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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5114171" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've largely become immune to Skinner based game design.  I think it was Diablo that broke me of it, and that was actually one of the first games to heavily implement it.I played each of the 3 characters in Diablo up until I beat the game at Hell difficulty.  Now, that might make a little bit of sense, in that the game play changed slightly between the three iterations.  Not alot, but maybe enough that you could justify it.But then I kept playing.  I'd seen and done all there was to do, but I was lever pushing to get that next randomly scheduled reward.Then I was saved by a hacker.  I found a trainer to download that hacked the save file, and this let you equip yourself with whatever you wanted.  My eyes were opened.  An RPG was only worth playing if it would still be worth playing if you could cheat by giving yourself whatever equipment you wanted.  Not that you would cheat, but if you could cheat, the story and game play would still be interesting enough to justify your time even if you no longer cared about any of the treasures you found or even leveling up.From that point on, I no longer pushed the lever to get the pellet.Apparantly I'm not the only one to discover this.  I was talking to someone recently that discovered this phenomena even earlier hacking the save files for things like Ultima and Bard's Tale.  If the only reason you are playing is to level up, then its not really a good game.I'd seen 1e played this way, but never really experienced it.  I'd seen 1e played with nothing but essentially random encounters dropping random treasure and grinding through encounter after encounter.  There is a send up to this style of play and the fact that some players even prefer it in KotDT (the story arc where they go on an unstructured big game hunting expedition and insist it was most fun ever).And I actually had some of this problem with 3e as a player.  It seemed like the game focused too much on leveling up and getting that next power.  Trouble was, I often found myself not really able to fully use and explore my current power set before I was getting new tricks I could pull.  I wanted to slow down and savor things and use my wits more and my new powers less. I'm inclined to think that the insistance on fast leveling, many levels, frequent rewards (new powers at every level), and 'adventure paths' where your whole career is fast tracked ahead of time verges on Skinner design.However, I'm inclined to think that there is no serious risk of this in a PnP RPG because the GM gets bored with it before the players do.</blockquote>

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