Last night, my party got ambushed while we were en-route to a spirit grove to put my spirit back inside my body (long story short: had a potions accident, wasn't technically dead), and our Druid spotted the would-be ambushers before they could get the jump on us. Since it was storming, he used Druidcraft to predict the next lightning strike, and used that to gain advantage on his Intimidate Check against the bandits by timing his speech to the next lightning strike.

It was pretty rad. =3

@Xirema Sounds like fun story telling.

@ColinGross Indeed.

@KorvinStarmast I archived a copy of all the dragon and dungeon magazines a while back. What issue # was the answer in?

Our rogue also had some poison they'd just finished crafting before we left town, and a few better-than-average damage rolls combined with their Assassination Rogue class features enabled them to OHK the bandit leader for like 70+ damage.

@doppelspooker your closure got reversed. Not sure if it's a valid question as is

@Xirema not saying it matters, but poison (at least the ones in the PHB or DMG) isn't doubled by Assassination (in 5e)

@DavidCoffron i've chopped off the deity portion of the question, like you're suggesting. Thanks.

It's not an awesome question but I'll let the community judge with their close & reopen votes in this case

@DavidCoffron The doubled damage was from the auto-crit from hitting a surprised creature. They're not high enough level to gain the other feature.

@ColinGross Issue #8, pages 22 and 23, Rob Kuntz the author.

@Xirema same situation. Critical hits don't double poison

@DavidCoffron ...?

@Xirema it's a weird consequence of how poison works. It's a separate damage roll independent of the attack roll

For example:

"This poison must be harvested from a dead or incapacitated Purple Worm. A creature subjected to this poison must make a DC 19 Constitution saving throw, taking 42 (12d6) poison damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one."

@DavidCoffron I'll bring that up. Most of the damage was from Sneak Attack dice, so it's only a difference of 3-8 damage.

The saving throw determines the damage, not the attack

Oh. If it's basic poison it makes little difference but with more powerful poisons it definitely does

@KorvinStarmast Ha! I have that one! There's a "realistic" method for generating your personal core stats... I think my dex these days would be negative.

But also: that's really confusing. It's weird enough when people try to figure out the crit rules for Divine Smite.

@Xirema basically if the damage comes from the attack the dice are doubled. Otherwise don't

@Xirema See this answer for a discussion on whether or not to double the poison: rpg.stackexchange.com/a/126219/23196

(yes, the damage gets doubled, but doesn't benefit from things like the Half-orc racial feature)

@Xirema that's because brutal critical specifies weapon dice

@GreySage The implication of that post is that poison is doubled by the level 17 feature, but not by a critical hit.

@Xirema I disagree with that. The poison damage is still not part of the attacks damage (which is what gets doubled by Death Strike)

@DavidCoffron The hit causes the saving throw. The poison takes effect after the attack?

@ColinGross essentially.

As opposed to something like chromatic orb... where the damage is just poison type and there is not save.

@ColinGross elemental weapon is an example of adding damage to the attacks damage.

@DavidCoffron And that would be doubled because it's incurred by the attack itself... not some coincident effect with the attack?

@ColinGross that's how I read it yeah

@DavidCoffron That's some pretty harsh hair splitting

@GreySage I don't think it is. The poison is very clearly not part of the attack roll

@ColinGross Yeah, it was a neat article.

Nor does it make sense to double it. You can't be 'more affected' by a poison because you are surprised. That's why you make a saving throw.

@DavidCoffron That's like saying "I didn't kill him, the poison did. Sure, the poison was only in his system because I stabbed him with a poison coated blade, but still, it wasn't my fault".

@GreySage no it's not. I'm talking about critical hits not culpability

The poison was what killed him. It's still the poisoners fault

X causing Y != Y is part of X (the attack causes the poison, which is not the same as saying the poison is part of the attack)

@DavidCoffron Well, the surprise isn't what does it, it's the Rogue specializing in taking advantage of someone's vulnerable situation. And poison can be more or less deadly depending on how it gets into your body. Injected/contact poisons can be more or less deadly depending on how much or where it gets into your body.

@Xirema not in 5e rules. The poison rules in the DMG discuss how poisons can be inflicted (they each have their own method), ingested poisons do nothing if inflicted by injury or contact

You could narrate it that way, but it's a stretch

@DavidCoffron I would imagine any poison that gets applied by attack roll was designed for that route of administration.

