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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8270423" data-attributes="member: 7026617">This is a perspective thing you have to engage with to usefully discuss this sort of thing in the first place:Do you really expect an RPG session to look like a given work of fiction?Because I think if you do, the vast majority of games aren't going to produce that.&nbsp; Works of fiction work as they do because they're deterministic; failures only happen at points that they do because they're dramatically desirable or necessary.&nbsp; Games are, barring some uncommon narrative heavy cases, random to at least some degree.&nbsp; That means both premature failure and outright anticlimax are possible, and if those bother you, they're liable to be a problem (even metacurrencies, which exist largely to flatten this effect, can usually not prevent them but just mitigate them) in almost all games to some degree (some more than others, but then, games have different allegiances so how hard a game is trying to avoid these things varies considerably; you can have one that makes better stories at the price of making less interesting game-play, for example, and that's not going to be a desirable tradeoff for everyone).This is what makes some genres more brittle in how they see games handle them; because their perception of how tolerant the genre is to convention violation and such timing aberrations tells them that you don't have as much wiggle room as you do with other genres.&nbsp; Other people won't see it that way. Sometimes this is because they're not really attached to the genre, so such violations don't bother them at all, sometimes its because what part of the genre they find important is not the same as others.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 8270423, member: 7026617"] This is a perspective thing you have to engage with to usefully discuss this sort of thing in the first place: [I]Do you really expect an RPG session to look like a given work of fiction?[/I] Because I think if you do, the vast majority of games aren't going to produce that. Works of fiction work as they do because they're deterministic; failures only happen at points that they do because they're dramatically desirable or necessary. Games are, barring some uncommon narrative heavy cases, random to at least some degree. That means both premature failure and outright anticlimax are possible, and if those bother you, they're liable to be a problem (even metacurrencies, which exist largely to flatten this effect, can usually not prevent them but just mitigate them) in almost all games to some degree (some more than others, but then, games have different allegiances so how hard a game is trying to avoid these things varies considerably; you can have one that makes better stories at the price of making less interesting game-play, for example, and that's not going to be a desirable tradeoff for everyone). This is what makes some genres more brittle in how they see games handle them; because their perception of how tolerant the genre is to convention violation and such timing aberrations tells them that you don't have as much wiggle room as you do with other genres. Other people won't see it that way. Sometimes this is because they're not really attached to the genre, so such violations don't bother them at all, sometimes its because what part of the genre they find important is not the same as others. [/QUOTE]

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