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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9198837" data-attributes="member: 70468">I ended up picking up a copy tonight on Apple Books. I’m pretty busy with my nixpkgs work right now, so I don’t know when I’ll have time to really dig into it, but it’s been helpful for understanding things like what all those different symbols mean in the diagrams. (I moved this up top to help contextualize the rest of my response.)There do seem to be diverse examples. Playing-style reinforcement includes a few other examples past the part you cited. There’s Oblivion, which is obvious considering that using a skill directly contributes to getting better at it. There’s also Civilization III, which is less obvious (since you’re not directly playing an avatar). In Civ3’s case, the buildings you build feeds back into the strategy you choose.I would be careful about generalizing too much. The value in a design pattern is in its offering a (purportedly good) solution to a problem. If you push it too far, it starts to break down. In the case of playing-style reinforcement, it’s the feedback loop into your chosen strategy that seems to be important.Shooting holes in my own hypothetical, the issue I see with it is the feedback loop is very weak. I perform my action (listening at the door), but the outcome may end up completely divorced from what I intended. We could still lose the fight inside even with surprise. I think the connection needs to be more direct, so the player can see the benefit the action has to their chosen strategy.There’s probably an opportunity to develop patterns specific to tabletop RPGs. I don’t know how much use people would get out of them though. I feel about it similarly to other RPG theory in that it’s something I might use as a sanity check after the fact, but I don’t find a lot of value in it as a starting point. What I find works well is taking an idea, and just running a game with it.I mentioned in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/whats-your-sweet-spot-for-a-skill-system.696411/post-9194935" target="_blank">another thread</a> trying to run everything like it’s PvP. It sounded like a really cool idea in theory, inspired by <a href="https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2017/12/d-in-news-1976-duke-and-evil-balrog.html?m=1" target="_blank">this article</a> by Jon Peterson on a particular classic style where players played both sides. It seemed like a good solution to the conflict of interest issue I mentioned in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/rpging-and-imagination-a-fundamental-point.701162/post-9198549" target="_blank">post #54</a>. Nope. Felt like crap. I’m glad I found that one out quickly, so I wouldn’t waste any more time to it.The feedback you get in the game is that monsters become your friends. The pacifist route is self-imposed until you get to a point of no return, which then takes you to a new area that reveals a lot about what has been happening. The feedback loop seems very weak. It’s not really helping your strategy. The fact that it’s harder, and there’s always the temptation to use the easy solution, seems more like using static friction for thematic reinforcement (using the player’s own will as the resource to drain rather than one in the game itself).</blockquote>

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