Consequence and Reward in RPGs


I like to compare trends in the game industry as a whole with individual segments, such as RPGs. Often what’s happening “out there” will turn up in the individual segments, if it hasn’t already.



The most striking trends in hobby games is the movement from games of consequence to games of reward. Players in hobby games in the past have been expected to earn what they received, but more and more in hobby games we’re seeing games that reward players for participation. This is a general trend in our society, where schoolkids expect rewards for participation rather than for achieving excellence, and in fact excellence is sometimes not allowed!

Reward-based games have always been with us via party games, and to a lesser extent family games. Virtually no one cares who wins a party game, and all of these games tend to be very simple and fully accessible to non-gamers. Mass-market games are much more reward-based then consequence-based. Hobby gamers might call them “not serious”.

A reward-based game is more like a playground than an organized competition, and the opposition in reward-based games tends to be weak/inconsequential/nonexistent.

Home video “save games” have always tended to make video games a “you can’t lose” proposition. We’re moving beyond that.

With free-to-play video games dominating the mobile market and a strong influence in other markets, designers reward players so that they’ll play the game long enough to decide to spend money in it. We see players who blame the game if they fail, who expect to be led around by the hand, even in games that people purchase.

Tabletop RPGs generally involve an unspoken pact between the players and the GM, so that the players can have fun and not have to worry too much about losing. But the game tends to be more enjoyable when there’s a possibility of failure - the triumphs are sweeter. The co-creator of D&D (Gary Gygax) put it this way in one of his last publications (Hall of Many Panes) "...a good campaign must have an element of danger and real risk or else it is meaningless - death walks at the shoulder of all adventurers, and that is the true appeal of the game."

Classic games involve conflict. Many so-called games nowadays do not involve conflict, and there are role-playing "games" that are storytelling exercises without much opposition.

Reflections of this trend in RPGs often involve abundant healing and ways to save characters from death, such as the ridiculous Revivify spell, usable by a mere fifth level cleric in D&D Fifth Edition, that brings back the dead on the field of battle.

35 years ago, a young player GMed his first game for our shared-characters campaign. He really wanted to ensure the players had a good time - so he gave out lots of magic items. We wanted players to earn what they received, so myself and the other lead GM waved our hands after the adventure and most of those items disappeared.

I’m a senior citizen, in my roots a wargamer, and I prefer games of consequence. But that's not where the world is headed.

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
 

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pemerton

Legend
Could you play RPG's the way you are talking about? Sure, of course. No one is denying that. What's being denied is that somehow this was the only way RPG's were ever played
I think this is really the key point. If classic, "gamist" dungeon-crawling was ever the main way of playing D&D, it seems to have lost that status some time in the early 1980s.

The idea that a cultural development that is over 30 years old, in a hobby barely more than 40 years old, is somehow a "new" thing is not tenable.

There is also a lot of projection going on in the characterisations of "true" or "original" D&D. Eg [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] excludes DL from being "truly" 1st ed AD&D, and likewise treats elements of Gygax's approach as purely idiosyncratic and not essential to "true" 1st ed AD&D either. Is "true" 1st ed AD&D, then, just whatever it is that Lanefan plays? Or played, back in the day? That's obviously not tenable.

A final comment: in some domains of activity, relative "toughness" or "hardcoreness" is fairly easy to identify. Running a half-marathon is, in some objective sense, more gruelling than jogging 500 m. Climbing a mountain is, in some objective sense, more gruelling that climbing over the fence at the local park.

But in what way is playing classic dungeon-crawling D&D supposed to be more gruelling than, say, playing DL back in the day, or playing the final encounter of some WotC AP, or (to turn to a non-D&D game) playing a session of DitV? There is a tone in some of the posts in this thread - with references to lethality, difficulty, etc - that clearly imply this is the case. But they don't explain what the nature of the gruelling-ness is supposed to be.
 

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S

Sunseeker

Guest
I hope I'm not the only one discomfited by this ageism. It's not right to dismiss someone's opinion just because they're old or sounds like they're old.

I hope I'm not the only one who can recognize the hypocrisy in berating "young folks" for playing the game wrong and then berating them again for not being willing to be berated.
 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him)
I hope I'm not the only one discomfited by this ageism. It's not right to dismiss someone's opinion just because they're old or sounds like they're old.

