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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9340445" data-attributes="member: 7040941">The thing is, there's nuances involved. You can empathize a game into a bland experience, aka, make it appeal to everyone and thus it appeals to no one. The important thing about empathy as game design isn't that you're there to coddle or eliminate unpleasant things, but to understand what feelings your game evokes and hone them to deliver the experience you want. The practical applications for doing that are when we get into things like game feel and start examining what the game does as it progresses from a physical to an emotional experience. For example, think of to-hit rolls. When used, they can evoke a solid tension, and the uncertainty results in potent emotional reactions. When we have a flat distribution, ala DND, we have two extremes and generally a lot of "meh" in the middle, and that then gets compounded when many if not most results don't advance the gamestate. If you took that and did it with a bell curve, the worser results are minimized, and the best results become even more exciting, but this all trades off with a far more consistent meh result. And of course, at a physical level, to-hit rolls are just slow, and elongates the player-game interface. So what if we nixed them altogether? Just straight up deal damage immediately, with whatever method?Its faster, and as a result emotionally feels more immediate and impactful and more like you're doing rather than hoping to do something. You do lose the immediate tension and release, however. I don't think its a coincidence in an era where video games are ubiquitous that more than a few games are dropping to-hit rolls altogether, or at least doing Degrees of Success, as the tension and release loses its luster when its used in this way to govern more or less everything you do. If it was instead used sparingly, and where it made intuitive sense that you could miss, then it becomes more desirable again. Missing with artillery feels better than going to smack someone with a sword and now the DM has to figure a reason you just missed.</blockquote>

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