@DavidCoffron Not quite my point. A contact poison is a lot more lethal when applied near a vital organ than near an extremity.

It's not unreasonable to me that a rogue specifically specializing in making precision attacks against an unaware target would similarly take advantage of that kind of knowledge.

@Xirema Seems like a reasonable narration or justification for critical poison administration. However, the poison damage isn't part of the attack damage still.

@Xirema ah. I misunderstood. That would be how I would justify it if it did work in the rules tbh so ignore my point about sense

Then again, I did have to push back (unsuccessfully) after my DM informed me that I'd gotten a harmful substance in my body that was repelling my spirit, and somehow, semantically, it didn't constitute a "poison" that could be removed by Lay on Hands, or a magical effect that could be removed with Dispel Magic.

Soooooooo................

@Xirema was it a disease?

@Xirema dispel magic doesn't work on creature abilities right? Just spells.

@DavidCoffron Apparently not that either, because I'd be immune to it if it were.

And if your not playing by RAW then my reading of poison crits is irrelevant. Play whatever is more fun. :)

@DavidCoffron They caught a plot. It's like a disease, but it's way more meta and no rules can help you

@Delioth I screwed up once and cast sleep on my party for plot. 2 of then were elves... my player's mentioned it mid week and I was like... oops

@Delioth "Attack of the Plot!" sounds like an 80's B-horror movie tag line

@Delioth My character was taking potions classes to gain proficiency in Alchemists' tools, and had an accident, which caused a "Soul-Repelling" contaminant to get inside her. Said contaminant was neither poison nor disease nor magic-dispellable.

Veeeeeery convenient for putting a Paladin halfway out of commission.

@Xirema Did your character learn how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even stopper death?

@Yuuki I'm only up to week 3 of the training. I think that's week 9.

I did it to end the session on a cliffhanger so I had to retcon it lol. Turned it into mass paralysis which became super fun when they defeated the enemy and my wizard held on to the homebrew spell in his Spellbook til they were high enough level

@Xirema Yup, sounds like a case of the plot.

@Xirema potion mishaps are a thing in the DMG. Could've been one of those

And those wouldn't be dispellable and aren't poison IIRC

@Xirema You should claim that it has no effect because your character's soul hasn't been pelled before.

Therefore, it can't be repelled.

@Delioth It wasn't too bad though. DM ruled that as a spirit, I can still cast spells and punch ghosts and provide my auras. It's almost an improvement.

Frankly, any game where you can punch ghosts is a good game.

@Xirema Yeah, that would be almost an improvement. For a straight caster it might be a straight improvement due to being incorporeal and jazz.

@Xirema was it permanent?

I'd abuse the deal out if it if it was

@DavidCoffron He gave us a fetch quest to get an herb to reverse the effect. I'm definitely finding my potions instructor and asking if we can recreate a "temporary" version of my mistake for future use.

Or replicable if not permanent

Become a cleric "realizing" (rightly or not) your deity preserved your spirit after the would-be-fatal mistake and have all the Spellcasting

Also, as a spirit, I discovered that there's the soul of a 10,000 year old necromancer inside my spell gem, and he apparently knows a bunch of spoilers for our main plot.

@Xirema oh so convenient narrator too xD

@Xirema Make sure not to drop your spell gem inside a vat of soul repellent.

@Yuuki I feel bad. I'd spent several weeks soaking the gem in Holy Water, afraid some kind of demon was inside it.

@Xirema Are necromancers inherently evil in this world?

@Xirema 10,000 years dead. Or died at 10,000 years?

@Delioth No, but they're all kinda jerks. (of the Necromancers we've met so far)

@DavidCoffron Unspecified. He kicked me out of the gem after he got tired of answering my questions.

@Xirema Eh, you spend long enough perverting the cycle of life and death and everyone you meet starts to look a lot like spell components/materials.

@Xirema what's your wisdom score? I wouldve made a deal to resurrect him in exchange for some favor (powerful undead minion or some magic item) and immediately begun my quest for cleric or druid scrolls (with a bit of multiclassing)

@GreySage Our Druid has a TV-Sitcom-Rivalry with a Necromancer whose entire deal is that he's kind of flakey and disrespectful towards people in general, but otherwise hasn't actually done anything evil or corrupt.

