galsiah said:You seem to be assuming that PC punishment = player punishment. That's not necessarily true even outside lulz+restart games. Setbacks in most current games tend not to provide entertainment since they don't open up interesting gameplay/content, whereas success does. There's no reason to avoid PC punishments - just so long as they don't punish the player.
Well, there are punishments and punishments. Take permanent injuries, for example. Sure, every manual on "roleplaying" is all excited about how fascinating is to play an one-handed, one-legged, one-eyed cripple. But fact is - a character who suffered a serious penalty on precision or can't handle anything bigger than one-handed sword without a shield/small handgun, is very unlikely to have a chance to survive in later part of the game, and having to watch him slowly limping from one side of the level to another is enough to stop playing altogether.
Sure, you could drop in some sort of a quest to remove this or that particular injury, but games with critical injuries tend to give them away very generously, and any entertaining setbacks are only entertaining the first time.
Further, I'd say that PC punishments that are "easily curable" are some of the worst kind - since they only act as a time-sink [[EDIT: assuming a game with no real time pressure - which is less than ideal]], and are therefore almost automatically a punishment for the player.
Every game has real time pressure, take poisonings - if you don't lose hitpoints every second, you lose them every step. Either way, injuries and afflictions which may be cured provide an additional system of challenges - a search for a healing fountain to heal a disease before it kills you, a frantic rush to a healer to get a cure poison potion before your hitpoints are over, a quest for a silversmith to replace a missing extremity, a change in magical research plan to get that stone to flesh spell before all others, you name it. If an injury is incurable, the PC is fucked up - and so is the player, if not immediately, then once the crippled PC's inefficiency starts to shine.