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Message: <blockquote data-quote="loverdrive" data-source="post: 9177992" data-attributes="member: 7027139">I'm mostly busy making vidyagames, as you might see on my Itch, so I don't really have much time to do any TTRPG-related work and/or thinking, but here's some:While working on my game, I recently had an epiphany: reward for beating a challenge should never boost your ability to beat similar challenges. It should've been completely obvious, but this thought never crossed my mind.If you beat a tough boss and get a cool new shiny sword that deals over9000 damage, the question is, what's the point? You've already proven that you know how to read animations, dodge, parry, manage your stamina and whatnot. You evidently don't need any help at combat, because if you did, you wouldn't be able to defeat this boss anyway. Instead, the sick loot drop should include Brazilian double jump boots, while cool shiny sword should be hidden behind tough platforming, so the reward A) is meaningful, B) pushes you towards developing a new skill and experiencing something new: you sucked at platforming before, that's why you mostly avoided it, but with these new double jump boots, how can you pass on an opportunity to test them out?Reward for beating a challenge should never boost your ability to beat similar challenges. It should've been completely obvious, but this thought never crossed my mind.It should've been obvious, but it made me wonder why so many RPGs do the exact opposite. Cutter gets better at violence by doing violence, so they'll do violence, and in the next session we will see how they do violence, but with 3 dots in Skirmish instead of 2! I'm waiting with bated breath! Just can't contain my excitement!Combined with niche protection, this quickly leads to ossification. Cutter beats people into a bloody pulp, Slide smooth-talks people into submission, Whisper does magic mumbo-jumbo. Day in, day out, the same ####ing thing. And I love Blades. It's one of my favorite games. Replace Cutter with Fighter or Gunlugger; replace Slide with Bard or Skinner; replace Whisper with Wizard or Brainer. Nothing of matter will change.So here's my Soviet Reversal: the only way to improve at something should be doing something else to incentivize wandering outside of the prison of  your character's specialization.</blockquote>

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