@DavidCoffron That's already covered. He apparently has a Clone buried in a dead continent to the north that he can return to if we bring him to it. So at some point we're going on a long voyage north.

Due to the circumstances of the plot, it's pretty unlikely this is part of some machiavellian plot, but who knows?

WhAt CoUlD pOsSiBlY gO wRoNg?

@Xirema oh but I love the "you rescued this guy who is actually evil and have to fight him a few levels later" plots

It's easy to overuse them and accidentally teach the players that it's not worthwhile to rescue folks.

@DavidCoffron I would enjoy the twist of "you freed this evil necromancer who's been imprisoned in this soulstone for millenia but it turns out he's gotten kinda used to being a homebody and now would like to get back into the shiny rock because he DVR'd some episodes of The Great British Bake-Off".

@BESW true. Or rescue people but keep a gun to their head and just terrify innocent damsels

Many players are very sensitive to negative behavior reinforcement.

Isn't reinforcement supposed to be rewarding behavior while punishment is, well, punishing behavior?

So negative reinforcement would be rewarding poor behavior?

@Yuuki related:

I blame the D&D-like paradigm that punishes failure with agency deprivation.

@BESW umm... is that a paradigm. I punish failure with... well new story arcs

@DavidCoffron Agh, I desperately want to correct that to "Achilles' Heel".

You got imprisoned? Now you can either try to escape or we can resume after you've served your sentence and deal with the aftermath of failing whatever quest you failed

@Yuuki Operant Conditioning.

@DavidCoffron Mechanically, D&D defaults to loss of power as a punishment for failure: you die; you lose levels; you miss out on XP and are underleveled; you miss out on treasure and are undergeared; these are all forms of reducing your ability to effectively impact the story.

It directly associates success with gaining capacity and failure with losing capacity; there's no "learn from failure so you'll do better next time" or anything like that.

@BESW I see what you mean. You only get XP for wins.

@BESW AKA the one feature of Powered by the Apocalypse that actually seems kind of novel.

@BESW Is there a way to skirt this without incentivising failure? Effectively any reward for success inversely something you are punished for when you fail - you miss that rewards

So it doesn't really matter what the DM does in terms of story arcs, the system's rigged to make players hypersensitive to avoiding failure because it just turns into a death spiral.

@Xirema You're still threatened with death in pbta though, and loss of treasure

@SirCinnamon Sure, there's tons of ways to do it and a lot of other games have done it!

@SirCinnamon I have no desire to defend the system as a whole, having seen how much railroading the McElroys have generated from it. Just observing that "You gain XP when you fail a roll, and enough XP will make future failures less likely" is a cool feature.

Fate, for example, provides opportunities for long-term character change/growth when you complete story segments (success), but when bad stuff happens to your character you get temporary currency that you can spend for future success.

@BESW Which do you think is best? I would be interested to hear about it. I tried playing dungeon world and the xp system is something I failed to fully... understand i guess

@BESW I mean... shouldn't you be sensitive to failure?

@Xirema that sounds pretty critical, but I have enjoyed PbtA Masks when I played that. Novel ideas aren't the only thing that makes a system fun.

@DavidCoffron Yes, but fear of failure often turns into fear of experimentation, which tends to force players into repetitive optimal play

@BESW So as a dnd translation almost like an XP on success but Inspiration on failure kind of thing?

@DavidCoffron Sure, but not hypersensitive to the point that it gets in the way of things like basic storytelling conventions such as "heroes hit a low point and then rally from it" or that it creates murderhoboism.

This^

Ten Foot Pole Paranoia, where players' caution grinds play to a halt because they refuse to do anything unless they're confident they've examined EVERY possible flaw and pitfall, is a very real thing.

Failures still hold negative effect which may include loss of agency but adding a minor gain to the mix lessens the blow because you now have a bright side to look on?

@SirCinnamon Kinda? Honestly I think the traditional XP paradigm is partly at fault.

I find it very cool how the players were able to play to a more interesting story and do risky and interesting plays given the fact they know that failure would usually lead to something heat as interesting.

@MikeQ that's not been my experience but maybe my tables are outliers

@Xirema to be fair the McElroys could railroad a game of Fluxx.

