It may seem like you wouldn’t learn as much by playing like a fool, but by making incredibly short-sighted and baseline decisions, you make a great control group for yourself. You’re free to experiment, you’re free to take risky moves, and you’re generally able to see what the ‘default’ progress looks like before layering on strategy. That way, once you actually do start using strategy in future games, you can compare to your original fool-game to see exactly how good your strategy fares compared to before.
Read moreGM Tips: You Don’t Always Need to Roll
Think about it this way: when should we be rolling dice? In my opinion, there are two conditions we need to meet to justify a die roll:
1) The action has both a chance of success and failure; and
2) The action’s success or failure carries consequences.
In the previous example, neither of these things are really true. While we could fail an individual roll, since we can keep trying over and over at no cost we are guaranteed to eventually succeed. There’s no real risk of failure. Frankly, the door might as well not exist since we know for certain that we will ultimately break it down.
So as a game master, how could we improve this door challenge? I have four suggestions:
Read moreHot Take: I’d Rather You Cheat Than “Play”
Now don’t get me wrong here, cheating is pretty awful. Cheating can very easily ruin the game for everyone and you shouldn’t do it. But there’s a key idea behind cheating that I want to highlight, which is that cheaters acknowledge that the game matters, but choose to disobey its rules. While this is certainly disrespectful to the game and the players, it at least acknowledges that the game exists and has some value. Which is why there’s something I think is worse than cheating: “playing.”
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