can't touch this
my partner and i tend to go for walks together almost every day before dinner. on one such walk, i was talking about my current mech build for Lancer. (Lancer rules by the way; it's the right kind of number-crunchy for me.)
effectively my build at the moment is the *teleports behind you* "nothing personal kid" meme. i hide, run around the map, leap on top of people, and hopefully roll well enough to kill them and get out unscathed. right now i accomplish this with a neat sword and too many knives, but at my next opportunity i'll be swapping the sword for a spear, my absolute favorite weapon.
this of course led me to thinking about my preferred builds in other games; i like dragoons and rogues especially. i like having high movement, being sneaky, literally disappearing and reappearing and whatever's in my way just gets deleted.
and i like not getting hit.
i've always been a dodger and not a blocker. i would rather not get hit at all than have to handle the repercussions of a strike. my playstyles reflect this, and they've done so for most of my life across many kinds of games. and i thought about that, about why i gravitate toward that kind of gameplay. if i were being ungenerous, i would just say i'm a coward afraid of taking a hit.
but actually it's because i'm a perfectionist.
i think somewhere along the way, i associated "got hit" with "made a mistake" and i was taught that mistakes are just not acceptable. and games do reinforce this at times. sometimes games really do demand perfection! (or they seem like they do.)
but expecting perfection from jump is foolish, really. i have a little list of affirmations on manifest.app and the first one is "you will fuck up. that's okay." fucking up (more generously, making mistakes) is the only way to learn. even if you do have to perfectly execute on a task, how else are you supposed to learn how to do it?
even knowing this, i think i'll still gravitate toward these styles of play. i like going fast and doing acrobatic things! the real challenge will always be decoupling mistakes and failure. making a mistake or getting hit is not permanent failure, especially not in roleplaying games where "failures" can be just as interesting, if not more, than successes. the only real, true failure is giving up because i can't do something perfectly. and that's no fun for me, let alone for anyone else.
all this to say, if you're ever my gm, just expect that i'm going to create a character that spends more time climbing trees or not-existing than doing anything productive in combat.