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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8275270" data-attributes="member: 16814">This is a weird take to me.  Ignoring how a designer intends the game to work leads directly to getting poor results from the game.  Sometimes you get lucky, because a game operates in ways a designer may not have intended, but usually this is why people have issues with games and seek advice.  You just have to look to the number of threads about resting/hp/ability rechage/deadliness of 5e to see this problem -- people are not playing according to the designer's intended mode of challenge and so are having problems and are seeking solutions.  Most of them blame the game for this, and not their deviation from the design intent.  The idea that how a designer built a game can be a strangle on how a table exerts itself is similarly just weird.  I mean, if I want to play Risk, I'm not going to pick up Monopoly and say to anyone that tells me that I should get a game designed to do Risk that they're limiting my fundamental agency as a boardgamer!  That's ridiculous.  Instead, this argument reads like someone that assumes that there's really only one kind of RPG, just with different flavors (and I believe you made this argument above) and so it doesn't matter what RPG you pick up, you can just flavor it however you want.  In that construction, your argument makes some sense, but this construction is one that's very limited and not terribly experienced with what other RPGs actually offer.  It's not just a difference in flavor, there are games that have fundamentally different approaches to play.Again, this seems confused.  Celebrity culture is where people good at thing A are listened to about things that aren't thing A.  An example would be caring what shampoo Tom Hanks used because he's a famous actor.  In that sense, yes, Tom Hanks is no better than anyone else as far as selecting a shampoo, so his opinion shouldn't matter.  However, if I wanted some knowledge and advice on how to act, then Tom Hanks is absolutely someone I should listen to.  We aren't talking about getting game designers opinions on shampoo, but on the very games they've designed.  That's not celebrity culture, is asking the people with relevant experience and a track record of success at that thing to talk about that thing.  Kind of how you would talk to a doctor about medical stuff, a scientist about things in their specialty, and an engineer about things in their specialty.  I absolutely want to hear from game designers about how they think the games they've made work, and about how other games work, because they've shown they have enough insight into that topic that they're successful.  I don't have to agree with them, but dismissing them as I would Tom Hank's opinion on shampoo (Buy it because I do!) is just silly.You seem like an honest poster, but you have some serious gaps in experience that are showing to anyone that has actually read up on game design and who has experimented with games that actually do it different from the set of games that is defined by strong GM decides mechanics, like D&D and to a lesser extent BRP (I believe you mentioned this upthread).</blockquote>

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