ELSEWHERE

We've started decorating for the season!

Oh, and Fluffy of course

So much pain today

this weather sucks and makes people hurt and I hate it

So woke up late again, I suspect I'm getting fatigue because of the weather, but I also woke up to hail and thunderstorms, so that was neat. When I finally got up (after also finally putting together the chore list) I did some December decorating and then Lee and I sat down to eat dinner. After that we went to my room to watch Wendell & Wild together -- it remains a good movie and holds up well on a second watch. I'd really, really like to be able to read the book it's based on.

My wrist/thumb has been bothering me and by the time Lee left to go to bed it was very bad, so I went digging around for my braces, which was difficult to do one-handed. But I found them and wore them for a while.

Gonna try to go to bed early-ish tonight again, we'll see how it goes. Certainly I won't be doing a lot of computering with my hand like this, so I'm just going to hang out and watch youtube until it's late enough to pill the cat.

Insomnia again, so up late, and now awake at 8 AM. Not a fan

Thinking about, a miscommunication in game philosophy in RPGs

Are you telling a story? Or are you playing a game?

How acceptable is it for the player to fail? How important is it that the characters Be The Hero?

There's been a shift in recent years that telling-a-story play is good and playing-a-game play is bad, but they're different preferences in what you're trying to accomplish, like level of crunchiness

This isn't so much a spectrum with one on one end and the other on the other -- it's not a matter of having more of "game play" and less of "narrative play" or vice versa. You can have that -- Zork at one end with basically no narrative but a lot of gameplay and collaborative fiction at the other. But I think we can agree that basically all modern RPGs value both, that everyone who is playing an RPG is coming to the table both to tell a story and to play a game. Everyone wants some character failure to be possible and everyone wants to be the Hero.

But it's a matter of priorities, and that informs how you play the game, or, more to the point, how you run the game.

Your player comes to a locked door. We'll say for the sake of argument that you don't have anything special planned for if they can't get it open, they'll just have to move on to a different part of the building. Do you have them roll to pick the lock (or break it open, or charm the lock, or) and risk them failing, or do you say "Your character would be able to pick this lock, so you succeed" and let them inside?

Is it more important to give your player chances to fail (and to succeed), or is it more important to keep the story interesting and in motion?

I'm thinking about this because it turns out I prioritize differently than everyone I can remember ever playing with, and some strife could have been avoided if it were part of the conversation at large, similar to finding out if your players are more interested in solving puzzles or beating up monsters. But it also seems to fall entirely on the GM to decide, regardless of how a player wants to be playing. And I've been saying that a "good GM" should be able to accommodate character failure and keep the game interesting even if they exhaust all their options for getting through that door and just can't get it open -- and I maintain that that's true, but not every GM prioritizes gameplay, regardless of how well they could accommodate that.

As evidenced by the popularity of games that push more toward narrative play, and some of the demonising you get of "crunchier" games like D&D and Pathfinder.

Just whatever you do don't single out one player to subject to 'chances for failure' and everyone else to be in 'narrative play' because that makes for a shitty experience

Gotta yell about this

Arin Hanson's video essays about why he doesn't like certain video games include very good game design points, are primarily about why he personally didn't like the games and ways he thinks they could have been better and: most importantly:

INCLUDE HIM ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO DISAGREE WITH HIM IF THEY FEEL DIFFERENTLY

And then he stopped making them because people hate Arin Hanson specifically and their constant complaining about how he doesn't make flash animations anymore and how he's bad at video games and how he's a bad person sucked all the joy out of it for him