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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9843083" data-attributes="member: 6690965">So this reads to me as describing designer intended player heuristics in play. Players, when encountering a game will strive to find a repeatable strategy, technique or decision making basis to choose which actions will best propel them to the goal. Where I think the article falls short is that it assumes players stop at beginner level heuristics. In contract bridge, players might start with making bids they can absolutely meet and/or striving to win tricks in off-suits or with the lowest possible card they can win with. Those work well when everyone is at beginning skill level, and eventually yield to better heuristics when players start using bidding languages.When you're specifically designing heuristics for players to discover, you want to make sure they hit at different levels of skill, so your game offers space for players to learn about it. Players prefer powerful heuristics that have strong and low variance impacts on the game state because they're trying to succeed. As a designer, part of the task is to keep your heuristics satisfying to use (players should feel like they gained and made better decisions by employing them) without actually making them so powerful that they truncate the decision space.The assumption in this article (and I think a lot of discourse about RPGs) is that it always seems to assume players will never get better at the game. Take the whole trap discussion: players will use whatever mechanic is least likely to injure them when engaging with traps. If the Rogue can dismiss them with a die roll consistently, they'll go that way, if the GM rewards conversation (and especially if there's a routine procedure they can develop to have that conversation) they'll approach that way. The damage-first, Fireball everything Wizard is a beginner heuristic that gives way eventually to control spells, which gives way eventually to pre-combat battlefield setting spells. Outside game discussion can speed this up, though it actually varies, you can't always skip someone past earlier stages of learning about gameplay effectively. I don't know that's necessary a problem, outside of the ultimate power of the heuristic being too overwhelming.</blockquote>

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