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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9222350" data-attributes="member: 71699">Emphasis mine, but bottom line I agree with your (and Baker's) point here. "The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment" isn't enough. We can also want "things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create". A traditional approach to conflict is the set piece - we've arrived at the place where there is conflict. There might be a veneer of explanation for such conflict, but it's not driven by play... it's encountered. A hard job in game design is designing the preconditions and mechanisms for satisfying conflict to emerge in play.It's one reason I think that both Baker and Crane chose to include a large dose of PvP in their sessions of How We Role: players are great at translating their competing objectives into conflict. But not everyone enjoys PvP. Another common mechanism is to give players a game asset that can only be protected and advanced through conflict. BitD externalises that from individual characters - "the crew is the central figure in the stories we’re going to tell about the underworld of Doskvol. Scoundrels will come and go—burned out due to trauma, or killed, or forever lost to their vices, or, if they’re very lucky, gone to some comfortable retirement—but the crew carries on." It's a neat piece of design, and you can see how once players buy into the faction game, player character pursuit of rep and turf yields conflicts.[USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER] saidI feel like in truth we shouldn't be thinking - I would like our playful conversation to be mostly assertion or mostly negotiation. Those are instrumental, they're not an ends in themselves. Think about this questionThere's no objectively right or wrong answer, but it's worth thinking about the following observationThese characterisations offer a biased picture, but do a good job of conveying what Baker sees as at stake. If I want a game where meaning mostly happens during play, that's likely a game with a decent amount of negotiation because a lot is going to have to be left unsettled until the play itself.Returning to my point above, one might therefore design for negotiation, but not in order to have the conversation contain negotiation, but in order for meaning to emerge in the conversation rather than being fed into it. Similarly, we should have a purpose for assertion, in order to want our playful conversation to contain a lot of assertion. To my reading, [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] is thus questioning that purpose. We can choose to leave it unexamined - we just happen to find it satisfying that way - but for design it's important to ask why it's satisfying? What about it satisfies?</blockquote>

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