Do you get it yet?
MJ, I think you're the one that doesn't "get it". That's my fault, I should have been more clear. I understand what you're saying. I understood it pretty quickly. That's not the problem. This is another time where I'm saying I'm involved when the MP pulls up, and you're saying I'm not. From a certain perspective, we're both right. I don't see the difference because to me, there isn't one. If you want to know why they're doing it, ask. You can't say they don't know what they're doing in the situation they've never faced, they are IN the situation. Ask out of character. I would liken it to hearing the player's thoughts the way God does. He's in the situation, out of character comments will tell you what he's thinking. I still say my way would work just fine if you communicated with the player. I don't think we're going to agree, and I don't need it explained. I'm just trying to clear up my position.
(Doing Therapy)
Two
I have thought about doing the novels as audiobooks, but the amount of time it would take to read them (including retakes for mistakes) is daunting.
I just downloaded the file. Now that I've got it, I might do an audiobook presentation of it for you. Don't hold your breath on that though.
(Doing Therapy)
Three
The only way to see if the player will WILLINGLY get involved is to force them to get more involved than they ever would have WILLINGLY gotten....
There's something wrong with you MJ if you can't see how screwed up that logic is.
Four
I know it's a lot of posts, but they're short. That just doesn't compute to me. The moment the MP pulled up, I was more involved than I ever would have WILLINGLY gotten. You insist that I wasn't forced to get involved. Well, if I'm more involved than I would ever WILLINGLY get because of something completely outside my control, is that not being forced to get involved? Any fool could see how you could be said to be involved.
(Doing Therapy)
More than one
It's been 4 days since the last, and they're short.
What you don't understand is that if I WILLINGLY did anything at Pearl Harbor, it would be to INCREASE the destruction. If we fought that hard over the base being destroyed, how much harder would we have fought if the devastation was increased tenfold? The MP opening completely kills that course of action. Can't exactly paint an ammo depot with a bulls-eye if you're in custody. There's more than one way to "Get Involved." You never thought of that as a viable option, did you?
The MP opening unquestionably forced me away from getting involved in a fashion of my own choosing. If anything, my involvement would be to help wipe that place off the map. Then, the United State's response would be swift and decisive. We would probably nuke Japan the next day. Nobody would EVER mess with us again. Not only was I forced to get involved, I was unquestionably forced away from involvement of my own choosing.
To you, "non-involvement" was always letting the base be destroyed and "involvement" was saving the base. What if the player wanted to get involved in the destruction of the base? The MP opening takes that option away completely. I bet my last dollar you never gave that option a moment's thought.
(Doing Therapy)
That is the fraggin' point, really...you don't GET to choose the world and how it plays out. you choose how you play it. If you had shot the MP, then you could have gone around destroying things. Some versers would choose to do that. Then the story becomes verser versus world, and is still interesting. It is always a CHOICE. You made yours.
Yeah, but I bet nobody gave that a single thought. That's the fraggin' point I'm making.
Under normal circumstances, I would have been far more likely to assist in the destruction of Pearl Harbor than try to save it. That option was killed completely when the MP pulled up. Nobody ever gave it a moment's thought. This MP opening is losing credibility left and right.
Helping to destroy the place would be "Getting Involved". What kind of involvement do you call that? There's more than one way to "Get Involved". You asked "Would John 'Get Involved' at Pearl Harbor?" You NEVER asked "HOW would John 'Get Involved' at Pearl Harbor?" This wondrous MP opening everyone is touting completely kills an absolutely reasonable path of involvement. Helping to destroy the base!!!!! If they're taken into custody, you don't learn if they're dedicated to non-involvement. All you learn is that they will let Pearl Harbor be destroyed. If they weren't in custody, would they have chosen to take an active role in its destruction? That's not dedication to non-involvement, and you would never see it.
I'm sorry, it looks like the MP opening is NOT the only way to test non-involvement. It completely kills a viable option for involvement. The ONLY way to test non-involvement is to tell the player where they are and let them decide what to do. I would have been far more likely to take an active role in the destruction of Pearl Harbor than try to save them.
Yeah, the MP opening wasn't forcing me to get involved. If anything, it would have been forcing me to NOT get involved!!!
If you had shot the MP, then you could have gone around destroying things.
Brock, killing a man in cold blood and painting a bulls-eye on the roof of a building. NOT EVEN CLOSE!!!!!!
(Doing Therapy)
Do both.
I told MJ I would find the hole in the MP opening eventually. Looks like I found it.
The MP opening doesn't test non-involvement. It just kills a completely reasonable option TO get involved!!!!!!
Two
Mistake
(Doing Therapy)
More than one
It's been 3 days!!!
Now you're going to say something about "Yeah, but John, how many players would want to destroy Pearl Harbor rather than save it?"
