The Difficulty in RPGs thread

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Wrathzog
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Post by Wrathzog »

Aryzbez wrote:So it should matter, that they're unable to take on level appropriate threats, diminishes how heroic and cool, they think their characters are.
I've been thinking about it and this is the same exact shit that came up when Mass Effect 3 revealed Narrative Mode. Narrative Mode put the game on super-easy, trivializing encounters for players who just wanted to get from one cut-scene to the next without all that shooty stuff getting in the way. And people got so Fucking FURIOUS about a game mode that they were never going to pick. But let's be real here:
Did playing the game on Narrative Mode somehow invalidate the experience for the player? No.
Are they getting less enjoyment out of the game than someone who was playing it on Action Mode or RP Mode? No.
Did it make Commander Shepard any less of a Galaxy Saving Bad Ass? Fuck No and [Right Hook].

D&D is no different. The play style of every group is going to be different and each group's play style is equally valid as long as they're having fun. To say otherwise is about as Asinine as you can get.

Disclaimer: Narrative-Mode gamers probably need to stay the fuck out of discussions centered around balance of the combat mini-game.
Last edited by Wrathzog on Mon Apr 08, 2013 9:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

Aryxbez wrote:Sounds like need a reality check, as they would be getting less out of the game. Weaker you are, the less fights you can have, the less BA-ness you can pull off in a given day, all calls for inferior experience in totality.
You need a reality check. You personally have never built characters up to the actual standard of CR. You personally are getting less of out the game. You personally make characters that provide the same inferior experience.

Why do you enjoy playing D&D without being able to make characters that actually play up to CR?

Answer: Because your DM doesn't play monsters up to CR, so you don't fucking notice.

It is exactly the fucking same for them. When they DM plays monsters lower, and the players play players lower, no one fucking has an inferior experience.
Aryxbez wrote:Should be obvious when their melee guy gets out melee'd by most basic melee monster of their level, or hell, lower!

Sure it's quite some arbitrary bits, but since the crowd we're regarding dwell on ignorance, they probably don't know that. So it should matter, that they're unable to take on level appropriate threats, diminishes how heroic and cool, they think their characters are. Which, given whole idea of D&D to play heroes defeating monsters, is being less as advertised, they should want to broaden their horizons to increase entertainment value. After all, they will brag how they play to "have fun", and would they seriously argue against having "More fun"?
It does not diminish how heroic and cool they think their characters are to have them fight lower CR opposition, just like it does not diminish how heroic and cool you think your characters are to have them fight opposition that is played far below CR, because that is the only way you personally do not get TPKed when you play, because you personally cannot play characters up to CR.

So any argument you make at other people is one that you should direct back at yourself.

Please for the love of god, if you fucking shitfaced dumbfuck post one more goddam post about how the hypothetical people who play "Tier 3" classes aren't living up to the standard of coolness and fun that you have established I will put you on fucking ignore, because you personally do not live up to the challenges that I throw at players or prefer from my games ever, and the only difference is that I am not being a condescending jackass telling you that you must not b having fun.
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Post by K »

Wrathzog wrote:
Aryzbez wrote:So it should matter, that they're unable to take on level appropriate threats, diminishes how heroic and cool, they think their characters are.
I've been thinking about it and this is the same exact shit that came up when Mass Effect 3 revealed Narrative Mode. Narrative Mode put the game on super-easy, trivializing encounters for players who just wanted to get from one cut-scene to the next without all that shooty stuff getting in the way. And people got so Fucking FURIOUS about a game mode that they were never going to pick.
The people who need high difficulty to enjoy things are never going to understand people who can enjoy games for other reasons.

The high difficulty gamers are living through the game to get a sense of self-worth since their actual lives don't have that, and that's just not a world-view that can be reconciled with any ordinary gaming experience.

