tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post2207135031368520736..comments2023-10-14T03:58:59.333-06:00Comments on The Tao of D&D: 6th Class: From Competent Player to ExpertAlexis Smolenskhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10539170107563075967noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-24975914019968975402018-09-11T20:11:45.120-06:002018-09-11T20:11:45.120-06:00Hello Jack,
Sorry about the lateness of my reply;...Hello Jack,<br /><br />Sorry about the lateness of my reply; I have pretty much no access to the real world during my workshifts, so I could not answer until now.<br /><br />Your realization is precisely what I'm seeking and precisely the point that Dreyfus was trying to make. At some point, EVERY piece of advice offered by anyone, expert or not, becomes increasingly less meaningful to individuals who are pushing their own boundaries of knowledge. Each person, as they push towards proficiency, gains the possibility of making discoveries and breakthroughs that have the potential to change human thought on any subject. We have to free ourselves from the cocoon of education that got us as far as competence. After that, we have to fly ~ and convention be damned.Alexis Smolenskhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10539170107563075967noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-4266509488926556342018-09-11T13:49:26.932-06:002018-09-11T13:49:26.932-06:00Very insightful post Alexis. I've been reading...Very insightful post Alexis. I've been reading your blog, with a few breaks in the last couple years when I lacked a group to play with, for about 5 years now, and I believe this is the first time I've ever felt like I must comment. Forgive me in advance for the meandering nature of this comment.<br /><br />On first read, I thought something like, "this is very intellectual; but how can I put it to use?" But then something clicked for me, the answer to a question I've thought about for a long time. <br /><br />After reading your posts about heuristics linked in this post, I began wondering what your exact stance on "neutrality" in D&D games was. By "neutrality" I mean that nebulous concept, variously defined in its particulars, that the DM, or the world itself, should be impartial, uncaring, disinterested, etc. I usually see this concept promoted by old school DMs as a way of guaranteeing player agency. As a principle, it tends to be joined by things like not using a DM screen, or rolling dice in the open. I've always valued player agency over almost anything else, so I've naturally gravitated to this idea.<br /><br />But there was always a problem with it: the pure, "bullet-point advice" form of the neutrality argument never squared perfectly with my experience of running a fun game. And how could it? It is, of course, just another form of puritanism that precludes anything from happening outside the realm of preset parameters, which are by their nature arbitrary.<br /><br />Of course, you're not one of those puritans, as from the examples in your posts it seems you're perfectly willing to create or modify an encounter on the fly, using your established heuristics about what those encounters should be. This is something you have thought about, and answered for yourself.<br /><br />I've done similar things, but I have always felt bound, in a sense, to things like "# appearing" or other things one might find, or write, on an encounter table, because that seemed "fair" and "neutral." Whenever I departed from those things, or made a decision such as "one of the orcs in the camp is the same orc you met before, in the dungeon you raided," I was sure I was making the game more fun, but I had doubts anyway. I doubted my decisions, and whether they undermined my commitment to player agency, whether they damaged the relationship between action and consequence. <br /><br />I've run games like this for years, always balkanized, accepting the principle of impartiality, but being unable to reconcile its pure form with things that seem obviously to make the game better. <br /><br />In reading this post, I've realized that things like the fiat decision to make an orc a familiar NPC, or the decision to create or modify an encounter, or any number of other things, are decisions that, with the right heuristics, can be felt. The religion of impartiality, which I had been clinging to, is a vestigial remnant of my "advanced beginner" or perhaps early "competence" stage; a framework that once provided me with a useful logic, but now merely interferes with the heuristics I've established not through idle theorizing, but experience and self-criticism. This essay has helped me to conclude that this is something I can finally let go of, as I can accept that may own heuristics may clash with axioms that, nevertheless, may be generally valuable. <br /><br />Indeed, maybe so many experts are so bad at unpacking their knowledge because, at the highest levels, anything but an infinitely detailed fractal of situational rules will produce contradictions.<br /><br />Thanks for taking the time to tackle big topics like this. No one has to do it, but you do it anyway. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09822146340754971142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-42705393371992968092018-09-09T16:52:47.616-06:002018-09-09T16:52:47.616-06:00Truth be told, kimbo, we don't know if those p...Truth be told, kimbo, we don't know if those professors were experts. We were told they were, because they had an accreditation. But we had to take the university's word for it. Alexis Smolenskhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10539170107563075967noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-23478229809668035882018-09-09T01:41:44.510-06:002018-09-09T01:41:44.510-06:00Great series of posts Alexis. Really useful perspe...Great series of posts Alexis. Really useful perspective for self examination and improvement.<br /><br />On your last point about bad-teaching-professors, the unconscious experts perhaps one could call them, i have experienced a couple of times experts with axioms and mental models which are demonstrably wrong (ie they dont represent the process they follow and if followed by others dont help to get the same results) but refuse to examine this at all. Perhaps unconscious learning trumps conscious learning.<br /><br />Reading Rory Miller's "principle based instruction for self defence" he mentions a big part of expertise is screening out the unimportant stuff, noise vs signal. <br />kimbohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12961382206655820923noreply@blogger.com