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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5168132" data-attributes="member: 42582">Celebrim, I think your two recent posts - about chess, and about the relationship between interlude and crescendo - are interesting, and put your OP in a somewhat different light.You suggested that I inflicted myself with a bad analogy. I believe that you have done the same in your use of the phrase "delayed gratification". This is a notion used primarly to explain various economic and work practices that are characteristic of a modern economy. Saving (and hence, to an extent) suffering now so as to be able to afford something nice in X years time is the classic example.There is nothing analogous to delayed gratification in listening to music with the sorts of contrasts you've described in your post. Rather, there is a type of contrast in experiences which makes the pleasure derived from one all the more powerful because of its relationship to the other. But the whole experience is still a pleasurable one. It's not as if listening to the interlude is suffering, or even an absence of pleasure.As my posts in this thread have shown, I think that there is an explanation for the features of modern RPG design (and especially D&D 4e) that you are interested in, which does not appeal to the ego-gamer/delayed gratification notion. It is about the sort of experience that the game delivers to the participant. In talking about the ego-gamer you are correct to focus on the issue of taking pleasure in playing, but you are (in my opinion) looking at it in the wrong way.The issue is not about wanting to shorten the reward cycle. It's about differences in what counts as rewarding (eg tactical vs operational concerns - OB/DB split vs iron rations). It's about different relationships to the PC as a vehicle for interacting with the gameworld. You haven't responded to my points about the obvious influence of indie design on 4e, but I think these are pretty crucial, because they suggest a strong alternative interpretation to the ego-gamer one that you have offered.There is also a <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Ron Edwards essay</a> that I have been reminded of by this thread:How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power. Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable confluence of Exploration per se. It's kind of a weird Illusionism perpetrated on one another, with everyone putting enormous value on maintaining the Black Curtain between them and everyone else. Typically, groups who play this way have been together for a very long time. My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way? Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting, cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not include that option, at least not very easily. Participants in Ouija-board play do so through selective remembering. I have observed many such role-players to refer to hours of unequivocally bored and contentious play as "awesome!" given a week or two for mental editing. What I see from such groups is the following: •They use a highly customized house-version of a given rules-set, usually AD&D, BRP, or an early edition of Champions; many of the customized details are unrecorded. •They employ a personalized set of subtle cues and expectations that arise out of their long-term friendships and habits of play. •The satisfaction-moments are rare to the extent of being perhaps a yearly event. "Nothing happened tonight" is typical, but the group believes that you don't legitimately get the cherished moments any other way. Such moments are treasured and carefully repeated among them. •Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!" •They're socially isolated from other role-players, as their play is so arcane and impenetrable that no one else can easily participate. If they go to cons, they go together, stay together, and leave together. One of them buys a new game that "looks good," and they rarely if ever try it, always rejecting it when they do. •They're socially isolated not only from gamers, but from everyone, insofar as their hobby is concerned. Forget social context; it's just these guys, aging, playing their tweaked versions of the game they discovered in high school, reminiscing about that one awesome time when character X did that awesome thing. Ouija-board groups vary in terms of how much fun they have, and I'll leave further discussion of the phenomenon to the forums.4e is clearly a game for those who don't object to overtly moving the planchette.</blockquote>

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