EDIT: As a secondary thought, I would ask
@pemerton and
@Manbearcat... what do you get from these discussions? I've never seen either of you actually declare that something about your playstyle was changed or that you've adopted a different playstyle and/or goals during these discussions, so I'm just curious what is your pay off here?
Well, a couple things I learned last night:
* Imaro and Bedrockgames think I'm a pompous ass who intellectually bullies people...which tells me they CLEARLY dislike me WAAAAAY more than I even thought. I knew there was hostility there after nearly a decade of conversation, but I didn't realize the temperature was that hot.
* If you're having an interesting conversation about "online/offline" content in Sandbox gaming and the impetus to evolve "offline content suddenly turned online"....DO NOT ASK PEOPLE (a) what their impulse and hopeful payoff is when challenging conversation with "this analysis is deeply niche and the overwhelmingly majority of the hobby doesn't care about it" and (b) when you have a thought like "self, I wonder if some of the frustration around looking at TTRPGs through an engineering lens is similar to the pushback on baseball/football analytics and the Evolutionary Biology/Psychology and Neuroendocrinology in research on love...again, DO NOT ASK IT.
The results will crush the interesting conversation you were having.
Across the span of engaging at ENWorld, two particular things stand out among many (and ironically, you were at the heart of the first one):
1) You remember our infamous "Gorge Conflict" conversation which spun out from a post-mortem of one of my play excerpts? Communicating with you and Nagol was actually extremely helpful to me in (a) preemptively trouble-shooting how complication generation can be a problem broadly and (b) how a particular type of Fail Forward complication generation can be a problem specifically for a certain segment of people and (c) helped me better understand the cognitive framework of one of my dearest friends.
The downstream effect of that is (i) I worked at better articulating myself in these conversations (with respect to discussing complications) but, more importantly, (ii) I worked at my play such that I've become better at identifying potential cognitive framework disparity at my tables when it comes to complications as an outgrowth of action resolution and (iii) I've become better at ensuring all parties are on the same page when it comes to decision-points > action resolution > foreseeable consequences (whether its in a system that features Fail Forward or not).
2) Unlike the above positive, the next one is a profound negative. A HUGE preponderance of data that culture war inertia and attendant coalitional thinking (as I already knew...but more data helps) turns otherwise earnest, sincere, autonomous, likely kind and fair in the rest of their life, people into something (an inversion of all of those descriptors) that they would surely regret if they could find their way out of the orbit of what they've been caught in.