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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4507445" data-attributes="member: 3820">Sure. But play styles vary even within a game, as people learn what they like. Say, for example, that people play a pretty low-lethality fantasy game. Maybe it's D&D, and the DM is very soft on the players, secretly fudging rolls. Maybe it's another game that's nudged to be a little less lethal (including, these days, 4e). There are still consequences within the game, though: but they might be social ones or world-changing ones rather than PC death. You fail, and a hamlet is razed or you turn a noble into an enemy or a friendly NPC becomes hideously cursed. Now where you start to get divergences is sometimes people who play games in that vein like them. If a gamer plays in both a traditional "failed your save, roll up another character" game and a lower-lethality "I'm not going to kill you unless you really do something stupid, but if you screw up you may lose things in the world that you care about," one of three things can happen. The player may decide they like the traditional game better. She may decide she likes both styles equally, and would enjoy alternating. Or she may decide she likes the latter style better, even though she likes the other trappings and tropes of D&D. So let's say we have a gamer who likes elves and dwarves and dragons and hippogriffs and beholders and mind flayers and drow and fireballs and flaming swords, but who isn't that interested in a high-lethality style of play. You can't really argue that he should play some other game: D&D still has 90% of the stuff he likes, he just wants to mess with a 10% that somebody else finds to be absolutely sacred. But that's what everyone does with D&D. Everyone drops out something in their 10% that somebody else finds vital and invigorating, be it drow, gnomes, dragonborn, a given setting. And the game still works.Honestly, I'll admit I see people talking about styles of gaming I'm not into a lot, and I wonder exactly what it is that they see in it. But the thing is, my default assumption is they must be doing something right. They must be doing some good gaming in order to prefer that style, or they probably are good at identifying what they like and acting on it. The attitude that they're doing it wrong... that's something you can only invoke if they're not having any fun. If they are, then it's just crazy egotism to assume they'd have more fun if they did it your way.</blockquote>

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