Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 9167456" data-attributes="member: 467">One of the interesting things that you see when you look at historical events is that humans are dumb. Like, really, really dumb. They make choices based on all kinds of reasons except actual reason and logic. I am currently reading &quot;The Main Enemy&quot; by Bearden and Risen -- a history of the end of the cold war spy games between the CIA and the KGB -- and even the ostensibly smartest operators in the world just do the dumbest things. Sometimes ideology gets in the way, or pride, or greed or just plain thick headedness.This almost never happens in tabletop RPGs. I don't mean that Players don't ever make bad decisions or dumb choices. hat i mean is it is exceedingly rare to see a player have their character intentionally make a dumb choice. if the PCs are all CIA operatives, they are cool and collected and awesome 100% of the time. They never decide to run out for a quick cup of coffee because they are sure their mark is sleeping and then lose them. People do that sort of dumb thing in the real world all the time -- skilled people, important people, &quot;heroes&quot; even.I think this is driven by the competence-porn that most modern adventure entertainment is. Heroes have to be infallible. if they do have flaws, they are tragic heroic flaws, not mundane failings. In general, this is fine, but it makes certain genres and styles of games hard to do. Espionage is just one example where players playing their characters more like actual people would enhance play, i think.Do you find that PCs are too perfect? Do you think PCs with more failings make RPGs more interesting? Do you reject those notions and prefer competence and cool?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Reynard, post: 9167456, member: 467"] One of the interesting things that you see when you look at historical events is that humans are dumb. Like, really, really dumb. They make choices based on all kinds of reasons except actual reason and logic. I am currently reading "The Main Enemy" by Bearden and Risen -- a history of the end of the cold war spy games between the CIA and the KGB -- and even the ostensibly smartest operators in the world just do the dumbest things. Sometimes ideology gets in the way, or pride, or greed or just plain thick headedness. This almost never happens in tabletop RPGs. I don't mean that Players don't ever make bad decisions or dumb choices. hat i mean is it is exceedingly rare to see a player have their character intentionally make a dumb choice. if the PCs are all CIA operatives, they are cool and collected and awesome 100% of the time. They never decide to run out for a quick cup of coffee because they are sure their mark is sleeping and then lose them. People do that sort of dumb thing in the real world all the time -- skilled people, important people, "heroes" even. I think this is driven by the competence-porn that most modern adventure entertainment is. Heroes have to be infallible. if they do have flaws, they are tragic heroic flaws, not mundane failings. In general, this is fine, but it makes certain genres and styles of games hard to do. Espionage is just one example where players playing their characters more like actual people would enhance play, i think. Do you find that PCs are too perfect? Do you think PCs with more failings make RPGs more interesting? Do you reject those notions and prefer competence and cool? [/QUOTE]

Verification