_noblesse_oblige_ wrote: ↑April 2nd, 2017, 12:08 pm
Games are meant to be fun. Not everything in a game needs to be rewarding, but the idea is that it should be fun.
Even tickling, and ice-cream gets old. You get sick of it if you experience it without end. Games are meant to be fun, but not everything in a game is (or should be) meant to be fun. Just think of Monopoly... and the Go To Jail square. That's what I meant by 'things hopefully avoided' and 'not always under player control'.
Games of chance can be fun because of the duality between loss and gain - with the chance of losing comes the chance of winning. However, for games of skill, probability may be a factor which affects the game, but the idea is that the player can mitigate circumstances through skill of play. If you allow a player's characters to be robbed without giving any recourse to defend against said robbery, then there is no skill in play and it is not a good game of chance either, because the player only has the chance to lose and not to gain from the event.
?
Do you mean that your take on the conversation was that I somewhere implied that the PC could randomly lose their wealth & inventory ~as with a pop-up menu saying "Surprise! ~You've Been Robbed!"... Like a chance card in Monopoly? I certainly did not.
Consider that RPGs
are games of chance, and that the skill involved ~is that of the PC in play. The PC is the player's window to the world, but it is the PC living in it, and influencing it to the limits of their ability; making the world available. So long as the PC cannot force their way in, sneak their way in, or talk their way in ~then the player shouldn't ever get in; and these actions are decided by the PCs ability to control the situation.
Gizmo wrote: ↑April 1st, 2017, 9:53 pm
Just as odd and incredulous as fighting 396 Berserkers in a single tile?
Relevance?
Abstraction of space. Not everything has to be modeled with perfect realism. Sometimes it is funner to go with a mechanism that is less realistic but more enjoyable.
True, but unrelated to sentiment. The Berserkers quote was a jab; akin to the ever common "Realism, in a world with faeries & dragons? What talk is this!?"... Where the reply mistakes consistency for plausibility. In a world with dragons as an implausible fact of life ~they deal with it because that's their reality... Realism ~in context. Smaug turning into papa-smurf to follow Bilbo through the backdoor, or Golem disguising himself as Galadriel to steal the ring... That's incredulous.
Gizmo wrote: ↑April 1st, 2017, 9:53 pm
What's wrong with getting a convenience for free? That sounds really
convenient.
I would say for the same reason bullet's aren't free. Most conveniences aren't free. Nothing that's free is valued ~because it's free; things only become valued when they become scarce and no longer free. Air becomes valuable when you don't have any. IMO no game system or privilege should be worthless; including money mechanics. Being able to spend money is its own privilege ~separate from having the money itself. (Consider the bank robber... sitting on a the million that she can't spend yet.)
If the player wants the PC to to have that much money on their person at all times, they should have to do what it takes to facilitate that (including defending it from theft). If the PC isn't strong enough to carry it, they should have to get stronger, have to discard something, have to trade it for lighter valuables, or have to get help carrying it.
Having a weightless, invisible, un-steal-able bag of money is itself a source of incredulity. It takes away story potential, and certain limitations from the character. It's also a kind of special ability that lets them show up anywhere without notice, carrying their entire net worth, and even if the designer wanted them to get robbed...and took money from them, plausibly it should be an all or nothing ordeal ~because they have all of it with them, or else the thief showed restraint when they mugged them...

... stealing only so much of the PC's money, and leaving the rest.
Games which force people to do things repetitively and by rote are games which annoy and frustrate their players.
You have that right... I have seen at least one RPG where picking up found money
wasn't optional, and was done automatically every time. The designers just assumed that the player would take everything not nailed down, whether it was in character or not.
Streamline mundane tasks so that people can focus on the fun stuff.
That is a very subjective action. I would say that Bethesda did this in spades with FO3, and ruined it as an RPG. Their idea of fun involves supporting the world sim (ie. maintaining the PA theme park ride); ensuring that nothing offends or annoys the playing customer while they are in their branded sandbox... So the player can do no wrong, and always has an out ~no matter what they do; and everything is available to them to do ~regardless of whether their character could/would/shouldn't, or should. For Bethesda, the character is a vestigial RPG relic that gets in the way of the player's fun.
When they streamlined the skills ~of which none now really matter. They got rid of the PC's ability ~
(or inability!) to search for traps and aim fire-arms; their gun skills effects are negligible except in VATS. They hamfistedly combined First-Aid with Doctor, to form the "Medical' skill; a mere multiplier for stimpack efficiency; with the side effects that they can now heal concussions with an injection to the skull. In Fallout stimpacks did not heal crippling injuries like broken bones or obstructed vision. The PCs needed to seek a doctor (,or be one) to cure that.
First-Aid was sport's medicine and minor would dressing skill... Doctor was for serious injury correction; essentially they were a Nurse and Surgeon skill respectively. First-Aid could be improved by skill books, Doctor could not. Doctor was a development path that affected conversations... And above all, the system allowed for six healing attempts per day ~without stimpacks; none guaranteed, and only three could remove crippling conditions. The player had to prioritize who got what treatment, and who's condition was worth the risk of failure ~at the expense of treating others, or themselves.
Streamlining removes [welcome] complexity.
Streamlining made injury in FO3 a joke; where in Fallout it was life threatening.
When one streamlines throwing, melee, and hand-to-hand into a single skill, it means that every champion fencer is also a champion pitcher, boxer; and vice versa for each. (And all of them are Kung-Fu masters)

It reduces the potential character variations in any game. And anyone whose good at one thing, is then equally good at several things ~whether it makes sense or not.
I've seen one free convenience that actually helped gameplay... In Grimrock, the player is playing four PCs, and it was added that those PCs equipped with bows would automatically pick up their spent arrows, if the party passed directly over them on the ground. The same was done for knife throwers, and PCs using slings.. They wouldn't pick up just any rocks, they picked up their own.