Tiktacy wrote:What is this "greater challenge" you speak of? I never said it was more difficult.
Yes, I was the one who said "greater challenge," not you. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, rather I was making a comment on the basis of reading between the lines of what you wrote. Having a few close calls and one near death experience while running strong builds is, I think, pretty close to a good difficulty level. Certainly better than how it is now, where most people generally get a fairly high level (~character level 20) character who can absolutely sleepwalk through the first 4 levels of any lair branch and may have, at most, a little bit of a challenge on level 5 (and sometimes not even that).
You said, "I found it made no difference, I didn't die in any of my games" — quite simply, I don't think that's a good way to determine whether rune lock provides a good challenge. On the other hand, saying you had some close calls and a near death experience sounded rather promising. These were only three games, all played by same person, so yes a very limited sample size and all. But if that ends up being the typical experience with it, then I'd say that is about right, in my opinion.
EDIT: Rebthor—to be fair, dpeg said that if a few specific species and/or builds end up being *too* harshly punished by rune lock, then there could be things done give players a bit of a break in those specific circumstances.
Let's try to maintain a clear, birds-eye view of what is needed with respect to game play variability. It is important that there are
1.) at least a
few strong, straightforward, and (thus) relatively newbie-friendly options representing at least a few very different approaches to the game;
2.) at least
several strong, but not necessarily newbie-friendly, options representing different types of approaches to the game;
3.) and
many other *viable* options that definitely fall short of a "power-combo" but are still not exactly a "challenge-game only" build.
So long as conditions 1 through 3 are met, then everything else can be challenge or variant builds, to some degree or another (and of course there's as much of a spectrum here as there is in items 1 to 3 above). Rune lock may shuffle a few specific builds from one category to another, but I doubt it would really "break" the game with respect to keeping this fundamental balance.