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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8965837" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This is not generally true for gamist aligned players. A plan that works is perfectly satisfying. A plan that is foiled in a manner that could be planned for (or through a risk going the wrong way) and results in a tactical situation that needs to be resolved is equally good. A plan that fails from first principles because the situation was dynamically updated in response to it renders the situation not meaningfully a game.There is no value to making one move over another at the level of the design (notably the opposite of this must be true from the perspective of the players in game for it to be a game, i.e. a player must be able to advance a case that climbing is better than jumping to achieve their goals)...unless the game is intrinsically degenerate. A board game where the &quot;gain victory points&quot; action is stronger/faster to achieve the goal than any amount of engine building, or where a player's actions produce an infinite combo without interaction and so on. The occasional degenerate board state (say an enemy that physically can't hit the PCs defense value, or a PC that has no viable action to damage a foe) is pretty much an inevitable outcome of an honest, unbounded game and should generally be controlled, instead of attempted to be designed out.There is also a question of challenge, in that you don't generally want the optimization problem to be actually trivial, where the player choice is so clear as not to be one. This is why I despise generic skill DCs, especially when paired with skill-as-approach: if the DC can't vary, and the distance to completion of my goal isn't related to the action I'm taking, then the optimization case is always &quot;attempt to declare my highest modifier,&quot; which is trivial and dull.Yeah, we're 100% on the same page here. I don't have any notes.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8965837, member: 6690965"] This is not generally true for gamist aligned players. A plan that works is perfectly satisfying. A plan that is foiled in a manner that could be planned for (or through a risk going the wrong way) and results in a tactical situation that needs to be resolved is equally good. A plan that fails from first principles because the situation was dynamically updated in response to it renders the situation not meaningfully a game. There is no value to making one move over another at the level of the design (notably the opposite of this must be true from the perspective of the players in game for it to be a game, i.e. a player must be able to advance a case that climbing is better than jumping to achieve their goals)...unless the game is intrinsically degenerate. A board game where the "gain victory points" action is stronger/faster to achieve the goal than any amount of engine building, or where a player's actions produce an infinite combo without interaction and so on. The occasional degenerate board state (say an enemy that physically can't hit the PCs defense value, or a PC that has no viable action to damage a foe) is pretty much an inevitable outcome of an honest, unbounded game and should generally be controlled, instead of attempted to be designed out. There is also a question of challenge, in that you don't generally want the optimization problem to be actually trivial, where the player choice is so clear as not to be one. This is why I despise generic skill DCs, especially when paired with skill-as-approach: if the DC can't vary, and the distance to completion of my goal isn't related to the action I'm taking, then the optimization case is always "attempt to declare my highest modifier," which is trivial and dull. Yeah, we're 100% on the same page here. I don't have any notes. [/QUOTE]

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