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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9515492" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I think it's a little more complicated, precisely because TTRPGs don't have pre-specified victory/loss conditions. A lot of what you're pointing out here are a combination of players internalizing a set of loss conditions that aren't necessarily discussed (intra-party conflict is a failure state, dead characters are a failure state etc).It always feels to me like we're really just arguing over what failure/success states should look like, and trying real hard to avoid acknowledging that if you change the goal of a game, it becomes a different game. All this discussion of &quot;what moves should be legitimate&quot; feels really secondary to &quot;and what should players aim to achieve/avoid with the moves they play?&quot;But, if the goal of play is still to achieve player specified ends, subject to the sadly underdiscussed constraints of genre and table norms, (save the world, find the killer, avenge my brother, stay alive, etc.) then it's not just an aesthetic change, it's a change to the available play loop.It seems disingenuous, to me, to do one without the other. That slippery slope argument relies on slipping in another goal, something like &quot;produce satisfying fiction&quot; or &quot;limit any player's contributions to a specific scope of impact&quot; or similar.I mostly think the immersion debate is eliding a gameplay argument; what elements of the board am I allowed to alter, and what am I trying to achieve through that alteration? If there's more than one goal, and actions are grouped into sets that are off-limits to serve one but not another, that is an awkward dissonance for a player to inhabit, like playing a card game two-handed against oneself.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9515492, member: 6690965"] I think it's a little more complicated, precisely because TTRPGs don't have pre-specified victory/loss conditions. A lot of what you're pointing out here are a combination of players internalizing a set of loss conditions that aren't necessarily discussed (intra-party conflict is a failure state, dead characters are a failure state etc). It always feels to me like we're really just arguing over what failure/success states should look like, and trying real hard to avoid acknowledging that if you change the goal of a game, it becomes a different game. All this discussion of "what moves should be legitimate" feels really secondary to "and what should players aim to achieve/avoid with the moves they play?" But, if the goal of play is still to achieve player specified ends, subject to the sadly underdiscussed constraints of genre and table norms, (save the world, find the killer, avenge my brother, stay alive, etc.) then it's not just an aesthetic change, it's a change to the available play loop. It seems disingenuous, to me, to do one without the other. That slippery slope argument relies on slipping in another goal, something like "produce satisfying fiction" or "limit any player's contributions to a specific scope of impact" or similar. I mostly think the immersion debate is eliding a gameplay argument; what elements of the board am I allowed to alter, and what am I trying to achieve through that alteration? If there's more than one goal, and actions are grouped into sets that are off-limits to serve one but not another, that is an awkward dissonance for a player to inhabit, like playing a card game two-handed against oneself. [/QUOTE]

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