Gotcha. (In my case, I was pretty disinterested in this aspect of Planecrash and mostly find myself skipping past the various D&D minutia. The thing I was interested in re: pathfinder was more about the story than the rules, i.e. how various gods and alignments and nations are normally portrayed)
It’s not obvious to me how much Planecrash was (implicitly?) promising to deliver on the sort of thing you describe here, but, makes sense to be sad if you were hoping for that, and/or to caution people about it.
I will note that the Project Lawful examples I have in mind can’t be fairly described as “minutiae”; they get at fairly fundamental aspects of the structure of the rules and the world.
(That said, it’s of course quite reasonable not to care at all about that sort of thing.)
I’m somewhat familiar with D&D, having played it a bit and read the rulebooks about 40 years ago and not since. So I recognised at once that Planecrash was set in a D&D-like world. The system of alignments, character classes, ability scores, and levels, and so on were familiar. I had never heard of Pathfinder but now know that it’s the specific D&D-like rules and world in which Planecrash is set. Beyond that I don’t care what the exact rules are (of Pathfinder or D&D).
From that point of view, are any of the defects you have in mind still recognisable as defects?
The story of the munchkin 2-year emperor is clearly a failure even for someone with no knowledge of the specific D&D rules that it violates. The fact that the author flouted several rules that were in the way of his plot just makes it worse, it turns it into tennis with the net down, but the plot as it stands was already pretty bad.
(that said, your comment prompts me to wonder about the domain of videogames, where there typically isn’t DM judgment restricting XP gain. You’ve also written about World of WarCraft and I find myself curious if the 2 year emperor trick works there)
Most multiplayer games have some way to limit XP gain from encounters outside your difficulty, to avoid exactly this sort of cheesing. The worry is that it allows players to get through the content quicker, with (possibly paid) help from others, which presumably makes it less likely they’ll stick around.
(Though of course an experienced player can still level vastly faster, since most players don’t take combat anywhere near optimally to maximize xp gain.)
That said, Morrowind famously contains an actual intelligence explosion. So you tend to see this sort of stuff more often in singleplayer, I think. (Potion quality triggers off intelligence. Potions can raise intelligence.)
It absolutely does not, precisely for reasons #2 and #3 I listed.
Game designers—especially designers of extremely popular games with large budgets and armies of playtesters—do not, as a rule, tend to be idiots. And they would have to be very stupid indeed to allow a very serious and very obvious exploit that has, furthermore, been known for decades.
This is why I find things like the aforesaid Two-Year Emperor “exploit” to be insulting to my intelligence as a reader. There’s few quicker ways, than that, to ruin any possible enjoyment of a story.
Gotcha. (In my case, I was pretty disinterested in this aspect of Planecrash and mostly find myself skipping past the various D&D minutia. The thing I was interested in re: pathfinder was more about the story than the rules, i.e. how various gods and alignments and nations are normally portrayed)
It’s not obvious to me how much Planecrash was (implicitly?) promising to deliver on the sort of thing you describe here, but, makes sense to be sad if you were hoping for that, and/or to caution people about it.
I will note that the Project Lawful examples I have in mind can’t be fairly described as “minutiae”; they get at fairly fundamental aspects of the structure of the rules and the world.
(That said, it’s of course quite reasonable not to care at all about that sort of thing.)
I’m somewhat familiar with D&D, having played it a bit and read the rulebooks about 40 years ago and not since. So I recognised at once that Planecrash was set in a D&D-like world. The system of alignments, character classes, ability scores, and levels, and so on were familiar. I had never heard of Pathfinder but now know that it’s the specific D&D-like rules and world in which Planecrash is set. Beyond that I don’t care what the exact rules are (of Pathfinder or D&D).
From that point of view, are any of the defects you have in mind still recognisable as defects?
The story of the munchkin 2-year emperor is clearly a failure even for someone with no knowledge of the specific D&D rules that it violates. The fact that the author flouted several rules that were in the way of his plot just makes it worse, it turns it into tennis with the net down, but the plot as it stands was already pretty bad.
Please see my reply to Eliezer for one example of the sort of thing I have in mind.
(that said, your comment prompts me to wonder about the domain of videogames, where there typically isn’t DM judgment restricting XP gain. You’ve also written about World of WarCraft and I find myself curious if the 2 year emperor trick works there)
Most multiplayer games have some way to limit XP gain from encounters outside your difficulty, to avoid exactly this sort of cheesing. The worry is that it allows players to get through the content quicker, with (possibly paid) help from others, which presumably makes it less likely they’ll stick around.
(Though of course an experienced player can still level vastly faster, since most players don’t take combat anywhere near optimally to maximize xp gain.)
That said, Morrowind famously contains an actual intelligence explosion. So you tend to see this sort of stuff more often in singleplayer, I think. (Potion quality triggers off intelligence. Potions can raise intelligence.)
And of course the entire genre of speedrunning—see also, (TAS) Wildbow’s Worm in 3:47:14.28(WR).
It absolutely does not, precisely for reasons #2 and #3 I listed.
Game designers—especially designers of extremely popular games with large budgets and armies of playtesters—do not, as a rule, tend to be idiots. And they would have to be very stupid indeed to allow a very serious and very obvious exploit that has, furthermore, been known for decades.
This is why I find things like the aforesaid Two-Year Emperor “exploit” to be insulting to my intelligence as a reader. There’s few quicker ways, than that, to ruin any possible enjoyment of a story.