Heh. Not a major deal [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]. Just pointing out the irony. Not a worry. Interesting points you are making actually and apologies for giving in to a bit of humour.
Ok, sure. No hard feelings.
My state in this thread is that I would be happy to discuss the difference between challenge to a player and challenge to a character, but I'm not sure anyone is interested in that. I have very much got the feeling that this is a continuation of several other arguments and that for the people who were involved in those other debates, this is mostly a proxy argument for whatever was being debated in those arguments.
I don't really know what the position is of everyone in the thread. I don't know what side arguments that they were involved in. It's been a long thread and I haven't closely followed everyone's stance. At this point, it would require me taking notes to really know what all has been argued and what people believe.
In general, I noticed that in the "opposition to the idea camp", we had two mutually contradictory positions arise:
1) Some argued that there was no such thing as "challenge to character", and that every challenge was a challenge to player.
2) Some argued that while yes, there was such a thing as "challenge to player", that challenges to the player violated the spirit of the game and that therefore every challenge ought properly be a "challenge to character".
Some seemed to be trying to argue those two points at the exact same time.
There has been a significant and potentially interesting sub-thread that arose over what I call a game's proposition filter - that is to say, in what form must (or should) a character make declarations in play. And a potentially interesting discussion could be had over why a proposition filter is inherently tied to the notion of "challenges to player" and "challenges to character".
Given that I can point to cases in this thread where you have completely misunderstood my position, I think it's highly likely that the irony that you think is there isn't, and that's the reason I didn't get the humor. But, as I'm also someone that frequently doesn't get humor, maybe the irony is there and I'm just not seeing it.