EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
My problem here is that what most people refer to as "optimization" is seeking to exploit enemy weaknesses--or, more often, to create weaknesses, since that's a thing D&D play permits that a simple game like RPS cannot represent--is avoiding exploitable play and over-reliance on perfect mathematically optimal solutions.
Further, I'm completely confident that all but an entirely negligible trace minority of D&D players plays their game by randomly determining what they think they should do, which nixes the article's definition of "mixed strategy" right out the gate. A mixed strategy, as the article defines it, is one where you (genuinely as close to random as you can) choose between two or more alternative options with a defined probability; no player is perfect, but you aim for as close an approximation as you can, so as to not be exploitable. Do you know of D&D players who randomly decide to cast a spell, or make a melee attack, or (in whatever other way) have their character act on a given turn? If you do, I'd be fascinated to hear their story, because it sounds completely alien to me.
Instead, most players re-evaluate the situation and go with whatever option genuinely sounds best. They tend to prepare a slate of possible choices in advance which are reliably pretty good. When they can pick (say) three things, each needs to bring something new or distinctive, usually in different arenas. E.g., a spellcaster will choose a reliable damage option (doubly so if it's a flexible one like chromatic orb), and a good reliable buff spell (e.g. haste), and a good reliable utility spell (such as fly). This doesn't mean that the game is in any way "solved", in either the technical or casual sense. Instead, it means that there are many choices, and when you have enough options within that set of choices, you try to pick the ones that you predict will give you the most bang for your buck.
And that exact same thinking applies to D&D combat decision-making. It's not random. It's very deliberate, because, when the options are well-designed and well-balanced, you simply can't make a calculation which determines the best choice--you must instead make an evaluation, based on personal preference, past experience, and incomplete but still useful knowledge. (E.g., the highest missed attack roll against an enemy tells you a floor for its AC, and the lowest hitting attack roll tells you a ceiling.)
And Quake is a different kind of game from both head-to-head competitive multiplayer gaming (which is what all of the examples given in the cited article are), and from squad-/team-based cooperative multiplayer gaming (which is what D&D is).
Are you familiar with the kinds of design that go into squad-based cooperative multiplayer games? Weapon breakage rules are uncommon in that sort of setup for a variety of reasons. Such mechanics aren't totally unknown...but they don't tend to occur very much.
I mean, I could bring up that Sifu (which you mention below) lacks inventory management mechanics, which is something D&D has. Would Sifu be better if you had to play inventory Tetris on the regular? I'm inclined to think you would say "no", yet that would absolutely add a whole new spectrum of "donkeyspace" options to investigate. So...would Sifu be better with inventory management?
I would not say Quake is telling you that, no, but that's because it's a fundamentally different kind of game. You don't "build" your character whatsoever in it. You literally aren't anything more than your armor, your weapons, and your location. Hence, the only creative choices you can possibly make are...which weapons you use, where you are located, and how you are moving. D&D has far, far more axes along which choices can be made, both tactically (which locations to occupy, which enemies to target, which abilities to use, whether to heal vs deal damage, etc.) and strategically (what equipment to bring, what abilities to learn, what stats to build high/raise, which skills to train, etc.)
Simply put, you can't just Frankenstein together bits and pieces of different games. They come from a context. In the context of D&D, where you are rewarded for specialization, and often effectively penalized when you have to resort to off-specialization things. The Quake-like equivalent of what you're advocating for is that everyone gets to bring their customized BFG...and a crappy pea-shooter. Soon as the customized BFG runs out of ammo (breaks), they're forced to use the crappy pea-shooter until they can get more ammo.
You'd need to redesign D&D combat nearly from the ground up to make "your special weapon is only a sometimes food, the rest of the time you're grabbing whatever improvised weapon you can" an actually engaging, rewarding, satisfying experience. Trying to just bolt it onto the existing system will, as said, simply leave most players frustrated and annoyed, because they plink away for two or three points of damage all while knowing what they could do if the system weren't constantly taking it away from them.
Sifu is also (a) not a competitive game, (b) not a multiplayer game, and (c) as you say, about the specific martial arts techniques you're using, rather than being particularly chuffed about weapons themselves.
Imagine if individual martial arts techniques could "break", meaning you permanently lost access to them simply from using them too many times. Would that make Sifu a more engaging gameplay experience?
Yes, but what you are asking them to accept is: "You now will suck most of the time, except the rare treat occasions where you get to be pretty good. You should be happy about this! This lets you explore donkeyspace!"
You haven't actually provided an incentive to do this, other than the nebulous notion that there are ways to exploit enemy behaviors...but weapon choice essentially never does that in D&D--not 5e, anyway. Other things fill that space, or at least attempt to.
Whereas I find most people understate it, and would need to see what you intend to do with spells that would not, itself, just be another "here, have worse gameplay, and be happy about it because now you get to explore donkeyspace!"
Perhaps. That doesn't seem to have been too onerous a limit back in 3.X, which is when casters were king. Even relative to current-day casters, I'm skeptical this would be enough. It just even further discourages quirky/risky spell choices.
