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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8688307" data-attributes="member: 6790260">"Not getting what you want" happens all the time in games."Having something happen that's not supposed to happen ever" should not happen all the time in games.Those aren't fail states. They are, yes, undesirable outcomes. That's not the same as a failure state.A failure state is something like your car breaking down. That's not supposed to happen. It's not like "you are low on gasoline, and need to get more." That's an undesirable outcome, yes. It's not a failure state.Er...what? These two sentences are completely at odds here.If you play to avoid it, then play should result in it not happening. If you play and that's one possible undesirable outcome, then whatever, undesirable outcomes happen. But if it's a failure state, it shouldn't happen.The failure state of a machine is a thing that should not happen with that machine. The failure state of an organization is something like collapse or civil war. These things are not supposed to happen and it is very bad when they do.That's what failure state means; as far as I was aware, that's what it's always meant. You, as a player, have failed if you allow a failure state to occur. You should never permit a failure state to occur if you have any ability to prevent it, and it should be considered a serious problem every time a failure state does occur. It's bad. It should absolutely be avoided, at all costs.Believe me, I tried. With all but one of the DMs in question. I tried every argument I could come up with. They absolutely, positively, completely refused to consider playing at anything higher than first level. Because first level is first. Why would it be first if it's not where you're supposed to start?Such experiences, particularly because they've happened several times, are why the "just start at higher level!" arguments lost even the little bit of credence I was once willing to give them.Pardon, I'm tired. Have had...a lot of life events these past two weeks. The part I meant to bold was "old-school push-your-luck dungeon delves." I think that was clear from context, given what else you've said.It probably won't surprise you that I find "Soulslike" games literally physically painful. Just the thought of trying to force myself through such a depressing, frustrating, soul-crushing experience is enough to put me off for a bit. I similarly cannot stand 99% of "roguelikes" or "roguelites" because, as stated, I get incredibly frustrated and depressed. Eventually I reflected and realized, "I keep playing this...but why? I'm not having any fun. I'm not accomplishing anything. I'm not learning or growing. I've hit a hardcore wall, and nothing has changed in the past...I literally don't know how many runs anymore. I don't want to play this anymore."The only "roguelite" games I've been able to play and enjoy are Desktop Dungeons (mostly because of its incredibly robust tutorial and overall very mild difficulty curve) and Hades (because they made death part of the story, ameliorating the pain of failure.) I tried really hard to like Rogue Legacy, for example, and it just wasn't to be. I'm not able to find joy in that process. Any difficult task that takes too long to complete ruins the joy of victory for me--instead of feeling pumped because I overcame it, I feel burned out and hollow, like "yay, all it took was flagellating myself into next week....."As noted above, "undesirable outcome" is not what I consider a "fail state." A fail state is you have screwed up and a really, really bad thing is going to happen. Because you failed. Failure is bad. Failure should not happen. Undesirable outcomes, well, you'd prefer they didn't happen. But you can handle it when they do.Exhaustion every time you hit 0 HP is not just an undesirable outcome. As noted above, the whole point is that you have nothing, LITERALLY nothing, zero ways to manage that problem. You can manage HP loss. You can manage other conditions, either waiting out their duration or finding a treatment for them. There's nothing you can do about exhaustion except retreat. And it happens with an event that, mathematically, is going to happen. A lot. Essentially every combat, especially if those combats are "deadly" the way almost all 5e DMs think they absolutely positively HAVE to be.Yeah that...again sounds like "we're going to use the term 'failure state,' but what we mean is 'undesirable outcome.'" A failure state is at the extreme far end of 'undesirable outcome.' It should, if literally anything can be done, never, ever happen; it should be avoided at absolutely all costs, like you should be willing to accept grievous issues in order to avoid it because those grievous issues will almost certainly be better than whatever the fail state is. Like having your car transmission explode. (That happened to my parents once. Thankfully it was covered by auto insurance, but it meant we were in a precarious vehicular situation for like a week or two.) Or, y'know, failing at something. Better to temporarily sacrifice your sleep schedule and social life to get your grade back on track than to get an F.</blockquote>

Verification