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Nurglitch wrote:
On a personal note, though, I'm upset that you've given up on trying to understand what I'm pointing to because you are one of the few people on these forums whose opinion matters to me, so it's dispiriting when I can't even get through to you.

If you have such a low opinion of the community why do you bother with the forum?

Nuglich,

This is not the attempt to find the Unified Field Theory, It's a Frakking Tabletop Wargame with Little Plastic Toys.

If you really are taking this GAME that seriously you desperatly need to step back a bit and gain some perspective.

The FAQ is nothing more than an attempt to make for fewer arguments at tournaments. Having just watched as a Man threatened the life of another man because he did not see the TRUTH of his interpretation of the rules at round 2 of Ard Boyz I can only applaud that effort.

As I always say, I am less concerned with the content of the rulings than with thier clarity. As long as I know what to expect, I can prepare for it.

olympia wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
On a personal note, though, I'm upset that you've given up on trying to understand what I'm pointing to because you are one of the few people on these forums whose opinion matters to me, so it's dispiriting when I can't even get through to you.

If you have such a low opinion of the community why do you bother with the forum?

I don’t think he does, honestly. Remember you or I or he will never meet the vast majority of the posters on here, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to value their good opinion very highly.

I think Nurglich is sincere in his efforts. He runs into a massive stumbling block in how rare people who are conversant with his methodology appear to be in the 40k community. Even on a forum like this where you get some dedicated people who are really interested in discussing rules.

I can follow some of it, but when he gets into the details I'm lost like everyone else seems to be. Whether this is purely due to our ignorance of the system he's using, I can't say. Most folks (even intelligent, detail-oriented people like Polonius and Yakface) seem to consider the accuracy and applicability he extolls in it to be implausible.

I agree that its implausible but I also think its simply unecessary as well when we consider that we are just talking about a game when its all said and done.

If a consensus of well informed, dedicated people trying to clarify an issue is not enough for you, then I think you need to wonder if you are asking too much.

bigtmac68 wrote:I agree that its implausible but I also think its simply unecessary as well when we consider that we are just talking about a game when its all said and done.

If a consensus of well informed, dedicated people trying to clarify an issue is not enough for you, then I think you need to wonder if you are asking too much.

I agree.

Nurglitch is looking too deep into this. He also enjoys looking too deep into this.

Nurglitch wrote:
Polonius:

No, there's a single true interpretation of a document with a fixed semantic referent like Warhammer 40k, and we approach it asymptotically. We cannot say we have reached this final truth since we must maintain an attitude of fallibility, lest we acclaim a false interpretation as the final truth, so in the meantime we settle on tentative truths as 'true-so-far'.

The basic concept here is 'reasonable doubt', though not in the legal sense I should hasten to add. Basically if one interpretation is more consistent in various ways than another, then we have reason to doubt one and not the other, and we're left with the other one as tentatively true. This remaining interpretation may not be the final truth though, so if another interpretation comes up that is more reasonable, then we have found reason to doubt the previous tentative truth. We don't do unreasonable doubt, or doubting everything, nor do we do the unreasonable acceptance of everything, we go with the interpretation we have least reason to doubt.

On a personal note, though, I'm upset that you've given up on trying to understand what I'm pointing to because you are one of the few people on these forums whose opinion matters to me, so it's dispiriting when I can't even get through to you.

Edit: Some NSFW comedy that reflects some ideas I've tried to get across here.

I read through your stuff in this thread and watched the video, and I think I understand better what you're aiming at. I also think that you're using the wrong tool for the job.

Yes, we could be more rigorous in logging our discussions about the rules (the z-axis debate was very enlightening for me) but any search for a "correct" answer to rules questions misses the point: in the real gray areas, we don't want correct, we want good. And good is far fuzzier than correct, and it takes into account many factors: how people play, balance, context, consistency, etc. I think I understand why you consider the INAT FAQ to be arbitrary (although I don't yet understand exactly how you'd go about with your system), I don't think it is. I think it merely uses criteria that are valuable to most gamers that you don't see as horribly important.

The 40k rules are an artificial construct, without a ton of internal logic. Clearly we should use what's there, but for me a good FAQ follows a few simple precepts:
0) When RAW is ascertainable and not stupid, use it.
1) Any answer is better than no answer
2) The best answers should lead to better games, regardless of the RAW
3) If most people play a certain way and it's not broken, dont' fix it.

I certainly understand people not liking those precepts, but I'd guess they're pretty close to what Yak and the rest of the Council use.

