story explanations (for some of these things, less so for others), but that’s the point: this is a world with knowable rules, and people know them. Including Keltham, increasingly.
It certainly seems as if I have misunderstood what you wrote, whether or not I misread it. I also think that your interpretation of what I wrote isn’t quite what I meant, but at least some of that is because I was sloppy in my wording, so let me first of all try to fix that.
When I said “inside a roleplaying game” I didn’t mean literally inside an actual-game-being-played, I meant inside a system whose rules are those of a roleplaying game. (E.g., “inside the world of Pathfinder”, as opposed to “inside an actual game of Pathfinder that someone is playing”.) I think you took me to mean the latter rather than the former; I should have worded things so as to rule out that interpretation; sorry about that.
Another thing to get out of the way at the start: I don’t understand your last paragraph; so far as I can see, nothing I wrote is invalidated at all by the fact that within the fiction there are things like numerical “intelligence” scores and “Will saves” and so forth. We know that those things correspond to game mechanics, but it doesn’t look to me as if the way they’re written requires (e.g.) that any of the characters see them as game-mechanic-like.
OK, on to what I guess is the main thing: my apparent misunderstanding of what you wrote. I’ve reread your original comment and, while your vigorous repudiation of what I took to be your meaning sure seems to indicate that I misunderstood it, I’m still failing to see how I misread; the only interpretations I can come up with that are consistent with what you’re now saying seem to me to make less sense than my original interpretation, rather than more.
(Which, to be clear, I appreciate likely indicates mostly that I am still misunderstanding! But maybe what follows will clarify the nature of my misunderstanding in a way that lets you fix it.)
Consider the following three claims one could make· One: “In this sort of work, the point is for protagonist and readers to know, from the outset, what the rules are, and to try to figure out how to win given those rules.” Two: “In this sort of work, the point is that there are rules that the protagonist and readers can figure out, and then they can try to figure out how to win given those rules.” Three: “In this sort of work, the point is that the readers know the rules from the outset; the protagonist may have to figure them out, but then readers and protagonists are both trying to figure out how to win given the rules.”
(Where “win” means achieving whatever goals seem appropriate; I don’t mean literally winning a literal game, of course.)
I originally took you to be endorsing One. You object to this and (if I am now understanding right) say that the point is Two or Three or something in their vicinity: what is required is a world with knowable rules rather than a world with specific rules known to the readers and protagonist. I am not quite sure whether your position is more Two or more Three.
I thought you meant specifically One, because some of the things you said (so far as I can tell) make sense only as consequences of One and not of Two or Three. For instance:
they have to, to the maximum extent possible, take as given the actual rules of the game in question, as they are experienced by actual characters when the game is actually played; and likewise, to the maximum extent possible, the fictional setting should be taken as it is exists in the actual game as played.
If Two is the point, this doesn’t make any sense. For Two, there have to be rules but it doesn’t particularly matter whether they are the rules of any particular game. They could be entirely different rules, and Keltham and the readers would be figuring them out together.
If Three is the point, then that would be a reason why the rules should be specifically the rules of the particular game that the readers will recognize from reading the work. But Three introduces a big difference between what the protagonist is trying to do and what the readers are trying to do: the readers already know the rules and the protagonist is trying to figure them out. There’s nothing wrong (I think) with that, but I don’t see how to square it with another thing you wrote:
it presents a challenge for the main character(s), which also doubles as a challenge for the reader. “Being placed in this situation, and provided with this knowable, and known, set of tools, how do you win?”
This seemed to me (and still seems to me) to be saying that the protagonist(s) and reader(s) are facing the same challenge, namely the one you describe in quotation marks. But that’s exactly what isn’t (or needn’t be) happening in case Three.
I can see one way to reconcile these things. The protagonist is typically spending longer in in-fiction time thinking about things, getting information, etc., than the reader is in real-world time, so it could make sense for the protagonist’s challenge to be harder than the reader’s. But I can’t see the slightest reason why the specific way in which it should be harder is “readers know pretty much all the details of the specific system, protagonist has to work that out” rather than, e.g., “readers know that the specific system is something akin to / derived from X, protagonist doesn’t have that extra information”, which is exactly the situation we have in Planecrash: we know Keltham is in something like Pathfinder-land, and Keltham doesn’t know that.
So I’m confused. If you meant One, then my original comment stands: Planecrash is plainly not trying to satisfy the constraints of One, and I don’t see any reason why it should be. If you meant Two, then I don’t see how you get from there to a requirement to match the rules according to which “the game is actually played” aside from obvious concessions for realism-versus-artificial-gameplay. If you meant Three, then I don’t see why you implied that the readers’ and protagonists’ challenges are the same, and I don’t see how you get from Three to a requirement to match the rules. And I don’t see anything intermediate between One, Two and Three to which some corresponding intermediate objection doesn’t apply.
So quite possibly you mean something that’s outside the space spanned by One, Two, and Three. But I can’t think what.
Oh, one other possibility, I guess. Maybe you mean pretty much Two, and your actual objection isn’t “the rules are different” but “the rules are worse”, the point being that it spoils the fun when e.g. the rules are too exploitable, because then there isn’t really an interesting challenge any more. But then (a) I don’t understand why what you actually wrote was that writers are obliged to use as nearly as possible the same rules as the game rather than (something like) rules no more stupidly exploitable than the ones in the game, and (b) in this particular instance it seems highly plausible that the changes made to the rules make them less stupidly-exploitable rather than more. (As per Eliezer’s comment in this thread.)
It remains the case that the most reasonable interpretation I can find for your original comment—meaning the one that makes your argument make most sense to me—is the one I originally gave it, asserting something like claim One. Apparently this was wrong, and I’m sorry I got it wrong, but I’m failing to understand what I should have understood instead, and my best concrete attempts in the light of your reply—see above—seem clearly less reasonable rather than more.
I’m pretty sure my error, whatever exactly it is, isn’t one of misreading. And I promise it isn’t one of deliberate misrepresentation, which some of what you said in your reply seems to suggest! I’m sorry to be being so dim. What am I missing?
