3. Permanent Character Death - X amount of saves and/or time based life expectancy

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

Edited by - Paul Cunningham on September 15, 2000 12:26:53 PM

There''s a relevant article at:
www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/Ruleslawyer_Sergio_9_1.html

It takes a little patience to slog through, but there are some good conclusions. It breaks games into 3 sections:

1) Where you level up quickly and increase your skills rapidly
2) Where you have a fairly static set of skills that you work to apply in more effective ways, and
3) Where the skills are slowly declining and you must rely more on strategy and planning than brawn.

Most CRPGs focus on the first - it''s constant levelling up to then pursue the next higher level.

The third type would be more like chess, where you are slowly losing pieces and have to make up for the loss with better strategy.

The article argues that for an RPG to be successful, it should allow for all three kinds of play. Doing that well in a CRPG is difficult because the game rarely lasts long enough to cover all three phases. But it would require some better game mechanics to begin with.

Remember Planescape? Good game, but towards the end you were getting obscene experience for mundane tasks. It was victim of trying to fit a more mature game using a set of rules that were designed for character improvement only.

Stupid question: what''s powergaming?

I applogise for my newbieness...

Falden

quote: Original post by Falden

Stupid question: what''s powergaming?

I applogise for my newbieness...

Falden

It''s basically when people play a game only to excel in every possible way. All they care about is exploiting every possiblity for their advantage.

You could also say it''s throwing out any immersion to try and play the game as a set of numbers - enjoyment from finding the optimum path through the game, or maxing out the numbers in the game, rather than playing the game as an experience or role-playing through the story.

Have you played Gauntlet Legends lately? This game is the definition of Powermaxing. Note: Gauntlet Legends has nothing to do with the original Gauntlet-classic.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

I think the worst case of powergaming that I have seen is in UO. While I was out in the woods killing 3 grizzleys at a time a lot of my guildmates were going to a dungeon. In that dungeon, there was a spot where many characters would go to gain skills. Basically there was a spawn of bad a** skeleton''s and everyone was raking in on it. Everyone but me. A few weeks later when we had our first combat contest... I got my a$$ kicked. I couldn''t figure out how... I had become quite successful with my weapon of choice, the kryss and still I was losing to characters that had started playing the game well after I did.
Was I roleplaying or powergaming? Where my friends roleplaying or powergaming?

Another case is the group hunt. We would gather about 10-12 of us and go out for group hunts. Some people were healing and others were killing baddies. Was this roleplaying or powergaming?

I suppose the real question is: If there is an exploit in the game, how do we fix it? Or should we fix it?

Personally I think your trying to solve the problem from the wrong end... you can''t controll how a player behaves in the game, but you can controll how levels/skills are achieved.

The VenuSoft team has a novel approach to this in the works... I''m sure it will not stop players from "trying" to powermax, because that''s what they will try to do... but, it will elliminate the "maxed" player.



Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

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