This is a good post. I typically always like your posts even if I don't agree with them entirely or with certain aspects of them.
I like that you're switching the conversation to your typical inclinations toward challenge-based play. I'd like to talk about that a little bit. You and I have talked in the past about systems that index various goals simultaneously (in particular, we've discussed Blades in the Dark among a few others).
Always. My usual feeling is that everyone is perfectly happy to sacrifice the G on the altar of the TTRP, and rarely willing to acknowledge what that costs.
So here is my sense of your position on challenge-based designs:
* Like the bit above that I've bolded, it seems to me that you feel an awkward dissonance when micro goals in a game are sometimes at tension with one another or one micro goal is momentarily or perpetually at tension with a macro goal. A game like Torchbearer (the pinnacle of challenge-based TTRPG design imo) would seem to generate this sort of struggle for you. You have multiple clocks going simultaneously and they each demand you perform subtly different calculus to stay on top of them. You have multiple currencies that power various aspects of play and attaining these or spending these come at costs to other interests or assessments around sacrificing immediate needs to invest in longterm gains. Gaining and spending these currencies requires you to perform a lot of tactical and strategic calculus around various, sometimes competing, interests and loops/intervals of play. Finally, gaining certain key currencies and advancing requires thematic struggle and action resolution failure.
I am not especially familiar with Torchbearer, outside of a few reports of play.
There are a lot of spinning plates to stay on top of and they can compound if you don't maintain extreme skill at managing the tactical level, the strategic level, while pushing hard on the thematic elements of play all times (which intersect with the tactical layer, the strategic layer, and the advancement layer).
Torchbearer's "board state" is never something that lets up. You can "keep the headman's axe at bay" perpetually and you can even thrive within the scope of your character's premise/thematics, but you never get full reprieve from that looming execution. It, by design, always haunts play. And you better not let up or it will catch up to you.
My sense is you might call this approach "parasitic design" or a "decaying board state?" If so, my sense is that you would ascribe "dysfunctional" as a descriptor for this approach to systematizing challenge-based play and organizing play priorities?
I'd probably go with decaying board state, sure. I've come to believe my understanding of "parasitic design" was obtained from someone misusing the term to talk about something else. I don't think I'd use dysfunctional for anything other than an unparsable rule. I might use degenerate, if the board state tended to devolve toward a single dominant strategy or can easily become unsolvable.
That all being said, I tend to put my relationship to that kind of game down to personal preference, not to a factor of design. Regardless of medium, I am generally not fond of games where the decision space and/or impact of player decisions decreases over the course of play instead of growing.
* So, assuming the above is correct, I have a question for you regarding baseball; starting pitching specifically.
I'll do my best, but I am exactly the kind of gay nerd who has happily not been to a baseball pitch since I was 9; you're killing me with these sports analogies.
The last sporting event I went to was a work function basketball game. I found the back and forth of each exchange tactically interesting, but couldn't help but wonder if it wouldn't be more interesting if they balanced the players.
When you're a starting pitcher, the dynamics you're working under are actually rather similar to playing Torchbearer. You have multiple competing interests that you have to constantly weigh and juggle.
1) You have a pitch count clock that is ticking and constantly looming (modern era absolutely tries to keep starting pitchers below 100 pitch count...so finishing ball games as a starting pitcher is extremely difficult anymore). So you need to optimize for efficiency, but sometimes a singular moment or a particular at-bat or a particular situation demands that you abandon your efficiency optimization to potentially "get out of a spot."
Some googling informs me there are strict time limits between pitches? I feel certain there's a nuance here I'm not grasping, but "players are under time pressure" seems to be the takeaway. The game equivalent is presumably introducing a chess clock, which certainly has dramatic impacts on how people play games. I generally understand it to be adding an "execution" element to the challenge, shifting play from just finding the right line to also demonstrating you can do so quickly.
2) Hitters' statistics increase dramatically vs a pitcher as the game deepens, as pitches accrue, and they get further at-bats against you. The third time through the order is a statically a huge increase in metrics vs a pitcher when compared to the first time through the order. Consequently, there are two different games of "cat & mouse" happening between pitchers and hitters here:
2a) Pitchers often decline showing their full repertoire of pitches to either all hitters the first time through the order or to select hitters specifically. This is a sacrifice of short-term gains for long term durability and the amelioration of that long-term trend of hitters getting better against you as at-bats accrue in a game.