Consider the following three claims one could make· One: “In this sort of work, the point is for protagonist and readers to know, from the outset, what the rules are, and to try to figure out how to win given those rules.” Two: “In this sort of work, the point is that there are rules that the protagonist and readers can figure out, and then they can try to figure out how to win given those rules.” Three: “In this sort of work, the point is that the readers know the rules from the outset; the protagonist may have to figure them out, but then readers and protagonists are both trying to figure out how to win given the rules.”
(Where “win” means achieving whatever goals seem appropriate; I don’t mean literally winning a literal game, of course.)
I originally took you to be endorsing One. You object to this and (if I am now understanding right) say that the point is Two or Three or something in their vicinity: what is required is a world with knowable rules rather than a world with specific rules known to the readers and protagonist. I am not quite sure whether your position is more Two or more Three.
I certainly was not endorsing One.
Two, if that is entirely the approach that the author takes, puts the work into some other genre, so this is also not what I was talking about.
Three cannot quite be taken literally, as there are always facts about the setting that are not constrained by any game rules but are a “free choice” on the part of the author/GM, but that nonetheless constitute “rules” in the sense that they are stable facts about the world that the protagonist inhabits (and which he, at the very least, benefits from knowing). (Such things exist in almost all genres of fiction, of course.) Still, Three is the closest to my intended meaning.
I thought you meant specifically One, because some of the things you said (so far as I can tell) make sense only as consequences of One and not of Two or Three. For instance:
they have to, to the maximum extent possible, take as given the actual rules of the game in question, as they are experienced by actual characters when the game is actually played; and likewise, to the maximum extent possible, the fictional setting should be taken as it is exists in the actual game as played.
…
If Three is the point, then that would be a reason why the rules should be specifically the rules of the particular game that the readers will recognize from reading the work. But Three introduces a big difference between what the protagonist is trying to do and what the readers are trying to do: the readers already know the rules and the protagonist is trying to figure them out. There’s nothing wrong (I think) with that, but I don’t see how to square it with another thing you wrote:
it presents a challenge for the main character(s), which also doubles as a challenge for the reader. “Being placed in this situation, and provided with this knowable, and known, set of tools, how do you win?”
This seemed to me (and still seems to me) to be saying that the protagonist(s) and reader(s) are facing the same challenge, namely the one you describe in quotation marks. But that’s exactly what isn’t (or needn’t be) happening in case Three.
I do not agree with your analysis.
For one thing, what’s necessary is not that the readers already know the rules, it’s that (a) the readers know that the rules exist prior to the author writing (any particular part of) the story, so the author is working within a set of constraints that he isn’t just making up as he goes along according to his authorial whims (and also that the rules aren’t going to change mid-story, except by events in the story), and (b) the readers can, if they like, go look up the rules—if they want to figure out a solution to a problem the character is facing, or if they want to check whether a described solution works, etc.
(This is perhaps the distinguishing feature of this genre, in fact. In most works of speculative fiction, except perhaps for the hardest of “hard sf”, you really have no idea what the rules are, what they permit, what they forbid, etc. The author could spring something on you from nowhere at any time. He can declare that it works, and provide some contorted reasoning why it totally accords with previously-described things; and this is the case regardless of how impossible it would’ve been for you, as the reader, to either predict the new thing in advance, or to gainsay the author on the question of whether it all “really works”. That means that stories where the reader is challenged along with the protagonist are, in most subgenres of speculative fiction, basically farcical.)
Note that (a)—the readers knowing that rules exist prior to the story, and exist stably throughout the story (unless explicitly changed by story events)—does in fact mirror the protagonist’s situation. He, after all, is not in a story—he’s just in the real world, where the laws of reality do, indeed, exist prior to the protagonist endeavoring to figure them out, and exist stably, i.e. they don’t change mid-adventure (and if they do, it’s according to the stable and unchangeable real rules, which have no exceptions).
Furthermore, there are two aspects to the appeal that I described.
First, there is the challenge of figuring out—in advance of reading onward to learn the author’s own answer—how the protagonist can, or will, solve whatever problem actually faces him. I am usually uninterested in attempting such challenges, because one can so very rarely trust authors enough to expect the challenge to be fair! For example, an author who takes any of the attitudes that you allude to, is obviously completely undeserving of the sort of reader trust that would make attempting to solve the “how can the protagonist win this” challenge anything but a waste of time. This is one aspect of the appeal of this particular genre of fiction—it makes such a level of reader trust possible.
But the second aspect of the appeal is the enjoyment of asking questions like “what could the protagonist have done instead?”, or “what should the protagonist do now?”, or “what could the protagonist’s opponents do, that would make the protagonist’s life more difficult?”, or “how might the story be different if the following conditions were tweaked?”—and so on in this vein.
Now, you can ask such questions of other sorts of stories, in other genres. But if you are dealing with speculative fiction of any sort, then such questions are usually pointless, because their answers amount to “whatever the author (or whoever is making the almost entirely arbitrary authorial decisions) wants”, “whatever the author (or etc.) decides will work”, etc. There’s no fact of the matter, so it’s all just fan-wank. (Many authors like to deny this, and claim that the rules they’ve allegedly laid out and allegedly followed constrain their story-worlds sufficiently that such questions are not devoid of meaning. I have little patience for such protestations; I find them to be absurd in nearly all cases.)
Not so in this genre. Here, we can ask the sorts of questions I listed above, and they can have answers, because the author is constrained. This is the key: the constraints upon the author, which are knowable by the reader.
It seems to me that you have picked a particular set of goals and constraints, called them “this genre”, and declared your dissatisfaction with the fact that Planecrash is not seeking those goals under those constraints.
I agree that Planecrash does not appear to be seeking the goals you specify under the constraints you specify.
I don’t see any particular reason to think either that its authors intend it to be doing those things, or that in some moral sense they ought to be doing those things. As for whether the work would be better if they were doing those things, I don’t know, but it does seem like there’s a substantial community of readers who are enjoying it without them.
(My feeling is that they are to some extent aiming to be able to set challenges to the protagonist with corresponding challenges to the reader—indeed there is concrete evidence that they are doing that at some particular points in the story—but for that there is no need for the readers to know more about the rules than the protagonist does, and indeed I think it’s better if their knowledge is pretty much the same as his.)
