> I'm not going to argue with you about what you enjoy. But it seems
like you think of the players as some kind of enemy that needs to be
kept in check.
Then I haven't made myself as clear as I'd hoped. Granted, I do believe that games have rules, and that those rules do impose limits of some kind - something entirely ruleless/limitless wouldn't be an RPG in the usual sense, IMO. Trying to probe those limits isn't necessarily a problem - but it can be, if it causes frustration to the other players in the game. If it doesn't do that then, great, there's no problem - but that wasn't what we were discussing :)
> I used to play like that too. In Mike's way of playing, the "limit"
that the player is probing looks like this: "how cool can I make the
scene by representing my character's actions through the selected
augments."
Which is fine in itself. The situation which I was discussing was one in which the other players turn round and say 'by doing that you're making the game less cool for us'. Now, that is the situation being posited; it doesn't matter which side is 'right' in any objective sense. FWIW, I'd argue that they're both equally 'right').
There are times when, in his game, I'm concerned about using a particular ability for an augment, specifically because there's not much chance of him saying no. There's no safety net and I owe it to the other players (including Mike) to do it right. That is simply not the same kind of limit as trying to squeeze as many points of augment into ten (or whatever) abilities. It isn't mechanical at all. It's just social and creative. And when I thought adversarially about my players, I wouldn't have believed it, but I now vastly prefer that play style. But maybe you wouldn't.
I do strongly dislike the adversarial style, as it happens, but I think that's a separate question. My style is, in part, 'give the players what they want' - the question is, what happens when they want different, mutually exclusive things?
-- Trotsky Gamer and Skeptic ------------------------------------------------------ Trotsky's RPG website: http://www.ttrotsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
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