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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8967725" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, yeah, this is a complicated topic.First, let me introduce Celebrim's First Law of Role-Playing Games - "Thou Shalt Not Be Good at Everything".  The idea of the first law is that all the rules of an RPG exist to fulfill the first law as sub commandments of it.  And the reason for this is actually related to the observation you've made, namely, that is the limitations on what your character can do that make the game fun regardless of the aesthetic of play you have.  If you are in for the challenge, it's the fact that you can't do everything that makes the game challenging.  If you are in for the self-expression, then it's that fact you can't do everything that is fostering your imagination.   If you are in for the narrative, then it's that fact that you can't do everything that is driving the narrative because narratives are about overcoming a problem and if you can trivially overcome the problem you don't have a narrative.   Every single player at the table regardless of their aesthetics of play depends on the first law to enjoy the game.However, your particular take here on the issue of disassociated mechanics or arbitrary restrictions being fun because they increase the limitations you have and therefore foster more challenge and more creativity is not one what supports every aesthetic of play.  So what is really going to happen is you're creating a system that only will support the fun of a certain type of player some of the time.  And for that reason, I tend to feel that they are more appropriate to board games or other games that already have limited aesthetic appeal (in that they appeal only to certain aesthetics and not that they are objectively less fun) rather than to RPGs that tend to broadly appeal to many aesthetics of play.  While it's true that you can increase say the Challenge aesthetic to a tactical minigame in an RPG by giving the characters chess-like restrictions on the moves that they make, I would argue that that would be one of only many ways you could increase the Challenge interest of an RPG's tactical minigame.  If you are feeling the need to do something like that, it is a sign that indeed that tactical minigame isn't bringing the interest that it probably should, but that doesn't necessarily mean that adopting chess like restrictions on movement is the best way to do it.  You can do it, and it would be as you've observed fun, but it would also be a huge trade off in that it could harm other aesthetics like Fantasy, Narrative, and Discovery to the extent that a player would lose interest in the game.  That is to say, if for some reason to enjoy the game it needs to feel "real" to a player, your choice to prioritize Challenge in this way is going to inherently limit your audience.And while the 1st law can be applied not just to the participants but to the rules themselves, in that all game systems have to make some tradeoffs, this is one particular tradeoff that I don't feel is worthwhile.</blockquote>

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