I do agree that there is a lot to be said for having rules that don’t get made up ad hoc as the story progresses (even when the story isn’t mostly about setting well-posed puzzles for the readers), and of course “non-speculative” fiction has that feature automatically, the rules being those of the world we’re actually in. To whatever extent the point of the story isn’t mostly to give readers well-posed puzzles, rules made up ad hoc are just as good provided they end up being as consistent and “fair” a set of rules as they would have been if fully worked out beforehand rather than e.g. being tweaked to get particular author-desired outcomes in particular situations. (One could e.g. imagine an author who, in the interests of fairness, decides that when some situation comes up that involves questions they haven’t already decided the answer to, they will ask an impartial friend what the most natural way is for the rules to work, without telling them any plot information that might bias their choice. Maybe that would work well, maybe not, but it wouldn’t have the sort of unfairness I think you are concerned about.)
I agree that the authors of Planecrash are clearly not working with exact Pathfinder rules. I don’t see any strong evidence either way for whether they worked out all the rules in advance, nor for whether if they didn’t they’re choosing rules in a “fair” way when they run into something they hadn’t pre-decided.
The specific major divergence you mention in another comment—how very easy telepathic communication seems to be for the Cheliax folks—is a thing that has bothered me too. I’m not sure whether that’s actually an argument on my side of this present discussion or yours, though, because I don’t know the Pathfinder rules about this and so my concern was “it’s hard to believe that all these people with good-but-not-superhuman brainpower are able to do all this telepathic communicating while other things are going on too, without making it obvious” rather than anything along the lines of “oi, not fair, that isn’t in the rules”. It seems to me there’s a roughly-equally-plausible possible world where the Pathfinder rules actually make Message overpowered like Planecrash-Message is, and in that possible world it would be better for the Planecrash authors to be more willing to diverge from the original rules, and I haven’t seen anything suggesting that Pathfinder rules are so carefully balanced that I should expect a policy of not diverging from those rules to result in a more plausible world than a policy of diverging from them where doing so seems to make for a better story.
Planecrash needs the Project Lawful management to be able to deceive Keltham rather effectively. If their telepathic communication were much worse then the jig would be up within days. It is not clear to me that the story would have been improved by forbidding the authors to make Message more powerful; perhaps that would just have made the overall shape of the plot impossible, or perhaps they’d have needed more munchkinning on other things that are in Pathfinder rules and it would have ended up more implausible rather than less, to anyone who isn’t a Pathfinder expert. (Maybe it would have forced them onto different paths that would have ended up making a better story. But I don’t see any reason to think it would have.)
Anyway. Clearly Planecrash is not playing by the specific rules you would prefer it to be playing by. If you say that this greatly reduces your enjoyment of it, then of course I believe you. But if you say it’s an objective failure to meet The Standards of The Genre, then I say: I just don’t think it’s trying to do the things you say it should be trying to do, and I don’t see why it should be, and I’ll match your declaration that it doesn’t work for you with my declaration that so far as I can tell it works at least as well for me as it would if the authors were constrained to match actual Pathfinder rules exactly and I strongly suspect it would be worse for me if they were so constrained.
Once again, I disagree with your characterization and your analysis.
It seems to me that you have picked a particular set of goals and constraints, called them “this genre”, and declared your dissatisfaction with the fact that Planecrash is not seeking those goals under those constraints.
You are speaking as if the classification of a story into a genre is something arbitrary—a personal choice I have made, according to my preferences and whims, and no more. This is inaccurate. Story genres are patterns of what sorts of structure and features of a work are enjoyable to readers, what sorts of reader responses they evoke, how effectively they do so, and other things of that sort. How we slice up the space of possibilities along these dimensions is certainly something we can debate; but it is not a matter of merely “picking and declaring”. When I say that this story falls into a genre, I am making reference to objective (or, at least, intersubjectively consistent) facts, not simply expressing my preferences.
I don’t see any particular reason to think either that its authors intend it to be doing those things, or that in some moral sense they ought to be doing those things.
What the authors intend, I cannot but speculate on (until such time as Eliezer & co. make their intentions known). That having been said, while I would not wish to push the “death of the author” line too far, still the author of a work does not have complete freedom in determining what sort of work it is. Likewise, genre conventions should certainly not be straitjackets (or else genres would never change, nor new ones arise); but deviations from such conventions ought to be justified by making a work better than otherwise (and, as in most such cases, it is almost invariably better for a work’s quality if the author understands the conventions he is violating, and commits the violations deliberately and with intent; note, by the way, that Eliezer absolutely does do this in other aspects of Project Lawful—see below).
I do not think morality, as ordinarily understood, enters into this, so at any time in this discussion when I say “ought”, I refer to aesthetic or prudential considerations, not ethical ones.
As for whether the work would be better if they were doing those things, I don’t know, but it does seem like there’s a substantial community of readers who are enjoying it without them.
Yes. You will recall that this conversation began when I advised someone that they might wish to avoid learning more about the Pathfinder rules, lest their enjoyment of the work be diminished.
Also, as I said earlier, I am enjoying the story myself. I have never said anything like “if Project Lawful hewed to the rules I set out, it would be good; failing to do so, it is bad”. That would be a false and foolish claim. But there are greater and lesser degrees of enjoyment; there are multiple dimensions on which a work may be appreciated, and a work may do worse on some dimensions than on others; a work may offer a more complete, more comprehensively satisfying reader experience, or, conversely, one that is flawed, marred by annoyances, unsatisfying in some ways.
This all seems like very basic media criticism to me. Frankly, “some people like it despite these so-called problems you describe!” is almost always a facile reply in such cases.
(My feeling is that they are to some extent aiming to be able to set challenges to the protagonist with corresponding challenges to the reader—indeed there is concrete evidence that they are doing that at some particular points in the story—but for that there is no need for the readers to know more about the rules than the protagonist does, and indeed I think it’s better if their knowledge is pretty much the same as his.)
Note that even if we take at face value what you say in this paragraph, it absolutely does not follow either that the authors shouldn’t avoid violations of the Pathfinder rules, or that readers do not benefit from being able to look up the rules. This is because if all that the reader knows about the rules is what the story tells us through the protagonist’s eyes, then the result will be that the reader knows less about the rules than the protagonist does! (This is the reason for the “character knowledge” concept in TTRPGs, and “Knowledge skills” in 3e-like systems, in particular. I hope that the logic of this is obvious enough, but I’ll explain it if needed.)