@Rubiksmoose You're not wrong.

Compare Lady Blackbird, where XP is points you spend to gain specific qualities like skill specializations or character notes, and you get XP for hitting character notes like "I expect to be in charge" or "I'm in disguise" or "I'm super loyal to my captain," double XP if it puts you in danger. Or you can reject a character note dramatically, erase it from your sheet, and get MASSIVE XP--which you can use to buy another character note.

My experience with PbtA (dungeon world) with their "XP only on failure" was that the cleric while standing in a perfectly safe place, kept casting a spell that required a roll, on a success he got something minorly beneficial and on a failure he got XP. I couldnt think of a creative or interesting and realistic punishment for him failing a random spell cast in the middle of a city. I sent a ghost in which the party dispatched because he is a cleric.

@BESW yeah but... people don't get better in the real world for being loyal

(I really like The Adventure Zone, both Amnesty and Balance; but if you're looking for an "Actual Play Podcast" that accurately presents how TTRPGs play, it's obviously not that. TAZ is more like an improvised Darths & Droids style of storytelling.)

@DavidCoffron If we're talking about realistic depictions of capacity development, then this entire conversation is nonsense.

@DavidCoffron Erm, as usual, BESW explained what I was trying to say, but more articulately

@Xirema this is absolutely true.

Personally I use the alternate rules for DnD5e where you get XP for completing story objectives - keeps the party on task, means i'm ready for their level ups etc.

and everyone in the party has the same level so theres no lagging behind or anything there

It's been a long time since I last played a game that used the "kill monsters for EXP" paradigm.

It's almost always been some form of milestone XP.

A realistic depiction of developing capacity would involve reflecting on actions to acquire generalised insights, consultation with others about their experiences, tedious practice and frustration with being unable to acquire skills despite doing everything right....

Nobody goes out and kills a bear so they can get better at picking pockets.

@Yuuki We still use it, but our DM does contrive scenarios to give extra XP to any players that have "fallen behind" the XP curve, to make sure we generally level at the same time.

@BESW So youre saying runescape really got it right....

@Xirema I haven't kept up with them but I very much enjoyed TAZ even when the rules lawyer in me was screaming sometimes lol. Amnesty I only listened in the beginner m beginning but definitely helped get me interested in pbta

I know nothing about Runescape, but probably not because I suspect it's also a linear development system where skills are retained without practice, insights aren't generalizable, and collaboration and accompaniment are discounted.

Sorta.

The thing about Runescape is that each of your abilities are compartmentalized into skills that each have their own leveling scheme.

So you can't really get better at fishing by spending an afternoon killing bears.

It's a skills-based system rather than a general XP/level-based system.

The thing about Runescape is you spend 10000000 hours mining iron ore, running to the smelter, and repeating, and it's called fun. Also, the ability to perform tasks with skills have a minimum skill requirement for that skill.

Well, that's not realistic either because skills DO have bleed-over; nothing's its own independent isolated thing, you develop personal skills through interactive skills, for example. It's messy and no abstraction will capture capacity-building accurately.

Kinda like Elder Scrolls, although I suppose the Elder Scrolls's perk system allows you to improve skills that you might not have focused on for leveling.

So the trick is to forget the bugbear of realism and find an abstraction that works for the kind of story you're trying to tell.

Unless you are playing a pure sandbox campaign, I see no benefit to non-milestone based leveling

Which usually means abandoning the causality relationship between action and advancement: instead, treat "the thing you do to advance" as the thing you want to see happen a lot in the game, and "the thing you advance" as the reward for doing and the way it's done.

Runescape is "I don't yet know how to make steel platemail, but if I make 200 more steel daggers, then I will suddenly figure it out"

It is a silly place

eg, Lady Blackbird is a character-driven drama story so you get XP for hitting your dramatic character notes. And you get to spend XP on cool skill specializations and dramatic character notes because it's a story about characters who do cool things but get hampered by their own drama.

D&D's a story about getting into a lot of fights and winning them, so you get XP for beating people up and you spend XP to get better at beating people up.

@MikeQ It's all about mass-producing those iron daggers so you can leave Whiterun with impenetrable armor twelve hours later.

Or the alchemy-smithing-enchanting loop to turn yourself into a god.

