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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8357083" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Contingent on it, no. But when designing a game, the designer should definitely try to avoid any situation where plainly more-effective strategies are counter to the fun both intended by their design and desired by the players.Another way of phrasing this: Your word choice here implies optimization and dull, staid, formulaic approaches to play. We're not talking about that. We're talking about, "You could run through this challenging maze that has a 1% chance of electrocuting you to death if you mess up enough times, or you could just walk through this door, down a featureless hallway. Both will get you where you want to go, which will you choose?" Yes, sometimes you had to have opted into the door in advance (by class choice, spell choice, etc.), but it's a reasonably safe bet that most groups will have someone who can do something that unlocks the door. At which point...why bother with the maze? Sure, it's gonna involve more action and drama etc. than the hallway...but if a no-danger alternative presents itself, why not avail yourself of it?Like...I don't think that analogies are a bad structure here. Why undergo a long but potentially pleasant hike to work when you can drive your car? Sure, the hike is almost certainly going to be more fun than driving, but that fun is gonna have to be INSANELY fun to be worth the extra time and risk of problems. Why try to capture and tame a wild horse yourself when you can just go buy a horse that's already domesticated? Sure, you'll almost certainly have a much bigger adventure, a much more interesting time finding, capturing, and taming your own wild horse...but are those things worth the potential years of investment that might wind up giving you nothing (if the horse can't be tamed or is suffering from a medical problem you couldn't see or whatever)?Again: It's all well and good to say "do the fun thing, and don't freak out about micromanaging every single detail to squeeze out the maximum benefit." But when you have a choice between "do a potentially fun, but also potentially dangerous thing," and "do a probably-not-fun, but definitely-not-dangerous thing," when both things will explicitly get you what you want...why would you do the former instead of the latter? There's very little reason, and plenty of reason not to. That's the whole point.A game should be designed so that it doesn't have this kind of super-ultra-obvious choice, where it's not "Potential fun, or obvious efficiency: choose one."When did random chance become the only source of drama and tension?I'm reminded of my "fear is a bad motivator" thread. The moment you start questioning death (or any other thing) as the result of pure randomness as the primary consequence, people instantly assume your purpose is to DESTROY all tension and drama and anything good and right and noble and desirable and fun and....That's just really, really tiring. There are lots of ways--and, as I argued in that thread, better ways--to get drama and tension. Sometimes, the most dramatic things in the world are purely deterministic, because they depend on which thing a person chooses, knowing what the consequences will be either way. Sometimes, the player doesn't know what the consequences of a choice will be, but does know that they're not going to be a random die roll, because the consequences will flow from the fiction rather than a mechanic.E.g. in my home game, when the party Bard chose to take on his great-grandmother's succubus powers, not for his own sake, but to free her from an immortal existence she had grown weary of, that she might rejoin her (human) husband in the afterlife? That was an INCREDIBLY dramatic moment, and heightened the tensions between him and the rest of the group. Yet he knew, quite well, what the consequences of that choice would be. No randomness. But drama all the same.Or when the party Druid summoned the power of the One--what the priests call the only god, and his fellow nature-magic-users call "merely" the greatest city-spirit. He didn't know what the consequences would be, but he had a pretty good idea they weren't just gonna be random, instead being costly to an unknown degree. An extremely high-drama moment, releasing one kind of tension (the One was called upon to slay a very nasty evil spirit) but creating another (Druid was "taken away" a la Elijah, for purposes unknown--allowing the player to take an indefinite break for personal reasons.)</blockquote>

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