No, I'll dismiss them when they mostly amount to a "back in MY day story, we had it tough, not soft like the kids today" rehash. Which this was.
 

Coreyartus

Explorer
Ya know, I started playing D&D in 1980, and I stopped playing it for years in part because of the attitude espoused in this article. "You're not playing it right!! You're ruining my fun because you don't play it the way I like to play it! Everyone should want what I want! I don't care if you're having fun, you're not having fun in the right way!"

Get over yourself.

Perhaps the type of player who plays RPGs has changed in 40 years. Perhaps games don't need to be the same. Perhaps our definition of a good time has changed, too. The nature of a quality gaming experience has shifted.

Any article that nostalgically laments how RPG players aren't "earning" their fun in the right way just comes across as pretentious privileged elitism and slips into the blather of File 13 way too quickly to be taken seriously. I can understand romanticizing the past, but blaming contemporary players for not playing their own games correctly suggests more about the writer of the piece than the audience of readers. Get off my lawn indeed. I can have fun lighting a fire with flint and steel, but I'd rather have fun with the developments that have come along since the invention of fire... Older is not always better. I'll take the new version over the old version any day, especially if it means not having to play with judgemental participants like this writer...

And frankly, ENWorld should know better than to publish this...
 

Hussar

Legend
And frankly, ENWorld should know better than to publish this...

Now, that I don't agree with. It's an opinion and it's one that should be dragged out into the light and examined. I've see far too many discussions with gamers over the years espouse something pretty close to this to think that it's something that will go away if we just ignore it.

Look, if you feel that hardcore gamism is a better way to play, then prove it to me. Show me how I can have a better time doing it that way than I can the way I prefer to play. But, like this article, if the only way you can make your play style look attractive is to denigrate how others play, then, well, like you say, that says more about the poster than anything.
 

pogre

Legend
I've played and enjoyed every edition of D&D during their respective times. (Yeah, I'm old). Our experience was that lower level D&D "back in the day" was far more dangerous and higher level play was actually less dangerous than the current edition. YMMV. It was just that for us, the pain of losing a high level character stung more because it took so long to get there.

I still enjoy some dungeon delving using some of the retro-clones from time-to-time. I also enjoy the story-driven 5th edition campaign I'm currently playing.

It's OK to play D&D more than one way. :)
 

prosfilaes

Adventurer
The most striking trends in hobby games is the movement from games of consequence to games of reward. Players in hobby games in the past have been expected to earn what they received, but more and more in hobby games we’re seeing games that reward players for participation.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Looking at top rated games on the biggest board game site, I see a lot of vicious games, where there will be one winner and many losers. Are you complaining about the fact that these games are more "realistic", in the sense that you have to build something yourself instead of simply attacking your enemy, which is rarely a solution in real life? Or that some of these games are cooperative, and the consequence for losing is that you failed the world and let civilization fall to epidemics, instead of simply losing to another player?

Mass-market games are much more reward-based then consequence-based. Hobby gamers might call them “not serious”.

Checkers, chess, backgammon, Monopoly, Clue, Uno, Scrabble etc., are all mass-market games that have clear winners and losers that are kept track of.

Home video “save games” have always tended to make video games a “you can’t lose” proposition.

Save games were created because without a method to save the game, a game was limited to how long you could play in one stretch. Super Mario Brothers is completable in 5 minutes, 20 minutes if you don't use the warps. That was all they could pack on the cartridge, so it wasn't a big deal. Super Mario Galaxy 2 takes over 3 hours for a quick run, and over nine hours to grab all 242 stars. With enough patience most people can get through either of them, but I suspect that SMB1, without the save game, will be quicker.

Classic games involve conflict. Many so-called games nowadays do not involve conflict, and there are role-playing "games" that are storytelling exercises without much opposition.

To quote the esteemed Arlo Guthrie back in 1972, "Dealing card games with the old man in the Club Car / Penny a point - ain't no one keeping score". I've played a thousand hands of spades with nobody really caring about who won and who lost. If you're talking about direct conflict, Snakes and Ladders, and Life, and Operation, to name a few, are older games that don't involve direct conflict. If you're not talking about direct conflict, I have no idea what you mean by "Many so-called games nowadays do not involve conflict". Are we talking about the likes of the Ungame... which came out in 1973, a year before D&D?

