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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9790420" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Plus, let us point out the rhetorical trickery employed here. (Note that I am arguing to the thread at large; I know you don't need to hear this.)"Tough.  Not evryone [sic] is going to be involved every moment, fact of life."What does that actually mean? "You won't be involved in every single moment." A pretty milquetoast thing. There will be some number of moments where you aren't involved.But what is that being used to claim? "You not being involved for long stretches of time is completely okay." No! No it is not! And that's a completely different statement from the previous one, not at all justified by the rather banal fact that moments where you aren't directly involved sometimes happen.Hard lockouts for extended periods of time should be rare. When they come up, there should be things players can do about them--just as there should be things opponents can do about them. Players should not be pulling out their phones while they wait for something interesting that might actually involve them this time. That, too, is a fact of life. Boring your audience in the long stretches between things relevant to them is bad.Plus? Realism is only one element of game design, and it is not the most salient in all parts of things. Realism requires that every character relieve themselves on the regular. Does that mean we force heavily-armored characters to doff all their armor three to six times a day to go piddle in a hole? Does that mean we expect players to have a plan for digging out a latrine hole every time they make camp, and how to cover it again every time they break camp? I should think no one in this forum would say "yes" to those questions. Realism is good when it provides useful or beneficial things, like making the experience feel more vivid and tangible. But being realistic is not the end-all, be-all of game design.So whether or not "not everyone is going to be involved every moment" is a "fact of life" is not, in and of itself, the reason to do something. People cannot make fireballs appear by doing a hand jive and chanting while holding a ball of bat poop and sulfur. Fact of life. And yet we have characters in-game who can do precisely that. Being a fact of life isn't enough, even if the underlying argument were sound to begin with.</blockquote>

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