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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8242464" data-attributes="member: 6696971">That is what I was looking for and what I figured.  I appreciate your honesty.You haven't told me the payoff you're looking for when you express what I wrote in the initial post yet, but here is why I engage on these subjects.* <s>I am a giant narcissist with a fragile, flailing ego and I desperately need people to think I'm smart and interesting and special.</s>* I'm a firm believer (in all things in life) that penetrating the mysteries of whatever you're doing and going as hard as you can is the best way to become "your best self" (at whatever it is you're doing).  Its aspirational.  I engage the material to challenge myself and challenge others to this end.* Specific to the TTRPGing hobby, my sense (obviously) is that people playing a wider variety of games will be rewarding for them and that diversity will help the hobby grow in multiple axes.  It will be good for the games they're playing now, it might get them to enjoy some other stuff as well, and, throughout that alchemy, it might seed a deeper diversification of the hobby at large (because one person bringing a new perception or a new game to a home table has downstream effects because of the multiple participants involved).* The best way I know to get better at something is be humble, scrutinize your efforts (whatever that might entail), have others scrutinize your efforts and grow from that.  When it comes to TTRPGs, I get better when I work my way through a post mortem of one of my games.  Just the practice of mentally recalling it in my mind is helpful.  But then going a step further to scrutinizing it (particularly where I felt I had a problem or didn't perform optimally).  Self-scrutiny and the sanitizing light of others is enormously helpful.  This is why I encourage intense post-mortem of the actual machinery of play (not an abstracted narrative of the play...the nuts-and-bolts of the play).  The biggest improvements I've made is when I've been challenged (by myself or by others) and have either (a) become better at articulating the conceptual space that we're discussing or (b) I've "downloaded" a different perspective on a grey issue and I've assimilated that for the future (which helps in a host of ways).[HR][/HR]Unrelated to TTRPGing, take Football prospect analysis.  Evaluating the Edge (On-ball Linebacker or Defensive End) is difficult.  I didn't play that position (I was a Defensive Back - both CB and S) but I certainly understand it.  Through intense effort and correction by others with a better trained eye than myself I learned not just how the alchemy of (a) Snap Anticipation + (b) Burst + (c) Bend + (d) Effective Hand Usage + (e) Developing an Effective Pass Rush Suit/Counters comes together to create the base foundation for a promising prospect.  And not just the reality of that, but what that looks like on film (and when a prospect doesn't possess those traits...what that looks like).  There are several other facets of productive Edge play (identifying Pullers and Spilling them, attacking with the appropriate leverage, Stacking and Shedding in the run game, converting Speed to Power, how length and frame intersects with all of this), but that is the base.I'm very glad I learned that through aggressive analysis and conversations with a wide variety of people from different backgrounds (along with my own intense regime of self-learning).  It helped me improve.  The exact same process of my TTRPGing could be ported over in lockstep to evaluating NFL Draft Prospects (and I give the same advice to people looking to be better at it).</blockquote>

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