Chris Groff I can’t stop thinking about your comment! It’s been on my mind all day.

A couple things come to mind as I try to reconcile what you’re saying. One has to do with “stance,” which is an interesting concept I don’t totally buy but can be useful to invoke. Like, when you’re holding your Burning Wheel character out at arms’ length and considering what awful things you’d enjoy seeing them go through, that’s totally authorial. Nobody who is trying to “be” Horgrav the Stern wants to see Horgrav suffer, right? That’s pretty masochistic. But if he’s not “you,” well then cool, rock on. That’s the “honest authorship” stuff I was talking about in the OP.

The other thing that comes to mind, and tbh the player who made the comment in the OP is probably coming more from this place, is that there’s a fine line between play being mechanized and play being overmechanized. I think as PbtA games, in particular, advance, I’m seeing games where procedures beget procedures. You’re constantly propelled down a track based mostly on how dice turned out.

Cartel features that kind of thing, for example: your character has someone tied up because he wants answers, so he slaps the victim around. And then because of the dice, he ends up hurting his victim and invoking enough Stress that now he has to really hurt the guy tied up in that chair. And then he beats the guy nearly to death or maybe even kills him. Which, you know, in a you-are-there kind of immersive moment, it’s thrilling and devastating to watch your character tick-tock out of your control and proceed to do terrible things. And you might miss roleplaying while that happens, because now the game is playing you.

So, overmechanized? Maybe? Totally a matter of taste of course. Folks say the same thing about lots of Burning Wheel procedures too, like how you resolve social conflicts with scripted verbal combat rather than “just talking.” There may be some game design event horizon we’ll reach where we literally wind up our characters, let them go, and watch what happens like deist storynerds.