Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="knasser" data-source="post: 6956093" data-attributes="member: 65151">I'm not the person you quoted, but the reason I would find that hard to believe is true is because it is staggeringly restrictive and any design that depends on that to more than a very casual degree is flawed. Why flawed? Because it should be possible to design a game that functions just as well for a much wider range. No other role-playing game I have ever played is as restrictive as that and to my mind the purpose of a role-playing game is to tell stories. Monopoly - a game of chance and arbitrariness - is about the last thing that should be a point of comparison for a role-playing game. For a role-playing game to be so focused on progressing through a set amount of encounters per day rules out any sort of story where encounters follow naturally from events and decisions rather than from metagame reasons. That logic is almost by definition. I'll repeat it because it is a critical flaw in a role-playing game. If the game system pushes you towards a set number of encounters to work well, then encounters are not following from player decisions, from the flow of the plot or the story or drama. They're being set by meta reasons and the story, drama, player decisions are all being driven by rules reasons rather than in-game events. That is a flaw because it reduces versimilitude and constrains many types of stories and player decisions. Constraint without advantage is an objectively bad thing because some lose for the sake of nobody gaining. If making a game work for six encounters by necessity made it work poorly for any other number of encounters, that would be one thing. But it doesn't. No other role-playing game I have played is so limited.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="knasser, post: 6956093, member: 65151"] I'm not the person you quoted, but the reason I would find that hard to believe is true is because it is staggeringly restrictive and any design that depends on that to more than a very casual degree is flawed. Why flawed? Because it should be possible to design a game that functions [B]just as well[/B] for a much wider range. No other role-playing game I have ever played is as restrictive as that and to my mind the purpose of a role-playing game is to tell stories. Monopoly - a game of chance and arbitrariness - is about the last thing that should be a point of comparison for a role-playing game. For a role-playing game to be so focused on progressing through a set amount of encounters per day rules out any sort of story where encounters follow naturally from events and decisions rather than from metagame reasons. That logic is almost by definition. I'll repeat it because it is a critical flaw in a role-playing game. If the game system pushes you towards a set number of encounters to work well, then encounters are not following from player decisions, from the flow of the plot or the story or drama. They're being set by meta reasons and the story, drama, player decisions are all being driven by rules reasons rather than in-game events. That is a flaw because it reduces versimilitude and constrains many types of stories and player decisions. Constraint without advantage is an [b]objectively[/b] bad thing because some lose for the sake of nobody gaining. If making a game work for six encounters by necessity made it work poorly for any other number of encounters, that would be one thing. But it doesn't. No other role-playing game I have played is so limited. [/QUOTE]

Verification