Polonius:

I think it's something to distinguish between what the rules say, and how we might play the situation they address. Not to say that an FAQ shouldn't address both, but that an FAQ should address both, and distinguish between clarification of interactions between the rules and what is to be done about those interactions.

Insofar as we can achieve the correct answer, and here I'd like to point out that I've been trying to suggest the journey is more important than the destination, the important thing is to connect the dots for the end-user so that there is common-ground available within which a correct answer can be found, and the best available least-wrong answer is locatable.

In part that's because the end-user is better served by a method of finding the answer than a set of answers, and in part it's because the problem is with commensurating different perspectives than it is about finding an answer that could satisfy all perspectives. The problem with the list you've set out, that I can see at first glance, are that often there is no reference for the values it expresses: whether the rules are stupid, for example, can only be judged objectively for it to be useful. Likewise for an answer to be better than no answer, it must be such that the cost of possibly being the wrong answer is outweighed by the effort required to generate an answer using a reliable method.

Whether the best answers lead to better game is, I think, a prime example of where we need to distinguish between the rules and play (aka. doctrine and practice). Quite aside from the problem of what counts as "better games", working from the premise that the best answers lead to better games means that we are inclined to read the rules with a bias towards what we subjectively consider to be better games. When this happen in YMDC, the flying recriminations of "cheater" tend to be somewhat justified (though not actually justified) because that just looks like bending the truth to suit some end. I think it's very much better if we acknowledge uncomfortable truths about the rules, and then make the decision to either accept or reject their normative impact on our practice as game players. Trying to read one's own preferences into the rules, rather than rejecting the rule and moving on to reject the play mandated by the rule, creates too much of the friction that degrades YMDC discussions. It degrades those discussions because it makes determining the truth of the rules a matter of competition, each debater trying to push their own 'truth', rather than of co-operation in trying to find the truth and find out how different people play.

Finally, the precept that if most people play a certain way and it's not broke, that we shouldn't fix it, is a bad precept for the following reasons: Firstly, it depends too much on what "broke" is cashed out as. The epithet "broken" means many things to many people, from the rules not fitting their conception of the background, to generating inconsistencies with other rules, to simply being a tactic or strategy one has yet to overcome. Secondly calling on the fact that most people play a rule one way is a classic fallacy called "argumentum ad populum", an appeal to popularity, which is fallacious when the majority are wrong. Take Chaos Dreadnought Fire Frenzies, by way of example. Most people play the Fire Frenzy as it worked in the 4th edition of the game when the Codex was initially released, so the Chaos Dreadnought is, to a vast majority, an unreliable fratricidal waste of points. The problem is that the rules for Walker line of sight and pivoting have changed, and now the Chaos Dreadnought is only an unreliable fratricidal waste of points if you put friendly troops in front of a Dreadnought (amusingly like the picture in the book of Terminators escorting a Dreadnought...). In this case most people are wrong, and in being wrong distort the landscape of the game by ignoring the utility of Chaos Dreadnoughts (although people seem to be warming to them in recent months). In this case especially the rules should be clarified because most people play it wrongly, and in doing so discourage diversity in the strategies available to the Chaos Space Marine army.

I do agree that we need to state a set of axioms or starting statements to get somewhere, but axioms are judged by their results, by the properties of the systems that they foundationalize. It's just that as axioms or precepts for resolving rules disputes go, we can do better, or at least avoid the problems that I suggest plague them.

In addition, I disagree with the opinion that the 40k rules lack an internal logic: it's the nature of rules that they are logical. They may not be wholly consistent, elegant, or transparent set of rules; they may be a jury-rigged set of ad hoc kludges, but either way logic is the essence of rules.

Think of it like the problem of drawing a limited set of lines through a set of nine dots arranged in a 3x3 matrix (I think those are the numbers): in order to see the logic of it you need to draw lines that go well outside of the area occupied by the dots. Similarly the 40k rules, the ones written down in the rulebook, require us to employ valid inferences to deduce all the rules that aren't written down, but which follow when rules interact with each other.

If the FAQ describes the logic by which the dots of the written rules are connected and the invisible dots of the unwritten rules are also connected, then not only do we have a method of deciding what the unwritten rules are and noting them down in the FAQ, but we have a method of fixing inconsistencies that might occur in the FAQ itself or with the original rules, a method that an ad hoc method lacks entirely.

After all, isn't people's complaints about GW's rules that they are written in a very casual manner, lacking the clarity of good technical writing, and full of problems such as inconsistencies, amphibolies, and bearerless predicates? An FAQ that explicates the logic of the game (really a logic that seems best suited for understanding the game given some set of preferred values) goes a long way to satisfying that demand.

