Tuesday, 4th August 2015, 17:08 by Siegurt
The thing is we actually have 3 different games we're talking about here:
1. You are XL1, and have no tools at your disposal, the options which you have at your disposal are *extremely* limited, there's "fight something and win", "Don't fight and run away (provided you have explored space enough that this is plausible)" and "Fight something you should win against most of the time, and if things go poorly use pillar dancing to reset the fight, and hope you don't die to energy randomization while doing so (or that energy randomization works in your favor and you can use it to escape altogether)"
2. You are in the very early game but not XL1, you have *some* choices, but they're fairly limited, what kind of choices you have depend on what consumable's you've found, what equipment you've found, if you have spells in your starting spellbook which might help etc. A well built early game character will often but not always have more choices than an XL1 character (possibly some risky choices like drinking unid'd potions), and moreover the separation between "fight that you should win" and "fight you might not win" is much clearer once you have a couple more XL's of HPs. So you're not nearly as likely to lose a fight you would expect to win.
3. You are not in the early game, you should definitely have some sort of (possibly in limited supply) escape options, you can end up in a fight that you should win, which is unluckily going poorly for you, and still win or escape, so as long as your decision making about what to engage is solid, you shouldn't die to bad luck.
Sandman's position seems to be that in game 1, it *should* just be a crapshoot, binary unanticipatable death should be encouraged and that going from 3 options to 2 would be better, I'm guessing that his contention stems from the fact that having the third option available in all games, makes game 3 (the one you play for longer) potentially tedious.
After 25+ years designing games for myself and my friends, one thing I can tell you is that if you want anyone to enjoy your game, you *always* include some hope, the hope can be slim and unlikely, it can be unreliable, it can be difficult to pursue, it can even be tedious, (it can even be false as long as no-one finds out) but a game with no hope at all is simply frustrating. With no outlet to hope for at all, it's only interesting as an academic puzzle, to be completed once and then put down forever.
Note that the hope I'm talking about also has to be a choice, something that the player can *do or not do* it can't be the default activity and hoping that the dice roll in your favor (In the case of a fight, it can't be "just keep fighting and hope things work out" for instance).
HP/MP regeneration while moving isn't *required* to provide that hope, energy randomization alone would be sufficient, if it were random enough that it would actually be possible to escape otherwise hopeless situations with some frequency, it would also be sufficient if every character started with a scroll of teleport, or some sort of costly ability that would let them escape in some fashion, or you could have every creature move slightly faster than the player, but have the possibility of being distracted and wandering off if you didn't hit them for a while. You could even do something silly like have HP/MP regeneration while moving be a thing at XL1, but go away by the time you're in game 3. (I feel like that would be inconsistent and awkward as hell, also counter to the whole "Gaining XP shouldn't ever make you worse" but it would work)
There's lots of possible solutions, however removing *all* hope from situation 1 characters will make me (and a lot of other people) not enjoy the game at all any more, therefore I feel it's appropriate to talk about if pillar dancing does go away, what should replace it, because with nothing replacing it, you no longer have a game.
Changes don't and shouldn't happen in a vacuum, good game design means you look at how to take out things that are boring or detrimental, but you also figure out how to replace them, when they provide something valuable to the game.
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- For this message the author Siegurt has received thanks: 2
- bel, WingedEspeon