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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5159286" data-attributes="member: 4937">The first thing to note is that you are immediately devaluing and shifting my argument by employing the verb 'want', implying that all the above decisions are choices.  However, that doesn't have to be the case.  You might not actually have any of those choices, or - to the extent that you do have them - they might be meaningless choices, actions you undertake purely to show you could do them, and not because any of them lead to significant changes in the game state.  So far, everyone is attempting to dismiss my point by arguing against some alternate construction.  Let's make it very clear.  Yes, I do agree that failing a save and failing an attack are not always the same thing.  However, that has never been my point.  My point is that in a quite common situation, they are the same thing.And my answer to this is simply 'maybe'.  It may be the case that this is true, but frequently it is not.  I think the problem people are having with my argument is instead of comparing the two things I'm comparing, people are comparing the general case of being stunned versus the general case of being not stunned.  Obviously, in the general case of being not stunned, you have more options than in the general case of being not stunned.  But in the particular cases of being not stunned that I'm comparing, that isn't true.   Yes, the general case of a round where you can act offers more oppurtunities than the general case of a round where you can't act, but in many cases even when you can in theory act your entire participation in the round is rolling the dice and then passing it to the next player.   That shouldn't even be contriversial.  I'm not sure how you could be a gamer and not have had the experience of a meaningless turn because of a dice failure.Now this is a very interesting follow up to what you wrote above, because suddenly you not only agree with me but you also are moving on to a point I wanted to make later - participation in the game and victory within the game aren't necessarily defined mechanically.  You don't have to define the game totally within these very tight video game like action-reward feedback loops.  In my last session, the point in the game I think may have been enjoyed the most was when half of the party was unconscious and bleeding to death, and the important point is that on the whole I think the players of the characters who didnt' even have a turn at that point enjoyed that part of the game more than any other time in it.  If we define 'participation' and 'victory' entirely in these action-reward feedback loops, its impossible to explain that.  If we define 'participation' and 'victory' in ways that include social collaboration and collaborative story telling, then suddenly that begins to make sense.  People were deriving enjoyment vicarously, and the excitement was greater precisely because status effects that had deprived them of actions had led them to a point where they had more invested in the scene.  Failure was fun.  That is not something that mechanistic theories of Pavlovian gaming can explain, but its critical to understanding how PnP games manage to deliver 'The Illusion of Accomplishment' in a way that lets them compete as modes of entertainment with Bejeweled Blizt, WoW, etc.</blockquote>

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