I'm sure your process will create some insights, but I see two huge problems:
1) getting people to create this FAQ, and then more importantly,
2) getting people to follow it.

I mean, it sounds cool, but I just dont' see the point. It's a ton of work, at the end of which we know better how 40k was designed. Most of us aren't interested in studying 40k, we want to play it.

BTW, I reread the walk rules, and they still pivot during the shooting phase towards the target.

Polonius wrote:The 40k rules are an artificial construct, without a ton of internal logic. Clearly we should use what's there, but for me a good FAQ follows a few simple precepts:
0) When RAW is ascertainable and not stupid, use it.
1) Any answer is better than no answer
2) The best answers should lead to better games, regardless of the RAW
3) If most people play a certain way and it's not broken, dont' fix it.

I certainly understand people not liking those precepts, but I'd guess they're pretty close to what Yak and the rest of the Council use.

This has got to be one of the most simplistic ways this debate has ever been explained and probably the most relevant for many people.

@ Nurglythingy - your problem has always been you poor use of English and your poor communication skills. Why poor use? Because 99% of the time you fail to explain your thoughts in a clear concise (especially conscise) manner in a way suited to the audience of people you are writing to. Failing to take into account the time available, intelligence and schooling of those reading your post means many of your good reasoned points get lost in the "noise". Also, the way you write has been pointed out by several posters as coming across as being condescending which further ruins many of the good points you raised.

Also, the journey isn't important, rolling dice and having fun is important - I am willing to bet that a simple document that is realtively reasonable in its intereptation that most people will accept as a "bible" is perfectly acceptable solution to most of us. I don't need 40 pages of advance logic giving me a framework as to how these rules were decided upon - I just need to know everyone else will play them. A rule might be played in an illogical manner, but if enough people decide to us that interpretation (part 3 from Polonius) and are happy to do so does it really matter if it becomes the de facto rule? If everyone plays by the same rules and the same FAQ's we should all be reasonably happy.

I agree with your decision not to write a FAQ yourself - I am not sure how many people would be able to read it so it is a waste of your valuable time.

Im sure the journey would be valuable to you Nurglich as Im starting to understand your mindset a bit. To the overwealming majority of us, however, the only thing that matters is having better games and an easy to reference FAQ.

Although Im sure some would find the analysis of your data facinating, that is a whole different hobby. Most of us prefer to keep the advanced statistics out of our gaming whenever possible.

Again, its just grown men playing with toy soldiers.

bigtmac68:

And yet you devote whole hours of your time to producing a podcast to talk about playing with toy soldiers.

Remember, no one is asking you to directly contribute to this putative project, or spend any more time than you already do on your hobby. The whole point is that the work can be spread out amongst those of us who do have time and interest, who have already built up a library of information on YMDC (I should give credit where it's due: Dakka Dakka's article system is practically designed for this sort of thing).

What I'm asking you to do is at least mention this perspective as a valid point of view on your podcast instead of either glossing it over or dismissing it entirely without critical engagement.

My philosophy, such as it is, is that you can have more time available for fun stuff if you take the time to look ahead and avoid problems before they start. "A stitch in time saves nine."


Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I happen to like my hobby of playing with toy soldiers. And as such I would like to engage with fellow hobbyists in a positive and constructive manner rather than just participating in a grumbling echo chamber about how hard-done-by GW hobbyists are because GW spends its resources on stuff we can't make for ourselves (models) instead of stuff we can (rules, FAQs, tactics, etc).

Polonius wrote:Most of us aren't interested in studying 40k, we want to play it.

fullheadofhair wrote:Also, the journey isn't important, rolling dice and having fun is important

bigtmac68 wrote:To the overwealming majority of us, however, the only thing that matters is having better games and an easy to reference FAQ.

QFT Thrice.

And the Adepticon FAQ does a pretty damn good job for what it is, and they solicit feedback.

whitedragon:

Yes, that is the majority opinion. The fact that it is the opinion of the majority, and often uncritically accepted, is why I'm asking that a minority opinion be at least acknowledged.

Good quote by Polonius in your signature, by the way, though I think I would modify it as so:

"Guess what? This is Dakka, where we all are cranks. This hobby, the internet, heck life itself is crammed with cranks. Really, when we call somebody a crank, we're mostly saying 'that person ignores a set of beliefs that I hold dearly, while the people that respect the beliefs that I choose to ignore are obviously wrong.'"