I know this because I used to be a high-difficulty gamer, and now that my life is richer I don't have the need to get bragging rights so that I can brag to myself about how hardcore I am. For example, getting to Monster Difficulty 10 in Diablo 3 or playing Hardcore mode in D3 was something that I would have done when I was 15, and now I can only see the 500 hours it would take to do that is a waste of so much time better spent.
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

This seems somewhat relevant:
Mark Rosewater wrote:Spike is the competitive player. Spike plays to win. Spike enjoys winning. To accomplish this, Spike will play whatever the best deck is. Spike will copy decks off the Internet. Spike will borrow other players’ decks. To Spike, the thrill of Magic is the adrenalin rush of competition. Spike enjoys the stimulation of outplaying the opponent and the glory of victory.
(replace decks with builds and Magic with D&D)

And no, I don't think it's necessarily true that people who want to play the game on 'hard mode' don't get a sense of self-worth from their 'real lives'.
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Post by Whatever »

Here's the thing. If you want genuine challenges, you need a game that has:
1) tactical depth (it doesn't have to be Go, but it can't be tic tac toe)
2) human opponents (ie, not single player computer games OR D&D)
(Also, the game should not reward people for an overinvestment of time or money)

Those games can be worth spending time on, since you're actually learning tactics and strategies. The real life application of those may be limited, because real life isn't zero-sum, but you're still learning something that applies beyond the game itself.

Learning to beat Diablo 3 (or whatever) on hard mode is difficult, but it's not actually a challenge. You're just learning how to carefully execute whatever steps are needed to beat the computer. At best, you're developing skills that have some utility in sufficiently similar games, but not outside of that.

D&D is neither difficult nor a challenge. You can experience the same enjoyment and personal growth that you might get out of a book or a movie, but you're not learning any kind of competitive skills.
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Post by Username17 »

Whatever wrote:Here's the thing. If you want genuine challenges, you need a game that has:
1) tactical depth (it doesn't have to be Go, but it can't be tic tac toe)
2) human opponents (ie, not single player computer games OR D&D)
(Also, the game should not reward people for an overinvestment of time or money)

Those games can be worth spending time on, since you're actually learning tactics and strategies. The real life application of those may be limited, because real life isn't zero-sum, but you're still learning something that applies beyond the game itself.

Learning to beat Diablo 3 (or whatever) on hard mode is difficult, but it's not actually a challenge. You're just learning how to carefully execute whatever steps are needed to beat the computer. At best, you're developing skills that have some utility in sufficiently similar games, but not outside of that.

D&D is neither difficult nor a challenge. You can experience the same enjoyment and personal growth that you might get out of a book or a movie, but you're not learning any kind of competitive skills.
This probably sounded wise in your head, but it's complete unmitigated bullshit. Rock climbing is both difficult and challenging. Seriously. It is.

Not everything that has winners has human losers.

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Post by echoVanguard »

K wrote:The high difficulty gamers are living through the game to get a sense of self-worth since their actual lives don't have that, and that's just not a world-view that can be reconciled with any ordinary gaming experience.

I know this because I used to be a high-difficulty gamer, and now that my life is richer I don't have the need to get bragging rights so that I can brag to myself about how hardcore I am. For example, getting to Monster Difficulty 10 in Diablo 3 or playing Hardcore mode in D3 was something that I would have done when I was 15, and now I can only see the 500 hours it would take to do that is a waste of so much time better spent.
This is a shamefully despicable viewpoint for several reasons:

1. Your logic isn't sound. You assume that your specific example proves the general case, which is both lazy and ignorant. You're effectively making a global ad hominem on everyone who disagrees with you, which is not only repulsive but also childish and pointless.
2. Your assertion is simultaneously tremendously offensive and utterly without value, because it serves no purpose other than to brag about how much better your life is while denigrating others for bragging about things that you say don't matter.
3. Your assertion is harmful to both the continuance and the emergence of tabletop RPGs and the roleplaying hobby in general. You're performing the equivalent of posting on a model railroad hobbyist forum and telling people to stop screwing around with toy trains and get real jobs.

