Skip to main content

I find the idea of playing fair in a single player video game insipid

People love to talk about "fun trumps rules" or "rule 0" in TTRPGs and the same applies to videogames.

I actually think it applies less in TTRPGs because of the multiplayer aspect, rules are expectations, and changing them matters more and should be thought out

Alex P. 👹
Alex P. 👹  
•
my one caveat here is that sometimes some players can't help themselves, like they've been too primed by the medium as a whole to follow skinner-box rewards even when it kills their fun, and in that case you should probably make sure any dumb exploits that encourage tepid disappointing play for pure check-the-box / make-number-go-up reasons get patched out
Alex P. 👹
Alex P. 👹  
•
(this is mostly just when people say "i wish i could do fun things in this game but feel compelled to do [boring thing X] for structural/psychological reasons" — I'm inclined to think you should throw them a bone even if it means someone who really really wants [boring thing X] is gonna get a bit mad)
silverwizard
silverwizard  

@Alex P. 👹 Just confirming here you mean TTRPGs

And I definitely feel like that's one of those cases where the table can/should/very should discuss breaking down those kinds of things. Stopping people from exploiting by discussing.

I'm also just a fan of looking at games as a series of consequences, and be like 'OK, teleporting peasant railgun, how does that change the world?"

I am also a fan of saying things like 'Ok, so you teleported across the continent with a peasant, that doesn't mean that the item is moving at the speed of sound, it's moving at normal speeds, no it doesn't make sense, but that's your fault"

@Alex P. 👹
Alex P. 👹
Alex P. 👹  
•

oh i mean in video games

sometimes you can totally ruin a single-player game by giving people a choice to do something un-fun rather than something really fun, even though it's just a *choice* the player is making

silverwizard
silverwizard  

@Alex P. 👹 Oh! that! Yes! I am definitely the worst about that.

But I am the kind of person who will be like "Oh, Morrowind wants me to be useless for the first four hours of gameplay, this is dumb, I'm going to edit my save file", which is what I'm talking about.

If you give me a bad option I could spend 20 hours grinding on, I'll just skip that 20 hours in the game of "How did you encrypt your savefile" instead of "Develop an RSI"

@Alex P. 👹
⇧