Inevitability and Eternity in Roleplaying Games

[@aavoigt]

Yesssss welcome to the club! Really interesting use of views of history to highlight games’ politics, intentional or otherwise

[@averylychee]

What a great essay! Lots of things to think about...

[@athena9656]

oh wow, amazing video!

[@BetterMonsters]

Love that core resolution mechanic! Personally, my sense is that making rules trying to restrict the ways players are allowed to be bad collaborators signals to them that they should be the worst collaborators the rules allow, while handing them explicit trust and a clear explanation of what experiences the game hopes to deliver tends to do the opposite. In much the same way, my sense is that players coming to believe their actions are allowed to be consequential-to-a-point pushes them to try to find the bounds of the simulation, exploring it as they would a toy or puzzle rather than as a living world.

[@H.Dithmer]

I forgot to mention (I actually just had to go check) but it's not wholly unique, there's a pretty similar move in The Between, and Bluebeard's Bride, if I remember correctly. It's only been a few days, but there's already a bunch of things I'd do differently in this essay!

[@BetterMonsters]

@@H.Dithmer Oh sure, but good game design is like cooking; it's almost never about coming up with something completely unique, it's about knowing what experience you want to achieve and how your components will feed into that.