@Yuuki Skyrim is, er, was

Elder Scrolls has a weird approach to XP because the world advances as your skills increase, which kinda penalizes you for overly investing in noncombat skills

But at the same time, it's really easy to break things by focusing on the right noncombat skills.

@MikeQ max all your skills, but never level up. Slaughter those low level bandits!

Namely, the crafting ones.

Part of it is due to some weird decisions, like making all Fortify Skill effects scale to your Restoration skill.

So if you're under the effects of a Fortify Restoration buff, you can create increasingly powerful Fortify Enchanting potions.

@Yuuki IIRC they patched that to lessen the enchantment-alchemy loop

Granted, even with the patches, you can still get some benefit from the loop, but not as explosively as before

Even so, I've always had the easiest time maximizing crafting skills in Bethesda games.

It was the same with Fallout 4.

Your equipment always scaled much better than any relevant skills.

RPGs are games, not reality simulations. Character development is a reward system that scratches a gaming itch, and the ways the game provides to get those rewards are part of how the designers tell us how they expect us to play their game.

Getting access to laser and plasma weapons before the game started dropping them was always a more effective bonus than being able to do more damage with bullets.

Since the D&D approach to XP is basically the video game RPG approach, I think that it doesn't always translate well to the TTRPG environment

For example, if you're DMing an adventure and have an intended difficulty (CR, whatever), what is the benefit of having players at different XP and levels?

Which is amusing, because it comes from tabletop wargaming models.

D&D used an existing XP model that was originally designed for a top-down tactical strategy game where unbalanced strength and weakness between units was a feature, and applied it to a granular level of play where it became a liability.

Then video games ran with it and honed it to a sharpened blade.

And D&D-like TTRPGs folded the video game developments back into their play schemes.

@BESW Right, this sounds familiar. The more you use a unit, the stronger it becomes, yeah?

@MikeQ In a wargame, there's interesting tactical choices inherent in the idea, like "do I want a few really skilled teams or a LOT of unskilled teams?"

(Do you want the Battle of Thermopylae? Because that's how you get the Battle of Thermopylae.)

@MikeQ Or, in the case of Ogre Battle, the more you use a unit, the more evil they become as they slaughter hordes of lower level enemies.

The XP approach generally works in video games because they're ultimately self-paced. You (the designer) want to incentivize spending time playing the game.

@BESW Didn't the Spartans lose Thermopylae? And the only reason Persia didn't go on to steamroll the rest of Greece was the Athenian navy?

@Yuuki But it was an interesting tactical encounter for a wargaming group to recreate.

XP also works in multiplayer online games because the world is effectively static. Player characters can advance but the world does not. If somebody missed the raid, they can spend their own time to catch up.

But at the table, all I've seen XP do is penalize players for not showing up

Yup.

Translating "which units are doing things" to "which players are doing things" was, I think, a fundamental flaw in the original wargame-to-roleplaying design.

Not that I'm a big fan of XP as a bar you fill up to add more stuff to you list of things you can do, anyway, but that player/character conflation is deeply troublesome at the table.

@BESW Earlier you mentioned the disconnect with single-track XP systems, where all of a character's abilities are tied to a single progress bar

What are your thoughts on systems where XP is an allocated resource? i.e. Characters get incremental amounts of XP that they can spend to improve individual stats/skills/whatevers; Level is a measure of how much a character has invested, rather than how much they have earned by killing goblins

3.5e's crafting system let you spend EXP to make magic items. Which was kinda broken, IIRC.

Because you'd spend EXP to make some fancy magic thing. And because of the fancy magic thing, you'd effectively still have the same power level as the rest of your party.

But because you were technically a lower level, you'd gain EXP faster than they did.

@Yuuki Or you earn as much EXP as the party, spend a big chunk to get a magic item, then lose the item, and now everyone else is ahead

@MikeQ As I've been saying, character development needs to match the goals of the game.

Personally I'm generally not interested in any system where characters just keep getting better.

I like games where characters change.

What does that look like? (characters change but don't necessarily improve at anything)

In Fate, at the end of every session you can pick one: re-write one aspect, swap the ranks on two skills, or replace one stunt.

The overall "power level" of the character remains the same, but the character develops and changes.

