Re: Difficulty Balance

In message <eo6mcm$26r$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:

>One is:  do the characters have time?  If each and every PC must do the
>tactically perfect thing each and every round of combat or it's TPK, my
>subjective sense is that there is "not time" for any roleplaying, at
>least not the kind that is expressed in character actions.  I suppose the
>PCs could talk or feel, but their decisions cannot express their
>characters, because they don't have any "spare" decisions, except the
>decision to die.

This, and the feelings you associate with it (which I can relate to,
BTW), strike me as being akin to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or
Combat Fatigue.  Some soldiers learn to shut off certain mental and
emotional responses in order to survive combat, and then find
themselves dysfunctional when the pressure is released as they either
fail to re-enable those responses for use in civilian life, or suffer
some sort of overload when they are re-enabled.

At least, that's my pop-psych take on it.

And as the ubiquitous "they" say: War is Hell.

I'm with Mary on this.  Hell is no fun.  Conflict can be fun.  You
only have to look at s****ts, board games and the like to see that. But
grinding conflict with (subjectively) high stakes and very narrow
success parameters is more like war than s****ts.  I don't think it's
contentious to assert that it's a lot more fun being a s****ting hero
than a war hero.  I would find it surprising if most players didn't
prefer the "70 yard touchdown in the dying seconds to win the game"
kind of heroism over the "died fighting a doomed rear-guard action to
save his platoon" kind of heroism.