There are roleplaying games that are storytelling exercises without much opposition. I understand the theatrical tradition and ad libbing played a big part in their ancestry. They're sort of marginal, and while I might agree that they aren't games, I don't see the relevance of that to anything; that some people enjoy engaging in group storytelling is nothing new, and is a pleasurable intellectual exercise.

Around to D&D, ever heard of "stand behind the pile of dead bards!"? That's a fairly modern rendition of an old joke in some form or other about the endless string of indistinguishable characters some players play, where the instant a DM kills off one, another one pops up. Doesn't seem like your consequences had much an effect there, beyond negating any attempt at playing a role. My one time playing the DCC RPG and having my character die because he looked through something and got attacked by a grub and died is not high on my RPG memories. It's interesting you don't mention that one actual pattern in modern boardgames is the mitigation of randomness; it's not fun, or a particular indication of skill, or a real challenge, to win or lose based on a die roll. So randomness may choose how the board is laid out, or what resources are coming out this turn, but not "this person wins because he rolled 6s all game and the other person rolled 1s". Which is a style choice, but it seems weird to praise a certain style of RPG as "games of consequence" when what the consequences are of is the fact that you rolled poorly.
 

lewpuls

Hero
It's a common reaction of younger people to claim that any suggestion that changes in life have occurred in ways that "don't sound good" is simply an old person reacting to/hating on the young. I've even encountered people who believe there are no generational differences, despite all the research and other evidence to the contrary. The possibility that changes in attitudes really have happened - and anyone who knows history knows that attitudes DO change strongly over time - is ignored. This becomes an ad hominem argument: "it came from an old person so it doesn't count and we can just make fun of it". That's a logical fallacy, folks. Something like "Hitler liked it so it must be bad", which is of course nonsense. What matters is whether something is true, not who's identifying or describing it.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem "Ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is now usually understood as a logical fallacy in which an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself."


In other words, when you try to interpret/divine what "I want" (usually incorrectly), when you blame me or "old geezers" for what I've described, you've *LOST ALL CREDIBILITY.*




Once again, I am editorially constrained to 500 words, which doesn't leave room for many examples. If I had had a thousand words, I'd have provided more examples. Btw, SMHWorlds, Coreyartus, I'm talking about ALL games, not just RPGs and certainly not just D&D. Nor do I see where I've failed to recognize that much of it comes from the GM, not the rules, in RPGs.


Than you, RevTurkey, Lanefan (yes, you explain very well in your initial post, but also ran well over my word limit!), JeffB, Derren, J.L.Duncan, Over-the-Hill, Pemerton, Libramarian, and others. Nice shot, AmerigoV! Yes, S'mon, that's true, I was around 30 then, not an "old geezer". Then as now I tried to say what I meant without worrying about whether others would agree, and I despise political correctness and rampant egalitarianism as much now as then.






My point in the OP is about what people expect to do and achieve when playing the game, not about what kind of thing they're looking to get from the game. Two people can expect the same "reward" (better, award), in the latter sense, yet want the game to play very differently. Diablo III gives lots of loot, just as many other games, but it's fully a reward-based game in the sense that you are going to easily get loads of loot, you don't have to earn it in any significant way, while in some other loot games (tabletop RPGs as run by a minority of GMs) you have to earn what you get.


In a way we could say reward-based games are like Monty Haul adventures, but that still focuses on the amount of the reward more than on what you have to do to get it.


You could take a party game such as Apples to Apples or any of its reward-based progeny (such as Cards Against Humanity), add big-money stakes (money from the players) to it, and it would become (as much as is possible within the hardly-competitive rules) a game of consequence rather than one of reward.




Yes, D&D grew out of wargaming. Out of Dave Arneson's miniatures battle campaign, while Gary Gygax was an officer in the International Federation of Wargamers (national game clubs were a thing in the late 60s). Naturally, with players initially coming from wargaming, there was a greater emphasis on challenge. But the attitude change is not unique to RPGs. The consequence-reward change is often discussed and glaringly obvious in video games. One of the topics discussed is how much easier it is to play video games successfully these days.


