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[Devastator]

Here's a hint:  You have never done everything right.  Nobody has done everything right, ever, and if you ever think you have, you simply haven't realized the mistakes you've made.

Those dead bodies are your imperative to do better, and to find the mistakes you're making.  If you don't have those dead bodies, what you are playing is not actually challenging.

[Lenglon]

Here's a hint:  You have never done everything right.  Nobody has done everything right, ever, and if you ever think you have, you simply haven't realized the mistakes you've made.

Those dead bodies are your imperative to do better, and to find the mistakes you're making.  If you don't have those dead bodies, what you are playing is not actually challenging.

Are you sure?

[Devastator]

I have an odd feeling that guy is no stranger to the 'game over' screen.

[piecewise]

Here's a hint:  You have never done everything right.  Nobody has done everything right, ever, and if you ever think you have, you simply haven't realized the mistakes you've made.

Those dead bodies are your imperative to do better, and to find the mistakes you're making.  If you don't have those dead bodies, what you are playing is not actually challenging.

Are you sure?

Of course he's Japanese.

[piecewise]

Seriously, though, please, make a LP of ER; or maybe something like "A day in the life of Einsteinian Roulette GM" with you narrating how you do turns. Preferably, you could outright mention some cool GM-knowledge while laughing at the player actions - and maybe post the thing sometime later, when the spoilers would be irrelevant (so, say, after the mission if its about the hidden mission rules and undercurrents). Or maybe how you bring together a mission. Or how you groan at the tinkerdogs posting in their mad pit of a thread. (well, before it all went to IRC, anyway)

That would be so cool!

I feel like this wouldn't be very interesting because most turns aren't very exciting on their own, and it would be like 2 and a half hours of me saying "And now I roll to see...yeah they live."



Though I could do a text lp talking about I create a game, which someone talked about.

[Radio Controlled]

While I can understand the idea that the game should be harder, there's a problem I see with the way it's postulated, that 'dead bodies mean it's hard'. Does it though? Because a lot of dead might mean the mission is hard... Or that the players are exceptionally bad. The artic mission is a good example: quite a few dead, utterly failed the mission objectives, but can you say the mission was hard? Or that the people on it jusr performed horrendous on an easy mission?

Similarly, can you claim diplo mission was easy, with middling players succeeding, or that the mission was hard, but that the team that did it was just that good? Say the mission had had the exact same outcome, but with 3 permadeads due to bad planning, how would that influence the mission review? Say the mission objectives are still all fulfilled, could you say the mission was equally succesful, despite higher casualty numbers? Or say we did it sans any dead, but failed the mission objectives, what would that entail? Which one of the two missions would be the hardest, and which team would be the worst one?

Or perhaps the mission had good difficulty, but the team was overpowered (not even accounting for factors like teamwork, planning or smart actions). A hard video game level can become a cakewalk with OP gear, even for a bad player. Does that mean the level is too easy? Or the character  just overpowered? Or is the game too easy cause it allows overpowered characters, or cause it doesn't have a scaling system that increases with char power (irrespective of the 'skill' of the player)?

[Nikitian]

I feel like this wouldn't be very interesting because most turns aren't very exciting on their own, and it would be like 2 and a half hours of me saying "And now I roll to see...yeah they live."

Hmmm. So now the GM's average turn-making time is revealed!

Also, could you perhaps pick a turn that's especially cool by design? Like one of those "Oh, and now you have to find STAN." or "Let me see... oh dear." turns? I imagine that could be fairly hard to know from before making the turn, but perhaps in some rare cases (semi-scripted mission boss - and inb4 "scripted" as in "it was mentioned in the GM's mission script from the very beginning" and not "ER Railways, next stop: Boss fight"; or something else) it could be achieved nonetheless? Could you perhaps just look out for such highly-packed interesting turns, and when one can be reasonably spotted in future, you'd do this turn-making narration?