Your entire argument is poisonous and destructive to the discussion at hand, to the community, and to the real progress of RPG design as a whole. It is the sort of discourse a troll would post, and as a designer you definitely should be held to a higher standard. I am thoroughly disgusted.

echo
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Post by Ted the Flayer »

I feel like I'm the opposite.

When I was a kid, I always played on the easiest settings because I wanted to pretend I was good at them because I literally wasn't good at anything else.

These days, I default to medium difficulty because I don't need an ego boost.
Prak Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.
Frank Trollman wrote:I don't think that is any excuse for a game to have bad mechanics.
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Post by Aryxbez »

ishy wrote:So at what level are we supposed to play? Since weaker is less fun, you only play in max level games?
Should probably read my prior post from a page ago, where advocating away from "max level" (Wizard-level? I assume) games,thusly, somewhat the opposite. I thought I made it fairly clear, but any misconceptions, I will try to clear up if I can.
SlyJohnny wrote:Danger is also a matter of setting and feel, not just mechanics.
Say the adventure hook is you're driving your car through a post apocalyptic landscape from point A to B, but you run out of fuel. You have to ditch your car and go find more.

But this does not mean that every reasonable, mechanically-balanced campaign has to have the players as a team of unstoppable dangerous badasses.
I will make the side-note, that I do adore Post-apocalyptic genre, and probably would enjoy Scenario 1. However, I understand that it is a different breed of sort from D&D's heroic Fantasy. Even in the D&D sense, those scenarios are very easily a level range difference. Scenario 1, is one easier captured in 1-5th level range, while by mid levels-onward, scenario 2 will be much more common.

In regards to level ranges, at higher levels, PC's will be (or supposed to be) said "unstoppable dangerous bad@$$es". In case of Mid levels, if they're just fighting 1-5th opposition, then to that setting, they will be pretty unstoppable. Even a 6th level Fighter could fight a nearly infinite amount of Goblins/Orcs. At High Levels, that's kind of the idea here, the things that challenge them, are equally BA opposition, and thus brings ability to be threatened, and like, back into the fold.

Thusly, it's fine if people want to play low level apocalyptic games, but, I'm not gonna pretend Fallout is somehow a High Level game, or otherwise make 10th level into a 5th level game. Yes, I know ye can make an "Undead Apocalypse" by using Undead of Various CRs to fit into other level ranges, but that's not really the point. As then yes, those Undead are ideally, going to be less "The Walking Dead", and more Giant Flying Shadow bats, and the Hullathoin, not trying to force low level opposition to be relevant threat to high level characters.
but people who crave the first scenario aren't always just idiots that can't do math or that pride themselves on what hardcore, murderous DM's they are.
Sure, but their desire is probably a different level range, or perhaps a different game entirely. D&D is Heroic Fantasy, if anyone feels that's a point of contention, they can read the back of the goddamn PHB (also introductory as well). If they don't want to play to the level ranges where PC's are especially heroic and competent, then they should probably not do so, and that's totally cool.

Also, I don't think DM's need to be "Hardcore, murderous" to challenge PC's appropriately, but they shouldn't have to play monsters like complete retards either.

I also find it odd that people are implicating I'm all "Dark Souls hardcore" and need an Ego boost?
What I find wrong w/ 4th edition: "I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!" --Caedrus mocking 4rries

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Post by Whatever »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Whatever wrote:Here's the thing. If you want genuine challenges, you need a game that has:
1) tactical depth (it doesn't have to be Go, but it can't be tic tac toe)
2) human opponents (ie, not single player computer games OR D&D)
(Also, the game should not reward people for an overinvestment of time or money)

Those games can be worth spending time on, since you're actually learning tactics and strategies. The real life application of those may be limited, because real life isn't zero-sum, but you're still learning something that applies beyond the game itself.

Learning to beat Diablo 3 (or whatever) on hard mode is difficult, but it's not actually a challenge. You're just learning how to carefully execute whatever steps are needed to beat the computer. At best, you're developing skills that have some utility in sufficiently similar games, but not outside of that.

