The honest 'No Challenge' gamer

Wow. I just found a post by someone who openly says they want something that I suspect alot of other gamers do, but just can't openly admit it. Link.

And to quote it

I'll continue to freely admit that I don't want challenge in my games. I want a story about how my character starts awesome (born the chosen one) and then goes about being awesome (fated to save the world). It's already known and decided that the world will be saved, the story is just how that comes about. The drama comes from the NPCs who can't or won't hop on the train of inevitability to awesometown.

I want the game to be a sycophant for me. In the movie Minority Report where there is that virtual "arcade" (or whatever you want to call it) where people are in pods where their fantasies are being enacted, crowds shouting adorations, etc. That's what I want out of an RPG.

 See, I hate the game style, but because this guy is honest and open I think that's valid. It's where someone wants this, but they pretend they are gaming in some other way, that strikes me as denial. A kind of gamer closet, if you will.

I'm actually thankful of coming across this. So many times I suspect someone just wants the above but wont admit it - I try and describe it but they will tip toe around it, even as they use a bunch of techniques to make the above happen. Now I don't have to describe it in abstract - I have a living, breathing example of a real person embracing this gaming. One of the things that kept it all in the closet is only being able to refer to it in abstract before. Hell, even the word sycophancy - I've wanted to use that exact word! Perfect example!

Lost in Bloglation

I just blundered with three posts in a row on another blog, one with a white background.

In my defence, imagine if someone said "Hey, we saw this house on fire today. So, I start talking with a guy about the firehose..."

"The fireman was talking to you instead of putting out the fire!?"

"No, listen, I didn't say a fireman, I just said a guy."

"So you talked with him about the fire, how big it was? What sort of hose you need to put it out, maybe?"

"No, listen again, we talked about the firehose! It's a firehose talk!"

"But...isn't the fire the big thing you first mentioned?"


So, having said that - how do you feel about white backgrounds in blogs?

Any comments that aren't discussing white backgrounds are off topic! >:)

I mean, you can see that's what I wanted to talk about. I did mention it at the top, after all!

Just teasing. ;)

(I should probably note my prior post is a result of such missunderstanding, but I'm too lazy to edit and atleast in the context I wrote it, it's applicable. Even if no one was talking about that at the time!!)

Yet another TPK dysfunction: Death Illusionists

I was reading Zak's blog and wrote an overly long reply, which I think warrants repeating on my own blog (dang I hate how I tend to be more inspired to write in responce to people rather than simply writing when I decide to) .

I'll quote a sample of the guy Zak was talking to/about. And I'll highlight the important part.

THe way I see it is, I want to have maximum control over the encounter difficulty so that when my party fights a BBEG or other major battle, I can be reasonably sure that they're not going to end up steamrolling it or being TPK'd unexpectedly. In my experience that's not really fun for the players or the DM. To me a lot of the drama from combat is sometimes coming down to the wire. Who is going to win? I want to be able to play my NPCs and monsters to their fullest without either wiping the party or being slaughtered, unless of course that's the purpose of the encounter.

The guy wants complete control over whether a TPK happens, which is to say he wants to make sure a TPK does not happen.

You can actually see the contrast in Zak's post

Zak S - Exactly! I want to be able to play my monsters and NPCs to the fullest knowing It MIGHT lead to a TPK!

You can see the difference between "without" and "might". But even Zak's "might" is problematic.

So, here's my comment:

You do know this guy is trying for the illusion of death/a TPK, by having a system which is so fined tuned it appears your going to die, but actually it's so fined tuned you wont. He just can't admit that, he has to say "I want to better gauge the results". And why does he need to better gauge them/know them in advance? So he can pick the one where the group doesn't die.

It's a recurring phenomena in gamers. I've had this chat with a friend of mine where he was doing everything to stop a PC from dying, yet when I suggested we just acknowledge PC's can't die, just defeated, he couldn't stomach it. And here's a link to another, with the guy quoted. He has a million reasons why killing PC's sucks, yet he can't get that that means PC's will never die (the system certainly wont force him to kill a PC - so if he hates killing PC's, when are PC's ever going to die? Never. But he couldn't admit that).

Not that your own approach isn't potentially problematic
Sure they sometimes steamroll or get TPK'd (maybe 10% of the time)
So let's say a TPK happens 5% of the time. So after, on average, twenty fights the whole party dies and everyone makes new characters? Predictably? So you'd never really make double digit levels, let alone top level. That kind of conflicts with the high levels. Which if your cool with that, okay.

Or does TPK mean one guy actually gets away and arranges some recover or resurrection? Or even if no one gets away, res's can still occur? In these cases the K in TPK stands more for Knock Out than kill. TPKO.

The death thing is a problematic issue (which leads to gamers like the linked guy, who can't admit they are attempting to have the illusion of being able to die, while fiercely demanding rules which will avoid death occuring (always by an apparent skin of the PC's teeth though (though on serious analysis, its not at all skin of the teeth)) or you just get a TPK predictably after X amount of combats. It doesn't matter if it's a 1% chance of TPK, if you do around 100 combats, you eventually die.

SWTOR comparisons to WOW: Why not compare it to any single player RPG?

If you have a prior game like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which involves killing monsters and doin' quests, does it seem missplaced to say Star Wars: The Old Republic is a clone of World of Warcraft?

Really that game structure is in alot of single player RPG's.

Of course maybe SWTOR picks up nuances of WOW's overall design. But if WOW's only distinguishing features are nuances of design, it's not like theres some sort of deep substance there to be copied.

SWTOR: Search your feelings...you know it's romance!

The Star Wars: The Old Republic mmorpg seems to be provoking ground you don't see much in other mmorpgs. A romance thread, for example.

Maybe we'll see more mmorpgs cover this sort of dimension in future, where we consider how we relate to each other in a way that isn't hacking each others head off or counting how many more purples we have than the other guy?

A new hope.

The make money tag was for lol, BTW! >:)