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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8267123" data-attributes="member: 6801252">I agree with you, in the context that this is how and why I run my Pathfinder 2e games the way I do, they have the same energy in terms of player/character association-- I was heavily influenced by <a href="https://theangrygm.com/through-a-glass-darkly-ic-ooc-and-the-myth-of-playercharacter-seperation/" target="_blank">this article</a> and Angry's discussion of the Murky Mirror.[SPOILER="Pathfinder 2e and Breaking Down the Combat as War and Combat as Sport Divide."]Personally, I like a mix, I like instances where you can just wade into the enemy, but also instances where that ranges from 'desperate fight' to 'actually impossible' depending on the nature of the opposition-- PF2e has been interesting in this respect because the encounters often take good tactical play to win, even when we do wade in, its like 'combat as war lite' because in hard fights, when we are fighting the winner is still the person who stacks the deck the best, its just you can do that to some degree with in-combat options. Like, fighting creatures stronger than you usually means using spells to weaken their action economy, spells and other abilities to drop their AC so that you hit and crit more-- you have to play well, but its performed in a way that you also feel like a big damn hero a lot of the time, since you're still squaring up and going blow for blow, just creating openings for good tactical play.On the other side, the way encounters are designed and difficulty is governed, its easy to set up encounters that combine and split-- if a low difficulty encounter is worth 60 exp of monsters, a moderate difficulty encounter is worth 80 exp a severe difficulty encounter is worth 120 exp and an extreme difficulty encounter is worth 160 exp, then its not hard to imagine how we might have an area, that if handled badly would result in an encounter at the higher end of that scale, but with good combat-as-war style play, be reduced or broken down into smaller chunks, if you divide and conquer, you could turn that into a few trivial/low/moderate encounters, instead of one big sever or extreme one.I think at some point, when I'm ready, I'm going to start a new thread about this style of play, because I'm starting to piece together a vision of what it could be.[/SPOILER]Honestly this thread is really helping me crystallize my new play style, as we discuss the interaction between player agency and all of these different elements. I'm starting to see where the borders really are, where the limitations are, and how they might be transgressed to make room at the table. To tie it all back into the original thread topic, what if we simply worked player establishment back in, but much like a Story Now game does, limited its scope to prevent it from interfering with the player-as-character in overcoming challenges element? What if we did the same for neotrad style backstory and character development?This I think brings me to [USER=70468]@kenada[/USER] 's pivot, and look at a quote from the conclusion in the linked text.I think that where Edwards ends up going astray to some extent, is that the answer is "Both!" When we discuss simulation, the trick is that we're often looking for the full experience of the thing we're trying to do. This has to do with the inherent subjectivity of fun. Take baseball, some people play baseball so they can win and don't enjoy baseball when they aren't winning they only practice and play in games to arrive at the moment of victory, some people enjoy the event nature of a game win or lose and they attend practice to arrive at days when they have an actual game and to enhance it, but some people enjoy going to baseball practice intrinsically whether because its a social event, or because they like the feeling of incremental improvement they see in themselves, some people yet like all of the above, or certain combinations, or unlike watching it played! Some people hate fighting games for the amount of work that goes into really engaging with them, other people are present to fighting games because that process is where the fun is for them. Some people think the alchemy in Witcher is boring and gets in the way of fun, for others it heightens the experience because it makes them feel more like a Witcher.So whenever we talk about Fun Now vs. Fun Later, as Edwards does in that essay, we're attempting to reach an objective sense of what fun is, so that we can just distill the experience to that thing. But since fun is inherently subjective, rather than objective, the best that Story Now games that try to cut to the fun can do, is prescribe what the fun is and then focus on that experience. Blades in the Dark makes a prescriptive statement that an in-and-out-of-game planning session for a heist isn't fun, and therefore isn't appearing in this game. In this context, the idea that some might recoil from its streamlining makes sense, after all for them, Harper ripped out part of the fun!I think that the trick is that Simulation play as understood in OSR techniques (procedures that turn notions of 'exploring a world' into game play at the table through mechanics that help to simulate that world and present it, as a logical system) are simply another agenda of play, a 'thing we want to accomplish at the table' or a 'thing we want to experience.'This brings me back a little to the idea of respect in differing game expectations, and thinking of tastes in inclusive ways rather than exclusive ways. If John thinks only the heist itself is fun, and Gary thinks planning and manually preparing the heist is the fun part, maybe the trick is just making sure John and Gary can respect each other as the game does both. In this context, prescriptive agendas of play just seem like a maladaption to the social conflict of Gary and John trying to chase the other's fun out of the game. Thats an overstatement of course, because prescriptive agendas have a place in creating games that don't have to worry about both John and Gary, and can artistically focus on their concept. But in the context of the gaming table, even that requires John and Gary to have respect for one another, after all, if the group is going to take a break from DND to play some Blades in the Dark, Gary is going to have to put their usual focus aside and the question becomes whether he can enjoy BITD's different way of doing things as an acquired taste, whereas maybe John is going to have to do the same when they both play in Justin's combat as war, hexcrawl sandbox where they don't get to skip to what John feels are the Juicy parts.One might question why John, Gary, and Justin are playing together in this case at all, but I think that on a practical level, they just are-- its really hard to get everyone on the same page about what agendas mean and how they work, and what everyone finds fun in a game. [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] referenced this in their commentary on neo-trad play agendas showing up and misaligning with Story Now agendas. So I don't think its really a matter of should it happen, I think its a matter of doing the labor of reconciling differing play agendas, because even if you don't want to do that labor, you're just going to end up with the labor of policing and purifying your game tables instead.</blockquote>

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