Re: Ditching the difficulty increase rule?

From: simon_hibbs2 <simon.hibbs_at_...>
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:54:42 -0000

>
>Why should jumping from one building's roof to another have
>a resistance of 16 in your first session and the same task
>with the same character 20 sessions later be at 6w?

Because after 20 sessions of jumping through the same old repetitive hoop all the effing time, we just don't care anymore. This is the real rason.

We dress it up by saying that now the character has learned where the god footing is and which tiles are loose and how much run-up is needed. All of these are perfectly valid reasons why it's not a big chalenege anymore, but they are window dressing. We say this because we don't want to be bothered the same problem all over again. The in-world explanation follows on from the needs of runing a fun game, not vice versa.

Now if the players are being chased by bad guys and come to this ga n the rof again and we want to make this a more dramatic situation, perhaps it turns out that the roof on the other side has had bulding work done and is now 3 feet higher than it was before. However the Narrator made this choice to make the game more interesting, not to simulate some arbitrary notion of realism.

We can always justify these choices using in-world reasons, and it's important that we do so, but the reasosn and the difficulty rating flow on from the needs of running an interesting game, not vice versa.

> Have others taken this rule out of their games? What long
>term effects will this have?

Your game will contain more dull and repetitive challenges, in a static world where fewer interesting things happen and more dull things happen.

Simon Hibbs