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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9244331" data-attributes="member: 70468">While video games don’t allow the creation of mechanics on the fly, that doesn’t mean that the resulting dynamics are narrow. Consider Final Fantasy XIV’s nightclub culture. The game’s programming does not have mechanics for setting up clubs per se, but it does support certain dynamics (such as being able to chat with other players, to perform emotes they can see, to buy a house in a public space and customize it) that allow for people to do that anyway. They seem to be popular too if all the spam in city chat is any indication. See also: speedrunners and all the ways they break games, game randomizers, modding culture, etc.I had FKR in mind when I wrote that. You’re talking about a particular dynamic those games were designed to support.This gets back to what I have been talking about regarding good faith¹ play. I consider it out of scope to accommodate every possible usage. You can make a game resilient to accidental misplay (as Baker has <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/456" target="_blank">discussed</a>, thanks to [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] for the link), but a game is going to be designed to create certain dynamics and to provide certain experiences. If people want to do something else regardless, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, and that’s true for any game (though it’s obviously easier with non-digital ones). The way I’d like to address that issue is to include commentary on my design, so if people want to do something else, they can do so with an understanding of how the game was designed to work. If they aren’t even interested in that, then welp. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷🏻‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-1f3fb-2642.png" title="Man shrugging: light skin tone    :man_shrugging_tone1:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging_tone1:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Otherwise, if we take it as fundamental to tabletop RPGs that play will work this way, then it privileges that kind of play over other types of play, which has negative implications for games that aren’t designed with it in mind. It suggests that there is something wrong with them, or that maybe they’re not even really RPGs. It also calls into question the possibility of your neotrad manifesto. How can one, “Shift GM to or toward a role taken on by a player,” if the design must also support play that doesn’t do that (since the design cannot lock them into running everything according to it)? It would require any neotrad design to be self-defeating or suffer those negative implications. Given that plus the way it interacts with using a design framework, the only reasonable solution is to treat it as out of scope, not to worry about it (even if haters gonna hate), and to be clear about what one’s game is trying to do.[HR][/HR][1]: Or whatever one wants to call it. I’m using this term because I used it before, but I’m not set on it. I don’t like the negative implication it has about other play, which isn’t bad per se — just out of scope. (Added in an update.)</blockquote>

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