Hi cohost! Sleep is eluding me so you get a roulette spin of the “ramble on a subject for a little bit while in bed” wheel to help me relax my brain towards nap time, or at least try to. Apologies for weird typos or non sequiturs, I’ll come back and fix those after sleep.
(I won’t come back and fix those after sleep, I know my vocabulary and I don’t believe sleepy me is going to have any gamer moments that need addressing)
Today’s roulette result is “RPG hot take” and so I have found one! Are you ready?
“I think games should encourage occasional encounters and setpieces outside the comfort level of the player characters. I don’t mean “easier” fights either, which is a pacing tool I’ve seen recommended. I mean games should encourage DMs to deliberately and judiciously pit the players against opposition more capable than they are, and I think if a game is so tightly balanced that any deviation away from evenly-matched breaks the game, that’s bad, actually, and the designer should be ashamed.”
Slightly less dramatic but no less honest, I think that if a game is built on strict competition bands, where players challenging outside their “tier” is impossible, that game had better have either an incredibly robust selection of opposition within each tier, equivalently strong creation tools, or an appropriately generic framework to abstract challenge.
One of the things that D&D 4 was incorrectly accused of, D&D 5 and Skyrim and elder scrolls online are accurately accused of, and many DM’s I have played with engage in consciously or un- is the “treadmill effect”, also known to me as the Kamen Rider Kabuto effect, where the actual challenge of a campaign enters at a static plateau and remains at that approximate level, barely fluctuating at all, until the campaign climax. Character power increases are met with equivalent opposition upgrades, the tools players need to combat new enemy types are never far away from their reach, and tensions remain fairly constant outside of perhaps scripted scenes and initial encounters. This is bad. The players having a 65% chance to defeat each enemy without losing more than 14% of their resources, every time, as a standard, is walking on a treadmill commenting on how nice the gym is this time of year.
“Why do you call it Kabuto effect, isn’t that one of the highest regarded rider seasons, isn’t kabuto a good rider” listen I chose my association very carefully: kabuto is a season with immaculate choreography, brilliant effects, amazing kinetic interactions, deeply moving character moments, actors who gave excellent performances, top tier suit, power and monster design, and a story as flat as a level-checking competition in the middle of slabsville, Nebraska. I don’t believe that every character has to have a “thematically complete arc”, though that’s a different rant, but the narrative tension of Kabuto outside of those character interactions distills to a very Skyrim “if you haven’t fucked up your stats, monsters should always die in 3 hits” approach. Souji Tendo believes he was chosen by heaven, he’s sincere about it, and the entire show is the world backing him up on that belief.
Souji Tendo will never know the thrill of a license level 2 lancer team deploying against a Tier 2 Spec Ops squad led by an enemy lancer built using player rules.
this absolutely also goes for video game rpgs, especially japanese-style ones. Well-chosen spike encounters are so important (and extremely difficult to do)