Not a dig at you, Polonius. Just pointing out similarities in sentiment.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

fullheadofhair wrote:@ Nurglythingy - your problem has always been you poor use of English and your poor communication skills.

Pardon me if I ignore the advice of someone who addresses me with condescending nicknames, and who doesn't follow his own advice.

Nurglitch wrote:

fullheadofhair wrote:@ Nurglythingy - your problem has always been you poor use of English and your poor communication skills.

Pardon me if I ignore the advice of someone who addresses me with condescending nicknames, and who doesn't follow his own advice.

You are free to do whatever you wish however I do follow my own advice as most of my posts, be they poor spelt, grammatically incorrect or missing the occassional word or two are at least readable by the majority of people. Yours on the other hand are an inpenetrable nightmare even for those of us at degree plus level of education that do not easily convey the useful knowledge I am sure is in there.

and for a final thought, unless your real name is actually "nurglich" lighten up on the condescending nickname theme, like the toy soldiers we play with aren't real nurglitch 'tis only a name to hide behind and isn't real - like mine, behind FHOF sits a short fat bald English man high on life and about to enjoy time with friends.

Nurglitch wrote:

fullheadofhair wrote:@ Nurglythingy - your problem has always been you poor use of English and your poor communication skills.

Pardon me if I ignore the advice of someone who addresses me with condescending nicknames, and who doesn't follow his own advice.

In all fairness, your posts are nearly impenetrable. I'm by most accounts an intelligent and well educated man, and I can barely decipher them.

Polonius:

I'm sorry, I'm not particularly good at writing in English. Please suggest how I can make my posts clearer for you.

Well, starters, your posts tend to read like they're trying to sound like academic essays. I'm not accusing you of affectation, but they do look like the result of such an affectation.

You tend to use a lot of words, and that's fine, and it looks impressive, but it makes it tough to read.

Compare

"I think it's something to distinguish between what the rules say, and how we might play the situation they address. Not to say that an FAQ shouldn't address both, but that an FAQ should address both, and distinguish between clarification of interactions between the rules and what is to be done about those interactions. "

With

"We should distinguish between how rules read based on our analysis and how they are best or generally played. A good FAQ would do both, showing both the strict answer and the recommended work around."

Original:

"Whether the best answers lead to better game is, I think, a prime example of where we need to distinguish between the rules and play (aka. doctrine and practice). Quite aside from the problem of what counts as "better games", working from the premise that the best answers lead to better games means that we are inclined to read the rules with a bias towards what we subjectively consider to be better games. When this happen in YMDC, the flying recriminations of "cheater" tend to be somewhat justified (though not actually justified) because that just looks like bending the truth to suit some end. I think it's very much better if we acknowledge uncomfortable truths about the rules, and then make the decision to either accept or reject their normative impact on our practice as game players. Trying to read one's own preferences into the rules, rather than rejecting the rule and moving on to reject the play mandated by the rule, creates too much of the friction that degrades YMDC discussions. It degrades those discussions because it makes determining the truth of the rules a matter of competition, each debater trying to push their own 'truth', rather than of co-operation in trying to find the truth and find out how different people play."

Cleaned up:

"The problem with creating "best" solutions is that it assumes that there is an idea for "better" games, and that's an inherent bias. Even where most people agree, enough won't that the focus should be to what the rules actually say. Anytime a discussion moves to a an argument of relative merits, the chance of objective truth disappears."

Hopefully I kept the meat of your arguments, but you use a lot of words, man.

Polonius:

I'm not sure what to do with your advice, since the substance of your revisions deviates so heavily from the substance of the original sentences. Given that, so far as I can tell, you've missed the "meat of [my] arguments", I find it hard to accept your advice to write in such a vague and uninformative manner.

I'll certainly try to keep my sentences short and pithy for you, but I'd like to point out that much will be lost in translation and that will mean writing ten times as many short sentences where one grammatically complex sentence will do.

Your request is fair and noted and I will certainly bring it up during my next show. You are correct that the opinion of the majority is not necessarily the best one.

Also I will have to give you a score for your point on how much time I spend on the podcast and the hobby in general, it is true that it means a great deal to many of us, myself included.

I do still think you are over thinking the whole thing, but if you are willing to make that kind of research effort I certainly will be the first to try to make use of it. I do have my doubts about how much support you will get from others though as that is some seriously brain bleeding analysis you propose.

I apologize if my previous posts were dismissive of your point of view, that was not fair given the intended tone of your posts.