People are now taught that they should never be uncomfortable, and that notion extends into games, at times. Video players of adventure/action/RP games have come to expect a "loot drop" from every monster, no matter how innocuous. Quite apart from how you can use your save games to keep doing the same thing (such as open a chest) again and again until you get a result you really like. (The guys I know personally who do this are over 60; it's not generational in and of itself.)


One of the advantages of single-player video games is that game developers can let players who are only interested in story go through the story without having to work at it. I've advocated an "autopilot" mode in video games for many years, and a few games have contained some form of same, so that when it gets too much like work or too tough, the player can let the computer play through the difficult part while the player watches, then continues with the story thereafter. However, many hard-core video gamers still react pretty negatively to the notion, even though it wouldn't affect how they play in any way. I guess they're worried that they'll succumb to temptation and use the autopilot, or they're worried about polluting the pseudo-competition of comparing times taken to "beat a game."




I did not use the old training cost rules of AD&D, because it turned PCs into money-grubbers rather than adventurers. On the other hand, players never swam in gold because I drastically reduced monetary rewards. I used my own experience method based on how well the players accomplished their mission; gold didn't come into it. Again, as someone said, it's the GM, not the rules, that most strongly determines the balance and style of cost/reward.




Saelorn, the consequence of going down to 1 HP is felt during the adventure, even though it's all healed up later. During the adventure it changes tactics and even strategy. Still, the point I tried to make is about how choices of the players make a significant difference to the *outcome*, or do not.




Saracenus, you have failed just as much as most people to figure out what I want. I abhor horror of any kind. I do NOT want complicated combat. I don't want complicated anything, because you can make a game with lots of gameplay depth without being complicated (in fact, that's superior to complicated games). I despise legacy games, which stink to me of planned obsolescence. And so forth. Trying to figure out what an author wants based on a 500 word piece is a fool's errand.




Hussar seems to be particularly out of touch with logic:
"No, but it is right to dismiss someone's opinion when it carries no weight, isn't supported by the actual facts, and has been repeated ad nauseam over the past thirty years."


The comments above have suggested many "actual facts" that I could not possibly include in 500 words. That something has been repeated a lot for a long time neither makes it true nor untrue, logically. And if you want an opinion to carry "weight," what are your criteria? By any reasonable criteria I've ever seen, mine carries far more weight than any random commenter's does. But that weight is not and should not be a criteria for establishing whether something is true or untrue. Your notion that it should is a subtle form of the ad hominem fallacy. More bad logic.




I have no idea how what I've said can come to be interpreted as "a certain style of RPG as 'games of consequence' when what the consequences are of is the fact that you rolled poorly." A player who wants to stay alive in most RPGs wants to limit the number of times he must make a good roll to avoid dying. And GMs who like rot grubs and other methods of killing someone out of nowhere, are turning the game into a button-pushing exercise, push some buttons and hope you don't get unlucky. (Of course, you've probably seen this explicitly, though more often it's levers than buttons.)


ENWorld can always be relied on for a very wide spectrum of comments. Heaven help me if I ever deliberately try to stir up comments.
 

CydKnight

Explorer
Society has come to expect rewards in general. The trend is that those expectations will demand more for less over time. What is not realized is that we are looking for fulfillment. The more we look for it in things (concepts are things too), the less fulfilled we become. So what do we do? We keep doing the same thing for that quick fix because it's all we know. It's a vicious cycle where our own egos tell us what we need to be fulfilled but it will only serve to satisfy the ego and egos are never satisfied for long.
 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him)
It's a common reaction of younger people to claim that any suggestion that changes in life have occurred in ways that "don't sound good" is simply an old person reacting to/hating on the young. I've even encountered people who believe there are no generational differences, despite all the research and other evidence to the contrary. The possibility that changes in attitudes really have happened - and anyone who knows history knows that attitudes DO change strongly over time - is ignored. This becomes an ad hominem argument: "it came from an old person so it doesn't count and we can just make fun of it". That's a logical fallacy, folks. Something like "Hitler liked it so it must be bad", which is of course nonsense. What matters is whether something is true, not who's identifying or describing it.