Well, with me alone, there's more players than you ever would have thought, so I'd call that argument invalid.
(Doing Therapy)
I bet nobody gave that a single thought.
I would be more concerned about the fact that I might be reviving a dead issue were it not for the fact that John has continued to write at me in all this time right up to three days ago. He also just e-mailed me about it again. So here I go again.
It was no one's business to think about how the opening might have gone except the referee, and it turns out that it went pretty well, all things considered. That is, it was intended to determine how determined you were not to be involved, and it determined that in a big way, because it accidentally stumbled on the one thing which you had sworn to yourself you would never change, and induced you to change it.
Now you say gee, but were it not for the MP opening you could have become involved by helping the Japanese so that the destruction was greater and the American response would be proportionately greater. We'll overlook the details that we had not yet started working on the atomic bomb and did not have bombers with sufficient range to reach Japan from any friendly point they did not already hold; maybe we'd have said forget Europe, let's kill Japan first. So maybe the MP opening impedes that approach. Of course, we don't know, because we don't know how the MP opening would have gone had you not then put yourself in the hospital--too much depends on dice at this point, because you could have been questioned and released, and then you could have done whatever you wished.
But more fundamentally, you are only thinking of this now--mumble mumble years after your character faced the situation. For all this time you've been saying you would have wanted to avoid involvement to such a degree that you'd have fled as quickly as possible, or fought your way through marines to get off the base and run to the hills. You say that the fact that you've thought of this possible response proves that someone would, but it doesn't prove that you would--it proves that having thought about it for too long you've found something you never would have thought to do at the time that you now thinks challenges the opening.
The opening accomplished what it was intended to accomplish. It doesn't matter whether you would have painted targets on ammo dumps or stolen ordinance to set explosives on critical buildings or anything else. What matters is we were faced with the question of which of these two things you would have done:
- Sat in the middle of the destruction and let it rain down on you as it destroyed the base without doing anything to impact events, or
- Done something to change the course of history.
That was the point. We were satisfied. The opening worked.
--M. J. Young
The opening worked.No, the opening forced me to get involved. I don't know why that's such a difficult concept for you to comprehend.
O.K., let's rephrase the question.
The question is, "Can John, who has argued strongly that versers should never interfere in the worlds they visit and so has stated a non-involvement 'Prime Directive' attitude, be in any way induced or coerced to become involved in events in a world, such as Pearl Harbor?"
That was the question we wanted to answer.
The answer is yes.
You admit it when you say
the opening forced me to get involved.
The opening worked: it caused you to get involved against your wishes.
--M. J. Young
Helping to destroy the base is not dedication to non-involvement, the MP prevents the player from doing that, ergot, the MP opening does not work to test non-involvement.
If you were going for a logic based statement that one fell on it's face.
That statement only works if you were able to add the sentence 'Helping to destroy the base is the ONLY way to show lack of dedication to non-involvement'.
That is obviously not true, as we found out without you destroying the base. A more logically sound statement is:
Revealing information about the attack shows lack of dedication to non-involvement, the MP opening drove you to reveal information about the attack, ergo, the MP opening worked to test your non-involvement.
I'd also like to point out logical statements are almost impossible to resolve in the negative the way you tried to do, but lend themselves quite nicely to proving the positive as they do in this instance.
Also MJ expressed earlier he was done with this, as you keep on rehashing the same points that have already been disproven. You got him back by claiming "oh, but woe is me, I'm just trying to learn."
You're just going to have to accept that based on the original parameters, the test worked. The question was "Is John, by MJ's definition, a non-involvement character", Pearl Harbor was the test, the answer came back "John is not,by MJ's definition, a non-involvement character".
Given those facts (which are based on MJ's definition so no one cares what you think about being involved) the test worked. Grow up and stop trying to bully MJ into responding to nonsense that he has resolved to ignore.
A non-involvement character who gets into a situation where they are more involved than they would like to be would NOT then go and increase their level of involvement. They would keep involvement to as low a level as was possible for them.
So the non-involvement character may decide being taken into custody is more involved than they wished they were, but their solution would not be to RAISE their level of involvement by warning about the attack.
You went from a low level of involvement to a high level of involvement based on your decision, when you were in the hospital bed. That shows that you are not a non-involvement player.
Seeing as the question was "Is John a non-involvement player" and we got the answer, the test achieved it's goal.
No one cares that you felt more involved from the start of the world than you wanted to, only that you upped the level of involvement at some point, proving you are not a non-involvement character
As to logic-based statements, in order to prove a positive I only need to provide one avenue which is true, which is why it's lends itself to positive proofs. In order to use a logic-based statement to prove a negative I have to prove all other statements are false. I established a line of thought that is true, and approached it from the positive.