What’s more, even on this premise, the use of message is a flaw in the story. How do we know this? Because the first explicit use of the spell in the text does in fact acknowledge those facts about the casting and use of message that I described elsethread! It seems that the authors knew about this, but then, more or less, forgot (probably more like: didn’t really think about the implications, in their enthusiasm to use a very convenient plot device).
To whatever extent the point of the story isn’t mostly to give readers well-posed puzzles, rules made up ad hoc are just as good provided they end up being as consistent and “fair” a set of rules as they would have been if fully worked out beforehand rather than e.g. being tweaked to get particular author-desired outcomes in particular situations.
I completely disagree.
Rules made up ad hoc are sufficient to make an enjoyable story (as they would have to be, or most of the vast swath of works we call “speculative fiction” would be worthless). It is absolutely not the case that they are just as good as rules fully worked out beforehand.
I agree that the authors of Planecrash are clearly not working with exact Pathfinder rules. I don’t see any strong evidence either way for whether they worked out all the rules in advance, nor for whether if they didn’t they’re choosing rules in a “fair” way when they run into something they hadn’t pre-decided.
See above re: initial vs. later appearances of the message spell in the story.
The specific major divergence you mention in another comment—how very easy telepathic communication seems to be for the Cheliax folks—is a thing that has bothered me too. I’m not sure whether that’s actually an argument on my side of this present discussion or yours
Mine, and here’s why:
It seems to me there’s a roughly-equally-plausible possible world where the Pathfinder rules actually make Message overpowered like Planecrash-Message is
This is, in fact, one of those cases where what seems “plausible” to you is an artifact of your lack of knowledge, and the plausibility is defeated by greater knowledge of the system. (Recall a similar dynamic in the argument about philosophical zombies.)
It is not nearly as plausible (not totally unimaginable, mind you! but definitely much less plausible) that message should be that overpowered, if one knows more about 3e-like systems in general and Pathfinder in particular. Importantly, the specific information needed to reach this conclusion is available in the text of Project Lawful itself; the “greater knowledge” I refer to is general knowledge about the structure and patterns of such systems / this system. Namely:
Observe that there exists a higher level spell called telepathic bond (5th-level for wizards). This spell is mentioned in the story, and it is made clear that it’s more powerful, and less easily available, than the ubiquitous message cantrip. But why should such a spell exist, and why should anyone ever have use for it, if message is as powerful as the story makes it out to be? This is a strange design flaw for a system where the relative power and usefulness of similar categories of spells is strongly correlated with their relative levels! (What’s more, as both spells appear in the Core Rulebook—indeed, they were both inherited from the earliest iteration of this sort of system, D&D 3.0, where they both also appeared in the core rules—so this apparent anomaly is not even explainable by “power creep”, by splatbook option growth, etc.)
This is, again, not an insurmountable objection. It is not unknown for such “power ladder anomalies” to exist in 3e-like systems. But they are the exception, not the rule. Therefore message being as powerful as how it is depicted in Project Lawful is not totally implausible, but it is definitely substantially less plausible than message being the way that it is in the Pathfinder rules as written.
I haven’t seen anything suggesting that Pathfinder rules are so carefully balanced that I should expect a policy of not diverging from those rules to result in a more plausible world than a policy of diverging from them where doing so seems to make for a better story.
The Pathfinder rules are carefully balanced in some ways, less carefully balanced in other ways. Likewise, some deviations from the rules are clearly good and even necessary, while others are just as clearly false moves in the game of story design.
Let me offer an example of the former sort of deviation, for contrast; I think this may help you to understand how I am thinking about this. Eliezer wrote:
Any wizard of any level with any magic item creation feat can transform 500gp of raw materials into 1000gp of magic item every 8 hours?
And this is entirely correct. The Pathfindermagic item creation rules famously differ from the magic item creation rules in D&D 3.5 (Pathfinder’s predecessor system) by removing the requirement that the creator expend his own experience points to make the item, and not replacing it with any other requirement for the expenditure of any other limited resource; thus the only limited resources that a character must expend to create magic items is money and time—but the exchange rate is such that… well, it’s as Eliezer said.
This is a problem with the Pathfinder magic item creation system, and a problem with Pathfinder generally. It is solved in various ways by various GMs, the details of which we need not concern ourselves with, except to note that such solutions tend to be unsatisfactory from a world-building perspective even if they’re adequate from a gameplay perspective.
In Project Lawful, the solution to this problem is, of course, spellsilver. We (the readers) have not yet learned very much about this material, but whatever it is, it’s evidently a limited natural resource, which is expended in the creation of magic items. (Unsurprisingly, this makes spellsilver extremely valuable, etc.; the implications are obvious, and depicted in the story in ways that make sense.)
When “spellsilver” first appeared in the story, my immediate reaction was “Ah! Eliezer has chosen to solve the ‘unlimited item creation’ problem by introducing a limited natural resource requirement! Very good, a classic solution and a sensible one; let’s see where this goes.” A reader unfamiliar with the Pathfinder system would, presumably, instead merely take “spellsilver” as a comprehensible feature of the fictional world, not noting anything amiss; a Golarion where there is such a thing as spellsilver, a rare material that is needed to make magic items, is perfectly coherent and unproblematic from the standpoint of constructing, and understanding, a fantasy setting.
In short, the introduction of “spellsilver” is a deviation from the Pathfinder rules as written that is (a) obviously very deliberate, (b) done with full knowledge of the rules as they are, and clear intent to achieve a specific effect by the change, and (c) successful at both the particular goal of changing the setting in the desired way and, more broadly, at improving the setting and the story that may be written in it.
The alteration to the functionality of the message spell appears to have none of those properties.
Planecrash needs the Project Lawful management to be able to deceive Keltham rather effectively. If their telepathic communication were much worse then the jig would be up within days. It is not clear to me that the story would have been improved by forbidding the authors to make Message more powerful; perhaps that would just have made the overall shape of the plot impossible, or perhaps they’d have needed more munchkinning on other things that are in Pathfinder rules and it would have ended up more implausible rather than less, to anyone who isn’t a Pathfinder expert. (Maybe it would have forced them onto different paths that would have ended up making a better story. But I don’t see any reason to think it would have.
