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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9843122" data-attributes="member: 6690965">See, that's sort of exactly what I'm taking shots at. I used contract bridge, a very old and very popular game as an example, and this kind of heuristic development is the basis of interaction with board games and video games. You make up a theory about how to play Slay the Spire or which resource you should start with in Agricola, and over repeated plays discard and form new ones. Analyzing a game's proposed heuristics might be advanced designer stuff, but it's very basic player stuff.I don't think RPGs are special, except in so much as we choose to treat them as special in the design. People who play games play all those other games too, and do all these same things. I think it's pretty obvious that RPG players learn about the rules (even if in a lot of games, that means learning about what procedures their GM likes them to deploy) and play through similar patterns.That the "average" player doesn't, I think, is as much a reflection of RPGs generally not actually having designed far enough for them to learn much. Board states are too similar, action choices are too constrained or FOO, games are too fragile and get redesigned when players try strategies too far outside the norms, and we've built a culture that rhetorically tries to suppress players from pushing past initial heuristics, with the optimizers and the munchkins and the rules-lawyers and all of it.It's the games, not the players that are the problem. They either lack depth so that beginner heuristics remain correct or aren't stable enough for players to do it and fall apart when players deviate from an expected baseline gameplan.</blockquote>

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