= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
So8res comments on Power and difficulty - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (49)
Oh, I've spent my fair share of time around D&D 2nd ed, and I'm well acquainted with munchkining/minmaxing. However, D&D is an environment were the narrative is one of balance and tradeoffs.
For example, notice how it's OK for one class to be stronger at low levels and another class to be stronger at high levels, but how people would be pissed off if one class was stronger at all levels. This is the "narrative of balance" that I'm talking about: people think it's OK for there to be tradeoffs (e.g. early vs late dominance), but pure dominance is considered a bug and not a feature.
(I'm not bashing this generically; balance is a fine feature for many games. But I'd appreciate games where there is a narrative of exploitation rather than a narrative of balance.)
D&D has often had issues with magic users. They often are stronger than non magic users at all levels. For example, use of the spell sleep allows you to disable a group of enemies with no save allowed. Exploitation is common.
In games you can generally gain a huge amount of power by researching the right choices and doing them.
In the real world that's a lot trickier because people in the past have researched the right choices and heavily exploited and monopolized existing power resources, and any publicly known power resources will likely be heavily exploited. Competition makes it harder than when you're playing with three or four people.
Of course, one could run a D&D campaign in which NPCs have already exploited and monopolized those resources. That said, I suspect this would start to approximate playing Papers & Paychecks.
TVTropes has an article, Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards ....