How does it work? I’m not finding an obvious instruction manual or introduction. The first one seems like the first puzzle, but I’m not quite sure how it works. Would someone who wants to jump in just… reply in the comments with what they try to do? Or is this a template for an RPG session someone could run with others? Or something else?
I’d shied away from RPG style simulated practice because of the difficulty with embodied integration. I find it far too easy to view my character from the outside and solve their situation like a puzzle, rather than experiencing myself as the character who’s actually encountering the confusion and psychological states and trying to navigate them from the inside. From a skim, it looks like you’re navigating this in roughly the same way Eliezer seemed to be trying to do in creating the genre of “rationalist fiction” (where you show rather than describe the experience of making the inner mental movements that produce clarity).
I think the name may have given the wrong impression. The ‘D&D’ part of D&D.Sci is mostly the trappings of the genre, not the substance; monsters, wizards and (simulated) dicerolls yes, anything resembling Actual Roleplaying no.
Since you asked . . . from the top, the typical/intended way to Consume my Product is:
Download the dataset provided in the introductory post.
Investigate the scenario and decide the best course of action, using the dataset, the problem description, and a vague sense of what tricks you think the GM will/won’t use.
OPTIONAL: Post about any ambiguities in the problem description or apparent errors in the dataset so the GM can clarify/fix them.
OPTIONAL: Post your findings and/or call your decision in advance (for bragging rights, this is best done in the ~week between the problem and the solution being posted).
OPTIONAL: Update your analysis/answer based on what other people said.
Use your solution in the evaluator the corresponding “Evaluation and Ruleset” post links to; see what happens to your character as a result, and what the odds of that outcome were given your choices.
Read the ruleset: see how well your deductions matched reality, and how close your strategy was to the optimal one.
OPTIONAL: Read the code used to generate the dataset.
OPTIONAL: Post about how well your strategy worked, and what you think you’ve learned from the game.
OPTIONAL: Post about what you think was good/bad about the scenario and what you’d like to see more of in future ones.
OPTIONAL: Make your own scenario. (aphyer has builttwo so far – both of which are very good – and various other LWers are planning to run games at some point this year)
I’d shied away from RPG style simulated practice because of the difficulty with embodied integration. I find it far too easy to view my character from the outside and solve their situation like a puzzle, rather than experiencing myself as the character who’s actually encountering the confusion and psychological states and trying to navigate them from the inside.
Your Honor, I plead guilty to exactly half of this charge. It’s true that—for example—the player in Voyages of the Gray Swan will not be feeling the terror, desperation and confusion of the character they play, because they aren’t actually having the experience of trying to analyze their way out of being eaten by crabmonsters. As such, they won’t be able to test or develop their making-good-decisions-under-pressure mental musculature: this is a weakness of the genre as it currently exists, and I cop to it.
However, I can tell you from experience that players do get to use their pattern-matching, noticing-confusion, admitting-they’re-wrong, and balancing-priors-against-the-evidence skills, because the scenarios are intentionally weird and messy enough that they have to do those things to reach the best answer. I suppose I’d summarize this by saying I think D&D.Sci players get to practice being rational, but not being not-irrational?
(I once tried to give players a chance to use their not-irrationality skills by writing one of my scenarios as fanfiction of a story with some compelling characters, and inventing a situation where those characters could die, survive, or survive and avoid some of the problems they face in canon, depending on the player’s decisions. This completely failed for reasons documented in the Reflections section ofthe evaluation post, chief among which is that none of my players had read the story my scenario was fanfiction of. I have various tentative plans for (hopefully!) more effective projects with the same goal.)
I like this. Thank you for bringing it up here.
How does it work? I’m not finding an obvious instruction manual or introduction. The first one seems like the first puzzle, but I’m not quite sure how it works. Would someone who wants to jump in just… reply in the comments with what they try to do? Or is this a template for an RPG session someone could run with others? Or something else?
I’d shied away from RPG style simulated practice because of the difficulty with embodied integration. I find it far too easy to view my character from the outside and solve their situation like a puzzle, rather than experiencing myself as the character who’s actually encountering the confusion and psychological states and trying to navigate them from the inside. From a skim, it looks like you’re navigating this in roughly the same way Eliezer seemed to be trying to do in creating the genre of “rationalist fiction” (where you show rather than describe the experience of making the inner mental movements that produce clarity).
I think the name may have given the wrong impression. The ‘D&D’ part of D&D.Sci is mostly the trappings of the genre, not the substance; monsters, wizards and (simulated) dicerolls yes, anything resembling Actual Roleplaying no.
Since you asked . . . from the top, the typical/intended way to Consume my Product is:
Download the dataset provided in the introductory post.
Investigate the scenario and decide the best course of action, using the dataset, the problem description, and a vague sense of what tricks you think the GM will/won’t use.
OPTIONAL: Post about any ambiguities in the problem description or apparent errors in the dataset so the GM can clarify/fix them.
OPTIONAL: Post your findings and/or call your decision in advance (for bragging rights, this is best done in the ~week between the problem and the solution being posted).
OPTIONAL: Update your analysis/answer based on what other people said.
Use your solution in the evaluator the corresponding “Evaluation and Ruleset” post links to; see what happens to your character as a result, and what the odds of that outcome were given your choices.
Read the ruleset: see how well your deductions matched reality, and how close your strategy was to the optimal one.
OPTIONAL: Read the code used to generate the dataset.
OPTIONAL: Post about how well your strategy worked, and what you think you’ve learned from the game.
OPTIONAL: Post about what you think was good/bad about the scenario and what you’d like to see more of in future ones.
OPTIONAL: Make your own scenario. (aphyer has built two so far – both of which are very good – and various other LWers are planning to run games at some point this year)
Your Honor, I plead guilty to exactly half of this charge. It’s true that—for example—the player in Voyages of the Gray Swan will not be feeling the terror, desperation and confusion of the character they play, because they aren’t actually having the experience of trying to analyze their way out of being eaten by crabmonsters. As such, they won’t be able to test or develop their making-good-decisions-under-pressure mental musculature: this is a weakness of the genre as it currently exists, and I cop to it.
However, I can tell you from experience that players do get to use their pattern-matching, noticing-confusion, admitting-they’re-wrong, and balancing-priors-against-the-evidence skills, because the scenarios are intentionally weird and messy enough that they have to do those things to reach the best answer. I suppose I’d summarize this by saying I think D&D.Sci players get to practice being rational, but not being not-irrational?
(I once tried to give players a chance to use their not-irrationality skills by writing one of my scenarios as fanfiction of a story with some compelling characters, and inventing a situation where those characters could die, survive, or survive and avoid some of the problems they face in canon, depending on the player’s decisions. This completely failed for reasons documented in the Reflections section of the evaluation post, chief among which is that none of my players had read the story my scenario was fanfiction of. I have various tentative plans for (hopefully!) more effective projects with the same goal.)
Very cool. Thank you for explaining all that.