D&D is neither difficult nor a challenge. You can experience the same enjoyment and personal growth that you might get out of a book or a movie, but you're not learning any kind of competitive skills.
This probably sounded wise in your head, but it's complete unmitigated bullshit. Rock climbing is both difficult and challenging. Seriously. It is.

Not everything that has winners has human losers.

-Username17
I was only talking about games. And I should have made that more clear. Obviously there's plenty of "stuff" you can do that's both hard to do, and leads to personal growth. But rock climbing isn't a game, and I'm not sure in what sense it has "winners".

Puzzles would be a better refutation of my point, though, because I really was just blathering on because it sounded good in my head. I'll have to commit sudoku to atone for my shame.
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Post by Stubbazubba »

echoVanguard wrote:
K wrote:The high difficulty gamers are living through the game to get a sense of self-worth since their actual lives don't have that, and that's just not a world-view that can be reconciled with any ordinary gaming experience.

I know this because I used to be a high-difficulty gamer, and now that my life is richer I don't have the need to get bragging rights so that I can brag to myself about how hardcore I am. For example, getting to Monster Difficulty 10 in Diablo 3 or playing Hardcore mode in D3 was something that I would have done when I was 15, and now I can only see the 500 hours it would take to do that is a waste of so much time better spent.
This is a shamefully despicable viewpoint for several reasons:

1. Your logic isn't sound. You assume that your specific example proves the general case, which is both lazy and ignorant. You're effectively making a global ad hominem on everyone who disagrees with you, which is not only repulsive but also childish and pointless.
2. Your assertion is simultaneously tremendously offensive and utterly without value, because it serves no purpose other than to brag about how much better your life is while denigrating others for bragging about things that you say don't matter.
3. Your assertion is harmful to both the continuance and the emergence of tabletop RPGs and the roleplaying hobby in general. You're performing the equivalent of posting on a model railroad hobbyist forum and telling people to stop screwing around with toy trains and get real jobs.

Your entire argument is poisonous and destructive to the discussion at hand, to the community, and to the real progress of RPG design as a whole. It is the sort of discourse a troll would post, and as a designer you definitely should be held to a higher standard. I am thoroughly disgusted.

echo
Agreed with eV. This was possibly the stupidest post I've seen on the issue, and considering everything that LM has said both in this thread and before it, that's saying something.

I know people I've just introduced to RPGs who have extremely well-rounded, successful, and fulfilling professional and personal lives who find the most fulfillment in games that are competitive or at the very least very challenging to them. They're just not in to stories and narrative in their game, even though they read fantasy as much, if not more, than I do. This is extremely normal. What rock is K living under where he could possibly get the impression that his was a universal condition?
Last edited by Stubbazubba on Tue Apr 09, 2013 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by ishy »

Aryxbez wrote:
ishy wrote:So at what level are we supposed to play? Since weaker is less fun, you only play in max level games?
Should probably read my prior post from a page ago, where advocating away from "max level" (Wizard-level? I assume) games,thusly, somewhat the opposite. I thought I made it fairly clear, but any misconceptions, I will try to clear up if I can.
But if you aren't playing at lvl 20 and below wizard level then:
Aryxbez wrote:Sounds like need a reality check, as they would be getting less out of the game. Weaker you are, the less fights you can have, the less BA-ness you can pull off in a given day, all calls for inferior experience in totality. [ . . . ]
Which, given whole idea of D&D to play heroes defeating monsters, is being less as advertised, they should want to broaden their horizons to increase entertainment value. After all, they will brag how they play to "have fun", and would they seriously argue against having "More fun"?
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Post by K »

Stubbazubba wrote: extremely well-rounded, successful, and fulfilling professional and personal lives
Not only do those kinds of gamers not exist, but those kinds of people don't exist. I don't know why you think that these unicorns are avid gamers.

I stand by my appraisal that hyper-competitive gamers are overcompensating. You can't achieve high levels of skill without sinking a lot of time into a task, and spending that time means that there is not a lot of remaining time for friends, family, and career.

