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Which is why, as with most game mechanics, there's a randomizer in there. I quite agree they don't want it. I have all along. But I think they should just say "Not the experience I want" rather than try to justify it. "Not playing your character" when that involves ignoring or overriding...

Tomorrow City struck me as very odd when I read it, and I can't really place my finger on why.

Thee used to be a game some insane teenagers would play locally that involved tag using pits dug at the beach and what were called "coke bottle skyrockets" (i.e. the small ones you theoretically launched by using a soda bottle as the launch frame). I kid you not.

Eh. My own feeling is that's just sliding around the categories. "Failure with forward motion" or "success with a cost" can easily be describing the same end result; if one of them has a better psychological effect on the user, I can't make myself care. Either way binary pass/fail for most...

Or at the least, don't think they should be, when your view on that may not be founded in anything but expectations (as in, thinking its easier to avoid that than it is). But of course, to be fair, there are all kinds of games that have various tools for saying "No, actually, I didn't fail that...

I don't have a specific game, but I can pretty much predict traditional or survival horror (but probably not action horror) would require hunting up new people. I'm not sure a superhero game wouldn't be the same now, which is ironic given our history, but people get tired of things.

My feeling is that at least some people have a very rigid definition of "failure" that's all or nothing.

Except, like I said, people are bad about predicting this sort of thing even about themselves, let alone a fictional character. People break in combat or get fast talked all the time who don't think they would. Over time, sure. Right at the start of play? Maybe, maybe not. Personally my...

Warbirds is what I was thinking of (it was making my brain itch so I looked it up).

The problem is that's not that clearcut. What its more accurate to say is that the player doesn't believe its in character (or at least is convincing themselves and/or others it isn't). How well people will stand up to terrifying experiences is one of the things people assume will occur more...

I'm doing a blank on it, but there's an odd game oriented heavily around air combat (because there's not really any ground) that leans somewhat into that.

I just realized there's also the question of how many "steps" actually get engaged routinely. Aftermath back in its day had a combat flowchart, but it indicated more nodes than routinely anyone would do.

This is really difficult for me to answer because it depends not only on the number of steps, but how much handling a step has. As an example, when playing RuneQuest I was used to up to four steps, three from the attacker (attack roll, hit location, damage) and one from the defender (parry or...

Though some people seem to still feel that the combat rules at least were overly complex. I never could quite understand that given you could fit most of it on either a character sheet or a one-page summary, but its clearly a thing.

I think its a little hard to do unless you go for a deconstructionist approach (which arguably, most of the media you quote do).

This seems to suggest impulsive decisions and "going with the gut" are things that do not exist. Unless we are communicating from different universes, that's a counterfactual, or you're using "logic" in what seems like an idiosyncratic way here.

You also have to ask how much visibility matters.

Once you move away from fantasy/horror tinged ones, its not much different from the fact there's relatively few of most mostly-historical games without heavy fantastic injections.

I'd like to note I consider Heroic Maps one of, if not the, finest battlemap producers out there. I just wish they produced modern period maps, too, and their SF maps had less of a tendency to lean in to Star War milieu.

I'll note people's reasons for irrational behavior is often amazingly opaque, sometimes even to them.