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These are both close, but there's an essential element missing that I think is the source of so much of the swirl in these discussions. The important bit is the primacy of an interactable world with immutable traits, not that the GM made up that setting. It is an incidental part of the form...

That doesn't sound like a TTRPG mechanics problem. If your level of disagreement or lack of commonplace with another person is that profound, I'm not sure playing games with them should be your biggest concern.

Pretend there's no GM. Some other system provides a set of challenging circumstances, perhaps a particularly clever video game that no one has managed to document, that has answers for all these fun hypotheticals. There is a fixed pattern of wind speeds, the guard rotation will happen the same...

.... So they don't do it that way, but another, different way? I'm making a case for impartial task resolution. Intent is expressed by picking the right tasks and stringing them together to achieve your goals. You get whatever the action says you get and it's on you to make that useful.

This is the most reasonable statement of the position I've seen yet, but I think it still goes too far. Hooks are a convenient means to help simulate players into wanting things which is the primary responsibility they have to make a game happen, not the sole source of interactivity within a...

Just touching on this particular point, 5e is a follow-up and expansion to the 4e rejection of codified task DCs that started with skill challenges. We were moving solidly in the direction of not making task difficulty setting (and the attendant on the fly game design) a DM responsibility in the...

Right, the limits of the situation are what make the gameplay interesting. You get faced with a board you can make limited moves on, and try to resolve it favorably. That can't be sufficient for a "railroad." Getting faced with obstacles and overcoming them is the gameplay loop. The point being...

So I know this company only because they're planning to break into boardgames and licensed my friend's design, but their primary business is fancy cards: Art of Play - Wonder Emporium

I'd like to think my response here was considerably more structured, especially as I don't give much credence to RPGs as an exceptional class of game. I specifically made the argument that the definition you're deploying can't be cleanly transposed to "traditional" games. I'm particularly...

I mean, realistically kickstarting games has the same relationship to preordering them as Uber does to taxis. It is functionally the same thing, but gets away with being less regulated by claiming to be different. I'm a little more sympathetic to the KS case, but it's absolutely trading on the...

I don't think you can skip the rhetorical step where you persuade people you're right. You either have to do that, and convince everyone involved that your view of agency should be universal or concede the point and have a discussion about "authorial autonomy" or some other concept that...

I came a little late to this, but I think it's probably best to start from the first post. I think this is a bit redundant (any rule that is not inviolable is not a rule), and in light of the rest of your post, I think is slightly insufficient. Firstly, I don't actually think knowledge is...

This feels like confusion around the word "face" somehow, and drives at that doublethink around play objectives I was talking about earlier. The player wants to make good decisions, constrained by systems that present adversity...if there is a method within that system to lower adversity, it is...

I think I misinterpreted @thefutilist there, that question at the end of the post I was responding to seemed targeted at the narrativist camp, not the kind of gameplay I was talking about. Personally, I've never internalized what precisely is meant by "play to find out." It seems to live in...

That's what the role-playing is for, that's the whole reason you set up genre constraints and build characters within a milieu and all that. The whole point of characters is to want things, either intrinsically (I want revenge on my brother's killer) or extrinsically (this dragon will pay me a...

Yeah, this feels like the usual pie size fallacy. More books being published you don't like doesn't mean less books published that you like, and the whole problem is pretty moot to begin with when more books are published than anyone could possibly read.

This is something I've tried to get at before, which is linguistically tricky and fairly sensitive; I would not describe the second activity here as a game in the sense I'd use the word to talk about tabletop. I would argue the state you describe in chess above is a necessary component for a...

I think a little more exploration of "gameful" is necessary here. Addressing the premise doesn't have a lot to do with the gameplay loop in question, and mutual understanding of how the game is to function is great, but doesn't actually have any bearing on the quality of the underlying game...

I'm not sure how to be clearer that those are completely different gameplay loops. The differences are more salient than the similarities, and it's wild to put "use mechanics" outside the grounds of comparison! The play is entirely the interaction with systems; different systems lead to...

Well, I think the problem we'd run into next is what is meant by "gameplay." My first point in this whole thread was saying the fiat/no-fiat divide isn't a useful razor, or rather it's an insufficiently useful razor. I don't generally find the critique of "processes of play" useful; it...