The guy who games all weekend does not have a good marriage, happy kids, and a promotion on the way. It's a simple matter of hours in the day and the amount of time it takes to accomplish those tasks.
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Post by Mistborn »

Just leave the thread K, seriously.
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Post by Username17 »

K, you just went full crazy. Take a step back, take a long calm breath, and meditate for a moment. People who like to play games on hard mode are exactly like people who like to play games on easy mode. It's a completely irrelevant personal preference. And people who are in one camp or the other are not morally or spiritually superior to anyone else.

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Post by K »

FrankTrollman wrote:K, you just went full crazy. Take a step back, take a long calm breath, and meditate for a moment. People who like to play games on hard mode are exactly like people who like to play games on easy mode. It's a completely irrelevant personal preference. And people who are in one camp or the other are not morally or spiritually superior to anyone else.

-Username17
There is no moral or spiritual component here. No one is the superior. If the guy in college who barely dates wants to spend his time studying and playing hard games, then that's simply a choice of time allocation.

Difficulty is just a slider for how much of a time sink a task is. Complicated rulesets take time to master. Complicated games take time to master. Games that require a lot of skill to keep playing take time to acquire that skill. This is a non-controversial and obvious statement for most people.

The people who need to spend that time are not going to ever want to game with the people who have other things competing for time, and it goes both ways. People with kids can't hang out for 26 hours at someone's house in the marathon gaming sessions like unattached college or high school kids can, so there is no point from a design standpoint in making a single game to cover both groups.

They need separate games. Boardgames already accept this by basically designing around the expected experience and keeping to it; some people play Fluxx because a a few 20 minute games are in their time budget and some people play Arkham Horror because 3-4 hours is in their time budget.

The only judgement here is on the people who think that one game can cover both kinds of people who are made happy by things on opposite ends of the design scale.
Last edited by K on Wed Apr 10, 2013 3:18 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

No K, you're still going the full asshole. Whether people like games that are hard and take a lot of repeats to get short distances or games that are easy and allow them to make a lot of progress with little effort has absolutely nothing to do with whether they have girlfriends.

And it's super dickish to imply otherwise.

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Post by K »

FrankTrollman wrote:No K, you're still going the full asshole. Whether people like games that are hard and take a lot of repeats to get short distances or games that are easy and allow them to make a lot of progress with little effort has absolutely nothing to do with whether they have girlfriends.

And it's super dickish to imply otherwise.

-Username17
Read some of the design documents for computer games like World of Warcraft. They really do design around the amount of free time of their expected player and they set difficulties to that expected time that player is going to expend. People who don't have a lot of free time need quick successes and a feeling of accomplishing things while people with more time want to keep plugging away at difficult-to-achieve goals. This is what they've learned from exhaustive market testing.

It's literally the whole philosophy behind grinding.

If people are personally offended by how they so easily fit into a market research category, I don't know what to tell them. It sounds like a personal problem.
Last edited by K on Wed Apr 10, 2013 3:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

K, what you're saying about time budgeting is true but also completely divorced from your assertion that happy people do not exist and wouldn't play "hard mode" TTRPGs if they did. Someone with a successful job and a girlfriend can be too busy to play a game that takes them longer than about thirty minutes to play at a time, but that doesn't mean that thirty minute game can't be exactly as difficult as a 3-hour one they don't have time for. It is trivially easy to create a very easy game that takes a very long amount of time to complete (World of Warcraft, your own example, falls into this category). It's much harder to create a very hard game that takes a short amount of time to play (or at least play one session of), but it is entirely doable.

I struggle to understand what kind of experiences could cause someone as intelligent as you to latch onto a delusion this far outside of observable reality.
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Post by K »

Chamomile wrote: It is trivially easy to create a very easy game that takes a very long amount of time to complete (World of Warcraft, your own example, falls into this category).
World of Warcraft is designed to be played in small components of time. Each reward comes in a few hours of gameplay, and so getting that reward has to be easy. The fact that you can repeat that cycle of effort and reward indefinitely does not make it a high difficulty or high time game.

