Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9852305" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I'm not interested in the "characters'" goals here, they're fictional constructs without agency. I'm interested in what the players' goals are and how those are supposed to be pursued. What is the purpose for proposing one action over another, and how should they reason about those choices, so as to prefer some specific approach?That doesn't hold, unless the players are actively ignorant of the game's mechanisms. If some manipulation of those mechanisms better serves their purported goals, then they should take those actions; I don't think they have a goal in the sense I used it earlier at all. I think they're doing something else (the precise what that thing is I freely admit to not really understanding) and that's getting discussed as though they were playing a game, right up until it comes to the question of a player trying to engage with the mechanics to succeed.I think the issue isn't the mechanical engagement, it's the goal the player is pursuing, and how that informs their decision making.My criticism of that kind of trad play is slightly different; I think they're narrow games with very limited space to play (mostly, it's about socially manipulating your GM), but I can parse player decision making as gameplay still.They want to get the game to a specific state, they have some condition that is a loss (usually death, sometimes some other stuff), formulate a set of tactics or longer term strategy that gets them to that state as efficiently as possible while avoiding the loss condition as effectively as they can. I'd critique the action space as being very limited (superficial claims of tactical infinity aside) and often unknowable, in a way that degrades the quality of possible decision making, but I understand the basis of that decision making, and could articulate why a player would prefer one move or another.This is the "no goal" option, or perhaps "the goal is not a product of gameplay." I'm still not totally clear on how to make decisions, or why those decisions are interesting. "Create compelling fiction" isn't parsable as a game; figuring out how you did isn't evaluated by result or mechanism but by a different kind of critique. If making decisions is not a question of gameplay, it's motivated by other concerns, and I can't help but feel those are not products of systems and mechanisms in the game, but from some outside force, perhaps the attitude the players are expected to adopt.Frankly, I don't expect after all the effort that's already spent on these texts for someone to explain what the actual thing being done here is in a way that I'll grasp at this point. I just find it very muddled when it gets discussed as gameplay but then attempts to reason about it as gameplay are critiqued.</blockquote>

Verification