Recent content by prabe

Or just have a better sense of what the other players around the table are making. Either would be a real solution, I think, though I don't think they're so mutually exclusive as you seem to.

Yeah. Catching yourself out in behavior you strongly dislike in others is ... usually not a fun time. I mostly share your feelings about people jumping into my niche, though I can get a bit bothered if someone's doing it in addition to some other niche they say is their primary. Having someone...

I can see being more open to some characters not succeeding, but if you (general you, not Autumnal you) make a character with the specific idea they won't succeed, it seems as though there are some success/failure states in play that are not aligned with the characters--other than "having a good...

If it's intentional, yeah, it's a jerk thing. It's not always intentional--at least, I've seen instances that I didn't think were.

Just to be clear: Musical as in garage band, not musicals as in operettas. See, for me playing a TRPG is more like writing a story than reading one, and it's not at all like telling a story I already know; and the experience comes with a number of coauthors and all the interesting social...

I was free-writing fiction before I was ever trying to GM, and what performance I've done has been almost entirely musical. I guess things attach different to different live experiences, huh? And one of my other pet peeves is that video games and TRPGs aren't the same; they're different media...

Only if they think the game is boring. (Seriously, this is a crap line and I'm sick of seeing/hearing it.) There are real fundamental differences between someone who is playing to win and someone who is playing not to lose. In a TRPG it's possible to encourage the former and discourage the latter.

Clearly we are looking at the asymmetries differently. As we are with so much else. Thing for me is, I got to much of the GMing stuff on my own, though by often circuitous paths. And again, we see things approximately opposite. If you're playing a game, the rules have to matter.

If they're unwilling to accept the possibility of losing, I wouldn't call them "gamers." They're certainly not willing to play any sort of actual game. If you want to just narrate things happening, go ahead and write that novel--and find out that "winning all the time with zero obstacles...

The asymmetry of the roles helps a lot, here. Things like "winning is meaningless if I can just decide to win" and "the point of play is to see what the PCs do, what stories emerge from their actions and interactions." It helps if I feel constrained by rules--including social contracts--and it...

I am a very competitive person--part of the reason I very much prefer cooperative board games at this point is that I do not like who I am when I'm competing--and almost all of my TRPGing these days is as GM. You know my tastes and preferences well enough, I think, to know that I want...

On some level, this feels like "I've solved being a good archer and now I want some other problem to solve," but that's almost certainly projecting my tastes and preferences onto someone else--it's a POV/headspace thing, in other words, that different people will see differently.

In the case of TRPGs--and relevant to what @Bae'zel said just upthread--what I tell the people at the tables I'm GMing at is that they don't have to wrongfoot me as GM to wrongfoot their opponents in the game/fiction, and if they have some weird edge-case thing they want to do, they'll probably...

My experiences are probably atypical, because at this point the only board games my friend group plays are co-op, but when people get all win/lose at the tables I'm at, it's mostly in the fiction, and it's much more about "characters vs. scenario" than "players vs. GM." But we've been doing...

Yeah, I was thinking there were probably aspects more relevant to video games, but I don't play video games. Better to be thought ignorant than to remove all doubt. :LOL: