Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6674319" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's actually worse than he even makes it. It's possible to implement perfect adaptive difficulty.  You can set it up so that every challenge in the game is not only scalable but is exactly scaled to the level of the PC.  You can fix the math completely.  Imagine a simple system where a 1st level character has 50 hit points and does 10 damage per attack, and he fights orcs that have 10 hit points and do 5 damage per attack.  Later, the character is 10th level and now has 500 hit points and does 100 damage per attack, and now he is facing orcs that have 100 hit points and 50 damage per attack.  The net result of level up has been, exactly nothing.  The game play doesn't change in the slightest.  Four orcs is just as much of a challenge at 10th level as at 1st level.  From one perspective, this is great; we've solved the problem of the difficulty curve and regardless of what order the player takes the challenges, the level of challenge will be predictable.  If we want the game to have a difficulty curve, we can have early encountered challenges be 1 or 2 orcs, and then graduate up to 3 orcs, and eventually 4 orcs.  The hardest encounter in the game can be 5 orcs, and regardless of how much the player grinds, that encounter will always require some degree of 'skill'.  But in other ways, this is terrible design since really we are leveling up to no purpose at all except to make the numbers bigger.   Games like this use leveling the way pinball games that multiply all scores by 100 or 1000 before displaying them to the player to make bonuses seem big and feel special use scores.Indeed, if leveling is optional, video games like this often have degenerate strategies in never leveling at all as often as not the designer tried to solve the difficulty curve by actually skewing the encounter difficulty by making things ever so slightly harder as you level up.   There are even cases where the optimal strategy in adaptive difficulty games is if you want to be good at something, invest your resources in being good in the things you don't want to eventually be good in.  An equivalent situation in an PnP RPG is a party that wants to be good at avoiding traps, decides to have no rogues in the party because they know that their DM - upon observing that the party has no defenses against traps - will avoid placing traps in the environment or make them easy to avoid.   The worst case result here is Schrodinger's Trap, which exists only if searched for and is more difficult to find and disarm the better that PC is at finding and disarming traps, so that the party with rogues suffer's more from traps than the one without it.  And this is not a hypothetical.  I've seen this occur in play, so that the DM gives monsters extra hit points when facing the fighter, and gives dungeons extra traps when the rogue is present all in the name of 'challenging encounters' as if the player by being good at something is signaling that is precisely the area that they want to be gimped and frustrated.  The results of course are exactly backwards, as you'd expect having a fighter in the party would make you strong in melee combat but vulnerable to traps, where as the reverse would be true when the rogue is present but the fighter isn't.   But if tailoring is in play, who knows?</blockquote>

Verification