They're changing in order to become better suited at handling challenges, no?

They're changing in response to the story they're experiencing.

I suspect the point is that they change based on what happened to them, not that you're trying to optimise the character in whatever circumstances

I'm cool with a system where character development isn't purely additive but would feel something is missing if the character simply cannot get on the whole better at what they do over time

Fate... doesn't really do optimization.

@BESW So, the character doesn't actually develop at all, they just swap some numbers around

No, I think I get it. The character changes as a result of what happened in the session, not in anticipation of upcoming challenges.

@GreySage Traditionally in Fate, you gain quantitative advancement at major story points.

@MikeQ Right.

@GreySage And no, "swapping numbers" is only one of those options.

And PBTA is the one where you progress skills by failing at them, right?

@BESW Oh, so it's just story-milestone based exp, and you play with options at the end of every session.

@MikeQ failure grants XP in PbtA

@GreySage No, there's no XP.

@BESW There's no exp in milestone based leveling either, you just level (sorry, I meant to say leveling, not exp in that last message)

There's no leveling in Fate either.

@BESW But you gain quantitative advancements?

Yup.

So there is leveling, it's just called something else

There isn't levelling.

Character progression is the more general term, methinks

I feel like you're being needlessly obtuse by explaining yourself very slowly

there is the concept of advancement

which in D&D is represented by experience and levels and in fate is not

Leveling implies tiered advancement, and often the level is a prerequisite for other abilities

@GreySage Think of it like character development as we talk about it occurring in movies, novels, etc. A character's beliefs or perspectives change, their self-image changes, the troubles they experience change, etc—they haven't necessarily become quantitatively better than they were before, but something old has gone away and something new is there instead. Fate characters develop this way.

@Carcer Nah, I'm just not interested in explaining several pages of rules that can be read for free online and has been explained in chat many times already.

then why engage at all

I'm tired

@Carcer BESW gains EXP by explaining things

Because we're talking about interesting concepts over a broad scope of games, not legislating a particular system.

that's why it's called EXPlaining

TONS of games don't use tiered all-in-a-bunch levels as their mode of progression.

yeah, some of them split the levels up

cf GURPS, BRP, Solar System, Gumshoe...

That's why I asked about XP as an allocated resource - I've seen that in multiple systems (White Wolf, 40k, Mutants & Masterminds, etc.)

yeah, there are a lot of systems where XP is an earned resource you then spend on whatever individual changes you want to make to the character

Yeah, XP is often used as a currency for purchasing things as you go rather than getting a package at a set quantity.

@BESW Indeed, but you went on this thing about how you don't like games that use linear advancement, then held up Fate as an example of one that doesn't, but in the end they use the same mechanic, just at a different granularity

The distinction I think being made here is that some of us in the conversation consider levelling one particular form of character advancement (which might not even necessarily involve numeric advancement!), where others are considering levelling to involve anything involving a numerical advancement of any variety.

but at the end of the day most things have levels. Even if it's not an overarching character level and instead is the difference between "skill rank 1" and "skill rank 2"

@GreySage No, I did not. I gave an example of how Fate does non-linear advancement. Fate also does linear advancement, which I was not talking about so I didn't talk about it.

@GreySage Similar mechanic, but it sounds like if I missed several sessions of Fate, my character would not be penalized for missing out on advancement

having a continuous system tends to make the math hard

@BESW Context: someone asked for how a game can handle someone merely changing.

(My Fate games tend to ignore the advancement milestones altogether, for the same reason I don't like linear XP progression.)

Fate doing this was provided as an example of how a game can do this.

Right. Fate is a game where characters can change without numerical gains. It is ALSO a game where characters get numerical gains. Get you a game that can do both?

Fate skips XP entirely in favor of game events (ending a session, finishing a plot) trigger specific progression events (re-write an aspect, gain a skill point). Smaller, more frequent game events trigger change-based progression; larger, less common game events trigger linear advancement events.

@BESW Oh ok, so it's loosely similar to milestone-based group advancement in a D&D-esque system (e.g. plot event = party levels up)

@Carcer the reason i'm myself saying Fate doesn't have levels is I think that's trying to put a square peg in a round hole, and redefining levels to mean things it doesn't in order to say "still counts" or something. Like, sure, it's got numeric advancement, but in many ways it doesn't resemble levels—and I wouldn't say Roll for Shoes or other games have levels either unless they have an advancement model called or resembling one.

