Character skill vs. player skill and character immersion

[elander_]

I don't know how the player can have fun without using his skills. Be it reflexes or tactical thinking or puzzle solving, i think he must use at least use one of his skills.

Leonarad Boyarsky also mentioned once that skills must impose constraints to what the player can do but not to how much fun the player can have. Or something like that.

 

[Kairal]

I think it would be significantly more interesting if my character could choose instead to tell the party about his weakness before the attack. As such the party leaves him behind and manages to defeat the goblins, however due to him having broken his Macho Man role the party loses all respect for him and leaves.

The point of this long winded example is that I prefer to have options with consequences for breaking my role rather than just being forced into it.

First, I think that an option where someone got killed because of your weaknesses, potentially affecting you and maybe increasing your fear threshold due to paying such a price for it, is way more interesting that dumb - my apologies - " my party left me now because they all hate me" option.

Second, nobody forces you to run into goblins and then run away screaming. You may scout the exit carefully, notice the goblins, and return to your party to discuss the situation with them.

It's not a great example and it should have more options and consequences than that. However the point was that you can't talk to your party about the situation because the Macho Man trait prevents you from admitting your weakness to the group... As such you're pretty well locked into the "CHAAAAARGE" dialogue option. Furthormore in a situation where the vice takes over you're locked into the result as well. Personally I'm not going to think "damn if I hadn't chosen those two traits at the very start of the game, Bill wouldn't be dead now". I'm going to think "a better game would have given me more options".

If the panic was implemented in an intelligent way such that as a player I decide I should flee, then i'm going to feel a lot more responsible for the outcome.

More on topic, about player skills I think I'd rather see a system where the player controls the character but simply doesn;t have a huge effect. To use OB with the lockpicking as an example have it a very simple game which requires little to no skill (I don't actually know what the minigame is) and then simply say the lock is too complex if your character's skill isn;t high enough.

In my view that combines the best of both worlds allowing player interaction + character skill. I'm really not sure that RPG's should be a challenge anyway.