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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5358789" data-attributes="member: 2067">I get a little irrationally annoyed whenever I see something like this.As if it's some form of character flaw on behalf of the people who are sitting down to pretend to be an elf for a few hours on a weekend. As if they're not up to the tough requirements of playing make-believe dragon-slayers. As if somehow they lack the moral fortitude to invest more work into something that they do for leisure. People will do what you give them incentives to do.Part of game design 101 is making sure that the incentives line up with the things you want to encourage: you are rewarded for obeying the game's constraints.If the game fails to engender people who willingly want to, say, engage in stunts outside of their rigid powers system, it is not a fault of some sort of sinful player slothfulness that they should be upbraided for. It is the fault of a game that does not provide enough incentive to do so. Ask anyone who's played Feng Shui if they've played using descriptive stunts, and you'll get a different response.Now, this might be an intended result. A game with less DM Fiat and fewer judgement calls means that there's less wild variation between a Good DM and a Bad DM, that even someone totally new to the game won't screw it up too badly, because there's fewer moments for that DM to decide to do something that winds up hurting fun at the table. There's a lot to be said for a game that can run on rails (except when you want it to). Chess runs on rails the whole time, and people genuinely enjoy it. But intended or not, it's not lazy players, it's based in the design of the thing. If people aren't doing what you want them to do, it's your job to make the game so that they will. And you do that with psychology, but that's a topic for a different thread.</blockquote>

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