Some attitudes do change over time, but you know what else is true? An older generation will look down at younger generations and complain that things were more difficult, more challenging, or their achievements were more worthy in their day and they way they did things. Your elders did it to your Baby Boom generation and you're doing it to the GenXers, Millennials, and what-have-you afterwards. Same old story - same old song and dance.

As far as I'm concerned, the important point is that people are enjoying the games they play. If you prefer a particular style of play, go ahead. But if you throw shade at someone else's style (and let's face it, you did), you're going to get pushback at the attitude.
 

Mishihari Lord

First Post
Before commenting on the articles, I want to comment on the comments. A lot of them could be summarized as "please stop publishing articles that I don't agree with." Seriously? How do you ever expect to learn something new if you only talk to people that think the same things as you do?

The article clearly highlights an element of playstyle: do I always want my character to get the candy, or do I want receiving candy to depend on my choices? The smart thing to do with this content is to use it to consider your personal playstyle: where do I fall on this continuum, and how can I adjust how I'm playing to better fit my preference? The foolish thing to do with the content is to use it to cast aspersions at those with different playstyles.

Articles like this can also be useful as a check on one's personal consistency. People get mad when it's pointed out that their actions aren't consistent with their espoused beliefs of positions. For example if one thinks intellectually that always getting the candy is lame, but it turns out that that's how he prefers to play. Or vice versa. Better understanding your own play preferences can be a lot of help in making your games better.

So my thoughts on the actual article. I pretty much agree with the idea that there's been a general shift in society to make what people receive less dependent on their own actions. Folks' thoughts on whether or not this is a good thing are pretty dependent on their political leanings, so I won't pursue this element further. Games have followed along with this shift. As a result, I tend to enjoy the older games more. 2E is still my favorite D&D. One of the big things I don't care for in later games is 100% recovery each day. I have more fun when the challenges I face today depend on what happened yesterday, frex, with regard to spells and health expended. With 100% recovery some strategy and resource allocation elements of the game that I enjoy go away.
 

My point in the OP is about what people expect to do and achieve when playing the game, not about what kind of thing they're looking to get from the game. Two people can expect the same "reward" (better, award), in the latter sense, yet want the game to play very differently.

If that was your intent, and it may well have been, but it was muddied by the judgmental tone of the article. If you want to discus that, but you use words and phrases like "such as the ridiculous Revivify spell, usable by a mere fifth level cleric" as a big example. Reading that sets the tone of the rest of the article as "the way I play is better and this other way is worse" - therein lies the judgement that people are jumping to and the ad hominem - "he's just a whiny old geezer". It's right there in the word choice, tone and prose of the article.

I would love to see an article with the same intent, but discussing the changes in expectations, approach and such, but done from a more neutral standpoint on what is good and what is bad.



For the record - Geezer here, just turned 50, started playing in '77.
 
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Before commenting on the articles, I want to comment on the comments. A lot of them could be summarized as "please stop publishing articles that I don't agree with."

Totally agree. I think lewpuls has a valid and reasonable perspective and has been mugged for it. It is a sign of the times that people want news they can agree with. They often react poorly to opinions that differ from their own. I think this site can afford different opinions without the personal attacks. Debate is fine but I think some of the comments above go beyond that.

People like different kinds of games. Some like a more forgiving game that allows them to live out heroic fantasies with a lesser chance of failure. Others prefer a less forgiving, grittier game with death stalking them at every turn.

Why don't we all try to find common ground before trashing essayists. After all, we're talking about games here people, games.
 

AriochQ

Adventurer
I think the issue at hand is that this is more 'editorial' than it is 'article'. It probably is more properly placed as a forum thread, rather than as a front page item.
 

S

Sunseeker

Guest
In other words, when you try to interpret/divine what "I want" (usually incorrectly), when you blame me or "old geezers" for what I've described, you've *LOST ALL CREDIBILITY.*

It's fun to watch my previous posts get substantiated.

It is not I the commentor who needs to establish credibility. That is on you. You must demonstrate that your point is well supported, or that your opinion is rational, even if disagreeable. What I read was neither well-supported (you can argue you didn't have enough room to provide specific examples all you like, one or two would not have taken many words), nor is it well rationalized, relying heavily on "back in my day"-isms for games somehow having more consequence and less reward.

