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Reading a post on a different forum, something clicked for me from a sentence fragment.
rationalization of the logic behind one very small rule
Doesn't parse for me. The rules of a game are not rational or irrational, any more than a brushstroke on a painting, or the lay of a mountain range is rational or irrational. They simply are.
If the basis of your engagement with a game is "it's like ..." rules must be rational to justify their existence.
This explains the very awkward conversations about Thousand Kings with B&P, where they seemed to feel, constantly, as if they were "cheating."
rationalization of the logic behind one very small rule
Doesn't parse for me. The rules of a game are not rational or irrational, any more than a brushstroke on a painting, or the lay of a mountain range is rational or irrational. They simply are.
If the basis of your engagement with a game is "it's like ..." rules must be rational to justify their existence.
This explains the very awkward conversations about Thousand Kings with B&P, where they seemed to feel, constantly, as if they were "cheating."
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It's funny, I've found that people who don't self-associate as gamers, or have much experience of gaming from established groups, just play with a fairly open mind when given a new game to play.
I was talking to John Wilson about this yesterday as he'd been playing Guillotine with some non-gamer friends last week. The way they just got to playing and having fun was in stark contrast with our experience of playing the same game with gamers at the university. They were querying the "fairness", "balance" and "reward" of the game from the moment the box was produced.
It's obsessive hobbyists that stop before play and try to find endless holes in rules or setting, or just excuses in general to not agree with anything or play the game as written. It's such a barrier to, you know, having fun.
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But whenever we're in the same game together, head-bashing frustration.
yrs--
--Ben
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The degenerate form of this isn't all that common, but it IS pretty vocal, and I suspect it's a form of relationship to rules-systems that predisposes one to do design (in the traditional, rules-as-physics mode, generally). So it's shaped a lot of RPG culture.