Re: Difficulty Balance

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007, R. G. 'Stumpy' Marsh wrote:
> Which just goes to show that expectations are as im****tant as outcomes
> to the enjoyment level.  I know many gamers who happily play Paranoia
> to the disintegration of their last clone, mostly in fits of laughter
> all the way.  Put those same players in a cyberpunk game and they'll
> fight tooth and nail to survive, but accept their losses, and in a
> typical D&D adventure they might feel cheated if even one of them
> died.

Correct.  And I think this hobby is filled with plenty of other 
expectation mixes that sometimes don't match others in the group.  That's 
why I wish we had a better game theory toolkit to use to diagnose why 
games work and don't work.

> For what it's worth, it seems to me that the best characters come from
> the Cyberpunk game, where character death is a not-infrequent and not
> unexpected occurrence, but TPK is thus far unheard of.

In my experience, characters dying too often as well as characters not 
dying often enough can both cause players to take the game and their 
characters less seriously, but what constitutes "too often" and "often 
enough" probably varies between groups and individual.  The problem there 
can be that the player loses suspension of disbelief or the player 
withdraws from attachment to the characters and/or setting because they 
don't like what's happening.  Role-playing, after all, is supposed to be 
an enjoyable activity and not everything that can happen to characters 
will be enjoyable to everyone.

The TPK is a particular problem because the structure of the hobby is to 
tie adventures to parties of characters.  If all of the characters in a 
party die, often (not always) the adventure dies with them.  While it's 
possible to create new characters for the same adventure, playing those 
characters through learning the same things earlier characters learned is 
often not fun because it's the same players behind those characters do the

same sorts of things all over again.  This is less of a problem in short 
adventures and one-shots, where the investment of time in the adventure
is also low.  But where the investment is high, players often expect
some sort of closure for an adventure.  Ultimately, I think these are
all player issues more than role-playing issues or character issues.

John Morrow