Revealing information about the attack shows lack of dedication to non-involvement, the MP opening drove you to reveal information about the attack, ergo, the MP opening worked to test your non-involvement.
Introducing another method of showing non-involvement doesn't invalidate any of my above statements.
1. Revealing information about the attack shows lack of dedication to non-involvement
(This is true regardless of if there are other ways for non-involvement to be shown)
2. The MP opening drove you to reveal information about the attack
(This is not impacted at all by the existence of other ways for non-involvement to be shown)
3. The MP opening worked to test your non-involvement
(Once again, not impacted by the presence or lack there of of alternate proofs)
I've proven it from the positive, based on logic based reasoning, that it worked. As such the existence of another approach, which may or may not have worked, has no bearing.
As to blindly following, I've already proven I'm more than willing to speak up based on my ideology even when substantially outnumbered on these boards.
An interpretation problem of the word "involved".
I wonder if the person "involved" would agree to disagree on it...
It only worked by accident. It only worked because I was a cocky idiot who chose to harass the MP.
Ah, but maybe we took into account that you were a cocky idiot who was bound to get himself in some kind of trouble that would tell us what we wanted to know.
PA announcement. John goes on a destructive rampage, which would be far more likely than me warning them (under normal circumstances)
I don't know whether it was likely at all. After all, it's been years since your character was in this situation, and in all that time you only just thought of it now. Every time prior to this that you've suggested the PA Announcement opening, you've said that you would have raced out of there as fast as possible had you not been detained by the referee. Therefore, the PA Announcement opening would not have worked by your own admission: you would have been able to avoid becoming involved by leaving the base, and you would have done so, and we would incorrectly have concluded that you were indeed devoted to the concept of non-involvement.
Now you say that the MP opening prevents the character from becoming involved by going on a destructive rampage. It doesn't, really, because if you really are going to go on a destructive rampage you start by shooting up his vehicle and escaping while he runs for cover. Even, though, if it did, it would not have mattered, because it took several years for you to think up that alternative. Thus the MP opening succeeded in proving that you held some things more important than non-involvement, and by your own description of what you would have done which you have given dozens of times over the past several years, the PA opening would not have done so.
And your protests that absent the flipping of the jeep we would not have discovered anything because you'd have kept quiet on the subject are meaningless, because we do not know and now cannot learn what you would have done had you been brought into interrogation.
-
"I want my lawyer?"
"What's your lawyer's name? We'll get you a phone; you can call him."
"I don't have a lawyer. I want you to provide one for me."
"Why the #3|| would we do that?"
"It's my constitutional right to have a lawyer."
"Sure, and no one is stopping you. Call him; tell him where you are. While we wait, I've got some questions for you."
"I have the right to remain silent. I don't want to answer your questions."
"Fine, you don't have to answer them, but I can still ask, and I'm going to keep asking until my shift ends, and then my relief will take over and he'll keep asking, and we will keep asking these questions until we get satisfactory answers. And if your lawyer wants to sit here with you while we ask the questions, he's welcome to do so."
"I'd like a drink of water."
"Sure. Just as soon as you've answered my questions."
You keep forgetting that all the "Constitutional rights" on which you're relying were asserted by the Warren Court starting in the 1960s. Prior to that, the only thing the right to counsel meant was that if your lawyer showed up he was allowed to be present for the questioning and could advise you; the only thing the right to remain silent meant was that you couldn't be charged with obstruction for refusing to answer questions in an investigation.
So we don't know if whatever Adam would have done next would have gotten you involved, because you short-circuited all that. But that's fine. We do know that the PA opening would not have worked because you'd have high-tailed it out of there before you had any thoughts of doing anything different, and that the MP opening did work and demonstrated that it had a high probability of doing so.
--M. J. Young
...this wasn't earth, the Warren Court didn't necessarily exist, and that it would have been decided by a dice roll.
I think you're wrong on that.
You do know that the general effects roll is used to "fill holes", as it were--that if there is some aspect of a world that was never decided, and the player takes an action that makes it necessary to know, the dice guide the referee in terms of to what degree things are as the player wants them to be. That, though, does not apply to any detail that is already known.
For example, when you were in Terminator, your mother was Sarah Conner. Because the corpus on which the world was based was the movies (or at least, my knowledge of them), she could not have been Mary Reilly. Your father was Kyle Reese, and he came from the future. A T-800 Model 101 tried to kill your mother before you were born. Those are all parts of the known story, and they are immutable. It was also immutable that unless you did something to change it, a T-1000 would arrive from the future seeking to kill you when you were thirteen, the day after you were making out with that cute Katie Brewster.
When I run a historical scenario, and in fact when anyone runs a historical scenario, it is the core assumption that the history of the world up to that moment is true in every particular I can discover, except in those details I have intentionally and consciously altered, and of course those changes that the player makes. Thus when you were in Pearl Harbor, it was as near to the history and condition of this world at that time as Adam could make it. That's the point of a historical world.