[Devastator]

That isn't quite what I said.. I said dead bodies means it's challenging.  It could be spread out to mean other kinds of failure as well.  It could be from any cause, bad orders, underpowered players, etcetra, and it could be in other forms, such as actual mission failure or permadead players or such.

I mentioned dead bodies because that's the only kind of real failure that exists.  A failed mission hardly matters, it's just a missing superartifact or two that you never knew existed in the first place, or a theoretically uncomfortable situation for Steve which he would then solve with no player effort at all.  A screwup on the Q'baja diplo mission, for instance, and I think Steve would have murdered the guy and took over the planet anyway.  Only loss would have been a couple tokens.  Temp dead, which used to make you sit out a mission, doesn't matter, you get patched up and sent out again immediately, no loss.

A significant majority of player casulties were caused by other players, but these days we have plenty of people ready to jump on any inappropriate orders in the OOC thread, 'don't do that' and any players seen to be dangerous have been marginalized, such as Xantalos or U_P.

In the end, the question of 'do the players suck' or 'is the mission hard' is irrelevant, as those are both qualitative statements, and the label is arbritrary, even say the boxes mission with STAN.  That had lots of stuff that is little seen, dangerous travel, for instance.  Getting down that pit was harder than anything you had to do in the diplo mission.  At the end of the day, the only question for me seems to be, 'did you guys get asked to do anything in-game?'  and the answer to that is often very independant from how the mission is described to the players.

For instance, Lenglon mentioned a bunch of things from the base cleanup in the diplo mission post-game stuff, but most of the examples aren't too much.  If you were packed together, PW wouldn't blow you up with one shot.  If you weren't supporting each other, you would have had a turn to rescue each other.  If you didn't take care of most of the battlesuits, it would have been another turn's work for Mya and his +3 amp with perfect decomp.  If you hadn't protected against rockets, it would have been about 50% chance of missing, 45% chance of no significant damage.  And that's assuming you wouldn't have gotten an extra turn thrown in with the missiles 'in flight', so to speak.

The current round is definately more significant, but we're moved from the point of 'don't blow yourselves up' to win, to 'do things that could be done with five 0 mission newbies'.  There's a long way to go from there.

And no, I'm not believing that everyone is totally awesome forever.  That's the sign of a good GM, but it's statistically impossible.  Isn't it 95% of everyone who thinks they're above average, or something like that?

[Dorsidwarf]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This. ER is a game about nutso convicts with weapons of outrageously high caliber on deadly and genuinely zany/surprising/spooky missions at the whim of an omnipresent green AI, at heart, and the whole "Do exactly and only as I say or I will have the GM assassinate you" just doesn't seem to like, fit.
I'm not like a long-term player though, so maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick about 'Space Army RP: Now With The Heat Death Of The Universe Approaching '.

[IronyOwl]

That isn't quite what I said.. I said dead bodies means it's challenging.  It could be spread out to mean other kinds of failure as well.  It could be from any cause, bad orders, underpowered players, etcetra, and it could be in other forms, such as actual mission failure or permadead players or such.

I mentioned dead bodies because that's the only kind of real failure that exists.  A failed mission hardly matters, it's just a missing superartifact or two that you never knew existed in the first place, or a theoretically uncomfortable situation for Steve which he would then solve with no player effort at all.  A screwup on the Q'baja diplo mission, for instance, and I think Steve would have murdered the guy and took over the planet anyway.  Only loss would have been a couple tokens.  Temp dead, which used to make you sit out a mission, doesn't matter, you get patched up and sent out again immediately, no loss.

Other people already addressed the first point, though. Dead bodies doesn't automatically mean challenging, and challenging doesn't automatically mean dead bodies. You can have a mission with a lot of bodies that wasn't challenging, just unlucky or filled with stupid decisions, and you can have a mission with no bodies that was nonetheless very difficult or dangerous.

By the second point's reasoning, dead bodies doesn't automatically mean challenging either, because you just reroll and go on another few missions. Neither would ending the entire game in defeat, for that matter, since PW would just run something else you could join up for. Everything's trivial if you don't care about its effects, and it's easy to not care about anything's effects if you assume that you've got infinite time, a compassionate GM, no character attachment, etc etc.

