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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wicht" data-source="post: 6599702" data-attributes="member: 221">It's kinda a joke. I thought it was funny. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />But it does also point out another difference in the two mechanics. One gives the player the illusion of agency. The other strips it away completely and says, "just because I said so." When you pile on the ability of the first mechanic to be tried again (and again, and again, and again); there is a completely different "feel" to the two.That's quite reasonable of you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Of course its partly psychological. The whole idea of "associating" two things together has to be a mental exercise. There is no actual physical connection between a game mechanic and what happens in a game (sans dexterity games and dice rolls). But if a large enough group of people get the exact same "feeling" from a specific set of mechanics, then it does no good to cavalierly dismiss their felt experience as somehow being irrational because you don't get the same vibe. And yes, people can adjust their thinking, in some cases, so that they interact with the mechanics differently. But not in every case, and, this is key,... it is unreasonable to think that they should, absent some larger motivation.  I read plenty of board game reviews and sometimes a game will get uniformly bad reviews, much to the disappointment of the designer. Sometimes, the designer will attempt to justify their game, explaining how, if you approach it with a certain mindset, or if you play it a dozen or more times, the game becomes really, really fun. And maybe the designer is right. But it doesn't matter. Because if people have to force themselves to learn to like your game, unless there is some sort of compelling reason why they should, its not going to happen.And this happened with 4e. There was a large body of people who were quickly turned off by the mechanics and the game-play as Dungeons and Dragons. Their expectations were not meant. 4e supporters (maybe like you have in the past) told them they were approaching the game wrong. Said supporters told them that if they just played it enough they would learn to love it. Others said, rather crassly (and I think this helped fuel animosity), that 4e was the game that wore the Dungeons and Dragons label now and if people wanted their game supported they would have to play 4e. In essence, the 4e supporters made the same mistake as I see game designers make when their game gets a bad review. They wanted other people to adjust themselves to the game, rather than think that the game needed to be adjusted to meet the people where they were, or at least closer to where they were.Geoff Englestein (a game designer and commentator) has a little thing in the Dice Tower podcast called Game Tech, in which he talks about the "science" of games. A few months back, last year sometime iirc, he had one in which he talked about games introducing new mechanics and he advanced the theory that for games to be comfortably accepted (and granted he is speaking about board games) they ideally need to introduce no more than one new mechanic into a persons experience. That if the game can take just one new idea and then mix it into already accepted ideas, the game will do better then if it tries to overwhelm the audience with a plethora of new mechanics.  I think there is some validity to this point and likewise, in the realms of RPGs, a game must meet a certain threshold of intuitive acceptance before it can introduce some new mechanic or interaction. Too much, too fast and you lose your audience, or in this case, your customer base. Sure they do.  And that's not a problem - so long as the player accepts and understands why they can't do it again....There is no right or wrong here... just acceptance or rejection of a particular mechanical dynamic within the framework of the game world. If the mechanic can be plausibly explained to the satisfaction of the player, then it will work. If the player intuitively struggles against the explanation for the mechanic then it won't work. And that's really all there is to it.And, just because a mechanic can be plausibly explained within the framework of the game world to you, is besides the point as to whether or not someone else will accept, or can accept, such an explanation.</blockquote>

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