PC Mistakes: That's not how I want to solve that problem.

I read this article the other day, about the difficulty of seeing "Star Wars" as it was originally released (or close to it.)

Why Finding the Original 1977 Star Wars Verges on the Impossible

Basically the author explains how important it is to see the original movie, how he hasn't been able to, and how hard it is to do so. And then says:

"I couldn’t do laserdiscs because no sane person has a laserdisc player these days."

I read that and laughed. One of my friends of the past 15+ years or so buys and sells laserdiscs. Enough that it went from a side thing he did to a full-time job.

Getting a laserdisc player won't be trivial, but it's far from impossible - eBay has a selection for $100 or so. And then getting a laserdisc copy of "Star Wars" is possible. I know, I've seen one, and watched it.

This is not an impossible problem nor one that requires a crazy amount of resources to solve.

The thing is, I read this as, "I see a solution, but that's not how I want to solve it."

I think this is a trap you can fall into as a player.

It's easy to get tunnel vision and only see a few - or one - way to get past an obstacle:

"We can't get through that door without the key."

"We can't get past those guys without killing them."

etc.

But it can also be easy to reject a solution out of hand not because it's impossible, but because you reject an obvious solution.

"We can't defeat those guys without cold-based attacks and we don't want to invest in cold-based attack spells or liquid ice grenades."

"We can't bribe our way through without a lot of money and we don't want to pay a lot of money."

etc.

Once you've rejected a solution, you can fall into a weird form of self-defeating thought. Instead of saying, "We'll do X unless we can think of a better solution" or "We can just do X and solve this problem," you end up with "Not X, so no solution." You wrack your brains and sit around noodling around on it and eating snacks and going off on tangents. All the solutions reject the obvious one, and eventually it's likely the answer is, "We can't do it" and not "Let's just do X."

In Felltower, we had this for a long time - there wasn't a way off of levels 2 and 3 down deeper. The silvery door was to a staircase but "the Lord of Spite's apartment" was how it was referred to. It was always rejected because, well, open that door and the Lord of Spite comes out. Eventually new players knew it was "the Lord of Spite's apartment" and not a staircase . . . and were shocked when they found it there were stairs down there. Similarly, we had an issue with opening a puzzle door using rotating statues because getting to all of the statues was hard . . . so people tried a lot of other ways to get through before they tried, you know, getting to all of the statues. We've seen the same in a lot of situations. We're probably doing it with something in Gamma Terra without realizing it.

I've found that a good solution is to keep reminding yourself of the obvious way out. "We could try Y, instead, or just do X." "Or Z, or X." It's not foolproof. Having an awareness of this thought-trap is a good way to avoid it at least some of the time.

As a quick note, as a GM, you can fall into the trap of "I don't want the problem solved this way." That's a very different issue, as the GM can secretly change or re-frame almost anything. The post above really concerns what you do as a player to get stuck trying to solve a problem a given way.