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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8997216" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Yup. The “G Factor” of a given game might be sufficiently remote that its just a background parameter of play (eg in Dogs you can affect your ability to resolve Conflicts and Towns via better or worse strategically Giving or tactically Escalating, manipulating fictional positioning, and Helping so an ally can artificially extend their dice pool and Reverse the Blow…but players shouldn’t be inhabiting a cognitive space bent on “winning the dicing game” and no one will ever confuse Dogs for a Step On Up engine rather than a Story Now engine), but virtually all games (though not all…some game’s decision-space is too shallow or incoherent or manipulated by factors external to the decision-space; eg “by GM Force”) have a “G Factor.” It just depends on “how remote vs how integrated” and “how deep amd consequential vs how shallow and inconsequential.”Related and not related:One thing that annoys me about discussing challenge-centered play in TTRPGs is that there is a rather vocal cohort of players who smuggles in “there is only one form of challenge-centered play in TTRPGs and outside of that scope is futile dysfunction” rather than appending “within this game’s particular parameters of challenge” to these discussions.There is a whole host of parameters of challenge-based play in TTRPGs. Some of them play nice with one another. Some do not. An incomplete list:* Play the fiction skillfully to open up your lines of play or amplify an existing one.* Play the GM by “setting conversation traps” to constrain or alter their obstacle framing via introducing causality/realism scaffolding for your position.* Pixel-bitching and/or “turtling” to maximally decrease your risk profile and grind play to a sufficiently slow pace to ensure your mental processing has “the space to work” while increasing the GM’s prospects of “revealing their hand.”* Make intended PC build decisions to successfully capture archetype or paradigm  for use in play.* Manage tactical resources and relationships to optimize game unit of play success.* Manage <large unit of gameplay; adventuring day, arc> strategic resources and longitudinal relationships to optimize game unit of play success.* Manage the intersection of and <large unit> of play optimization.* Thread the needle to optimize the Venn Diagram overlap of tactical/strategic/thematic decision-space to ensure that compelling play meets discovery/surprise meets advancement schema meets a desired matrix of success:failure play trajectory.These are all different sites of challenge-based play. Conversation about challenge needs to not assume one (which it so often does). It needs to correctly index which one, or ones, the game in question includes as a parameter for play.</blockquote>

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