What did you expect the conversation to be about?

I - haven't been having as much fun as I could be having, and, I don't think - I don't think that's because of the, I get that you're doing something different from the standard Pathfinder game and different isn't necessarily bad in fact different is usually good and new experiences are good and it's quite possible that, the dumb thing is that it's quite possible I'd enjoy this game a lot, that I'd be enjoying it a lot, if it were just - presented in a different way, if it had been presented in a different way, and that's ridiculous of me and I know that's ridiculous of me, see, I think the problem is that we weren't clear on expectations and we had different expectations from each other and I'll come around to enjoying the game I'm sure and you put a lot of work into it and I hate how your puzzle didn't have the payoff for you that you wanted it to but on the bright side I think Altronus loved it but it didn't land for me because I didn't realize what you were doing so things like having people comment on our player character traits pulled me out of the game because in the version of the world that I thought existed many of those weird traits didn't exist right I assumed that the setting made sense with us as a part of it instead of making sense as a thing that we were added to and I viewed our actions and NPC actions as a lossy approximation of what those characters were doing in the actual world of the game so like if Altronus eats a pound of halfling wandermeal once every three days to reset his starvation timer and only "wastes" a 5 silver ration when he needs to reset his timer against ascorbate deficiency that's not necessarily canon to the campaign setting - maybe it is or maybe it isn't - but if Altronus makes a movie reference that's definitely not canon is what I was thinking, that's how I thought of it in my head, and now you're saying that the goofy wandermeal thing he's doing is definitely canon and the movie references are canon too and also we're a party of crazy people who dreamed up Planet Earth and that could be really fun I think if you'd said at session zero that you were going to run a game like that I'd have been hyped but I built a serious character and I had a backstory and a personality for her and this - when Ileosa read my mind you told me what my character was thinking and it wasn't what I'd thought my character was thinking and that's - it's - violating is a strong word but what my character is thinking in their own head is something I'm supposed to have control over or at least is something that I'm accustomed to having control over you know Machiavelli said something about restoring ancestral rights being one of the most popular things a Prince can do and taking them away one of the worst possible ideas not that that's really all that relevant right now I'm sorry about the tangent, my point is I didn't plan for Lyvina to be a crazy person and all of this would have worked better for me - it would have worked better for me if you'd set expectations outside the game or even when we were bumbling around trying to - when we were bumbling around if you'd told us out of character what your expectations were so we were playing a game together instead of it being you who's playing a game on us and you should have just it would have worked better for me if you'd just told us what you were doing out of character instead of trying to solve out of game problems inside the game is how I feel but it worked fine for Altronus you know he enjoyed it and you know you try things and sometimes they work and I don't want to say that it's your fault or my fault it's just an unfortunate thing that happened and we move on we live and we learn

[pause for breath]

and there's a there's this thing where like okay this campaign is trying to bill itself as a setting where you can do anything because it's open world and people do clever things like buy things through their bags of holding or block the doorway with commanded shadows or use mage's magnificent mansions as a food-producing spell I never even looked at it that way I always thought that mage's magnificent mansion was kind of a useless spell but the thing is that I wouldn't have ever looked at it that way because there are easier ways to make food and I already know them so that isn't what would jump out at me when reading the spell and there's something of a central theme or one of the central themes I'm not going to pretend like I've entirely figured out where you're going with this I know you want us to figure that out and if you it's really dumb I know it's dumb that I'd probably enjoy that if I'd just I know it's a passing mood so I'm not sure we really need to talk about this and maybe it'd be going better if I wrote things down and put my thoughts in order but there's this theme where the setting is exploitable and you can come up with good ideas and they won't be shot down and this is a story about coming up with good ideas and implementing them and maybe the game is supposed to be unwinnable if we can't cheese things hard enough but the problem is, the problem is that works for Barry and for Arthur because they're allowed to try as hard as they can and it's just good clean fun but if I tried as hard as I could we wouldn't have a game because I know the system better than that's not strictly true maybe in our group I'm just at the Pareto Frontier of system mastery and mindset and I wouldn't be casting permanent images or feeding people with mage's magnificent mansions I'd be casting infinite wishes and feeding people with hydras and you tried to reassure me early on when the King was dead and no one liked the new Queen and I'm not sure whether we're supposed to be on her side or not because people hate her for the dumbest reasons but she also independently of that seems kind of mean but at the time I thought she was going to be an arc villain maybe she still will be I don't know but I said "why not just resurrect the King" and I didn't want to make your life harder and I remembered reading on the boards that there's an Adventure Path where that's a huge plot hole so I came up with a reason why it'd make sense for them not to have tried resurrecting him but you had the Field Marshall uh the Watch Sergeant that everyone calls the Field Marshall you had her say that it was a good idea and she hadn't thought of it and I think that was meant to reassure me that this was an open world kind of game but the problem is that there still are rails somewhere because I know you aren't going to let me cast free wishes and I don't know where the rails are and it hurts, it hurts to give me that kind of hope, to say that it's an open world, and I'm free to just play, and maybe you even believe it because you - you don't get how close the world is to falling over, but if I press the matter you'll have to respond, so maybe I'd prefer to just know where the constraints are so I'm free to optimize within those constraints but you can't hold the rules and the setting in your head so you think you're fine if I cut loose but you're not, and it hurts more to kind-of-try than it does to just follow the rail-road tracks, and both are better than actually putting in a real effort and getting slapped down for it.