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Set aside single action resolution. Players have a goal related to the current score; how best do they achieve it? What's the minimum number of resources they could spend to get there? Taken from that perspective, the ideal state is to offload as many consequences to score specific clocks, and...

I quite like not really watching Leverage. It's ideal in the background, checking in and see where they are in the formula or like, sick daytime or laundry folding television

You're missing the salient point here. It's not what the player wants with this one action, it's the goal the player is pursuing across multiple action declarations that's driving the strategic decision making under discussion. Success is being viewed less atomically than a single act of resolution.

I really love her work, which is almost exclusively about media I am not interested in.

I think this is just the discoverability problem clashing with widening readership and genre splitting. For a specific kind of reader, the was certainly a time you could really pick up a random book in the fantasy section at a library or bookstore and more or less know what you were getting...

Almost exactly the opposite for me, or maybe some overlap. I can't stand the isekai frame narrative, the whole fish out of water in a different world portal fantasy thing, but I'm absolutely down for a strictly codified progression system.

More relevant to this discussion, I think both storytelling and performance belong largely to that category. RPGs can be games, but they don't have to be, and for a great many purposes people purport to play them, probably don't need to be. We should be careful, when considering RPGs as games...

Not when I use it. I'm quite happy to take Suits' definition: I don't really hold with the notion of "non-Suitsian" games, I just think a lot of people use "game" very loosely to indicate a great many forms of play that are not ultimately games.

I play a lot of board games. My favorites are the heavier economic games, your 18xxs and Splotters, with the occasional dash of a tableau builder or some other kind of mid-heavy weight euro. I'd never turn down a round of Hansa Teutonica. Most weeks it's 1846 or 18MEX these days, but we hop...

See, that's sort of exactly what I'm taking shots at. I used contract bridge, a very old and very popular game as an example, and this kind of heuristic development is the basis of interaction with board games and video games. You make up a theory about how to play Slay the Spire or which...

You're describing the approachability or obviousness of a heuristic. Players will find those first or faster, but if they aren't satisfying or powerful, they'll still upgrade given more exposure. Similarly to above, it's often good to have heuristics of different levels of obviousness in your...

So this reads to me as describing designer intended player heuristics in play. Players, when encountering a game will strive to find a repeatable strategy, technique or decision making basis to choose which actions will best propel them to the goal. Where I think the article falls short is that...

I think those two issues are conflated routinely. The sense of "immersion" meant by "the mechanics get out of the way and I forget I'm playing a game" and the sense indicated by "I'm making decisions my character can't make" should be treated as separate concerns. It would be great if we could...

I really think it's down to direct mapping of player and character decision making and forward causality from action determination to resolution. The character and player make a decision to do something, then something happens.

I don't see a compelling reason this needs to go either way. Your case here doesn't suggest the GM has actually done any world building, and if that's the case, I don't know why she would say no (I wouldn't in her shoes at this point). On the other hand, I don't think this would be a huge...

It's very clear at this point that no one is winning anything here. :p

That's not exactly what I meant, and I think my description is colored by all the board game design I've been doing lately. The whole point of that kind of art is to package a specific kind of striving experience into a box and hand it to people who might be interested in having it. A playtester...

I asked my friend the other day if the coffee he'd given me was a natural process (he's normally a dark roast guy and I was surprised to get some acid), and he said "no, I just use like a pour over, and I added some pumpkin spice seasoning" and I realized we were not coming from the same place.

Woah! That's a lot of steps to walk from where I'm at, not the least because I'm not especially storytelling inclined. If I had a strong interest in narrative, I would obviously be writing novels. Perhaps if there was a strong tradition for fictional travelogues or gazetteers outside of like...

I continue to be sad I mentioned tortles. Setting that aside, there's clearly a norm at stake here that I don't think is reconcilable. This discussion really seems to be focused on a conflict about what GMs do. If I'm completely honest, the whole appeal of the activity is the building out a...