DND was brought up as a comparison point by you to your players so I was trying to meet you where you are, I think the key takeaway might be more that your player deserves a little less of your contempt, with the notes about the rules merely serving as a reality check on whether your lessons on narrative gaming are copacetic with the game you're playing, which incentivize a different play loop than the one you're trying to explain.
You came across very strongly in your condemnation of the kind of play these rules encourage and your player is following up on, and it seems productive to examine that, that contempt and anger is very core to your thesis for the thread-- it practically defines your voice as OP!
But yeah you did say you'd go easier, so that's good, but I wanted to emphasize what we're discussing here.
I didn’t see anger in the OP but I did see contempt and frustration. The excerpt below epitomizes the contempt I think.
“I am flat-out DONE with gameplay that focuses on "How do I get my next bonus to stat and my next +2 sword and my next +2 AC bonus so I can be awesome?!" Go play BG3 or Skyrim, away from my table, if that's your thing.”
Thanks for bringing this up. I hope the player didn't feel I was treating him contemptibly. Something I need to be careful of.
In terms of attitude toward the "gamist treadmill" style of play, I don't know that I would say my attitude toward it goes so far as outright contempt. Up to a certain degree, I have no problem with it. It is, as mentioned, almost expected from RPGs as a core play loop. And I'd be lying if I said I'd never pored over the old BECMI / Rules Cyclopedia random treasure tables and dreamed about acquiring most of the magic items listed in it for a character.
I freaking
love the original Baldur's Gate games (1 and 2). And I
love gear stacking in those games. Cheesing the red dragon with that one cleric spell that reduces its HP to 1, just to get the Holy Avenger for your paladin in BG II? Yeah . . . totally done it. (I mean . . . come on, why wouldn't you?).
But there's a context, time, and place for that. And frankly, I simply no longer have the will to tolerate it in tabletop settings. Which is why I brought up CRPGs in the OP. That is
absolutely the appropriate context for it. Good grief, I've spent 500+ hours playing
Deep Rock Galactic on the PC, and a solid 20% of that time was spent actively forging weapon upgrades and messing with the character "fashion designer." So I get it. I know that motivation intimately.
But in the tabletop RPG space, I've come to the point that I now know there's a vast breadth of gameplay experiences that go beyond the gamist treadmill.
And I very much want to get to them.
I'll admit to feeling frustration and perhaps disappointment that it's still . . . quite so hard to productively discuss the alternative narrative-style perspectives. Which is why I posted the OP; I was hoping to see if there were other productive ways to describe and discuss the kinds of play I was looking for without turning the conversation into a torpid session of jargon-y navel gazing.
It felt like I had an opportunity to maybe bring the player and me into closer alignment on playstyle, goals, and expectations. I hope I didn't quash his sense of fun, was in no way my intent. But I do feel . . . hmm, cheated, maybe? Exasperated? when a game's focus turns to extreme gamist treadmilling.
Every ounce of time and energy I spend addressing the gamist treadmill creates a negative opportunity cost. Not only am I no longer getting to focus on the things I find compelling in RPG play, I'm having to expend time, energy, and mental cycles on something that actively pushes away from what I find compelling.
The more I think about it, this gets to the real crux of my negative reaction to it. It's not the thing; it's the opportunity cost of dealing with the thing.
