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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9025397" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'm just speaking of the way most people actually tend to play. Because that's the real issue here. It may be the case that your players don't follow the trend, but the trend is there and it's quite real.Because the line is perilously thin. Especially because you're using penalties rather than incentives. Because gamers today don't have as much time or energy to play as they did before. The character funnel, for example, removes a significant amount of the "challenge" from old-school-style play because that challenge is actively un-fun when you have nowhere near as much time as you did before. When spending six months having characters die left and right can mean you never get anywhere.Hardwired challenge, especially when it's really significant challenge, is effectively a wall for a large portion of players. Making that hardwired challenge be present literally before play begins means inserting those walls that early. Walls like that drive people away from the game.So? 99.999% of humans cannot ever achieve those heights. What does it matter that the 99.99th percentile is better, when the 90th percentile of one is going to be hardly much different from the 90th percentile of the other?I was only using that as an analogy. The mechanical analogy here, would be that being a dwarf is, itself, a special survival boost if you happen to play a wizard. Thematically, you'd probably go for the actual explanation for why there aren't dwarf mages in Dragon Age, the environment dwarves come from exposes them to something which worsens their ability to access magic. (In actual DA lore, dwarves used to be able to use magic, before recorded history; but literally no one, not even the dwarves, knows about that anymore.)Nah. I used the example I used very intentionally. Remember that the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed specifically because of a failure to translate American customary units to metric, and there have been many (many, many, many) other instances of similar problems in aviation, aerospace, military, etc. D-Day was on June 6 not because that day was especially good, but because the Allied commanders wanted to make sure that you couldn't have confusion between the European forces (which listed dates as DD/MM) and American forces (which listed dates as MM/DD.)Haughty, "our-way-is-best" approaches to science and technology are literally as old as recorded history (and probably much older.) Couple that with the explicit jealousy with which wizards guard their secrets, and fundamental underlying differences in expression (believe me, shifting to dozenal is MUCH more of a difficulty than mere unit conversion.)Why? Again, guild trade secrets and the like were zealously guarded. There's a reason we don't know all of the techniques used at various points in history, like Damascus steel, Greek fire, etc. If it is possible for us to lose the correct pronunciation of the name of God Himself because some secrets are simply kept too well, it is quite possible for the very few Dwarf Wizards to be foolishly insular and far too proud to share their knowledge with anyone else. The idea that knowledge wants to be free is a deeply modern concept.A ban isn't a fix though. It's an admission that there's a problem that can't be fixed.Well...sure? I didn't say it was easy. Often the better solution to something is harder. E.g. the old saw "fast, good, cheap: pick two." In this case, it's more "simple, easy, good: pick two." The simple, easy solution is a ban--but that's clearly not great. The simple, good solution won't be easy to come by, it's gonna take effort on your part. And easy good solutions, they're gonna be either complex or fly the way an F-117 does: not at all unless continuously corrected.</blockquote>

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