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Message: <blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8616007" data-attributes="member: 71235">I grew up in the era when RPG mechanics were, well, mechanical, and achievement-based. Everything you could do was rated, and so-called character deficits were most often just ways to get more build points for you to engage in min-maxing with (GURPs and Champions, I'm looking at you). The deficits themselves were in the nature of vulnerabilities to things, activation rolls, rolls to see if your nemesis/frail grandma showed up. At best these things provide random genre-appropriate events, and at worst actively detracted from the fun of play. In any case, the systems governed playing to "win" over some other character via use of stats, and left the rest to the table. The other characters were usually NPCs, of course, so an adversarial stance was highly likely.Then I played games like Spirit of the Century/Fate, with its encouragement to create two-edged aspects that could be used to help or hinder your character—except now it would be more appropriate to put "hinder" in scare quotes, because the currency involved was not just in building your character but something you traded actively in play: You accepted a compel on your aspect but got a Fate point to spend on overcoming the problem! Now we had more genre-appropriate things happening, but, crucially, negotiated between participants based on contribution to making events/story more interesting and fun by mutual agreement.Torchbearer ups the ante there significantly by baking the setback/advance currency into the mechanics in such a way that you need to trigger your deficits to have a hope of surviving. It isn't even an optional, fungible currency any more: If you don't use your traits against yourself, you aren't going to be able to make camp, or won't be able to recover enough when you do make camp. Maybe players will try reaching to get an advantage on some roll, but there's a fundamental shift in perspective that we're not playing this game just to outroll the NPCs or whatever. We're exploring an interesting, gritty story of desperate adventurers facing hardship. I think that subtly affects the motivation to reach for every mechanical bonus you can get in order to "beat" the challenge—although Torchbearer still has plenty of mechanics around gaining every bonus you can get!But even there, the pass/fail mechanics also change the ground, and I have complained several times with [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s group about how the term "fail" really isn't appropriate. If you "fail" in Torchbearer, you (often) don't fail to achieve the objective of your test. You (often) get it, but then face a consequence or twist. It's an ongoing adjustment for me, and I'm sure for the other players, to judge whether to try something or not based on considerations other than the mere odds of passing the roll. We're learning to ask what might happen on a fail, or ponder it ourselves, knowing it's likely we'll still get the thing we want (the shiny bauble, a critical bit of information), but have to pay a price for it rather than just get it (and there's always a minimal price to pay in terms of the Grind). This isn't the same as who gets to call bull when someone is reaching, but it's fed by the same underlying philosophy of the game engine, which makes reaching less likely to come up and less likely to be a problem to work out amongst the participants in the game.This isn't as cogent as I'd like but I can only spend so much time revising a forum post. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I hope it was clear enough.edits: fixed some typos</blockquote>

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