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A defense of illusionism
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9110736" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>Drifting the topic slightly, but this general tone has started to bother me more and more. It isn't an intrinsic feature of games and design as a whole that some combination of mechanics inevitably creeps in that exceeds the tolerances the game was built for. That's just not something that has to happen. And conversely, a lot of the things that get put together as "broken combos" seem to be pretty clearly just "reading the mechanics and using them" by the standards of most other kinds of tabletop games. We're not into speedrunning exploits here, we're into basic deck construction or 3rd playthrough of a eurogame territory.</p><p></p><p>"Authorship" is a loaded term in TTRPG discussion. There's a general gameplay sense in which authorship is inevitable and reasonable. Consider a board game example again: Dominion can't play itself. It proscribes what you can do, when play will start and when play will end, but the inputting of actions to create and resolve a board state and the making of decisions could reasonably be termed "authorship" and is essential for the game to happen.</p><p></p><p>The problem is that "authorship" implies the authoring of a story specifically, and that is a whole other debate. I can envision a model of immersion that's comfortable with authorship, in the sense of specifically applying the agency of the character being portrayed. Taking that view, I find a little more charity for the essay's points around this.</p><p></p><p>I found the writing a little protracted and flowery, personally, felt like a lot of restatement. Generally, it seemed to be pushing a broadening of a definition of illusionism away from the strictest sense of negating player input while appearing not to do so, to more general GM techniques for driving toward a desired conclusion, hitting specific story beats, reusing prep and so on. In that sense, I think the essay should mostly be taken as a counterpoint to that definition of illusion I provided swinging the other way, and broadening to absorb more and more "reasonable" GM techniques into the reviled state.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9110736, member: 6690965"] Drifting the topic slightly, but this general tone has started to bother me more and more. It isn't an intrinsic feature of games and design as a whole that some combination of mechanics inevitably creeps in that exceeds the tolerances the game was built for. That's just not something that has to happen. And conversely, a lot of the things that get put together as "broken combos" seem to be pretty clearly just "reading the mechanics and using them" by the standards of most other kinds of tabletop games. We're not into speedrunning exploits here, we're into basic deck construction or 3rd playthrough of a eurogame territory. "Authorship" is a loaded term in TTRPG discussion. There's a general gameplay sense in which authorship is inevitable and reasonable. Consider a board game example again: Dominion can't play itself. It proscribes what you can do, when play will start and when play will end, but the inputting of actions to create and resolve a board state and the making of decisions could reasonably be termed "authorship" and is essential for the game to happen. The problem is that "authorship" implies the authoring of a story specifically, and that is a whole other debate. I can envision a model of immersion that's comfortable with authorship, in the sense of specifically applying the agency of the character being portrayed. Taking that view, I find a little more charity for the essay's points around this. I found the writing a little protracted and flowery, personally, felt like a lot of restatement. Generally, it seemed to be pushing a broadening of a definition of illusionism away from the strictest sense of negating player input while appearing not to do so, to more general GM techniques for driving toward a desired conclusion, hitting specific story beats, reusing prep and so on. In that sense, I think the essay should mostly be taken as a counterpoint to that definition of illusion I provided swinging the other way, and broadening to absorb more and more "reasonable" GM techniques into the reviled state. [/QUOTE]
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