Sawyer potešil
Hi. How do you perceive difficulty in RPGs? Is it just a matter of fights, hard levelling up? Or is it mainly a matter of complexity of relations between NPCs, hard moral decisions, logic puzzles and other non-violent aspects?J.E.Sawyer píše:
I think difficulty and agony are two separate things (or should be) in games. Combat and "contested" game play should be oriented around challenge, of which difficulty is an important element. The focus is on figuring a way through a problem. This can be a puzzle, logical or otherwise, through which there are a finite amount of designed paths, or it can be something like combat, with a theoretically infinite number of strategic and tactical approaches.
When it comes to making moral decisions, ethical decisions, or character decisions with NPCs, I believe the focus should be on agony in the classical sense. The struggle is to make the choice, not to succeed or fail. If you're guessing blindly, success and failure aren't particularly interesting. In many cases, it's boring or infuriating.
The reason why stories like Antigone and the Oresteia are interesting (to some) is because their characters are trapped between two equally good (and bad) choices. Orestes makes the choice to avenge his father's death by murdering his mother, but in doing so is pursued by the Furies for his filial betrayal.