Frankly, this reads to me like a post-hoc excuse for shoddy work—and, what’s more, an entirely unnecessary one. I have rather greater confidence than you, it seems, in Eliezer’s ability to write a story that doesn’t involve this sort of carelessness with constraints. And I have little doubt that it would be a better story overall.
As for your last paragraph…
I have addressed the matter of fiction genres earlier in this comment. The “well I like it fine the way it is!” and “it would be worse if they fixed these flaws!” stuff seems like rationalization, at best. With respect, I detect a note of defensiveness in your responses. There is no need for that. A flaw is a flaw, and we can admit that without giving up our appreciation for those aspects of the story which are good (and there are, indeed, plenty of things about Project Lawful which are not only good, but good in very uncommon ways).
Who was it, after all, who once wrote: “if you can’t criticize, you can’t optimize”?
Classification into genres is not arbitrary. But I don’t think inferences of the form “this story has features X, Y, and Z, which put it in genre G, and stories in genre G generally try to do P, Q, and R; therefore this story should be doing P, Q, and R, and not doing so constitutes a defect” are valid unless either you can get from XYZ to PQR without going through G, or XYZ are tied to G so strongly that no reasonable person familiar with G could deny that a story with XYZ is trying to do what stories in genre G generally try to do.
If Planecrash ends up being enjoyable to read, or instructive, or funny, or prophetic, or suitable for turning into a wildly successful 30-hour-long opera cycle, those merits are not in any way nullified by its not doing particular things that stories sharing some of its features often do.
I think the discussion is devolving into “Said states his position. Gareth states his position. Said restates his position. Gareth restates his position.” which is seldom productive, so I shall leave it here unless there are particular things you are anxious to have a reply to (in which case, let me know and I’ll probably oblige).
Regarding your final few paragraphs: it is possible that I am being defensive, but I am pretty sure I am not being defensive on behalf of Planecrash, which I certainly don’t regard as flawless or unworthy of criticism. I simply disagree with some particular claims you are making about it, and if I am defending anything it is my position on what makes a given work of fiction better or worse.
I think you have substantially misread my point.
It is not necessary, for anything I said, that Keltham should “know” that “he is inside a roleplaying game”. (I don’t think it’s even true, in-story, that “he is in a roleplaying game”, so there isn’t anything for him to “know”, in that case.)
I did not say anything about ‘a class of fiction whose key feature is “person familiar with game X suddenly transported into an instance of game X”’. What I said was:
I will also note, even aside from your mischaracterization of my point, that your protestations are substantially subverted by the fact that the characters in Project Lawful are constantly talking about people’s ability score values, their Sense Motive and Bluff and so on, etc. Yes, there are in-story explanations (for some of these things, less so for others), but that’s the point: this is a world with knowable rules, and people know them. Including Keltham, increasingly.
It certainly seems as if I have misunderstood what you wrote, whether or not I misread it. I also think that your interpretation of what I wrote isn’t quite what I meant, but at least some of that is because I was sloppy in my wording, so let me first of all try to fix that.
When I said “inside a roleplaying game” I didn’t mean literally inside an actual-game-being-played, I meant inside a system whose rules are those of a roleplaying game. (E.g., “inside the world of Pathfinder”, as opposed to “inside an actual game of Pathfinder that someone is playing”.) I think you took me to mean the latter rather than the former; I should have worded things so as to rule out that interpretation; sorry about that.
Another thing to get out of the way at the start: I don’t understand your last paragraph; so far as I can see, nothing I wrote is invalidated at all by the fact that within the fiction there are things like numerical “intelligence” scores and “Will saves” and so forth. We know that those things correspond to game mechanics, but it doesn’t look to me as if the way they’re written requires (e.g.) that any of the characters see them as game-mechanic-like.
OK, on to what I guess is the main thing: my apparent misunderstanding of what you wrote. I’ve reread your original comment and, while your vigorous repudiation of what I took to be your meaning sure seems to indicate that I misunderstood it, I’m still failing to see how I misread; the only interpretations I can come up with that are consistent with what you’re now saying seem to me to make less sense than my original interpretation, rather than more.
(Which, to be clear, I appreciate likely indicates mostly that I am still misunderstanding! But maybe what follows will clarify the nature of my misunderstanding in a way that lets you fix it.)
Consider the following three claims one could make· One: “In this sort of work, the point is for protagonist and readers to know, from the outset, what the rules are, and to try to figure out how to win given those rules.” Two: “In this sort of work, the point is that there are rules that the protagonist and readers can figure out, and then they can try to figure out how to win given those rules.” Three: “In this sort of work, the point is that the readers know the rules from the outset; the protagonist may have to figure them out, but then readers and protagonists are both trying to figure out how to win given the rules.”
(Where “win” means achieving whatever goals seem appropriate; I don’t mean literally winning a literal game, of course.)
I originally took you to be endorsing One. You object to this and (if I am now understanding right) say that the point is Two or Three or something in their vicinity: what is required is a world with knowable rules rather than a world with specific rules known to the readers and protagonist. I am not quite sure whether your position is more Two or more Three.
I thought you meant specifically One, because some of the things you said (so far as I can tell) make sense only as consequences of One and not of Two or Three. For instance:
If Two is the point, this doesn’t make any sense. For Two, there have to be rules but it doesn’t particularly matter whether they are the rules of any particular game. They could be entirely different rules, and Keltham and the readers would be figuring them out together.
If Three is the point, then that would be a reason why the rules should be specifically the rules of the particular game that the readers will recognize from reading the work. But Three introduces a big difference between what the protagonist is trying to do and what the readers are trying to do: the readers already know the rules and the protagonist is trying to figure them out. There’s nothing wrong (I think) with that, but I don’t see how to square it with another thing you wrote:
This seemed to me (and still seems to me) to be saying that the protagonist(s) and reader(s) are facing the same challenge, namely the one you describe in quotation marks. But that’s exactly what isn’t (or needn’t be) happening in case Three.
I can see one way to reconcile these things. The protagonist is typically spending longer in in-fiction time thinking about things, getting information, etc., than the reader is in real-world time, so it could make sense for the protagonist’s challenge to be harder than the reader’s. But I can’t see the slightest reason why the specific way in which it should be harder is “readers know pretty much all the details of the specific system, protagonist has to work that out” rather than, e.g., “readers know that the specific system is something akin to / derived from X, protagonist doesn’t have that extra information”, which is exactly the situation we have in Planecrash: we know Keltham is in something like Pathfinder-land, and Keltham doesn’t know that.
