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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8158842" data-attributes="member: 87792">I'm not. Logic on its own outside the realm of pure mathematics) is nothing more than mental masturbation. I'm going with the person whose analysis is both logic driven and ties to the observable facts. If you get any incorrect facts into your logic then you can end up just about anywhere (Bertrand Russell notoriously proved that if 1+1=1 then he was the Pope).I'd say that gaining a better understanding of the game should almost always lead to a better analysis in your own head.The problem here is that I'm pretty sure that you personally have introduced at least two to my certain knowledge incorrect analytical cases, one of which you've wanted to talk about at length and people have been asking you about. That one is your "authoring challenges out of existence". Unless you mean by way of a disintegration spell or equivalent I can not think of a game where you get to do this. When something is in the fiction it is in the fiction. Retcons are not something you get to do. Now you can go round it, subvert it, or be one step ahead so it's non-serious (as my example of buying magical endless rations showed). But you can't just say "that challenge was never there" except in the event of a complete screw-up and you are trying to bring that game back on track. An example would be if you were to introduce spider-monsters crawling all over someone and they were to hit the X-card because they had a debilitating fear of spiders rather than a normal one and were literally shaking and hyperventilating you might well replace the spiders with some other threat.The thing about the flashback mechanic is that it is very heavily a genre convention and is about as appropriate to other genres as wizards getting to cast fireballs is appropriate to most genres. The only two and a half games I can think of with it (Leverage and Blades in the Dark with the half being some Fate settings) are very explicitly heist games. And if you watch almost any heist movie or series (such as Ocean's X or Leverage, the latter of which was licensed for the game) then you frequently see flashback scenes where the flashback explains what was really going on and how although our characters appear to be up the proverbial creek without a paddle instead that's just how they want to look to the bad guy.The flashback mechanic is in some ways meta because it's doing things out of chronological order for the characters. But it's doing things in exactly the same order you'd see it if you watched a show or a movie of what the characters did. Is it authoring? In the same way that casting disintegrate (or even fly) to eliminate problems is, yes. But it's entirely expected for the genre and if I want to play a heist game that doesn't take ridiculous amounts of time in planning it's the best way to do it.Abstract - and it's also effectively your mental and emotional hit points. Run out of stress points and you're out for the rest of the heist and you take a trauma long term. Is now the time to open the can of worms about how the most likely outcome in some of these modern games is success-with-consequences. Which gives the GM a lot more control while at the same time meaning that player actions are more closely connected to the world?</blockquote>

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