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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9700435" data-attributes="member: 7023840">Kinda, yeah. But I've written about the problems and nature of second-order design before, as well as the issues and differences with heuristics (norms etc.) and rules, and I think that a lot of the conversations ignore what happens in practice because it's hard to talk about second-order design, negative space, and the heuristics used.Which is fancy-speak for ignoring the ways that we are blind to the ways that games are actually played, by actual people, with varying levels of experience, practice, knowledge, and expectations. I did a deep dive on WOTC's first TTRPG once (called Everway) and why it was a glorious failure- the short version is that it worked amazing when it was played internally at WOTC, Jonathan Tweet and John Tynes ran the games. And they were amazing GMs! The freeform, diceless system worked perfectly when you had these DMs, and a group of engaged gamers!But in the real world? Not so much. Does that mean that Everway is a bad game? Not at all- it was an amazing game, but only for a certain small group of people. I used to link to a Mitchell & Webb Show skit- here it is...[SPOILER=Some NSFW Language][MEDIA=youtube]i1NfWIaYed8[/MEDIA][/SPOILER]The basic point is that something that seems simple to one person is impossible to another. Give you another example- some of the great and wonderful games (the PbTA games and the BiTD games) are viewed by some people as constraining actions through "principles" and so on, but that's only because they have internalized that process and they can do it. For others, it might as well be magic- a standard 3e player might think it is basically slightly bounded ad hoc storytelling. Meanwhile the PbTA and BiTD players look at the rules lite brigade and think that what they are doing is madness, because they don't have the same background in the heuristics and expectations for those games. And so on.Basically, the application of ideas works best when you're using it within a specific area, and not to compare. If you know what I mean.</blockquote>

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