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coffee c's avatar

Interesting breakdown, my first thought is I'm wondering how many games meaningfully exist with mixes of dynamics outside of the core groupings, and whether there's still big areas of unexplored design territory you could reach just by mixing the dynamics in unconventional ways.

My second came from talking this over with some friends, the split of Challenge-Based vs Character-Based was the most interesting to me because it's something I'd noticed and tried to define before myself with terms like 'strategic' vs 'narrative' which were worse. Talking about this split though, I felt like 'Character-Based' was still too loaded of a label to use for the opposed side: it became too difficult to talk about it without conflating it with the general 'character focused' stance that valued roleplaying and character development *without* being directly opposed to challenge-based game priorities.

You can play into a character's traits and motivations deeply but still be expected by the group and system to make the 'winning' decisions for the sake of the game, tracing all the way back to the classic rebuttal of 'if endangering the party is What Your Character Would Do, then you've brought an unfitting character to the game'. To the casual listener this is still 'character based' play, but I don't think it makes the game Character-Based in the sense you want the label to mean.

Suggesting a better alternative label is tricky, because I think the opposite of Challenge-based encompasses a few different motivations that are all about prioritising the story over 'winning' - being true to the character is a big one, but so is creating the most dramatic narrative (and this would come up a lot in a nondiagetic non-challenge-based game). Called it 'Story-based' feels a bit like arriving back at square one, but nothing that much better comes to mind. Theatric-based?

Part of me thinks that because the real dichotomy is about 'do you make decisions with the aim of winning the scenario or not', the other category is fundamentally defined as 'Everything That's Not Challenge-Based' and can't be put under a more precise label. Or maybe it should just be multiple categories rather than a dichotomy.

Stepping back a bit, I'd say in my experience the three categories that I've seen cause the most mismatched expectations when joining a new tabletop game are GM-Referee/GM-Conductor, Challenge-Based/Character-Based, and Player-Lead/GM-Lead, so they're the most important ones to really pin down. The answers to most of the others are obvious when you read through the system you're playing, but lots of systems are pretty lax about where they fall on those three because they're usually relegated more to GM style.

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