@doppelspooker it depends on your context

Lady Blackbird has a non-numerical advancement mechanism, and not levels, but does have advancement.

Using "level" as a generic word for ANY quantitative advancement sucks the usefulness out of the word.

like, "levelling" is pretty widely used in videogames to refer to increasing both overlal character levels and also the levels of more individual granular things

levelling as a verb, sure

i can use "i'll level this skill" as a verb for increasing the skill's score

like I've been playing way too much warframe lately and it's totally valid to say that I am levelling my gun and my gun is level X but that's not related to my character level

but i wouldn't say fate has levels, because characters have no such concept attached.

@Carcer yo dawg I heard you like levels, so I put levels in your level so you can level while you level

that sounds like my jam!

[grinds for a hundred hours to make a hat]

@doppelspooker Fallacy of composition?

@BESW man, tabletop rpgs as a market appear designed specifically to tell us that anything we thought we could generalise about them was wrong

@doppelspooker The very idea that systems of rules are generalizable across a whole medium is weird.

Do people think that Monopoly ends with correctly guessing who murdered Uncle Moneybags on Park Place?

@BESW to be fair, that would be better than Monopoly RAW

i agree :D

@Carcer That's a low bar, but yes I would play Cluopoly. If you own the site of the crime, you lose profit while it's closed for the investigation?

actually on that topic one of the board games I do own is a german thing called "Accused" which is about trying not to be held responsible for murder

it's pretty fun

Cool.

in that a murder happened, and it's irrelevant and unknown who actually did it, the only thing that matters is that it doesn't look like you did it, and involves a creative writing element where you have to come up with an alibi at the start of the session and then have to try and justify any evidence against you which doesn't match up afterwards

Actually, on reflection maybe people DO have that expectation for video games; consider the disdain for "walking simulators" even if they're actually quite complex interactive experiences, because many folks seem to think that video games need specific mechanics or they aren't really video games.

the key word is "game", really

there's an expectation that a game involves some element of skill or luck

if a game doesn't have either of those things, is it a game?

you're gonna kick me for this but actually yes

oh wait! or luck

yeah

i misread

Sure. Tic Tac Toe.

so usually it gets parsed as a system with rules and a goal, and where the player has agency to perform actions

tic tac toe involves skill

it's an incredibly simple skill which is very fast to master

but it's a skill nonetheless, no matter how trivial

[shrug] I disagree. It's not something you practice or can improve at.

But I also disagree with the "skill or luck" definition of "game."

but you can improve at it

a child who first plays tic tac toe does not automatically understand the winning strategy

but they can learn it

they improve their skill

like I said it's a very limited skill you can completely master very quickly

but it's there

It's knowledge, not skill.

anyway I really ought to be in bed

same

lots of skill is just knowledge at the end of the day

I'm not personally trying to argue for the skill/luck game definition either, I think it can be broader than that

but it's an interesting discussion

night

I'm not sure it's useful to define games.

If I had to I'd probably go with some kind of "interactive fun" definition, but it's not a thing that needs a rigid "in or out" concept. It's a shared understanding of experience.

We can't legislate it without prioritizing ourselves over others.

But my point, beyond that, was that folks discount certain kinds of games as not games. Even within the "skill and luck" definition, The Witness and Dear Esther both count as games but get dismissed as walking simulators.

According to my game dev buddy who has been asked way too many times whether __ is really a game or just a __ simulator, author intent is important

(And by your definition of skill, a walking simulator counts because you have to learn how to push "w" on the keyboard.)

@MikeQ [throws a copy of Barthes at him]

I wouldn't try to legitimately argue that so-called "walking simulators" are not games

Absolutely.

IMO it's enough that the experience is interactive

it doesn't even have to be fun

lots of games aren't, either by accident or by design

I think the requirements of "game" are 1. rules/goals and 2. player interaction. Rules don't have to be strict or explicit, and interaction doesn't have to be exciting.

right I honestly have to go to bed now or my partner is going to get upset

cheerio folks

A cutscene isn't necessarily a game, but I could say "Let's play Watch The Cutscene" and now it's a game

So "game" is based on user intent.