2b) Beyond the dynamics of 2a above, pitchers often change their sequencing and location dynamics of pitches either to the whole lineup or to specific hitters. This might be working against a pitchers strength in a particular at-bat or in a particular inning or a particular time through the lineup. The intended payoff is that a particular dangerous hitter or the lineup-at-large might be off balance; again sacrificing optimization of tactics right now for (hopefully) strategic payoff.
If I'm parsing this correctly: every pitch you throw against a given batter is assumed to make future pitches less effective, both in general, and as a function of that specific pitch. Essentially, pitchers have a hand of cards which reference both some general stat they keep depleting, and each card has a personal modifier that also degrades, though these stats are modified in some way by the stats of the batter.
This is very similar to the dynamics of War Chest, a game I do not like precisely because of its degrading board state. Every lost unit permanently decreases your ability to replenish, use and reinforce units of that type. Every action taken not only limits the decision space on the board, but the total size of the decision space for all future decisions.
3) The Home Plate Umpire is a huge part of a pitcher's calculus. As the adage goes, "the most important pitch in baseball is strike 1." That is because getting ahead of the hitter (achieving a 0 balls : 1 strike count) is absolutely essential for success at every interval (for this at-bat, for pitch count optimization, for staying out of trouble in this inning, and for reducing the total number of times through the order in the game). However, the second most important pitch in baseball is on the 1-1 count. The difference between hitter success on a 2-1 count (2 balls : 1 strike) vs a 1-2 count is profound.
So a pitcher has to "game the Umpire" and pitch to that Ump's subjective tendencies both generally and especially on the first pitch of an at-bat and when facing a 1-1 count.
I think you're losing me here? There's a subjective element to pitch evaluation, and that varies from umpire to umpire, and that might be gameable? I don't understand how that interacts with balls : strikes, unless you're saying the strategic importance of gaming it properly is different at different stages of the game?
4) Finally, it is absolutely essential that you "show up big" in big moments as a starting pitcher. Your team is deeply relying upon you. There is an intangible of grit and fortitude and courage that you have to show and that comes in many forms from (i) the way you carry yourself generally when its your day to (ii) your body language/disposition on the mound between pitches to (iii) whether you have proven that you can "clutch up" in order to "get out of a jam" or make a key pitch in a key situation. And whether anyone wants to admit it or not (iv) striking out a key hitter for the other team (especially overmatching them with a fastball or making them look stupid with a slider) juices up your team, no doubt.
I don't know that I have anything to say about this. Modeling stress/team dynamics are outside the kind of gameplay I'm interested in, and frankly outside the kind of spectating I'm interested in.
This intangible component is kind of the thematic/premise piece.
I could go on, but hopefully I've demonstrated the dynamics of starting pitching in baseball and why I feel like (i) its analogous to being a player in a game of Torchbearer and (ii) why I wonder if you would look at these starting pitching dynamics as "parasitic design" or a "decaying board state" (particularly the dynamics of the pitch count inevitably leading you to get taken out of the game) and therefore "dysfunctional challenge-based design."
I think I made an earlier error. I was looking at pitch clock, you meant "pitch count" which after some searching, I'm taking to mean "pitchers have an increased risk of injury and decreased performance as they throw more pitches over the course of a game." So, essentially, an upper limit on the number of actions you can take. I don't actually see that as having much impact in the decaying board state sense, that's more of just a game timer.
The board game analogy I'd use is Bus, which hands out all of the available action tokens to each player at the beginning of the game, and ends when only player has any left with no hard restrictions on how many can be used each round. They're entirely a clock in that game, as the effectiveness of those actions and the available places on the board in which to play definitely expand as the game continues.
Hopefully this makes sense and gets some traction in your brain because I'm very curious about the contours of your positions on this stuff. I'm pretty sure we disagree about key elements, but I don't know.
I don't really know where we're going here, but my original point is that much disagreement seems to be about the goal of play, and the difficulty of holding more than one such goal in mind, while simultaneously having multiple resources/abilities that must only be spent towards some of those goals.
This seems to be about a game space having complex tactical concerns, theoretically in service to one goal.