So I’m confused. If you meant One, then my original comment stands: Planecrash is plainly not trying to satisfy the constraints of One, and I don’t see any reason why it should be. If you meant Two, then I don’t see how you get from there to a requirement to match the rules according to which “the game is actually played” aside from obvious concessions for realism-versus-artificial-gameplay. If you meant Three, then I don’t see why you implied that the readers’ and protagonists’ challenges are the same, and I don’t see how you get from Three to a requirement to match the rules. And I don’t see anything intermediate between One, Two and Three to which some corresponding intermediate objection doesn’t apply.
So quite possibly you mean something that’s outside the space spanned by One, Two, and Three. But I can’t think what.
Oh, one other possibility, I guess. Maybe you mean pretty much Two, and your actual objection isn’t “the rules are different” but “the rules are worse”, the point being that it spoils the fun when e.g. the rules are too exploitable, because then there isn’t really an interesting challenge any more. But then (a) I don’t understand why what you actually wrote was that writers are obliged to use as nearly as possible the same rules as the game rather than (something like) rules no more stupidly exploitable than the ones in the game, and (b) in this particular instance it seems highly plausible that the changes made to the rules make them less stupidly-exploitable rather than more. (As per Eliezer’s comment in this thread.)
It remains the case that the most reasonable interpretation I can find for your original comment—meaning the one that makes your argument make most sense to me—is the one I originally gave it, asserting something like claim One. Apparently this was wrong, and I’m sorry I got it wrong, but I’m failing to understand what I should have understood instead, and my best concrete attempts in the light of your reply—see above—seem clearly less reasonable rather than more.
I’m pretty sure my error, whatever exactly it is, isn’t one of misreading. And I promise it isn’t one of deliberate misrepresentation, which some of what you said in your reply seems to suggest! I’m sorry to be being so dim. What am I missing?
I certainly was not endorsing One.
Two, if that is entirely the approach that the author takes, puts the work into some other genre, so this is also not what I was talking about.
Three cannot quite be taken literally, as there are always facts about the setting that are not constrained by any game rules but are a “free choice” on the part of the author/GM, but that nonetheless constitute “rules” in the sense that they are stable facts about the world that the protagonist inhabits (and which he, at the very least, benefits from knowing). (Such things exist in almost all genres of fiction, of course.) Still, Three is the closest to my intended meaning.
I do not agree with your analysis.
For one thing, what’s necessary is not that the readers already know the rules, it’s that (a) the readers know that the rules exist prior to the author writing (any particular part of) the story, so the author is working within a set of constraints that he isn’t just making up as he goes along according to his authorial whims (and also that the rules aren’t going to change mid-story, except by events in the story), and (b) the readers can, if they like, go look up the rules—if they want to figure out a solution to a problem the character is facing, or if they want to check whether a described solution works, etc.
(This is perhaps the distinguishing feature of this genre, in fact. In most works of speculative fiction, except perhaps for the hardest of “hard sf”, you really have no idea what the rules are, what they permit, what they forbid, etc. The author could spring something on you from nowhere at any time. He can declare that it works, and provide some contorted reasoning why it totally accords with previously-described things; and this is the case regardless of how impossible it would’ve been for you, as the reader, to either predict the new thing in advance, or to gainsay the author on the question of whether it all “really works”. That means that stories where the reader is challenged along with the protagonist are, in most subgenres of speculative fiction, basically farcical.)
Note that (a)—the readers knowing that rules exist prior to the story, and exist stably throughout the story (unless explicitly changed by story events)—does in fact mirror the protagonist’s situation. He, after all, is not in a story—he’s just in the real world, where the laws of reality do, indeed, exist prior to the protagonist endeavoring to figure them out, and exist stably, i.e. they don’t change mid-adventure (and if they do, it’s according to the stable and unchangeable real rules, which have no exceptions).
Furthermore, there are two aspects to the appeal that I described.
First, there is the challenge of figuring out—in advance of reading onward to learn the author’s own answer—how the protagonist can, or will, solve whatever problem actually faces him. I am usually uninterested in attempting such challenges, because one can so very rarely trust authors enough to expect the challenge to be fair! For example, an author who takes any of the attitudes that you allude to, is obviously completely undeserving of the sort of reader trust that would make attempting to solve the “how can the protagonist win this” challenge anything but a waste of time. This is one aspect of the appeal of this particular genre of fiction—it makes such a level of reader trust possible.
But the second aspect of the appeal is the enjoyment of asking questions like “what could the protagonist have done instead?”, or “what should the protagonist do now?”, or “what could the protagonist’s opponents do, that would make the protagonist’s life more difficult?”, or “how might the story be different if the following conditions were tweaked?”—and so on in this vein.
Now, you can ask such questions of other sorts of stories, in other genres. But if you are dealing with speculative fiction of any sort, then such questions are usually pointless, because their answers amount to “whatever the author (or whoever is making the almost entirely arbitrary authorial decisions) wants”, “whatever the author (or etc.) decides will work”, etc. There’s no fact of the matter, so it’s all just fan-wank. (Many authors like to deny this, and claim that the rules they’ve allegedly laid out and allegedly followed constrain their story-worlds sufficiently that such questions are not devoid of meaning. I have little patience for such protestations; I find them to be absurd in nearly all cases.)
Not so in this genre. Here, we can ask the sorts of questions I listed above, and they can have answers, because the author is constrained. This is the key: the constraints upon the author, which are knowable by the reader.
It seems to me that you have picked a particular set of goals and constraints, called them “this genre”, and declared your dissatisfaction with the fact that Planecrash is not seeking those goals under those constraints.
I agree that Planecrash does not appear to be seeking the goals you specify under the constraints you specify.
I don’t see any particular reason to think either that its authors intend it to be doing those things, or that in some moral sense they ought to be doing those things. As for whether the work would be better if they were doing those things, I don’t know, but it does seem like there’s a substantial community of readers who are enjoying it without them.
