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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5159753" data-attributes="member: 4937">Those would be examples, yes.  In general, I see this as a trend away from delayed gratification and toward immediate gratification.  I don't have any way to prove this, but I don't believe that this trend is the result of a player base with a shrinking ability to commit time primarily because this trend in PnP gaming seems to parallel shifts in delayed gratification toward immediate gratification in other areas of gaming, larger society etc.  Your theory that it has to do with something specific within the PnP community wouldn't explain the larger social trend.  I'm suggesting that the PnP communities move toward all these things you list is part of a larger design trend which PnP designers are taking inspiration from. In essence, yeah, you could think about it being an issue of pacing in that theories that require there to be minimal times between rewards are forcing on the game toward pacing where periods of failure are minimized.  It's probably fairly obvious that I'm going to end up arguing that as the period of failure approaches zero length, the meaningfulness and the satisfaction of the reward is reduced to zero.  The tolerance players have for reducing the failure period (or risk, as an alternate way of looking at the problem) depends on the player's personality.  'Ego Gamers'/'Achievement Driven Gamers' derive more satisfaction from the short wait period relative to gamers with different primary goals in the game, because they are in it for that immediate sense of accomplishment.  Also I'd like to argue that the smaller the period of failure, and the lower the risk, the more infrequently failure occurs, counterintuitively, the more any particular failure 'stings'.  If you expect to hit 50% of the time, missing doesn't seem like an unlucky fluke.  It's something you prepare yourself for.  But if you expect to hit 90% of the time, missing sucks because you didn't expect failure as a possible outcome.   An example of this I'm very familiar with is in Bloodbowl, where the failures when you move the Agility 4 or Agility 5 player are more frustrating than the ones when you are taking actions with the expectation that they might fail.</blockquote>

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