The Culture: The Real Hobby Restores The Virtue Of Long Time Preference Behavior

The Bros behind the lines in Soviet Canuckistan had the sort of observation I'd not seen in a while.

Magic systems are always the worst part of RPGs

I take it back. Carcosa had a good magic system.

"Ooooooh our sword and sorcery game is a savage world, where magic is weird and chaotic and unstable, practiced only in infamy!!!! Roll damage against your foes... and you might get a MUTATION!" Yeah boo hoo players love mutations thats not a "cost" to magic thats a perk.

Carcosa had it figured out. The only way players will actually treat magic like a terrible, evil force is if it has a cost in human life. Subtle themes and slow-burn consequences completely fly over their heads.

You can read the original Twitter thread rolled up here.

The last part I bolded for emphasis, and it points to a bit of psychology that's long been a known issue in game design, especially in Tabletop, due to how badly the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play fucked up the hobby.

The reason that subtlty is wasted is because the player never sees the bill come due and thus never has to suffer the consequences for doing this or that.

This is, quite frankly, a Time Preference Problem.

Time preference refers to the tendency to value immediate gratification over delayed satisfaction. In economics, it is the relative valuation placed on receiving a good or cash at an earlier date compared to receiving it at a later date. This concept is also known as time discounting, delay discounting, or temporal discounting.

In essence, time preference represents the amount of future utility that is equivalent to the current utility of consuming a good or service. It is often illustrated through the example of saving money and using it to acquire additional goods or services in the future. A person with a time preference favors having a good sooner rather than later, and therefore prefers having a good immediately to having a somewhat greater good later.

Guess what the Bros' restoration of how this hobby actually works does? Put Time Preference consequences where the player can see it and feel it, WHERE IT HURTS.

How?

What does Time Preference mean? Valuing Current!You over Future!You, such that Future!You may not even be conceivable as an concept; this is known due to criminology studies of repeat violent offenders, who not only lack Theory of Mind but also cannot conceive of a future more distant than the next day- if that.

When we speak of crminally behavior, one of the tells is "High/Short Time Preference" (i.e. the unwillingness or inability to consider or decide in favor of delaying gratification in favor of future benefits). Subtly falls under this category in Game Design terms because it is not something that hits a player right then and there, at the point of decision, to tell him that he done fucked up; to make a wrong decision where subtlty is in play is to forgo a future benefit in favor of immediate utility- selling one's birthright (future benefit) in favor of food (immediate utility).

And like the proverbial tragic character, then get mad when the consequences "come out of nowhere".

When you're playing the Real Game, with Strict Timekeeping that forces you to bench a man due to Time Jail, sloughing off consequences other than getting hit in the face on the spot becomes impractical because those subtle costs stop being subtle.

They stop being subtle because the player gets to see those costs--to eat those costs--on the spot without recourse. Get infected with Lycanthrophy? In a Romero-style zombie scenario and get bitten? Better hope your man can find a cure before he's turned, and since he's benched in Time Jail you can't just ignore those consequences.

That mutation is the same thing.

Yes, shoving the costs--including all of the horror and moral hazard--up at the table works. However, the other way to put it where the player sees it is to remove the capacity to ignore the future by making the future come into the present.

Time Keeping pushes the future into the present by removing that is, at that point, an illusion of time; when you're drawing up the bill for the action at the table, all those consequences are put front and center before the player.

Which means that while that afflicted man rides the pine, the player is forced to realize that he had better have a plan to deal with those consequences when that man comes off the bench or it's going to snowball out of control.

It's just the same as all those players that ignore logistics when playing high-tech or consumable-intensive mans. Your giant robot gets fucked up? Hope you can fix it. Run out of ammo? Fast Eddie Lo ain't going to deliver if you can't pay. Cyborg body gets bodied? Hope you can swap to a spare while you find a mechanic to fix it.You get the idea.

Now watch as the Bros find more ways to make the subtle obvious.