(My feeling is that they are to some extent aiming to be able to set challenges to the protagonist with corresponding challenges to the reader—indeed there is concrete evidence that they are doing that at some particular points in the story—but for that there is no need for the readers to know more about the rules than the protagonist does, and indeed I think it’s better if their knowledge is pretty much the same as his.)
I do agree that there is a lot to be said for having rules that don’t get made up ad hoc as the story progresses (even when the story isn’t mostly about setting well-posed puzzles for the readers), and of course “non-speculative” fiction has that feature automatically, the rules being those of the world we’re actually in. To whatever extent the point of the story isn’t mostly to give readers well-posed puzzles, rules made up ad hoc are just as good provided they end up being as consistent and “fair” a set of rules as they would have been if fully worked out beforehand rather than e.g. being tweaked to get particular author-desired outcomes in particular situations. (One could e.g. imagine an author who, in the interests of fairness, decides that when some situation comes up that involves questions they haven’t already decided the answer to, they will ask an impartial friend what the most natural way is for the rules to work, without telling them any plot information that might bias their choice. Maybe that would work well, maybe not, but it wouldn’t have the sort of unfairness I think you are concerned about.)
I agree that the authors of Planecrash are clearly not working with exact Pathfinder rules. I don’t see any strong evidence either way for whether they worked out all the rules in advance, nor for whether if they didn’t they’re choosing rules in a “fair” way when they run into something they hadn’t pre-decided.
The specific major divergence you mention in another comment—how very easy telepathic communication seems to be for the Cheliax folks—is a thing that has bothered me too. I’m not sure whether that’s actually an argument on my side of this present discussion or yours, though, because I don’t know the Pathfinder rules about this and so my concern was “it’s hard to believe that all these people with good-but-not-superhuman brainpower are able to do all this telepathic communicating while other things are going on too, without making it obvious” rather than anything along the lines of “oi, not fair, that isn’t in the rules”. It seems to me there’s a roughly-equally-plausible possible world where the Pathfinder rules actually make Message overpowered like Planecrash-Message is, and in that possible world it would be better for the Planecrash authors to be more willing to diverge from the original rules, and I haven’t seen anything suggesting that Pathfinder rules are so carefully balanced that I should expect a policy of not diverging from those rules to result in a more plausible world than a policy of diverging from them where doing so seems to make for a better story.
Planecrash needs the Project Lawful management to be able to deceive Keltham rather effectively. If their telepathic communication were much worse then the jig would be up within days. It is not clear to me that the story would have been improved by forbidding the authors to make Message more powerful; perhaps that would just have made the overall shape of the plot impossible, or perhaps they’d have needed more munchkinning on other things that are in Pathfinder rules and it would have ended up more implausible rather than less, to anyone who isn’t a Pathfinder expert. (Maybe it would have forced them onto different paths that would have ended up making a better story. But I don’t see any reason to think it would have.)
Anyway. Clearly Planecrash is not playing by the specific rules you would prefer it to be playing by. If you say that this greatly reduces your enjoyment of it, then of course I believe you. But if you say it’s an objective failure to meet The Standards of The Genre, then I say: I just don’t think it’s trying to do the things you say it should be trying to do, and I don’t see why it should be, and I’ll match your declaration that it doesn’t work for you with my declaration that so far as I can tell it works at least as well for me as it would if the authors were constrained to match actual Pathfinder rules exactly and I strongly suspect it would be worse for me if they were so constrained.
Once again, I disagree with your characterization and your analysis.
You are speaking as if the classification of a story into a genre is something arbitrary—a personal choice I have made, according to my preferences and whims, and no more. This is inaccurate. Story genres are patterns of what sorts of structure and features of a work are enjoyable to readers, what sorts of reader responses they evoke, how effectively they do so, and other things of that sort. How we slice up the space of possibilities along these dimensions is certainly something we can debate; but it is not a matter of merely “picking and declaring”. When I say that this story falls into a genre, I am making reference to objective (or, at least, intersubjectively consistent) facts, not simply expressing my preferences.
What the authors intend, I cannot but speculate on (until such time as Eliezer & co. make their intentions known). That having been said, while I would not wish to push the “death of the author” line too far, still the author of a work does not have complete freedom in determining what sort of work it is. Likewise, genre conventions should certainly not be straitjackets (or else genres would never change, nor new ones arise); but deviations from such conventions ought to be justified by making a work better than otherwise (and, as in most such cases, it is almost invariably better for a work’s quality if the author understands the conventions he is violating, and commits the violations deliberately and with intent; note, by the way, that Eliezer absolutely does do this in other aspects of Project Lawful—see below).
I do not think morality, as ordinarily understood, enters into this, so at any time in this discussion when I say “ought”, I refer to aesthetic or prudential considerations, not ethical ones.
Yes. You will recall that this conversation began when I advised someone that they might wish to avoid learning more about the Pathfinder rules, lest their enjoyment of the work be diminished.
Also, as I said earlier, I am enjoying the story myself. I have never said anything like “if Project Lawful hewed to the rules I set out, it would be good; failing to do so, it is bad”. That would be a false and foolish claim. But there are greater and lesser degrees of enjoyment; there are multiple dimensions on which a work may be appreciated, and a work may do worse on some dimensions than on others; a work may offer a more complete, more comprehensively satisfying reader experience, or, conversely, one that is flawed, marred by annoyances, unsatisfying in some ways.
This all seems like very basic media criticism to me. Frankly, “some people like it despite these so-called problems you describe!” is almost always a facile reply in such cases.
Note that even if we take at face value what you say in this paragraph, it absolutely does not follow either that the authors shouldn’t avoid violations of the Pathfinder rules, or that readers do not benefit from being able to look up the rules. This is because if all that the reader knows about the rules is what the story tells us through the protagonist’s eyes, then the result will be that the reader knows less about the rules than the protagonist does! (This is the reason for the “character knowledge” concept in TTRPGs, and “Knowledge skills” in 3e-like systems, in particular. I hope that the logic of this is obvious enough, but I’ll explain it if needed.)
What’s more, even on this premise, the use of message is a flaw in the story. How do we know this? Because the first explicit use of the spell in the text does in fact acknowledge those facts about the casting and use of message that I described elsethread! It seems that the authors knew about this, but then, more or less, forgot (probably more like: didn’t really think about the implications, in their enthusiasm to use a very convenient plot device).
