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Yeah, that makes sense. I struggle to understand how those two kinds of decision could coexist, and why it would not be arbitrary to pick one or the other, especially if both are expressed through the same mechanical framework all the time.

I'm solidly pro-manipulation here. My issue is that RPGs are deeply inconsistent about whether or not players should be doing mechanical manipulation and when. I am not using the term pejoratively; if I had it my way, games generally would simply not include mechanics players are not supposed to...

I should expand further about what I actually do like: my preferred kind of gameplay is presenting a difficult, open-ended situation (ideally several such nested situations, maybe starting at a strategic or political level, and narrowing down to a tactical scope) and then letting players with...

I'm not interested in the "characters'" goals here, they're fictional constructs without agency. I'm interested in what the players' goals are and how those are supposed to be pursued. What is the purpose for proposing one action over another, and how should they reason about those choices, so...

Very similar experience for me. I've found as the hobby expands, the things I thought were the point are apparently not only not universal, but relatively rare.

This is exactly the doublethink I can't seem to do that these games require. Do I or do I not have a goal I am trying to achieve? If I do, then striving to achieve it means limiting obstacles and eeking out advantage with each action. If I don't, then I can't apply the logic of gameplay to my...

Set aside single action resolution. Players have a goal related to the current score; how best do they achieve it? What's the minimum number of resources they could spend to get there? Taken from that perspective, the ideal state is to offload as many consequences to score specific clocks, and...

I quite like not really watching Leverage. It's ideal in the background, checking in and see where they are in the formula or like, sick daytime or laundry folding television

You're missing the salient point here. It's not what the player wants with this one action, it's the goal the player is pursuing across multiple action declarations that's driving the strategic decision making under discussion. Success is being viewed less atomically than a single act of resolution.

I really love her work, which is almost exclusively about media I am not interested in.

I think this is just the discoverability problem clashing with widening readership and genre splitting. For a specific kind of reader, the was certainly a time you could really pick up a random book in the fantasy section at a library or bookstore and more or less know what you were getting...

Almost exactly the opposite for me, or maybe some overlap. I can't stand the isekai frame narrative, the whole fish out of water in a different world portal fantasy thing, but I'm absolutely down for a strictly codified progression system.

More relevant to this discussion, I think both storytelling and performance belong largely to that category. RPGs can be games, but they don't have to be, and for a great many purposes people purport to play them, probably don't need to be. We should be careful, when considering RPGs as games...

Not when I use it. I'm quite happy to take Suits' definition: I don't really hold with the notion of "non-Suitsian" games, I just think a lot of people use "game" very loosely to indicate a great many forms of play that are not ultimately games.

I play a lot of board games. My favorites are the heavier economic games, your 18xxs and Splotters, with the occasional dash of a tableau builder or some other kind of mid-heavy weight euro. I'd never turn down a round of Hansa Teutonica. Most weeks it's 1846 or 18MEX these days, but we hop...

See, that's sort of exactly what I'm taking shots at. I used contract bridge, a very old and very popular game as an example, and this kind of heuristic development is the basis of interaction with board games and video games. You make up a theory about how to play Slay the Spire or which...

You're describing the approachability or obviousness of a heuristic. Players will find those first or faster, but if they aren't satisfying or powerful, they'll still upgrade given more exposure. Similarly to above, it's often good to have heuristics of different levels of obviousness in your...

So this reads to me as describing designer intended player heuristics in play. Players, when encountering a game will strive to find a repeatable strategy, technique or decision making basis to choose which actions will best propel them to the goal. Where I think the article falls short is that...

I think those two issues are conflated routinely. The sense of "immersion" meant by "the mechanics get out of the way and I forget I'm playing a game" and the sense indicated by "I'm making decisions my character can't make" should be treated as separate concerns. It would be great if we could...

I really think it's down to direct mapping of player and character decision making and forward causality from action determination to resolution. The character and player make a decision to do something, then something happens.