Now, it's certainly true that there was no Warren Court--Earl Warren wasn't appointed to the Supreme Court until after the war. But then, that doesn't help you at all, because if there never is a Warren Court, there are no Miranda rights, no Wong Sun Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, no Terry v. Ohio Terry Stops, really no limits on what police (and particularly military police) can do in investigating a crime. No attorney will be appointed for you (that's not in the Constitution) if you can't afford one. You get treated as anyone suspected of espionage during World War II. You might wind up in a Japanese Interment camp.
--M. J. Young
That would only apply if Adam as referee knew of such things.
I don't know whether Adam would have known any of that, but I would bet he knows something about how terrorist suspects were questioned at Gitmo and Guantanamo, and I'm sure he would think that there were fewer limitations in the forties than there are now.
You were certainly likely to be interrogated roughly.
As for going on a destructive rampage and my only thinking of that now, a player somewhere sometime would think of that. The MP opening kills any chance you have of seeing it.
But that's irrelevant. All that matters is that you would not have thought of it at that moment, because all we wanted to know is whether you would have become involved. It worked.
You think Claire Danes is cute?
Who? I don't think I ever saw her when we were both thirteen, so I'm not sure I could say what I would have thought then. I do know that John Conner thought Kate Brewster was cute when he was thirteen, or at least cute enough to vanish with her into a dark corner in the basement of a friend's house. I don't know what that looks like to you, but let me assure you that that girl who was interested in making out with you was cute enough that you didn't stop to consider the fact that her dad was in the military.
--M. J. Young
I'm not interested in your notions of a "better opening" to test non-involvement, because such a question is always going to be player/character-specific. I can find a dozen good openings for testing that, depending on what kind of player and character I'm facing.
Yes, any of your proposed openings might work, given the right player. Any of them might fail horribly, given the wrong player.
--M. J. Young
All you've said thus far is that you don't believe I would have done what I'm now suggesting. What relevance does that have? The fact of the matter is I was never given the chance to try to think of it. How do you know I wouldn't have thought of that if given a few minutes alone?
Face it MJ. I proved you wrong.
No, my assertion was that the opening Adam used was the only one which was guaranteed to put you, John Cross of that particular time, in a position where you would have to choose between becoming involved somehow and suffering consequences of not having done so. You now say that the opening used would have prevented some random individual from pursuing a course of becoming involved which never occurred to you for several years, and which on any opening you've suggested would have been entirely optional--that is, someone not committed to not becoming involved would not necessarily have done anything other than leave the base as quietly as possible on the openings you propose.
The problem that is posed to you, which you have not solved, is how do you create an opening for the Pearl Harbor scenario which forces a player committed to non-involvement to choose between becoming involved in some way and suffering severe consequences for not having done so. It is inarguable that the MP opening worked. It is defensible that even without your stupidity in poking someone driving a vehicle in which you are a helpless unprotected passenger it very well may have worked when you were placed in interrogation that makes Guantanamo look like a Caribbean vacation. You propose that it would have been better to put the player in a situation in which there was no pressure on him to do anything and see what he does, and thereby to learn whether he was truly determined to go to any length to avoid altering the history of the world, no matter what it would cost him. Your PA opening fails precisely because it does not force the player to choose between becoming involved and suffering serious consequences of not doing so.
O.K., so it's my fault. I wanted to see whether you would become involved or suffer serious consequences. You chose to become involved and make me suffer serious consequences. You can be certain that it is threads like this that reinforce my conviction not to pick up your game again, because I don't want the headaches. You are an unreasonable complainer when you don't like the outcome of your game, and you're complaining to me about the outcome of a game for which my level of responsibility is about 1% (Adam's is about 19% and the other 80% is yours). So I am 1% responsible, it is 1% my fault. You're going to continue to complain to me about it because Adam won't acknowledge when you complain to him, and you don't want to take the responsibility on yourself for what happened.
--M. J. Young
Er, what happen to agreeing to disagree?
Seems the relapse is quicker than I thought...
If you can go back to the past, would you warn anyone about the earthquake that have happened recently?
Please MJ, Max please stop responding to the forum troll. Remember negative attention is attention, and that's what is being craved.
You won't see the unbiased, uninfluenced reaction to the situation no matter what you do.
Will it make you feel better about how the situation was handled if you can go to the world again, knowing now what you didn't then?
I just don't really get it.
It was a nightmare.
Can't we just admit that we had no control over the situation and let the nightmare end?
You could learn so much more about the player by turning them loose for a little while.
And I do that sometimes.
Here, though, the question seems to have been, "Can we force John to become involved?" We succeeded.
--M. J. Young