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I'm sure you're the foremost expert on your opinion, but I sort of assumed you were making a general claim about the structure of RPGs. If that wasn't your point and you were simply relating your perception of them, then obviously I have no grounds.

Oh I don't agree. The GM does not have a comparable role to a player in a conventional game, certainly not in trad play. If the GM is comparable to anything in bridge, it's the cards; they're a human filling in for the state of the game. Generally though, I don't think a lot of people play RPGs...

Point of order: are these metacurrencies? They look more like standard class resources at a glance. Characters seem as aware of them and able to decide to use them as players do.

Am I? I'm mostly concerned with players being able to know/do things without being at the mercy of the dice or the GM, and being able to make impactful decisions to achieve their goals. This requires impartial and trustworthy mechanics and that's most easily achieved by laying out a detailed set...

My deeply misguided parents thought my voracious fantasy habit was a waste of potential in middle school, and demanded I start reading classics, for some reason starting with Moby Dick. I was not, at age 11, ready for Melville, had a very bad time, and stopped sleeping so I could secretly read...

Well, that's the problem of sim in a nutshell. The violations are obvious, the constituents are not, and sharing those violations doesn't seem to mean sharing those constituents. I understand the urge to suggest is not a thing, because I'm not sure it's one thing.

Oh I've read it. I imagine I'd have been a big fan if the timing worked out.

I really miss the cottage industry around extrapolating setting from system. Once upon a time I thought that was where design was going, that we'd settle on proposing settings to reify systems and making systemic changes to produce new settings. I figured a big D&D update paired with a...

John Wick really is a perfect example of how high hit points function without the vague luck/skill explanation. You just get hit a lot and don't die.

I've always posited this as either a system or setting failure, and never been particularly sympathetic to claims this situation can somehow live outside the rules. You can only whine about fighters jumping off cliffs if you're proposing a change; otherwise you should be preparing for cliff...

I've spent some time trying to get to grips with the hidden design principles actually at play here. Mostly I think it comes down to "don't mess with forward causality of decision->action->resolution" and "don't separate character/player resources." This thread has me considering another...

What's your cut-off? I've played 3 days of 1812 with a player elimination at the start of day 2, and a doomed position for at least 1 player before the start of day 3. We're trying to play again, now that we've got a better handle on the short-selling mechanics, but it's obviously a tricky one...

That isn't a simple question. Let me try an allegory; would you houserule a board game in the middle of play if a player wasn't enjoying the experience? Generally speaking, I would answer no. I might not play that game again with them or at all, I might be open to a proposed change after...

Sort of, but I wouldn't have put immersion as my primary concern. I think immersion comes down to the distance between character and player decision making and how aligned those are mechanically. A player playing well should produce the same decision their character would be inclined to use in...

I'm honestly not sure how you can do that consistently, but also no, my concern is that negotiation is not generally a compelling gameplay experience (and once it's introduced, it eats all the other possible gameplay experiences). If the climbing rules are consistent, then the time is a factor...

That would be the second option then. They had other actions to deploy, though I do find it interesting those actions were not subject to further risk, and you've added a second gameplay loop in deploying resources to alter the odds.

I don't see how that solves the problem. If you don't allow the player to change their again declaration in response, then there was hardly any point to informing them in the first place, or if they can, you're back to negotiation as they fish for different consequences.

I actually think the problem is the inverse; two groups may be appearing to do something very similar (especially when you judge the end-product report of play) when they have actually done quite different things.

Yeah, I empathize with that. My take is that all this churn mostly comes down to struggling with the underlying nature of what we're doing. Not to give the creative agenda thing too much credence, but I think there's more than one fundamental activity living under the same name in RPGs, and...

I love that anecdote, and it aligns neatly with my understanding of competition as a means instead of an end. I don't take the same conclusion though; that the activity is fundamentally a cooperative group effort doesn't mean we can flatten down what the activity is. I love to play games with my...