Search results

I see we're jumping right back to extremes. It hardly seems controversial that authors wield more power than GMs. Is not the standard railroading critique "some GMs really should be writing books?" Perhaps "experience" and "author" are not the options we're picking between here.

Feels like we're into pretty meta territory, in that storyteller/not storyteller divide seems to be entirely down to the relationship between the GM and their output. I don't think we can or should remove the GM's intention and approach from any analysis of what they're doing. To be honest, I...

If I was interested in fighting the semantic battle for the appropriate use of language, I'd probably take the most umbrage at this use of "challenge." I'm not actually interested in trying to set a monopoly on any particular meaning, but there's real danger of conflating the sense I'd use the...

The rules that don't permit them. If the procedure for jumping is laid out, it is not given the GM to tell me I can or cannot jump over the pit, and it is not possible for the GM to be inconsistent about which pits I can put can't get over. The (somewhat valid) narrativist critique is "but the...

You know, it's funny because I think I usually get the opposite branding, despite being about as allergic to "rulings" conceptually as you can be. I was reading a blog a while back that made a compelling argument that my particular class of player is pretty much gone in the TTRPG space, as board...

Right, I'm with you here in that I draw a hard line between content and action resolution. I want plenty of guidance from a game on what I should put in the fictional setting, and absolute (and player facing) clarity on what happens when those elements interact. The emergence should come from...

It's very much still a story you experience instead of one you drive, though the writing is excellent. The gameplay is very satisfying though, very much building on the Paper Mario action command structure with a much bigger set of build choices.

Yeah, I'm at 80 allowance, and I'm hovering between 40-50 stars, though maybe I should just spend some runs simply pushing those, and there's trucks with the moon pendant and trading post. I still wish they'd just go a step further and give me more deterministic control outright.

I keep learning just how much there is left for me to do, right when I feel close. Loving the puzzles, but at this point I could really do with more control over the roguelike generation. It's frustrating to feel like I'm unable to try a solution simply because of the day is unspooling. There's...

The underlying disagreement here seems mostly to be not actually about the decision making process, so much as the player relationship to that process, right? Seemingly no one disagree that "trying to simulate plausible results from a world in motion" does not narrow all decision down to single...

This caught me off-guard, particularly the last point, but I found it quite clarifying. I would have inverted that when discussing what I found valuable in play; if it isn't affected meaningfully by player skill, then it can't be important. Your formulation helped unravel some other language I...

I don't think I agree at all with this. Making choices that determine the outcome of play is, I would argue, the entirety of expressing agency in games.

That's not quite what I'm getting at. I'm not sure I agree we couldn't do a choice by choice analysis, but it's not what I was driving toward. I'm purporting that an element of agency is not just influence, but discrimination. It's easier to talk about in competitive games, but I'm curious how...

I'm not sure that's relevant to my question, given we're talking about player agency. I can accept a different goal, but I'd still expect the comparison about agency to yield to multiple, and variably effective, lines of play to get to the result, if we're taking the same structure from other...

I'm curious about how that actually works. I understand agency in trick taking (setting aside bidding as a whole separate question) in that a player picks a card to play, and playing the correct card at the correct time through the conventions of trump and following and so on, forces the rest of...

No one needs me to rant about skill challenges again. I was going to go get some representative samples of my point to link to, but then I ran into literally you and I having this same discussion...

I spent years writing about the weakening of agency skill challenges represented, precisely because there are so few tools available for players to force their desired outcomes, and when 5e came on the scene, I saw it's skill model of 5 generic DCs as simply moving further in that direction. I...

Dusk City Outlaws was essentially designed for this, if you can find a copy

Just wanted to call this out: the normal rule for the parrying property does not use a reaction, parrying is a 1/round ability outside the rest of the action economy: I haven't done much in the way of house rules personally. I'm still using bonus action potions, which makes Rapid Drink sad...

I'm sure some would argue the D&D case is a mischaracterization, because there is some principle at play players are probably familiar with that underlies how their particular DM handles that kind of interaction they've intuited/deduced from play. Personally, I would argue this is an ongoing...