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Originally Posted by
Darth Ultron
It is not good or bad...it is just different. And that is the whole point. The idea that everyone must make a meaningful contribution to every single encounter is the modern idea.
OS game, each player and each character get a chance to do something thoroughout the whole adventure..but yes, sometimes they just sit and wait..and sometimes others sit and wait...and everyone is fine with that.
The Modern game is just endless watching and nitpicking for as soon as a single player is even slightly lessened for even a moment....the game has a balance problem.
As a modern gamer, I'm offended that you're generalizing everyone so extremely. If you actually believe that, I'd say screw you, but you'd probably just say something about me being a whiny bitch and dismiss any arguments I made on that basis. (Not that I feel I should have to, given that your "argument" just just a series of wild assertions about how valorously patient gamers were in the good ol' days and how whiny, impatient, and/or oversensitive kids these days are.)
If you
don't actually believe that argument, but made it anyway, that's almost worse.
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Game balance is a mechanical, roll playing thing...not a role playing thing. If a player is obsessed with the numbers and roll playing, then they are not role playing.
Stormwind Fallacy alert!
Roleplaying and rollplaying can intersect, but never in the sense that one precludes the other. You can do both! I'd explain more, but it should be frickin' obvious enough that I don't have to.
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Modern gaming puts the overwhelming emphasis on mechanics as a way to balance the game, as, of course, they can be measured and compared. You can easily say that the game is balanced, when all characters have the same +10 or equivalent. To the Modern Game, Role Playing is just fluff to be done outside of combat or other mechanical roll playing.
Or--and here's a funny idea--maybe it's just that game designers only influence rollplay, and should make sure that works as well as possible! Maybe the gamers at home shouldn't be forced to balance the rollplaying enough that it doesn't impede the roleplaying!
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Well, note this is not being submissive. This is you not having the proper amount of Game Mastery to make the type of character you wanted to play in the game. In your example here, it would seem you wanted to have a pure roll playing combat character, but you simply did not make one to play.
I could make a big stink about how you're misrepresenting the situation explained in sentences of that post you left out, and in a way which insults me (I
did make a ****ing roleplaying character, that's half the ****ing problem, you ****ing *******!), but that's not important. What's important is that you made an argument, I made a ****erargument, and you made a counter-counterargument that completely demolishes your original argument.
That's a lot of profanity. You're really getting under my skin.
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Because the In Charge type game is wildly unbalanced. The balance of this game is random, and depends 100% on the players.
Congratulations! On top of getting under my skin by asserting that because I observed that I was bad at combat, and then got bored with combat, I must only ****ing care about combat...your very next argument blunders into one of my least favorite Creationist fallacies. And as an ecology-and-evolution major, I have
very strong feelings towards Creationist fallacies.
But let's back off. Which fallacy am I talking about? The "evolution is random" fallacy, of course! It's wrong because it's actually directed by natural selection, which (in short) drives the Brownian motion of random mutaton in various directions based on environmental conditions. What does this have to do with your argument? Well, the game balance isn't actually random! It's driven by player actions, which are (despite all appearances)
not ****ing random! They are entirely dependent on what problems the players have to overcome and what tools they have to overcome them. And those are both under GM control.
A GM naturally controls the
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So if a player has enough role play mastery, imagination, rules mastery, setting mastery and real life knowledge....and they are aggressive and assertive enough to ask the DM to make such things and add them to the game just for their character....and all the other players do this as well....then the game will be balanced. If not...no balance.
...
What?
What do you mean by balanced? How does all of this lead to balance? And what does
any of this have to do with this:
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Originally Posted by
Quertus
Also true. But, when one player is doing everything, and another is doing nothing - the kind of stories one hears all the time - it's pretty obvious how things are unbalanced.
Because the situation you're describing as "balance" sounds
exactly like one player doing everything while others do nothing.
I'm a real jerk, bringing up the original context of the argument like that.
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This is just a Type of Long Game: The Slow build up to a massive, near open ended campaign arc. And the players can't really build a character for this, as no one knows what the future will hold as the arc is so open-ended.
I
have built characters for campaigns like that. It's a matter of building characters which sound interesting, which seem like characters you'd like to play.
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I find this view odd. I hope I don't shatter any illusions by telling you that game designers are just employees of a company that make games just to be payed.
Alright, let me explain capitalism to you.
The idea is that people who do good work get paid and outcompete people who do bad work. With me so far? Therefore, if a company wants to be as competitive as possible, they should make their products as good as possible (and sell them at good prices, but that's not important.) So, work with me--should the company be trying to make good games, or not?
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Even at the most basic: the Rule Writers have no control over the final product. They do their job, and write rules. And even if they make the most amazing perfect rules ever....they still have to go past a couple other people....people that can change, adjust or alter them. And even with the best case possible, like the prefect rules make it past all them people, you still have the Dreaded Editing. And if they need to cut 12 lines of text from page 33, they will, and there goes 2/3's of the perfect rule.
You...you...
That is so stupid.
Yes, other people can ruin good work, but they usually don't. If editors take apart your work, completely change a rule you spent days on, there's
always a reason for that. The fact that the editors are being paid to edit means they know how to edit, and what the point of editing is, and all of that. They're not going to ruin a "perfect" rule for no reason. However, they're perfectly willing to cut those lines of text from what the writer claims is a perfect rule if they're useless fluff or if they make the product worse.
Say, you wouldn't happen to be a writer of some kind, would you? Or do you just buy into the deification of the writer and the demonizing of anyone who forces them to change their Artistic Vision?