NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9624142" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I'm none of these people, but I'm definitely in the other camp, so I'll take a shot.It's obviously conditional, and starts with the same question: What is the player's goal?<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Are they trying to apprehend a criminal?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Is this entirely a forensic exercise into something that's already happened?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Do they need evidence of what's occurred to persuade a third party?</li> </ul>The important thing is that the players want something that can be evaluated. Did they capture the criminal? Did they discover what happened? Can they prove it? The gameplay portion comes in stringing together together actions that can get them from the current state to that end state, and the evaluation at that time. Meaningfully, it needs to be contingent on their choices. You correctly identify that there is really no game if there is no contingency, but I dont' particularly want to deal with the most dysfunctional form of play you present here:It would be easier to have this conversation if you didn't pepper everything you said with this stuff, as if it must be normative. That railroads can exist doesn't mean they must exist, and we should set the case we all agree is degenerate (give or take bloodtide) outside the discussion.I'm lumping the next bit together, because I think it's dealing with an essential misunderstanding; it does not matter what the player's goal is. The whole engaging thing of an RPG is that the "fiction" bit allows players to set unusual and largely unbounded goals for play. They differ from other games that end after 7 turns, or when a player has acquired 100 victory point, or when the stock market crashes in the simulation. Instead, it's the job of players to set their own goals for play. There's usually some negotiation about those goals, the whole trad process of presenting "plot hooks" is essentially just advice about offering up interesting suggestions for those goals to players, and lots of play has traditionally made the acceptable space for what goals a player might pursue very small (get wealthy, kill your rival, save the kingdom, etc.). I think there's a laudable trend toward increasing pre and during game negotiation for what goals are within the scope of play, interesting/agreeable to all participants and the GM will thus be able to prepare for, which is nice, but I don't think a fundamental change.All of these questions come down to whatever it actually is the players want to achieve; player goals are where the role-playing comes in it is within imagination that any of the situations you propose might be acceptable win or loss states for solving a mystery, depending on what the players have tried to achieve. "Mystery" tends to come down to deduction though; can I put together disparate sources of information to narrow a pattern down to specific outcome? The answer might very well be no, in which case we move back to the basic questions the game poses (are you still alive, do you still have the ability to declare more actions, do you want something else?) and then go from there.I was writing more on this, but this is moving very quickly, and I wanted to jump ahead to something else that stood out starkly to me.I think "aesthetic preference" is doing some real heavy lifting here; this is a matter of gameplay, not set dressing. It is, technically, an aesthetic preference that I'd rather play Big 2 than Go Fish for sure, but the reason is not because the cards look any different, or that an outside observer unfamiliar with either game could even tell the difference at a glance or even with a transcript of play. The gameplay is different between the two, and in this contrived example, obviously better in the first case. The decisions I will make between the two are texturally different; there are more points of interaction in Big 2, the impact of each decision on the end of the game and on each subsequent decision is bigger, and the impact of my decisions on victory is greater than the initial state of the deck in Big 2 than Go Fish."Affecting how the game unfolds" simply isn't the entirety of the goal here. The point is to let players make interesting decisions, and for those decisions to be interesting, there must be a means to evaluate them. The gameplay loop that makes all that possible requires there be a reference state the player's choices can be compared against to see if they got what they wanted. A mystery, the thing the players want involving information that is unknown to them, but theoretically learnable, can lead to those interesting decisions as they try and get it.Choosing to evaluate play entirely in terms of whether what happens has "real consequences and provokes hard choices" is as much the aesthetic preference on display here. You're picking a presumably appealing fictional state as more essential to play than what I'd call the "quality of gameplay."</blockquote>

Verification