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I'd argue that's a pretty shallow way to look at "gamism" (a term I'm frankly pretty suspicious of in both the GNS and GDS senses). See, my critique of 4e is that it was not especially gamist, particularly outside of the crunchy combat; the skill system was a step toward generic resolution...

I'd argue that's more because gamist games have largely faded out entirely over the same period, or shrunk in scope to narrowly defined chunks of gameplay. Mostly I think those players have drifted off to board games.

Personally, I think Perception (and perhaps more controversially, Knowledge) clearly should be defenses. Hidden creatures or things (or unknown relevant details) should be rolling against PCs, and offered up immediately if they fail. Edit: But I also think an appropriate reward for investing...

I think I've explained myself poorly, that's my point precisely. There isn't a standard we've agreed on, and energy/design work is spent largely on pursuing new models or smashing together favored mechanics, instead of iterating on a fixed set of design goals. The framing of "modern design"...

There's an implicit assumption in here that I spend most of my time with RPGs (especially "modern" ones) beating my head against. There's nothing inevitable about the current set of design norms, on either "side" of this whole discussion. I don't need to submit that players should ever have...

This is the sort of thing I'd put cleanly in "rules" or "system" instead of GM guideline. The expectation the players have (not unreasonably) is that they should be able to express agency before consequence pins them down entirely. It shouldn't be incumbent on the GM to redesign the game on the...

I think that rather necessarily simplifies that "resolution" down to a pretty limited play space. Hard to have a seven step plan if you're inventing the opposition one step at a time, though I don't know if I've seen a game that actually separates content creation and interaction into separate...

Right, it's very clear you don't value those distinctions, but like, it's pretty obvious to me that those aren't the same things? I would make different choices of my primary goal was moment to moment presenting interesting things the table would enjoy, than I would if I was trying to create a...

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.