the playstyle I suggest doesn't lead to that unless a player ignores their character conceptualization.
If the player is avoiding expedience by sticking to conceptualisation, how is that conceptualisation going to be challenged? Or changed?
If the player is at liberty to change conceptuatlisation in response to choices, what governs those choices? Self-evidently it can't be conceptualisation. You don't want it to be expedience. Is it whim?
Do you have actual play examples to post that illustrate the point you are trying to make?
Before the hard decision, I did not know X about my character. Until I made the decision, X was still unknown to me. After the decision, X is now known to me. That's a discovery about the character, which makes it something I learned.
How many times over the years after someone ends up in a unique situation and makes a hard decision, have we heard, "So and so really learned something about himself."?
As [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] pointed out way upthread, we are not talking here about actual people living actual lives. We're talking about actual people authoring imagined lives. When an author chooses to have his/her protagonist do X rather than Y,
perhaps s/he learns something about him-/herself. (Eg I empathise more with an X-er than a Y-er.) But s/he doesn't learn anything about the protagonist. S/he makes a decision that the protagonist is an X-er rather than a Y-er.
The idea that decisions cannot result in discovery is absurd. If decisions prevent discovery, then we shouldn't make any decisions at all. Let the dice randomly determine everything and make tons of discoveries.[/quote]Discovery implies
externality. That's why, for instance, philosophers once spoke about
our knowledge of the external world, and why one of my teachers once glossed idealist theories of knowledge in this way:
you can't get more out of knowledge than you put in.
To discover something about my character requires something external to take place. I've given examples in this thread. So have others.
It doesn't have to be done through random number generation. There are other resolution systems possible. But it does require some way of establishing salient elements of the fiction other than via decision-making by the player of the PC.
To my mind this is actually not a radical thesis about RPGing, given that this type of game has relied on resolution mechanics, including random number generation, to establish external constraints on player choices and interpretation of the fiction from the outset.
D&D is (though not necessarily should be) the baseline assumption. If we can't argue from a base of some sort, then there is no argument.
By my count, there are only three recurrent posters in this thread who make D&D the baseline assumption: [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], [MENTION=6795602]FrogReaver[/MENTION] and [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION].
I'm not interested in talking primarily about D&D. It's not a system I'm playing at the moment, and I doubt think that focusing on it is going to shed any particular light on the questions raised in the OP or subsequently in the thread. If you think that there is some aspect of D&D mechanics or play that
will help address those questions, then by all means post it.