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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 5740583" data-attributes="member: 386">You know how when you play chess you're supposed to try to win the game, and not - I don't know, try to make as many moves as possible?  That's the kind of thing I mean when I say "play the game".So that means I think that the rug gets pulled out from the other players when the game, which has been telling/expecting you to play it one way is suddenly telling/expecting you to play it in a different way.  As if you're at a chess tournament and suddenly - in the middle of the tourney - you're being ranked based on the numbers of moves you made, not on games won.What I understood Monte to mean by "out of bounds" was this: "Does the game present players with challenges that have pre-made solutions?"  (I might add only pre-made solutions to that.)  In "The Case of the Werewolf's Curse," the early stages have pre-made solutions (use a Move Action!  shift!  immediate interrupt!) but removing the curse doesn't.  In that way it's an interesting example.  I think pemerton remarked about the possibility of allowing someone to subdue the effects of the curse by making a Diplomacy check.  That would be "out of bounds" role-playing as far as I understand Monte's use of the phrase.I really enjoy that kind of "out of bounds" problem-solving play.  When I first started playing 4E I expected to see a lot of it, because I thought (and think) that 4E makes it incredibly easy to quickly and simply adjudicate any "out of bounds" approach to a problem your PC wants to try.  I discovered that, in my games, I didn't see nearly enough of this, so I started writing a hack in order to get it.As for bad design: I don't think that your goals are bad!  What I think is bad, or poor design, is when the game forces players to make choices with two conflicting... ways of playing at the same time.  An example: You're supposed to want your PC to win; the reward system of the game relies on it.  You also have to determine, fairly and without bias, what the DCs for your actions are.  You have to do two things at once that conflict with each other.Another example: The game expects you to role-play your character to the fullest, to really attach yourself to your PC and invest a lot in your creation.  If a course of action would get you in trouble, you're expected to do that if it fits with your PC's personality.  It's also a really hard game, killing PCs left and right if they get into trouble, and the only way to gain XP to avoid getting killed is to achieve concrete goals (kill monsters, get loot).  That might work for some sorts of horror games (though Call of Cthulhu, as far as I can tell, doesn't do this), but you can see how it might get annoying.</blockquote>

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