Other MMOs are not the same. Final Fantasy XI has single goals that take years of actual realtime to achieve, and even the most achievable goals take thousands of hours when they can be achieved at all.

At best, you can create different places in your game where one or the other kind of player will feel at home. The guys who log onto WoW for a few hours of leveling solo once a week are never going to be invited into one of the top raiding guilds that schedules 20 hours a week of mandatory events, but the two can pass each other in town while they are playing their respective versions of the game.

But they can't play the same tabletop RPG set of rules. There isn't enough conceptual room to have both kinds of players. You either cater to one or the other. There is no one-size-fits all design in RPGs.

As for happiness.... that's not a meaningful issue and not what I was talking about. There are unhappy people who are killing it at work and only have a few hours to play and happy people with shit jobs and no family who play more hours than they work. Available time and how it relates to difficulty is the only issue.
Last edited by K on Wed Apr 10, 2013 4:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by RobbyPants »

K wrote: Read some of the design documents for computer games like World of Warcraft. They really do design around the amount of free time of their expected player and they set difficulties to that expected time that player is going to expend. People who don't have a lot of free time need quick successes and a feeling of accomplishing things while people with more time want to keep plugging away at difficult-to-achieve goals. This is what they've learned from exhaustive market testing.

It's literally the whole philosophy behind grinding.

If people are personally offended by how they so easily fit into a market research category, I don't know what to tell them. It sounds like a personal problem.
K, Frank is basically saying there are four quadrants to the graph, whereas you're saying it's simply linear. Just because the people who designed WoW are only concerned with two quadrants doesn't mean the other two don't exist; they just don't cater to them explicitly.


Edit: Added a quote to the post I was replying to, since K replied again while I was writing the post.
Last edited by RobbyPants on Wed Apr 10, 2013 4:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by K »

RobbyPants wrote: K, Frank is basically saying there are four quadrants to the graph, whereas you're saying it's simply linear. Just because the people who designed WoW are only concerned with two quadrants doesn't mean the other two don't exist; they just don't cater to them explicitly.
There are people in the other quadrants, but there aren't significant amounts of them.

I mean, there are people who like high difficulty and don't expend a lot of time and people who like it easy and to take a lot of time, but they are such a small part of the gaming population that you shouldn't design for them.

That's just how the demographic breaks down.

You could design games for those very small audiences, but that just seems a recipe for a failed enterprise. I mean, it'd be like designing products for chess grandmasters or legally-blind gamers.... they exist, but you aren't going to cover your costs with that market.
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Post by ishy »

Playing at different can also change difficulties tactics you can use.

Say for example I'm playing a shooter with a friend.
If I'm playing with someone who is better than me, I'd play at a higher difficulty and utilise cover and ranged attacks (since enemy accuracy is usually lower with greater distances).

If I'm playing with someone who is worse than me, I'd play at an easier difficulty, ignore cover and just shotgun/melee people in the face.

If I changed those tactics around, I'd die very often on higher difficulty and probably get bored at lower difficulty.
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Bigode wrote:I wouldn't normally make that blanket of a suggestion, but you seem to deserve it: scroll through the entire forum, read anything that looks interesting in term of design experience, then come back.
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Post by Username17 »

Challenge and time expended are not remotely similar variable. Some people want short, hard games. Some people want long, hard games. Some people want short, easy games. Some people want long, easy games. It's not even related to have much total free time people have, because some people want to spend a short amount of time many times on long games, while other people want to spend a short amount of time each on many different games at one time.

It's just a ridiculous argument, and more than a little insulting.

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Post by John Magnum »

Let's add a second dimension to the Ron Edwards Big Three. Some people like Long Simulationist games, some people like Short Narrative games. You have to focus in and design your game to exactly one element in the set

Code: Select all

{Long, Short} x {Narrative, Simulation, Game}
or else it will be trying to be too many things to too many people and it will be a nightmarish chimera failure of design.
-JM
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