Re: Mechanisms to combat multiple-entry by a player

From: Enno Rehling <enno@despammed.com>

Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 12:18:20 +0000

> You're a power-gamer, right?  Listen, Enno, there are two schools of player out
> there.  Power-Gamers and Role-Players.  All the others are just variations of
> those two.  Maybe you think that because your game isn't an RPG that
> roleplayers don't join it.  You'd be wrong, im sure.  Role-Players *do* join
> games like yours, many of them in fact, and they don't get any pleasure from
> "communicating with themselves" in general.

I know they do, and I like that they do it. The players staying the
longest in the game are the role-players, the ones that realize that
there's more to it than just massacering their neighbours. Because the
power-gamers, once they've killed everyone around them, get bored fast.
I'm too lazy to be a good power-gamer. But I know there are a lot of
them around, and they can spoil the fun of the role-players, especially
if the mechanisms in the game that are supposed to balance it a little
are circumvented by playing more than one faction. It's the power-gamers
that do this, not the roleplayerrs. I wish they'd all be roleplayers,
really :-)

> The whole point of a game for a roleplayer is interaction with other real
> people.  The actual strategy doesn't matter a hoot.

It matters as soon as your faction gets wiped out by them. Roleplayers
cannot ignore that the world around them contains powergamers. A faction
of peaceful berry-pickers will die quickly. But that doesn't mean they
should have to go to the other extreme of building huge armies to
protect themselves either, because that's not the way they like to play.
Game mechanics should give them a chance even when they aren't
optimizing, by doing what they're good at - socializing, and gaining
strength in number.

> This all sounds like an incredible waste of time and effort to me.  Why bother?
> Build a strong game and the cheats will wither away over time.  What's left
> won't cause you any problems as long as you are "hands on" with your GMing.

For some games, this works. For others, it doesn't. This doesn't have to
do with whether it's a strong game or not - some game mechanisms are
fun, but don't work with a game that has multis. Take poker, or any
other classic games - a multi in poker would ruin the game for anyone
who plays according to the rules. Letting everyone do it doesn't help.
It ruins the game. You could say poker is badly designed, of course -
and it is indeed badly designed for a pbem that allows multis. But if
you want to reduce pbem games to just the parts that work in the
presence of multis, you're taking away far too much, imho.

Another aspect: Time. Powergamers usually have far more of this than
casual gamers - some spend up to 80 hours/week on online games. If you
want casual gamers to stand a chance in the game, you cap some values:
No faction can have more than X units, for example. This limits the
amount of "useful time" that you can spend on your faction. Once you
allow multis, those caps become meaningless. Powergamers rule the game,
casual players get squashed.

Enno.

References

Re: Mechanisms to combat multiple-entry by a player
Enno Rehling <enno@despammed.com>
Mon, 09 Jun 2003 16:01:22 +0000
Re: Mechanisms to combat multiple-entry by a player
madcentral@aol.com (MadCentral)
Tue, 10 Jun 2003 11:20:58 +0000

Referenced By

Re: Mechanisms to combat multiple-entry by a player
Enno Rehling <enno@despammed.com>
Mon, 09 Jun 2003 16:01:22 +0000
Re: Mechanisms to combat multiple-entry by a player
madcentral@aol.com (MadCentral)
Tue, 10 Jun 2003 11:20:58 +0000