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The importance to RPGing of *engaging* situations
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8924119" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>We're drifting from the premise of the thread and starting to eat it, I just want to reiterate my initial point, which was "games can be fun without all the elements of plot/characterization offered by TTRPGs, and that same kind of enjoyment can exist (and in unique way and function) within them if the design allows for it."</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't think either of things follow from that definition. Take the context of my friend's 4X bee game he's intentionally designing with a parasitic core mechanic. You have a bag full of tokens that range in value from "Great-Good-Bad-Terrible" and serve as the randomizer for certain events. Using tokens to perform actions removes them from the bag, tokens leave the bag at a regular 1/turn tick, and actions that replace tokens are slightly skewed toward Bad/Terrible tokens, thus that eventually you become unable to act.</p><p></p><p>The structure of the game is then about mitigating those draws and achieving as much as possible before the randomizer works against you. You're building out a board position over time, but you're fighting against constrained choices as the game goes on and your economy will eventually collapse. Skillful play absolutely exists in how you make those choices, but ultimately you are always worse off on turn 12 than you were on turn 1.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Yeah, this particularly conclusion has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Parasitic design is about an inevitably degrading board state, not the inability to play well. Heck, there are games where you can opt in to a parasitic state, jumping back to Netrunner, you have economy engines that involve destroying portions of your deck, which will eventually run out your ability to play the game....you just plan to win before then. Admittedly, that's not a great or particularly pure example, because you still have to build a board state, so your options will expand and then ultimately contract, vs. a pure parasitic design where they can only contract.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Admittedly, my Blades experience doesn't span past a few one-shots, and it's possible I need to get up to a third or fourth level of management before the game starts to present possibilities for me, but I don't see how any of that is incompatible with a parasitic design. </p><p></p><p>In a heist, every action degrades your board state. You're more likely than not to not achieve what you want without further complication, you're spending resources to mitigate that complication, and/or making decisions about which complications you're willing to deal with. Outside of an unlikely critical success, there is no action you can take that improves your position, and certainly no strategy that can make those consistent. Your economy becomes more and more constrained the longer the game goes.</p><p></p><p>In point two, there's a variety of events occurring that make your board position worse at all times, you literally used the word "inevitable" which is a pretty clear indication of what I'm talking about. I have the least experience with this layer of the game and downtime, having not played a consistent enough campaign to get there, but my reading was that it had all the same issues you saw in the heist level, and recovery was calibrated to present new, largely unavoidable problems. It's possible there's another layer of the game, wherein I will finally be able to see how I can get ahead of the curve and cascade down a better board state to the earlier two, but I just did not see it when playing/reading through the game.</p><p></p><p>To be clear, I'm not saying the game didn't have decision making that produced different tactical or strategic outcomes, it clearly does, I'm just not seeing how the enforced trade-offs in every decision don't always make the board state spiral away. I'm saying it's designed so you can't win, and prides itself on that point, because it describes all of the loss conditions as interesting. Which might be true, if you're engaging with them in some other way than I was, but I found the whole thing frustrating, because I could never find a line of play that led to victory, or make a decision that felt meaningfully superior to another. Narratively, I might prefer one consequence to another, but I couldn't find a handle on mechanically how I got ahead of the game and it seemed that the game was designed not to let me do that. There was no optimal line of play I could articulate a preference for.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8924119, member: 6690965"] We're drifting from the premise of the thread and starting to eat it, I just want to reiterate my initial point, which was "games can be fun without all the elements of plot/characterization offered by TTRPGs, and that same kind of enjoyment can exist (and in unique way and function) within them if the design allows for it." I don't think either of things follow from that definition. Take the context of my friend's 4X bee game he's intentionally designing with a parasitic core mechanic. You have a bag full of tokens that range in value from "Great-Good-Bad-Terrible" and serve as the randomizer for certain events. Using tokens to perform actions removes them from the bag, tokens leave the bag at a regular 1/turn tick, and actions that replace tokens are slightly skewed toward Bad/Terrible tokens, thus that eventually you become unable to act. The structure of the game is then about mitigating those draws and achieving as much as possible before the randomizer works against you. You're building out a board position over time, but you're fighting against constrained choices as the game goes on and your economy will eventually collapse. Skillful play absolutely exists in how you make those choices, but ultimately you are always worse off on turn 12 than you were on turn 1. Yeah, this particularly conclusion has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Parasitic design is about an inevitably degrading board state, not the inability to play well. Heck, there are games where you can opt in to a parasitic state, jumping back to Netrunner, you have economy engines that involve destroying portions of your deck, which will eventually run out your ability to play the game....you just plan to win before then. Admittedly, that's not a great or particularly pure example, because you still have to build a board state, so your options will expand and then ultimately contract, vs. a pure parasitic design where they can only contract. Admittedly, my Blades experience doesn't span past a few one-shots, and it's possible I need to get up to a third or fourth level of management before the game starts to present possibilities for me, but I don't see how any of that is incompatible with a parasitic design. In a heist, every action degrades your board state. You're more likely than not to not achieve what you want without further complication, you're spending resources to mitigate that complication, and/or making decisions about which complications you're willing to deal with. Outside of an unlikely critical success, there is no action you can take that improves your position, and certainly no strategy that can make those consistent. Your economy becomes more and more constrained the longer the game goes. In point two, there's a variety of events occurring that make your board position worse at all times, you literally used the word "inevitable" which is a pretty clear indication of what I'm talking about. I have the least experience with this layer of the game and downtime, having not played a consistent enough campaign to get there, but my reading was that it had all the same issues you saw in the heist level, and recovery was calibrated to present new, largely unavoidable problems. It's possible there's another layer of the game, wherein I will finally be able to see how I can get ahead of the curve and cascade down a better board state to the earlier two, but I just did not see it when playing/reading through the game. To be clear, I'm not saying the game didn't have decision making that produced different tactical or strategic outcomes, it clearly does, I'm just not seeing how the enforced trade-offs in every decision don't always make the board state spiral away. I'm saying it's designed so you can't win, and prides itself on that point, because it describes all of the loss conditions as interesting. Which might be true, if you're engaging with them in some other way than I was, but I found the whole thing frustrating, because I could never find a line of play that led to victory, or make a decision that felt meaningfully superior to another. Narratively, I might prefer one consequence to another, but I couldn't find a handle on mechanically how I got ahead of the game and it seemed that the game was designed not to let me do that. There was no optimal line of play I could articulate a preference for. [/QUOTE]
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