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: 9852342" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I'm solidly pro-manipulation here. My issue is that RPGs are deeply inconsistent about whether or not players should be doing mechanical manipulation and when. I am not using the term pejoratively; if I had it my way, games generally would simply not include mechanics players are not supposed to try and leverage.Let's take the case that [USER=7025508]@Crimson Longinus[/USER] put forward earlier. If the player's goal is to succeed at the stated goal of a given score and to come out as far ahead on resources so they can continue to do so in future, it is beneficial to a player looking to minimize complications to, to the best of their ability, persuade their GM to set as many possible clocks that will not matter if they aren't filled by the end of score. This essentially lets them create new pools of resources they can spend.This is putatively undesirable behavior, and out of the bounds of how a player should approach the game. Similarly, a player should seemingly propose actions without regard for how they might be categorized into one skill or another; or at the very least, in situations where more than one skill may apply, players should not seek to manipulate their action declarations to use their higher ranked skill if possible.Both of those cases that were discussed earlier don't make sense, if the player's goal is to succeed in their action declarations and/or in whatever goal their pushing in the game state. Either the player is laboring under a different set of incentives with a different actual goal (the thing I think is the case), or those situations are some kind of design weakness, or there are other rules in play (my proposal players should be making decisions as if in ignorance of their mechanical consequences).Given how much the design is lauded as achieving the goals, and indeed, these are not held up as weaknesses to be shored up because they produce undesirable player incentives, it seems clear to me that players should be using a completely different criteria to make decisions.</blockquote>

Verification