I completely disagree.
Rules made up ad hoc are sufficient to make an enjoyable story (as they would have to be, or most of the vast swath of works we call “speculative fiction” would be worthless). It is absolutely not the case that they are just as good as rules fully worked out beforehand.
See above re: initial vs. later appearances of the message spell in the story.
Mine, and here’s why:
This is, in fact, one of those cases where what seems “plausible” to you is an artifact of your lack of knowledge, and the plausibility is defeated by greater knowledge of the system. (Recall a similar dynamic in the argument about philosophical zombies.)
It is not nearly as plausible (not totally unimaginable, mind you! but definitely much less plausible) that message should be that overpowered, if one knows more about 3e-like systems in general and Pathfinder in particular. Importantly, the specific information needed to reach this conclusion is available in the text of Project Lawful itself; the “greater knowledge” I refer to is general knowledge about the structure and patterns of such systems / this system. Namely:
Observe that there exists a higher level spell called telepathic bond (5th-level for wizards). This spell is mentioned in the story, and it is made clear that it’s more powerful, and less easily available, than the ubiquitous message cantrip. But why should such a spell exist, and why should anyone ever have use for it, if message is as powerful as the story makes it out to be? This is a strange design flaw for a system where the relative power and usefulness of similar categories of spells is strongly correlated with their relative levels! (What’s more, as both spells appear in the Core Rulebook—indeed, they were both inherited from the earliest iteration of this sort of system, D&D 3.0, where they both also appeared in the core rules—so this apparent anomaly is not even explainable by “power creep”, by splatbook option growth, etc.)
This is, again, not an insurmountable objection. It is not unknown for such “power ladder anomalies” to exist in 3e-like systems. But they are the exception, not the rule. Therefore message being as powerful as how it is depicted in Project Lawful is not totally implausible, but it is definitely substantially less plausible than message being the way that it is in the Pathfinder rules as written.
The Pathfinder rules are carefully balanced in some ways, less carefully balanced in other ways. Likewise, some deviations from the rules are clearly good and even necessary, while others are just as clearly false moves in the game of story design.
Let me offer an example of the former sort of deviation, for contrast; I think this may help you to understand how I am thinking about this. Eliezer wrote:
And this is entirely correct. The Pathfinder magic item creation rules famously differ from the magic item creation rules in D&D 3.5 (Pathfinder’s predecessor system) by removing the requirement that the creator expend his own experience points to make the item, and not replacing it with any other requirement for the expenditure of any other limited resource; thus the only limited resources that a character must expend to create magic items is money and time—but the exchange rate is such that… well, it’s as Eliezer said.
This is a problem with the Pathfinder magic item creation system, and a problem with Pathfinder generally. It is solved in various ways by various GMs, the details of which we need not concern ourselves with, except to note that such solutions tend to be unsatisfactory from a world-building perspective even if they’re adequate from a gameplay perspective.
In Project Lawful, the solution to this problem is, of course, spellsilver. We (the readers) have not yet learned very much about this material, but whatever it is, it’s evidently a limited natural resource, which is expended in the creation of magic items. (Unsurprisingly, this makes spellsilver extremely valuable, etc.; the implications are obvious, and depicted in the story in ways that make sense.)
When “spellsilver” first appeared in the story, my immediate reaction was “Ah! Eliezer has chosen to solve the ‘unlimited item creation’ problem by introducing a limited natural resource requirement! Very good, a classic solution and a sensible one; let’s see where this goes.” A reader unfamiliar with the Pathfinder system would, presumably, instead merely take “spellsilver” as a comprehensible feature of the fictional world, not noting anything amiss; a Golarion where there is such a thing as spellsilver, a rare material that is needed to make magic items, is perfectly coherent and unproblematic from the standpoint of constructing, and understanding, a fantasy setting.
In short, the introduction of “spellsilver” is a deviation from the Pathfinder rules as written that is (a) obviously very deliberate, (b) done with full knowledge of the rules as they are, and clear intent to achieve a specific effect by the change, and (c) successful at both the particular goal of changing the setting in the desired way and, more broadly, at improving the setting and the story that may be written in it.
The alteration to the functionality of the message spell appears to have none of those properties.
Frankly, this reads to me like a post-hoc excuse for shoddy work—and, what’s more, an entirely unnecessary one. I have rather greater confidence than you, it seems, in Eliezer’s ability to write a story that doesn’t involve this sort of carelessness with constraints. And I have little doubt that it would be a better story overall.
As for your last paragraph…
I have addressed the matter of fiction genres earlier in this comment. The “well I like it fine the way it is!” and “it would be worse if they fixed these flaws!” stuff seems like rationalization, at best. With respect, I detect a note of defensiveness in your responses. There is no need for that. A flaw is a flaw, and we can admit that without giving up our appreciation for those aspects of the story which are good (and there are, indeed, plenty of things about Project Lawful which are not only good, but good in very uncommon ways).
Who was it, after all, who once wrote: “if you can’t criticize, you can’t optimize”?
Classification into genres is not arbitrary. But I don’t think inferences of the form “this story has features X, Y, and Z, which put it in genre G, and stories in genre G generally try to do P, Q, and R; therefore this story should be doing P, Q, and R, and not doing so constitutes a defect” are valid unless either you can get from XYZ to PQR without going through G, or XYZ are tied to G so strongly that no reasonable person familiar with G could deny that a story with XYZ is trying to do what stories in genre G generally try to do.
If Planecrash ends up being enjoyable to read, or instructive, or funny, or prophetic, or suitable for turning into a wildly successful 30-hour-long opera cycle, those merits are not in any way nullified by its not doing particular things that stories sharing some of its features often do.
I think the discussion is devolving into “Said states his position. Gareth states his position. Said restates his position. Gareth restates his position.” which is seldom productive, so I shall leave it here unless there are particular things you are anxious to have a reply to (in which case, let me know and I’ll probably oblige).
Regarding your final few paragraphs: it is possible that I am being defensive, but I am pretty sure I am not being defensive on behalf of Planecrash, which I certainly don’t regard as flawless or unworthy of criticism. I simply disagree with some particular claims you are making about it, and if I am defending anything it is my position on what makes a given work of fiction better or worse.