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That isn't what I meant by "adversarial game", I find the definition you use above not useful as that would be a style of play the vast majority would label bad, and we don't need another term for it. What I meant is a game with a competitive element between players and referee. Perhaps the...

Trust isn't a single numerical value, it's complex, multifaceted and ideally reciprocal. You can trust people on some issues and not on others. You can trust someone and still have issues with them when they have a bad day. I can't count the number of times as a player that a game has been...

Some players are content with PC-limited actions, some want more and a bunch of players don't know and just go with the flow. Players don't obsess about this stuff as much as we do. IMO time and the huge variety of game styles and RPGs out there has made it more difficult in some cases for...

For a while as a player and referee I thought comprehensive accurate simulation was a goal to aim for in a RPG gameworld. At some point after more refereeing experience I came to the conclusion that such an accurate simulation was (a) impossible and (b) not something most players wanted or...

I think this has changed over time, a lot of players want to skip the vulnerable early levels, especially when they have played through them a lot before. Some people want to start with the special hero. IMO a PC who's a special snowflake in one game might be a good fit for a different game...

I find mysteries are very hard to run in RPGs unless they are a total railroad, as the genre requires players to seek out clues and anomalies in the gameworld, and poke at the world to see what happens, and referees being human and fallible, with limited time to prepare, what they find some of...

Worldbuilding can be fun in and of itself, it can help certain playstyles and some players enjoy exploring gameworlds created by other people. Overly rigid worldbuilding that doesn't leave room for PCs to breathe, and worldbuilding that isn't appreciated by players the way the creator would...

I did say "sometimes", there are lots of acceptable resolutions I didn't discuss, precisely because they are acceptable. I'm interested in failure modes and how to avoid them, so I tend to focus on stuff going wrong. The stuff going wrong in this case is generally when the players and GM's...

IMO this is the sort of large scale action which conventional procedural games can struggle with on both micro and macro levels. On the micro level the probabilities of repeated dice rolling can all but guarantee eventual failure if the GM is inclined to keep asking for rolls till a critical...

So long as they are satisfied with the amount of agency they do end up with, it doesn't matter. More agency isn't objectively better, it's only better if that's what the players want, and the referee (if there is one) is OK with it. More agency means more or bigger decisions, and players who...

I think a significant proportion of players don't want a decision-heavy game, or want to restrict their decisions making to particular subsets of the whole. Sometimes this results in an increased workload for the GM, who needs to facilitate the type of game desired, and avoid forcing the sort...

There are two main reasons for players investing PC resources in being good at something, reasons that are almost opposites of each other. First, they may want to spend lots of time pursuing this chosen activity in-game and be seen as competent at it. Conversely, they may want to spend as little...

IMO it's not the material itself, it's all about the referee attitude to that material. Some referees feel bound by some or all of their prepared backstory, even the unrevealed material, and may use it for adjudication purposes. Others don't and are willing to modify or throw away prep, even...

Well, in a particular game it depends what the priorities are and how the magic works in that setting. A RPG is at the one and the same time a bunch of PCs in a gameworld and a bunch of people sitting down and socialising. The relative importance of these activities varies from group to group...

What you say can be true from a referee point of view, but I don't think it's necessarily true from a player perspective. A dungeon plot has physical walls and junctions to enforce decision points, and the only way for the players to reject the plot is to leave the dungeon (assuming that's...

The alternative to heavy worldbuilding is generic fantasy, which is what a lot of people who aren't interesting in worldbuilding, or lack the time for it, resort to. Generic fantasy typically has huge issues with consistency and logic (castles and flying foes, a crazy, anachronistic mix of...

Look, I'm on the autism spectrum and have difficulty determining people's opinions when face to face with them, let alone some posts on the internet. Something about being asked to interpret other people makes me very uncomfortable, given that I've got it wrong in the past. I also find it very...

The devil's in the details. I agree in a conventional referee-based game that the referee is responsible for keeping the game moving and quickly resolving or tabling for later player appeals re adjudication. In such a game they are ultimately responsible for asking a a player to leave if they...

This isn't the 1970's or 1980's, I think most games allow at least some appropriate discussion of issues that players have with the game, and immediate expulsion for daring to question the referee is much rarer nowadays. The average age of players has gone up, and most players expect to be...

I disagree, as I think your definition of "world-building" is far too narrow. To me, world-building is an umbrella term that embraces multitudes, any building or creation of elements of a fictional world is potentially "world-building", whether that's architecture, language, history, geography...