FAIL STATE INFLATION - Monocled, or degenerate?

Because repetition is annoying, like you said. Fallout gives you some freedom, but getting sent back to level 1 makes you have to take the same early steps again and again. Unless you take long breaks between playthroughs, I could see it getting old pretty fast.

 

I don't see it as "getting sent back to level 1", just as the end of story for my character.
I usually play a few/several times in a row until I run out of character ideas and then take a few months of pause.

 

You know, I'm sure that I remember in BG2 (first time around - not when powergaming it the umpteenth time with full foreknowledge of each encounter) having fights (Firkraag, Silver Dragon, some enemy parties, Irenicus) where even after a couple of reloads, I'd still come out with a couple of dead party members, or someone who needed freedom from imprisonment, or turned to stone or whatnot. I wouldn't consider it a failstate because whilst it meant a significant penalty (a trip to town and much gold if your cleric was down, or vulnerability until you could rest repeatedly or buy the relevant scrolls to resurrect/free/decurse/stone-to-flesh the relevant characters). It helped that some cures really did need scrolls to cure until your cleric/druid reached quite a high level.

Maybe that's the answer. Set the difficulty so that even with a few reloads, you're lucky to take out the optional 'champion' fights (like Firkraag) without some deaths, but rather than going the Bioware 'everyone hops back up at end of fight' or the 'instagib' system, you have a significant penalty - but far from insurmountable - like going to town and buying the right scroll. It just means that story-critical fights should be save-scummable, while optional fights should leave you feeling lucky to win even with 2/3 of your party dead.

 

Was going to brofist your post until I read this. If anything, story critical fights should be even more difficult. I'm sick of handholding in "RPGs". Put in the challenges. Let people rise up to them or fail and quit.

 

And that, my friends, is 120% bullshit.
Give or take 20%.

First of all, any sort of added challenge is usually meaningless with unlimited retries (there are exceptions, but rare enough to be ignored for the sake of this topic).

Second of all, you either gets to bend the laws of probability (probabilistic mechanics or your own imperfection) in your favour, or you get information about possibility space for free. This renders a good number of gameplay mechanics completely moot. For instance, ensuring, through copious reloading, that you beat every short term challenge flawlessly completely removes long term resource management and various failure mitigation mechanics from your game. That probabilistic or hidden information mechanics gets irreversibly broken goes without saying.

Third staring at the screen spamming quickload isn't indicative of any skill. Patience alone doesn't make you a monocled hardcore gamer and if you need to cling to such thought the chances are you're beyond all hope anyway.
I've been there and done that - either man up and stop deluding yourself that you're doing anything but but pumping your quickload lever compulsively in hope for a food pellet like a well conditioned rat you are, or man up even more and stop fucking doing it.
Really, it's liberating to know that you're not going to go through a fight with enemy hilariously out of your league about ten or so more times until you manage to not get that concussion powder blow your face off, but can turn back and flee.

Sure, if your inflated fail state means that you'll play the game ironman without, for example, ever resurrecting party member (or ragequite & delete save trying), then be my fucking guest - an LP of, say, Wiz8 where no PC gets ever killed would certainly

Well, it sort of is - if you try to make all the interesting diseases, consequences and partial failure modes worthwhile part of your development effort, then them being only seen by players who consciously inconvenience themselves by abstaining from using reload button kind of puts hamper on your motivation since you know, time and money effectively down the drain.

I wouldn't consider this approach effective.

Really, about three decades of having death and resurrection as prominent cRPG mechanics should have taught people that.

Sure, fine gradation of success and failure states is very desirable, as it helps make the game interesting, balanced, less random in its outcomes and allows certain mechanics to not be eliminated from gameplay proper, this time due to being too risky (textbook example - stealing), but it doesn't make people savescum much less.

It can and should be used in tandem with anti-fail state inflation mechanics to make the gameplay less randomly frustrating and inflated fail state less likely to become deferred actual one.

The proper way to fight fail state inflation is by either disallowing such degenerate gameplay altogether (forced ironman) or by making reloading itself fall into the realm of even slightly inflated fail state.

This can be accomplished in several ways, for example:
-delayed consequences may make reloading part of extended fail state by introducing player investment in doing stuff that is wasted if player reloads save that still allows them to avoid undesireable consequences. In open world games, "smart" delays can be used based on measures other than time, preferably something that can't be accumulated easily. If you can assure that save state to be rewritten at the point where player learns of the failure (by either using a really long delay, or forcing one save limit and handling backups and failsafes automatically), it becomes foolproof, but it can't apply to all possible fail state extensions.

-reload penalties can be used to make reloads worth less than the alternative in most situations short of death/TPK, without .

tl;dr

Having to ask the OP question alone is a clear mark of degeneracy.

Make the notion of perfect run meaningless by not allowing player to see all or even majority of content on any single playthrough.

If and only if you don't reload.

And it isn't really inflating fail state, it's using houserules to eliminate abusable mechanics.

That's pretty OK if abusable mechanics is already in.

That only works if a story for your next character isn't largely the same.