A significant majority of player casulties were caused by other players, but these days we have plenty of people ready to jump on any inappropriate orders in the OOC thread, 'don't do that' and any players seen to be dangerous have been marginalized, such as Xantalos or U_P.

This is true, and a bit unfortunate. That said, you might notice Xan's marginalization is almost entirely IC and reasonable, and most other "dangerous" characters aren't around anymore because they've already gotten themselves thoroughly murdered. You might also notice that getting predictably murdered by "allies" is less than fantastic in most circumstances.

The current round is definately more significant, but we're moved from the point of 'don't blow yourselves up' to win, to 'do things that could be done with five 0 mission newbies'.  There's a long way to go from there.

I fail to see how any of the current missions could be completed with any realistic chance of success by five 0-mission newbies, especially if we're talking newbie players as well as characters. One of the ground missions actually has a large complement of newbies, and it's relying heavily on its robot overlords to not get eaten by the ground, let alone survive any active threats.

Of course, you probably need them to be standard issue gear so you can curbstomp missions even more.

I feel like if this bothers you that much, you should just make your own game and show us how it's done. This is clearly across the line of mechanical objections and into sarcastic whining.

[Devastator]

Thanks Irony. 

The dead bodies bit is to be a metric; something that differentiates between an 'easy' mission and a 'hard' mission that isn't completely arbritrary.  Even if correlation isn't 100%, it's nice to have something that can be pointed at.

the five newbie thing.. well, I think you might actually want a sixth or a seventh for the ground mission.  Two with light weapons, one with a free prototype weapon, one amp user, a driver, and a spare with a cutting laser.  The ship mission would be three guys with goop throwers, one with a cutting laser, and one 'fighter' with a combat weapon.  Success wouldn't be guaranteed, but I'd bet on better than 50%.

I'm also very reluctant to imply that newbies are also useless players.  You're not useless simply because you joined later than other players.  You're useless because you're on missions that can be, and are, soloed by your robot overlords.  And because new players tend to disappear more.

And it is sarcastic whining, heh.  I suppose I could make a game, though, but would you guys really want a freak like me running one?

[Lenglon]

Topic reminder: price of AoW - price should or should not be raised from 30 to 50 tokens
argument: current price of 30 tokens is reasonable, 50 is too many, because 50 would mandate 5 missions minimum, 10 maximum, of saving every single token in order to buy it, and saving every single token for that long is an unreasonable expectation in of itself. leading to it becoming unpurchasable.

counterargument: token gain per mission listed above is inaccurate, the missions used to estimate do not accurately portray token gain rate.

my opinion: token gain per mission listed above IS accurate, and raising price of AoW should not occur.

just thought i'd remind ppl how this began, because arguing about the definition of "challenge" is pointless.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I think the AoW price can safely be upped. It will extend the price margins for the other gear, because you'll be able to have something that's powerful and expensive without having its price be unfavorably compared to that of an Avatar.

In my opinion, the Avatars should not be "purchaseable", as you put it. They should not be gear just anyone can buy if they survive long enough. Sure, they come with a number of catches, but 30 token doesn't even begin to cover the sort of battlefield presence an Avatar has. They're awesome things, to be sure, but I think the overall game flow and mission structure would greatly benefit from battlesuits (and/or Assault Suits) being the biggest things generally available to the players. Avatars could be a part of a special rewards program, extending from the "tokens as a measure of a character's trustworthiness/competence", as in "you have served us well and have shown great skill and command ability - if you want to, we can put you into an Avatar of War, although you'll lose most of your current gear because you'll be entombed in a massive almost-sentient war machine".

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

PW did offhandedly mention that an AOW would need about 15 high power grenades in it's weak points to take it down, or even slow it down.

[kj1225]

I say up it to 40. Mostly just because of how massively powerful they are and it should take a metric ass load of tokens to get it.

But I'm also tired and want to stay a fleshy organic. So what do I know.