So if you find your opinion being readily disregarded, you really should reflect inwardly on that, instead of one again accusing your detractors of lacking credibility.
 

prosfilaes

Adventurer
It's a common reaction of younger people to claim that any suggestion that changes in life have occurred in ways that "don't sound good" is simply an old person reacting to/hating on the young. ... What matters is whether something is true, not who's identifying or describing it.

It is up to the author to make their case. You're basically claiming the new generation doesn't want to work for stuff; Adam Conover, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ , points out this has been an accusation against the new generation since at least 1968.

Also, how you phrased that shows part of the problem. Old people get seriously grumpy when a younger person claims that the new generation is better in some fashion. In fact, most groups of people get annoyed when someone from a separate group claim people in their group are better than people in the first group. But you treat it as a problem of the young.

Psychology and sociology are hard disciplines. They involve things that are very hard to accurately study, where it's hard to get a good accurate sample and hard to measure what you want to measure. The fact that people want evidence for claims isn't something you should object to.

I despise legacy games, which stink to me of planned obsolescence.

The coexistence of Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy, and the way that many people who owned the first bought the second and enjoyed it, indicate that they bring something to the table to the players that their non-legacy versions don't. The subject is a bit off-topic, but it's a casual dismissal, even "despise", of a style of games.

Once again, I am editorially constrained to 500 words, which doesn't leave room for many examples. ... Trying to figure out what an author wants based on a 500 word piece is a fool's errand.

So basically you want a participation trophy. For all your claims of wanting a challenge, when pushed to fit in a full thesis in 500 words, you blame your failures on the format. If you cannot communicate what you want in 500 words, then don't write in 500 words, and if that means you don't get published here, so be it. If it's a fool's errand to figure out what an author wants based on their writing, then it's the author's fault, no matter what the length.

I have no idea how what I've said can come to be interpreted as "a certain style of RPG as 'games of consequence' when what the consequences are of is the fact that you rolled poorly."

Early D&D, where you started with a few hitpoints and died when you hit zero, and save or dies were plentiful, mean that you die when you roll poorly.

Despite having another 1300 words, you don't seem to have made any attempt to back up your claim that there's a change of this manner in games.
 

Ratskinner

Adventurer
This whole thing some old-timers have about how back in their day PCs actually had to work for a living and walk in 9 ft deep snow to the dragon's lair and it was uphill both ways and ....

That just doesn't match my experiences with Old-school at all. Mine seem much more in line with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s, even when the DM was using all or most of the rules that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] mentioned. I don't think I've ever met an old-school dwarf who made it more than a few levels without somehow running into the Franklin Mint Dwarven Heritage Artifact Collection. (For that matter, I was recently playing a 1e OSR revival game and we found them as treasure in a published adventure at about level 4, IIRC.) My High School group played mostly published adventures and my first college group played mostly homebrew in the FR. I don't know how you miss all the treasure. Just put your finger on the wall and never let go until you've mapped and murdered the whole place. The whole procedure is often referred to as "cleaning out the dungeon" for cryin' out loud. I've witnessed 20 minute arguments about whether or not the party should make the effort to take the copper pieces. "Sure, individually they're worthless, but we have 35,000 of them."

Were the rules "harder"? Aside from being terribly-edited and occasionally inconsistent, I don't actually think so. Old-School DMs could easily achieve whip-saws in lethality just by switching monsters. You want to increase death in 1e, just increase the number of "save or die" events and vice-versa. Heck, if you're in the upper single digit levels or higher, that might be your only hope, if you want to whack a fighter type. They've just got waayyy too many hp WRT monster damage output and "to hit" numbers. BUT! So what? You've probably got more than one Raise Dead scroll lying around. Because, as I said about magic in the other thread:

It is, however, less-codified and generally opaque to the players. Whether that's good or not is in the eye of the beholder. But it does have the (unintended?) side effect of making magic item "drops" one of the key ways a DM can influence the party, plot, or whatever while simultaneously making him seem like a nice guy. Add a dash of fairness and suddenly every old school party I've ever been a part of glows from orbit when somebody casts Detect Magic.

