PetrusOctavianus: The lengths people go to to suck out all challenge from games...
Would it kill you to stop threadshitting?
These are singleplayer games with character advancement constrained in weird, broken and stupid ways. They don't have a set difficulty level, and, more importantly, they don't have branching plots or any story sim dynamic for losers. You either win every fucking encounter or it's monsters rejoice, game over, reload and try again. There is no procedural story and no experience to miss on by winning every encounter -- except reloading, which is, in roleplaying terms, the most dissociating experience that can happen.
The only thing people influence by adjusting encounter difficulty is how often they have to reload. And that's the game: build the best party and
generate an unbroken string of victories, shoring up your failures and bad rolls by reloads. In each encounter, the player has a measurable chance of victory. A victory is necessary for the story to continue, thus, I and every sane person conclude the player's goal is to have the chance as close to 100% as possible. You apparently don't think so.
So I'm asking -- what is a fair, non-munchikinny chance of victory? What should the number be,
for a player? When do you start asking yourself,
as a player, "Hey, I'm winning too often, I should start sucking more"? No, I'm not really asking, this is a rhetorical question, because anything other than "never" is fucking insane, because once you've come up with an approved failure rate number, the game has thoroughly degenerated to a Monte Carlo log printout, with encounters replaced by rolling a percentile against the Certified Anti-munchkin Magic Number to see whether you win or not. Once you,
as a player, say, "I think I should win a regular fight 95% of the time and a boss fight 50% of the time",
there is no game left to play anymore -- what remains is an
extremely convoluted way of generating predetermined probabilities, a zero-player game, like Progress Quest but with reload-flavored entries.
Goblins, Non-Munchkin Success Rate: 95%. Roll: 34. Win.
Hobgoblins, NMSR 90%. Roll: 71. Win.
Centipedes, NMSR 95%. Roll: 98. Reload! Roll: 50. Win.
Coffin room, NMSR 90%. Roll: 17. Win.
Trapdoor battle, NMSR 50%. Roll: 85. Reload! Roll: 68. Reload! Roll: 11. Win.
You're a schizophrenic who can neither math nor game design, and I don't throw around this accusation lightly. You whined about me playing powerful characters (who win encounters, because winning is baaaaad) but gave party-building advice (to win encounters). Having thus pulled a vanilla Stormwind, you then come out hard against roleplaying in this and in one of dtgreene's threads. And the whole "munchkin" (tabletop griefing) business in
singleplayer CRPGs is simply pants-on-head insane. Newsflash: pants are for legs. Choose more appropriate headgear.