Re: What difficultly level do you play one?

On Wed, 10 Jul 2024 06:22:48 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

On Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:28:12 +0100, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, JAB
wrote:
>

Another one of my pet peeves, monsters that just inhabit rooms waiting
to be killed by some passing adventurers. Do they never eat, sleep, work?

>
Ah, the Gygax approach. Yeah, that's why 2e introduced this whole novel
concept called "ecology." That and the idea that creatures - that should
be mortal enemies - are just hanging out in one room, never leaving,
while the other group they hate hangs out in another is silliness.
>
My pet peeve though is when you get ambushed in one of those games where
you'll actually arrive at the ambush at a completely arbitrary time,
sometimes days or weeks long variability. What? Do they have perfect
scouting? Is a scry spell being used 24/7? Do they just sit there staking
out the location day after day waiting for the eventual group of enemies?
>
Icewind Dale II was particularly egregious on ambushes. You'd stealth
scout an area, see that there were four or five monsters, and then start
the encounter and creatures that were never there in the first place
started "beaming in" and ganking your squishies in the back. It was the
"monster closet" approach, but there was no closet.
>
Finally, mages with a full-on combat spell loadout. Um... what? Why does
the wizard have nothing but magic missile, scorching ray, fireball, and
ice storm memorized? Does this guy not use utility spells at all?

I generally give CRPGs a pass, since the gameplay is intentionally
made more arcadey. But I found the long-rest to only become
particularly problematic starting with the 2002 "Neverwinter Night"
games, where you could plop down and rest uninterrupted at will,
instantly recouping your spells and hitpoints.

(Well, instantly from the player's perspective. Nominally time passed
for the character, but since neither monsters nor quest advanced a jot
during that time, you'd never notice it wasn't interest).

The earlier Gold Box games and even Baldurs Gate restricted the
ability to rest somewhat. They either penalized you with random
encounters which interrupted your sleep (which you normally only took
anyway when you were low on hitpoints and spells already, so it could
be particularly dangerous) or just flat out disallowed you to rest
("the area is too dangerous") until you reached a safer part of the
map. It was a good balance between 'realism' and fun; the alternative
was having to trek back to somewhere safe everytime your hitpoints got
low (and then finding enemy reinforcements had arrived and you had to
fight through the horde a second time just to get where you left off,
and that's not fun at all.

(well, at least not in CRPGs. It can be quite fun in tabletop, but
that's because players have a lot more options and the game -even
D&D!- is a lot less combat focused. Reinforcements arrive in tabletop?
Find a way to stop those reinforcements! But reinforcements in the
computer game are just automatic respawns and players have no agency
over their appearance).

But as video games become ever more complex, I find the excuse for
"long rest heals all" less and less appealing, because nowadays video
games CAN better duplicate tabletop by giving players more options,
and relying on full rests instead feels like a lazy crutch.