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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6245496" data-attributes="member: 177">Yes, but I think in so defining it, you miss some important points of human nature.  Your definition hinges on a technicality - technically, the player can take an action, yes.  But technicalities are not satisfying to humans, generally.  There are cases where the player can see pretty easily that no action they take will change the course of events in a meaningful way.  "Yes, I can throw a rock, but in actuality, this encounter will resolve the same way whether I sit her and occasionally roll to throw a rock, or if I go outside and smoke a cigarette while you guys do the real stuff."  Yes, he can throw a rock, but nobody will care if he does or doesn't.At the point where their actions have no meaningful impact on the course of events, the typical player is sidelined, is sitting out, will get bored and disengage from the fiction, whether they technically can act or not.Yes, and while you seek that, I'll go off on the road to Shambala.  We are apt to have similar levels of success in finding our respective goals  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />More seriously, though, again you miss a point of human psychology.  That which resolves quickly and simply is not really a challenge to the player.  Challenging the players requires engaging their mind and/or the nuances of what they have on the character sheet, and that takes multiple decision points for each player - and now we are talking time again.Moreoever, in the sense of probabilities - fast challenges generally also need to be *easy* challenges (and thus not actually challenging). Take, for example, a coin-flip challenge.  50% chance of failure.  Each time they have to go through one, their chance of overall success is chopped in half.  After 7 such challenges, their chance to get through the chain is less than 1%!  It is the same mathematics that makes critical hits more a problem for PCs than a tool for them.And, the players will start to recognize the fast (and thus easy) challenges for what they are - mooks.  And they'll start to treat them differently.The other alternative is to make all challenges relevant, and somewhat difficult, but then they take time.</blockquote>

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