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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8930147" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I mean, you picked two examples I find frustrating precisely because they don't allow for much agency in player decision making, or have particular interesting gameplay.I've railed for years about how skill challenges are not a particularly good game, precisely because the range of player decision making (mechanically, I'm willing to conceded there's plenty of choice in fictional positioning, it's just not generally relevant to the actual game) is very small and usually trivial to optimize.I was just thinking about the discussion in the other thread we were having about Blades, actually. A friend of mine (over a game of The Great Zimbabwe, one of our favorite Splotter designs) talked about how much he enjoyed a session of BitD, knowing my prior frustrations (and that I'm somewhat infamous for having opinions about TTRPGs). He enjoyed it immensely and will likely go join a campaign somewhere, but assessed it as "oh I'm not sure it is a game" in the sense of the activity we were about to engage in.Obviously that's an incomplete analysis from off-hand commentary. But I think it's a good example of where I'm coming from. I'm not looking for a fundamentally different activity from the board game we just played. I don't see any reason TTRPGs shouldn't be designed first and foremost as games, and everything you're talking about can flow from there.If an action doesn't make fictional sense but could still be declared, that's a design problem, not a gameplay prompt. Skill challenges are frustrating because they abstract a thing that doesn't need abstracting. Just say the situation, let the players declare actions, resolve the actions, and then determine the new situation. If you don't like the resulting gameplay, then the place to go is rewriting/tuning the actions.I used to get pegged a lot as an extreme simulation guy, but that's a cart before the horse thing. Simulation is just a likely result of writing sufficiently clear and useful rules/actions, and will generally give way to genre consideration/player expectation when you need to write rules they'll be leveraging regularly.</blockquote>

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