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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9282617" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Depends on what you're having faith about, I'd say.It's one thing if it's "small benefit that comes at a meaningful and obvious price in enjoyable play." It's quite another to presume that smart players won't look at a system with clear exploit potential and universally say "nah, I won't do any exploits at all, I'll accept losing a lot more when I could have cheesed the hell out of all that stuff."Because that's the problem with dominant strategies, degenerate solutions, and perverse incentives. They reward the people who use them, and anyone who doesn't is leaving useful tools on the table as...I guess a moral victory? But lots of people will use them. It's not even like it's cheating. It's using the literal rules the game offers. It just uses them in ways that defy the intended spirit and ethos of play in order to succeed as often as possible. Which the game tells you you should want to do; succeed more and you will get more stuff, suffer fewer problems, have more kick-butt moments, and generally just do better.Failure feels bad. Success feels good. Relying on the vast majority of players to accept a greater failure rate than they could have had, when the only consequence is not playing by the external moralizing the DM is projecting onto them? Yeah sorry I don't really anticipate that being a compelling reason for players not to do stuff.That's why you see 5MWD stuff, even though it harms the gameplay experience, unless the DM goes out of her way to actively punish such behavior with mechanical consequences.Would you tell a DM who wants to avoid that problem that it is "taking away player choice" to enforce strict time pressure on their players? Would you tell a DM who's finally had enough with murder hobos who repeatedly refuse to play along with a positive, heroic tone, that it's taking away player choice to start posting guardsmen and having wanted posters etc., etc.?Because both of these are fundamentally the same as the other stuff. Using rules to shape player behavior away from undesirable actions and toward desirable ones. You're just annoyed about the method.</blockquote>

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