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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7567896" data-attributes="member: 5142">This sort of circular reasoning actually puts a finger on what may also have been bugging me about the post in question. I don't mind D&D as a puzzle-game, and saying 'no' is often a valid necessity of play for such games. (I even plan on running an OSR-stylized dungeon crawl in the hopefully near future, likely using Black Hack.) But when other games are less designed as puzzle-games challenging player skill and more about character-propelled dramatic conflict, it seems peculiar to complain that "then the puzzles won't work" because puzzles aren't the point of play. This sort of thinking is rarely, if ever, applied similarly to boardgames. When we play card or boardgames, we almost instinctively understand that each particular game has its own idiomatic purposes, challenges, and strategies featured through its game design that we must learn. The conflict that drives gameplay will be set on different hinges, and we naturally adjust to that fact with minimal fuss. One would hardly go into playing Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Pandemic as if one were playing Monopoly. Nor would we play any of these games expecting the play assumptions of the other, though we may classify families of games with similar design principles. It would be an almost farcical argument to suggest that there must be something wrong with Pandemic because then Monopoly's bank would not work in the game or that the locations of Pandemic are not fixed in a linear fashion around the outer edge of the board. Or even to suggest (with equal parts absurdity and genuineness) that there is something intrinsically wrong with Pandemic because if its design principles or rules were applied to Monopoly, then the game play that results would fail spectacularly. The underlying presumption being, "What good is Pandemic if I can't use it to play Monopoly?" And yet we strangely and frequently encounter this attitude in TTRPG circles wherein people judge the merits of games (or design principles) in a manner that presumes "OneTrueWayism." And thus they refuse (through almost intentional ignorance) to understand with any cordiality the idiomatic nature of TTRPG systems and their design principles because they see, analyze, and rationalize everything through Their One True Game. Is it any wonder why the conversation so readily breaks down when faced with this sort circular reasoning?</blockquote>

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