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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5161434" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, first of all no.  According to my argument there is no difference in the action/reward cycle between failing to recover from a debilitating status that forces you to lose a turn and taking an action which results in failure.  In both cases, on your turn, you roll a dice, recieve no gratifying reward, and pass the dice to another player.  In both cases, the ego gamer likely does it unhappily.  I basically agree.  Removing both status effects that debilitated a character and misses from the game would in fact add more immediate gratification to the ego gamer.  Both are sources of irritation and frustration.  He doesn't like to miss.  He doesn't like to be stunned.  Both 'suck'.  My point in comparing the situation where you are stunned to the situation where your turn was pointless because you accomplished nothing was to bring up the fact that you couldn't solve the problem by simply getting rid of 'stunned', because there would be similar situations that would annoy the sort of player who was particularly annoyed by being stunned.  I predicted that it wouldn't stop at 'getting rid of statuses'.  I predicted that quite quickly there would be a demand for 'getting rid of misses', and that prediction was born out very quickly when someone pointed out a thread where they were discussing that very thing.   In fact, my assertion is that where all of this ends is 'getting rid of failure'.  The only way to tie the action/reward system tightly enough to satisfy the ego gamer is to make every action give a reward.  In a video game, at some level thats easy enough.  Every action is accompanied by satisfying sounds, bells, flashing lights, and so forth.  When the player is playing a game like Diablo II, he plays for hours on end, perhaps for days of time, usually with no chance of meaningful failure at all.  In fact, in a game like Diablo II, failure is defined down to a less than perfectly satisfying reward of treasure.  All that activity on the screen gives a small mental reward for the action and keeps the player engaged despite the repetitiveness of the activity.  Eventually though, by defining failure down far enough, you can destroy your illusion of accomplishment.</blockquote>

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