Thank you for the feedback and I will certainly bring it up on the show and let the audience make their own decisions. I will do my best not to editorialize on your comments and just put them out there for all to hear.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I hope you don't mind if i summarize them, Polonius has a valid point that you tend to be a bit, umm, verbose.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And as an aside, just curious, if you are a fan of P.Z Meyers? A lot of your posts read like him without the "colorful metaphors". He also has quite a thing for cephalopods.

Nurglitch wrote:Polonius:

I'm not sure what to do with your advice, since the substance of your revisions deviates so heavily from the substance of the original sentences. Given that, so far as I can tell, you've missed the "meat of [my] arguments", I find it hard to accept your advice to write in such a vague and uninformative manner.

I'll certainly try to keep my sentences short and pithy for you, but I'd like to point out that much will be lost in translation and that will mean writing ten times as many short sentences where one grammatically complex sentence will do.

I don't know what to tell you. I can't understand what you're saying. Either you're not writing clearly or I'm not reading properly. I don't' see myself trying too much harder to read your stuff, as I've read treatises on tax policy with less effort. That's not boasting or being dismissive, I'm just not going to get a highlighter and do three reads of something posted about warhammer. You clearly have a scholarly background, and I suppose you could just be so versed in the jargon and style of that world it doesn't translate well.

Maybe, start with a thesis? Tell me what your point is, and then explain it? My approach is.... and it is better because.... kind of stuff.

Nurglitch wrote:Polonius:

I'm not sure what to do with your advice, since the substance of your revisions deviates so heavily from the substance of the original sentences. Given that, so far as I can tell, you've missed the "meat of [my] arguments", I find it hard to accept your advice to write in such a vague and uninformative manner.

I'll certainly try to keep my sentences short and pithy for you, but I'd like to point out that much will be lost in translation and that will mean writing ten times as many short sentences where one grammatically complex sentence will do.

This reply actually demonstrates part of the issue - which isn't sentence lenght IMHO as your sentences are frequently short. The reply in itself it isn't an issue - it is as you say accurate and coveys what you are thinking but it is far too wordy and unwieldy. The reply isn't an extreme example but set in 5+ other paragraphs makes it a headache to read.

"I'm not sure what to do with your advice, since the substance of your revisions deviates so heavily from the substance of the original sentences."

to

"since the changes you made are so different from what was originally written"

I'll certainly try to keep my sentences short and pithy for you, but I'd like to point out that much will be lost in translation and that will mean writing ten times as many short sentences where one grammatically complex sentence will do.

to

I will try and keep my sentences short ands not so complex, but the actually meaning maybe lost and I may end up writing 10 times as many sentences.


It's not that it is written badly, it is just not condusive to a short sharp read that is often required by people who are zipping in and out of the board either at work or whilst doing other things. As I have said before, tailoring your writing for the audience is the most key rule of sharing information - it doesn't matter how brilliant your ideas are if you cannot communicate your ideas to those that want to read them. This was only a quick response, so please excuse bad writing in shortening your sentences - I didn't have time or inclination to get my "how to write" books off the shelf.

I believe that many of your ideas do not get the exposure they deserve purely because of your writing style.


As I said before, feel free to ignore me - after all I am but a hidden voice on the internet.

edited for additional idea.

bigtmac68:

I don't mind if you summarize my feedback. It's your show.

That said, I'd suggest different summaries than the ones that Polonius gives, for the sake of both accuracy and scansion. The following quotations are my attempts at compression, the non-quote-marked material adds additional summary material:

[summary]
"We should distinguish between rules and play. A good FAQ distinguishes between these things, showing both what the rules say, and what is recommended for play."

A good FAQ gives reasons, both motivation and explanation, for why particular answers are given to particular questions, and also why play might deviate from the stated rules. This helps people 'connect the dots' between the rules, the questions, the answers, and play.

Furthermore, a good FAQ provides a method for answering new questions, as well as checking and correcting established answers, so that everyone can help to develop and debug the document.
[/summary]

"Reading a rule according to how you might play it means that the rule will be different things to different people, depending on their bias. Even if there is widespread agreement that it should be played in a certain way, it will remain an open question whether the rules actually sanction that majority opinion. Where players' preference for particular ways of playing influences how they read the rules, the opportunity for an objectivity is lost. Without the common ground of objectivity, disagreements between subjective readings will break down into acrimony."

Likewise aside: No, I never heard of him before you mentioned him. I would describe myself as a fan of Daniel Dennett though, his writing style and his work.