Now, could a DM just kill characters through pure arbitrary malice? Sure, but I don't see how that's any different than it is today, other than perhaps culturally being more or less acceptable, and I'll bet that varies a lot between modern groups as well. However, I'm not sure that increasing random/arbitrary lethality makes the game "harder". Its not like we didn't complete the dungeons anyway. Unless you want to count the paperwork necessary for occasionally making up a new character....

As always YMMV, and its just my $.02
 

It's a common reaction of younger people to claim ...

... Hitler liked it so it must be bad ...

... you've *LOST ALL CREDIBILITY.*

... I despise political correctness and rampant egalitarianism ...

... reward-based games are like Monty Haul adventures ...

... I despise legacy games, which stink to me of planned obsolescence ...

... Hussar seems to be particularly out of touch with logic ...

... By any reasonable criteria I've ever seen, [my opinion] carries far more weight than any random commenter's does

OK. So I really need to know -- given the volume of inflammatory comments you make above, did you choose the last line of your comment with *deliberate* irony, or was it accidental?

Heaven help me if I ever deliberately try to stir up comments.
 

Does anyone else who plays video games have the same opinion as the OP? I'm curious as my experience of modern video games seems very different from the OPs:

Video players of adventure/action/RP games have come to expect a "loot drop" from every monster, no matter how innocuous.

Good Lord, wouldn't that be nice. You have no idea how long it took me to get the parts I needed for all my bags in HZD. I swear I'd have taken a mission to kill a herd of Thunderlizards if one was guaranteed to drop a friggin fish scale. In virtually every adventure/RP game I play, there are huge sets of posts on how to find worthwhile drops. Yes, everything drops trash, but that's as exciting as saying "every orc in OD&D drops standard rag clothing". In fact, I'd say the exact opposite to the OP's contention is true. Loot Drops are now used as a means to drag out games and make them longer and harder. Old-school video games had fixed drops -- so much easier! No more donning stupid hard-to-find armor and +2 golden rings to increase the farm rate by 0.000001%

Quite apart from how you can use your save games to keep doing the same thing (such as open a chest) again and again until you get a result you really like.

Doesn't work in most games I play; the chest is randomized at creation time and so you can't do this. Save-scumming is totally old-school. Not a thing in modern games. Also, I play a few MMOs and Dark Souls style game (e.g. Nioh) where there is no save. Actually curious -- have there been any major releases in the last year where you can save-scum loot chests?

I've advocated an "autopilot" mode in video games for many years

Don't most games now have a variable level of difficulty you can set, and the easy mode is often explicitly called "story mode; for those interested only in experiencing the story" and you can do exactly as suggested -- turn it on for specific areas if you like? The only games I know which don't do this are either pure storytelling or hyper-difficult.

they're worried about polluting the pseudo-competition of comparing times taken to "beat a game."

As far as I recall, in games with difficulty switching, they almost invariably have achieves that take that into account. You don't get the achieve for "winning in hard mode" if you switch out of hard mode -- dirt simple, pretty much universal.

As an aside -- the dig about "pseudo-competition" of speed-running seems a bit odd? Its not something I do, but I can't see why it's not a seriously competitive thing. It requires game skill, puzzle solving and a ton of practice. Seems pretty genuine to me. Is it a generally loathed concept?
 

prosfilaes

Adventurer
I despise legacy games, which stink to me of planned obsolescence.

It's still off-topic, but that's quite a leap to judgment. "Planned obsolescence" was a big discussion about the games when they first came out, but people still love them, and before despising them, you should look at why. The Legacy feature adds a cumulative effect, so you continue playing to see what's going to happen, and every single game (or subgame, really) has consequences on the next. Interestingly enough, Pandemic Legacy has few of the awards you're going on about; it's all about containing the damage and knowing at least it was only Montreal that collapsed, and NYC is still around.

Pandemic Legacy has between 12 and 24 plays in it; say 16 on average. Compare to a Strategy & Tactics game subscription, where you get a wargame a month; every month, are you going to get 16 plays of the new wargame in? Or even 8, since Pandemic Legacy is $70 and an S&T game issue is only $35? I've got a bunch of games still in shrink, and some with only one play in. If you get several dozen plays out of every game you own, then legacy games may not be for you. If you're like me and my friends, you may get more game play out of a legacy game than almost any other game you buy.
 

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