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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6287692" data-attributes="member: 4937">And what?Again, what?  If anything is passive aggressive, it's taking someone's comment about skinner boxing to be pejoratively comparing people to rats.  If it had in any way been a pejorative comparison of people to rats, then it wouldn't have been passive aggressive at all - that clearly aggressive and hostile.  Passive aggressive is when you indirectly express hostility.  The most common sort at EnWorld is when you intimate that other people are being so insulting that they need to have their position forcibly quelled.  Typically this is done by characterizing other peoples arguments as being evil, beyond the pale, insulting, or what have you so that instead of talking with each other about anything, we end up arguing about who is being insulting.Like well, now.I read the quoted comment and I think that that is a lot of over the top passive aggressive characterization of it.   It's certainly no less relevant and no more pejorative than the '20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours of play' type comments.  Both represent in a pithy way serious design concerns for an RPG.   There is a danger that your attempts at simulation will create tons of micromanagement relative to play time - in a cRPG for example, organizing packs, transferring items between characters, picking up items, buying and selling items, might end up being a considerable percentage of play time.   Likewise, there is a danger that you end up creating a game that is relatively uncompelling outside of the rewards of leveling up and designing your character.   Those are real concepts and real problems that I'd like to think we are mature enough to talk about, sympathize with, and explain without people yelling about comparing people to rats.It was pigeons in the original experiment anyway.    Even if I were to accept all that characterization, or even if I thought you could actually attribute it to the post in question, we could equally characterize all the defenses of fast leveling from you "Handbook of RPG Warring" if we are inclined to do so.   People who want to level solely are boring micromanagers filling up the game with tedious tasks because they don't actually have the imagination to think up exciting stories.  Their DMs are sadists who enjoy making PCs fail and making players bored.  Blah blah blah blah blah.  I don't even want to bother to keep making the stuff up, or comb back through the thread for all that insinuation, because it's not valuable.I don't think viewing the thread the lens of your "Handbook for RPG Warring" is very healthy.   There are real dangers to both slow or fast pacing.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both.   It's worthwhile to discuss things like:What are the advantages and disadvantages of faster or slower pacing?When should we be using a faster or slower pace?How does pace of power advancement relate to the pace of story advancement?Are we letting ourselves be unduly influenced to expect a certain pace of play or a pace of an aspect of play based on what worked elsewhere without consideration to what could work in a different story, format, or style?Why do we level up at all?  Surely a good story doesn't require it.  What are we playing for?  I advice assuming the answer is probably a long list and not one single thing (see The Forge Fallacy, basically good games can only address a single goal of play). Instead we are trying to quell whether or not people can bring up the subject of operative conditioning in the context of an RPG.</blockquote>

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