In message <1168612722.037067.108190@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
"gleichman" <fox1_217@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Simon Smith wrote:
> > A scenario may be too difficult for a multitude of reasons, of which
> > excessive tactical difficulty is just one - albeit the one most easy
to
> > identify. Any group running at the upper limits of its performance
band
> > would benefit from a slight difficulty reduction, and any group
running
> > /above/ the upper limits of its performance band obviously needs the
> > difficulty to be reduced. There's nothing controversial in either of
those
> > two statements.
>
> I'm afraid there is. It is certainly imposing your limits on people you
> don't even know. I for one am not willing to make a blanket statement
> like that.
>
> Mainly because I have indeed seen groups who completely and utter
> enjoyed 50% TPK results over a series of adventure- and who would
> consider your "benefits" either redundant (i.e. they already had them)
> or unwanted.
>
> People play the games for different reasons and different method.
> Everything you consider good is bad to someone, everything you consider
> bad is good. Time to get used to it if you're wi****ng to exchange
> thoughts with people outside your social group and experience.
If the players are still enjoying themselves, and still roleplaying well
(including playing well in the gamist sense) then they're still within
their
competence band, and there's no need for a difficulty reduction. It's easy
to see that that's still possible even with TPKs every other scenario.
Just think of a group of soldiers on what they know to be a suicide
mission,
fighting for some sort of noble objective. Hell, there's some classic
cinematic examples of this sort of thing: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid; The Magnificent Seven; By Dawn's Early Light; many films from the
Hong
Kong action movie genre, where they're much more prepared to kill off the
heroes than Hollywood. The challenge becomes not survival, but how far the
characters can get before they are brought down, or how much damage they
can
do, or going out in style, or final bonding with comrades. (The latter is
why I mentioned By Dawn's Early Light, which is basically just talk).
Those
can be great fun, and can give some of the best roleplaying experiences
people ever have.
If you will forgive the levity, the tone/lethality spectrum I posted
earlier
could be expanded upwards still further:
....
150% TPK
200% Paranoia
....
:-)
And you could also expand the table to cover the horror genre - everything
from Call of Cthulhu to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But even if you have a group of players who are cool both with TPKs and
any
level of tactical difficulty up to and including completely impossible,
there's still going to be some other kinds of excessive difficulty that
they
don't enjoy. That's why I still don't consider what I said above
controversial. You have yet to come up with any examples of 'genuinely too
difficult' from your own games.
--
Simon Smith
When emailing me, please use my preferred email address, which is on my
web
site at http://www.simon-smith.org
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