Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9079079" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I suspect we probably agree about this as the defining feature of the medium, but I'd argue this formulation is backwards. Most games allow players to declare actions, "attempted" implies a risk of a failure that isn't definitionally necessary and so on. I think the unique feature of RPGs is better understand as players being able to continuously set/abandon their own victory conditions, and play being unbounded in time when victory is achieved or is rendered impossible. There's a lot of focus on the breadth of available action declarations in an RPG, but that isn't necessarily constitutive, especially when you boil down a lot of actions to resolution: many of them are just different narrative glosses on the same underlying action.This harkens back to my point about ludic agency earlier. It doesn't generally play well with extensive narrative agency. You generally need a fixed, knowable board state to enact strategies on, and a known, objective means of evaluating success in order for your gameplay decisions to matter.</blockquote>