thread: 2011-05-18 : Ben Lehman: Rules and their Functions
On 2011-05-24, Vincent wrote:
Just terminology here.
"Deterministic," as Jonathan's using it, means diceless; deterministic as opposed to randomized. "Mediating" is short for "fiction-mediating," which means referring materially to fictional things. An alternative to mediating rules is procedural rules, where the rules tell us how to talk, not what to say.
Deterministic mediating: "whichever player has the higher strength rating on her character sheet, her character wins."
Randomized mediating: "whichever player rolls the higher strength roll, her character wins."
Deterministic procedural: "the player on your left says what happens."
Randomized procedural: "whichever player has the highest card, she says what happens."
There's a third distinction that's useful to draw, which is cued vs noncued. People use "freeform" to refer to qualities of cues or lack of cues too. ("Cues" here being things you can point to in the real world, like dice and words on character sheets and who's sitting where.) Dogs' traits get called freeform all the time, because you get to make them up for yourself.
Ben's point is that on top of all these distinctions, rules ALSO operate both continuously and immediately, some primarily one and some primarily the other, but all in principle both.
