I said it makes it pointless to munchkinize because a good GM either patches on the spot or rebalances or whatever, to make characters approx equally viable. That is has no signifigant net result in any way. That includes how the GM can (and probably should) compensate for player skill differences as part of why it's net-zero. giving little buffs to characters of players that aren't very skilled, little nerfs to characters of players that are, etc. is a good thing. clever strategies should be rewarded, yes, but not so heavilly rewarded that other players make no impact upon the game. and a good GM will do exactly that.
The problem is, the GM is not God. They are an imperfect human who can and will make mistakes. If you try and have them do no balancing except on-the-spot balancing, you will not have everything be equal, because sometimes the GM will undershoot good balance, and sometimes they'll overshoot.
A good example of this, with the very same GM we have now, is Piecewise's effort to balance Tinker. Someone designs a gun and tests it; sometimes, the gun would end up being so uselessly weak--unintentionally on PW's part--that the idea (though workable) was just abandoned. Sometimes, it would end up being so good that it basically replaced old equipment. This resulted in power creep, which gradually made people stronger, and the game harder to make fun.
Perhaps your point is that PW should have nerfed weapons repeatedly until they became useless. Maybe you're right. I know it would have pissed a lot of people off, and ruined the game for a lot of people. I can't really say anything more than that.
Perhaps your point is that PW is a bad GM, because he can't balance everything into a perfect equilibrium on the dot I'd disagree here too, but I can't say much beyond that.
that's what rule 0 is for, is someone designs a million-damage-attack, the GM should NOT be putting 10million hp enemies against the players, because the people that do 5 damage an attack will have zero impact and be completely irrelevant. in that case, the million-damage attack HAS to be rule-0'd out, or a counterplay threat has to be introduced, like Anor Londo Archers, or suchlike.
See, I agree here. The GM shouldn't be letting anyone do a millio dmage. My point is that saying "Oh, sure the exploit exists, but that's fine" is foolish; people will notice it, be debuffed by GM fiat, and be unhappy because that feels arbitrary and unfair--especially when other people are making use of the same mechanic, but aren't debuffed because they're deliberately taking other pointless flaws.
The Anor Londo archers example is just stupid. It has no bearing on an RPG system like this, because in Dark Souls it
doesn't counter an OP blocking character. It does force a player to use
skill rather than
stats, but this implies the false tradeoff that a character with high stats is unskilled. To go back to your original example, why is the guy with the great shield incapable of using a different strategy than normal? Why is the only valid solution the one thing the OP melee guy is bad at? In the actual game, with proper timing, it isn't that difficult to get into melee range--and it's actually easier than a ranged strategy unless your character is entirely built for sniping (and therefore much weaker throughout the rest of the game).
Beyond that, even if it were a perfect example, we still have the problem that there's no guarantee of the Munchkin builds having nice counters like that. Again, I'm brought to the Pancaek Problem: How do you kill a character with godlike magical power and extremely effective and cheap armor? Exploit the one weakness of it being a pancake? Can
you come up with a solution here? A solution which doesn't feel arbitrary, as the Amp Specialist and Nuke door incidents did?
Assuming you're capable of making a character that powerful, you have a responsibility not to do it, as a player. so, assuming the system you end up working in is breakable (safe assumption), then a skilled munchkin will have to either intentionally hold back, by choosing to use a flawed concept or build, or they will be rule 0'd down to approximately the same region of power as everyone else.
...And quite possibly be made unhappy because there's no way to do it in a nice way. I suppose their enjoyment of the game isn't a problem though, because they aren't playing the game right, yeah?
if a player is unskilled in a broken system, then, again, they can be rule 0'd, up to the level of everyone else.
this is why the brokenness of a system is irrelevant.
Okay. So why are we even keeping the broken system in the first place? It's more work for the GM to constantly be Rule Zeroing everyone, but I thought your point was people can then play more interesting characters by breaking the system. But, now you're saying that weak but interesting characters can just be Rule Zero'd up to par.
So really, you're just saying that in your ideal system, you'll have fun building a character the way you like to build a character, and everyone else can be Rule Zero'd if they don't do the same?
however, if what is happening is the GM is focused on making the system perfectly balanced, then someone who makes poor design choices or plays their character poorly has no recourse because fixing their flaws would throw off the balance of the game. It's better to have a accepted to be broken system that can and will be hourse-ruled to personalize power to each player than a balanced system that screws the unskilled over.
Why are we suddenly saying that a balanced system will necessarily screw over weak characters? They can still be Rule Zero'd, just as in the broken system, with exactly the same amount of balance breaking as in that system. I suppose some people might be unhappy about only weak characters getting arbitrary buffs, but I somehow doubt they would be soothed by strong characters getting arbitrary debuffs to match.
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Topic: Einsteinian Roulette: OOC and NEW PLAYER INFO (Read 2542511 times)