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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9798695" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think it is important to stay grounded in the reality of the thing and this post is a really good reset to the discussion.One of the great difficulties of TTRPGs is that many of the things that are exciting are exciting because of the aesthetic of Sensation and that's an aesthetic that is really hard to capture in a visceral way at the table.  The experience of mountain climbing is exciting in large part for the sensory experience of it all - the majestic views for example or going the other way the vertigo from the unfathomable drops.  It's not impossible to capture some Sensation through the imagination, but it's not the same describing riding a roller coaster and being on one (for example).  The same is true of those majestic views.  I'd presume from experience even a TV has a hard time capturing the sensation much less a word painter.  Tolkien is often admired in some circles for capturing the aesthetics of seeing something majestic of the natural world in his words, but most of us aren't Tolkien and even then it's still not the same.  Much of the admiration comes from having seen it yourself and seeing how well Tolkien puts that experience to words.  If you haven't seen it, it's not the same.  And that's not even getting into each of us having different powers of visual imagination.The Challenge aesthetic is superficially the same, but there is a massive difference in what "physically demanding" is going to be experienced as on a mountain and at a table pretending to climb a mountain.  In a game, "This is really hard" and "I just go on enduring" don't feel anything like they do in reality, and there isn't a lot of obvious fun in, "You rolled badly on the dice.  Your character's will gives in and he gives up and can't go any further."It's not obvious from your post or to me in general that the core loop of man against nature is in the simple case all that fun or can be made fun easily at the table.  I think it's always the case that you can only capture part of that loop and you have to find the fun you can't capture in something else.  One of the problems is that its hard to put enough concrete reified details into it that lends itself to the imagination.  So many of the tasks are mundane and slow that they just lend themselves to a test of fortune and few details.  Another problem is the tasks are so repetitive that it's only interesting to describe them at most once.  Were this a movie we could have long montages that depend on cinematography and visuals to impart the Sensation we need to make the trek interesting.  But that's just hard to do at a table and almost nobody plays an RPG purely to listen to the storyteller narrate for 20 minutes.  Even if it is fun to listen to a good storyteller or an audio book, that's just not why people came to the table.But I'm also not saying that you shouldn't try to do it.  By all means have expeditions that cross rugged and difficult and unknown country and track the food and water and whatever else seems to be critical to the situation.  Just don't expect that to produce anything other than what you GrimCo has said: "No drama, nothing exciting, just rational decision and slow trek".  The fun then comes from how that part of the game interacts with drama.  Your narrative is about getting up a mountain because it would be fun and a personal challenge.  The narrative gets very different when you have to get up the mountain in three days or the world (or your part of it) ends.  The Fellowship have to attempt the Redhorn Gate or the world ends, bad weather or not.  Rational calculus changes compared to doing this for adventure (in the traditional sense of the word).My general impression of RPGs is that if something was possible, it would have been done by now.  I think we often overlook just how sophisticated the games coming out the 70s and early 80s actually were.  Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon and AD&D invented so much fundamental technology that all games depend on today, and we didn't drop that technology and use something else primarily because it's really hard to invent better approaches given the limitations of a TTRPG experience. I don't think we are stuck on the hit point because it was invented first and people lack the imagination to get away from it.  I think we are stuck on the hit point because there just isn't anything better.  I don't think there are magical mechanics that have been largely undiscovered that satisfy most people's aesthetic needs.  I don't think that at this point we are likely to invent processes of play fundamentally all that more interesting than a well-run "Isle of Dread" or "Descent into the Depths of the Earth".  We might create settings or scenarios as or more compelling, but we aren't going to reinvent the wheel at this point.  Everything is a tradeoff.  Can you create a more interesting experience at a TTRPG for a gritty expedition than "Oregon Trail"?  Maybe not.</blockquote>

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