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[spazyak]

why don't we just make the enemies tougher or smarter?

Far, far easier said than done.

Also, very fine line between enemies being smarter and the GM fucking with you. See the Curious Case of the Thermonuclear Door.

oh? and thermonuclear door?

[Radio Controlled]

Again though, doesn't power level segregation do a lot to alleviate these problems? It's no fun if the best thing you could possibly do on a mission is sit tight and not break anything while the grownups do the mission, but if you just sequester all those overpowered jerks and throw them on suitably brutal and unfair missions, while letting the others go on with their more (un)reasonable lives, doesn't that solve a lot of the 'OP at the end of the upgrade tree' issue? Combined with a chance to retire a char and do a NG+ perhaps.

[MidnightJaguar]

Putting everything else aside, overshoots tend to also be utterly hilarious, take for example Mesk kickboxing his way through the serial killer mission or Jim shooting an office supplies store worth of materials at terminal velocity towards a bunch of homicidal doctors.

[Pancaek]

See the Curious Case of the Thermonuclear Door.

Every time someone mentions that, I die a little bit more inside.

[Radio Controlled]

See the Curious Case of the Thermonuclear Door.

Every time someone mentions that, I die a little bit more inside.

In contrast to the event itself, where you died a whole lot more on the outside.

[Dorsidwarf]

why don't we just make the enemies tougher or smarter?

Far, far easier said than done.

Also, very fine line between enemies being smarter and the GM fucking with you. See the Curious Case of the Thermonuclear Door.

thermonuclear door?

M20(?) team went in operator and tactical, and achieved most of their objectives. They then ignored three seperate fate warnings and walked through the main door into an armory of thermonuclear warheads.

And failed to see the tripwire.

They're only alive (mostly) because of immense, absolute, increddible lenience on PW's part (letting morul put up a barrier against enough firepower to distract a continent of haebi from their brains being stolen)

[Radio Controlled]

It was Pancaek who tanked the nukes though, Morul was part of a team on the planet itself.

[Harry Baldman]

Again though, doesn't power level segregation do a lot to alleviate these problems? It's no fun if the best thing you could possibly do on a mission is sit tight and not break anything while the grownups do the mission, but if you just sequester all those overpowered jerks and throw them on suitably brutal and unfair missions, while letting the others go on with their more (un)reasonable lives, doesn't that solve a lot of the 'OP at the end of the upgrade tree' issue? Combined with a chance to retire a char and do a NG+ perhaps.

It's pretty fun if you're really good at wrecking things with a lot of collateral damage and the mission happens to call for that. It's not a good mission if it doesn't at some point, obviously. Besides, good thing about increasing pluses resulting in catastrophic overshoots is that it encourages you to diversify. You can still be a grownup at some things that you haven't had much practice in, for one.

Sequestering, while theoretically workable (bit early to tell, really) kind of feels artificial, though. And increases the number of missions needed.

Not that I'm seriously suggesting the encroaching madness thing as a legitimate fix for ER. I just think it's a funny idea for a character progression system. I mostly gripe about ER because it gets me to think more exactly about design, you see. It's a bit too late in its lifespan to change in a fundamental way.

[Ozarck]

My exact thoughts when I read that post.  I've had fights in DnD which took multiple sessions to resolve.

Yep. First and last time I tried playing, rolling for initiative took the entire session.

really? that's bad form then on the Gm and players. rolling initiative should take about thirty seconds total.

[NJW2000]

I think actual degredation of the player as they level is gimmicky at best, and poor at worst. It would be almost impossible to do without having an optimal point, at which you just level med or uncon instead or something. Noone wants to kill their own character.

[Egan_BW]

Make leveling up random and non-optional.
Though I would somewhat like to see post-ER being more like Perplexicon and less of a swarm of incompetent fools.

*ER crosses its fingers for airship game.

[MidnightJaguar]

I do kinda like the idea of a character who has survived enough missions and gone crazy enough that they can't help but overshoot though, Like  if someone with a +5 in med gets an 11 and makes a protoaltered out of someone instead of stopping a teammates bleeding out.

[Radio Controlled]

I'd like to see more ER personally, though not necessarily in the exact form we know it now. Maybe more of an exploration game, where you're a bunch of impressionable young schmucks in a strange universe who, after getting their little heads filled with fantastical tales of your predecessor's antics, are now tasked to go find new resources and lands for your fledgling colony. Better hope you don't disturb the local fauna!

Hell, if those self-sustaining and expanding colonies work out, we could also become a sort of interdimensional goon squad who travel from dimension to dimension to solve whatever problems the colonists there have, to stay in the spirit of old ER. Need a hive of hostile crystal space bees taken out? Want some expendables to go grab some of those weird anomalous can openers over yonder? Is there inter-faction rivalry between different colonies that need some expert diplomats to talk through? Who better to ask than the spiritual incarnation of the HMRC!

[Egan_BW]

To be honest, we could do practically any setting while still technically being in the ER universe.

[Dorsidwarf]

I'd like to see more ER personally, though not necessarily in the exact form we know it now. Maybe more of an exploration game, where you're a bunch of impressionable young schmucks in a strange universe who, after getting their little heads filled with fantastical tales of your predecessor's antics, are now tasked to go find new resources and lands for your fledgling colony. Better hope you don't disturb the local fauna!

Hell, if those self-sustaining and expanding colonies work out, we could also become a sort of interdimensional goon squad who travel from dimension to dimension to solve whatever problems the colonists there have, to stay in the spirit of old ER. Need a hive of hostile crystal space bees taken out? Want some expendables to go grab some of those weird anomalous can openers over yonder? Is there inter-faction rivalry between different colonies that need some expert diplomats to talk through? Who better to ask than the spiritual incarnation of the HMRC!

Steve Garvey: >"Another dimension needs your help. They're under attack by the last team we sent to help them."