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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:

I'm not disagreeing, here, but I've come to the conclusion that often when people say something on the lines of "the players have optimized the fun out of the game" what they mean is that the players have solved a specific problem, or set of problems, and aren't interested in the same old...

I don't think anyone has said that the win/loss conditions/states in TRPGs are the same as those found in more conventional games. I think there are people who think they aren't there, and there are people who think they are. (And some of those games you mention do have win/loss conditions, or...

Laugh while you can, monkey boy.

Seems to me there's way more than enough blame and shame to go around, between the two.

It interesting, thanks for sharing! (sorry for the snip) What I'll say is that in the games I run, it's the martials who tend to deal the most damage to single targets, not the casters. And I've run 5e campaigns through level 20. There were extenuating circumstances, though. That said, I'm not...