Now that I’m not at work, and I literally picked up two (2) slices of pizza on the way home, scarfed them, had a rye, and working my way through a beer made within the county, let me offer another observation for your esteemed consideration.
There’s a difference between Over-Complication and Balance Issues
Over-Complication is the opposite of simplification. Over-complication is when I tried to figure out my first repair bill. Here was my thought process
1- I took damage.
2- First spending priority is healing to full.
3- Looks like I need to buy a repair kit before I can “drive over healing packs and heal”
4- There are two separate prices for repair kits
5- Discounted repair kits can’t be re-sold
6- But, since I made a pact with mechanic before the mission, can HE buy it at wholesale to repair ME or is that really re-selling?
7- Not sure, but it looks like that’s not ok. Rather than wrangle with the GMs about the rules, I’m going to go with buying the higher price retail kit from Stretch
8- Ok, now time to heal. How many heals can I get from my medic?
9- I need to calculate to 75%. What’s 75% of 55
10- uses calculator
11- what do I do with fractions
12- reads about rounding up
13- ok now how much more health do I need from Stretch
14- uses calculator
15- and what will that cost (x2)
17- but I can’t pay in fractions of LP
18- bluff bargain to pay for N HP but receive N+1 HP
19- now what else can to buy…
Over-complication is when the cognitive tasks of analysis and decision-making outweigh the creative tasks of saying “given those dice-rolls, now what.” I don’t want driving-over-health-packs, but I also don’t want to use a calculator more than once for one purchase. I like to be able to eyeball things on first read, then go back with a sharpened pencil for the final decision.
Too much over-complication is bad for several reasons
- raises the bar for for casual players or people short on time. If you
don’t know what option is favorable at a glance, you end up patrace
being the ONLY person picking option 1a which is explicitly called
THE HARD WAY - Makes it exponentially more difficult for people who like to play the metagame, of which @bizmail_public is the exemplar. For every individual analysis that individual players make (such as an 18-step heal process), metagame players need to do the same analysis across the a playerbase of 25. And that’s just to heal, not to mention FP and AR and ETC compared across 3 missions. No wonder Bubba’s crying uncle. Now, I don’t like to play the game the same way that he does, to be sure. I don’t care much for min-maxing at all (unless I’m playing Skyrim), let alone across all players across all missions. I’d rather do me, tell some tales, and then mosey on. But I sure as hell appreciate that people like him like to play the game and provide that type of perspective, analysis, and leadership. He’s like the Thomas Friedman of BBS door games.
Players have every right to advocate for less Over-Complication
The second concept is Balance Issues.
Balance Issues are when players gripe about not making the right decisions before-hand after they’ve come to learn new information after-the-fact. Or, grousing about how X is advantaged over Y because Z. It looks like:
- mechanic A keeps revising their price because they’ve seen mechanics B and C offer cheaper, later, so mechanic A doesn’t want to be seen as unfair
- suggesting that since mechanics can read and repair maybe we buff the scouts by giving them read, which actually does make more narrative sense
**Balance Issues ** are totally appropriate, and totally to be expected, in competitive games, of which, I suspect a fair portion of the players in BWD are familiar. Griping about Balance Issues is fairly common among certain digital subcultures. Anyone who’s played an MMO knows about balance issues, as do: competitive RTS, FPS, and MOBA players. Even SP RPG games (fallout, skyrim already mentioned here) suffer from balance issues. In the post-Chelsea wasteland, not everyone may be able to read, but all of us are familiar, if not fluent, in being able to independently observe and identify imbalanced items, abilities, and powers.
But…BASD and BWD are not competitive games, they are cooperative. There’s no one single winner, everyone who has fun is a winner. There’s no shaming noobs for dying early, there’s sincere regret if and when anyone gets left behind, because to be left behind is to be left out. And, to me, it’s the cooperative storytelling that makes this so much better than any tabletop RPGing that I’ve ever done.
Which is why: we as players need to avoid whining about Balance Issues. We need to trust that our GMs are not toying with us in some thunderdome (even if the dome does show up near Edwards AFB). We need to trust that the GMs want us all to continue playing, even if we suffer from bad judgement or bad dice rolls, as Donald has foreshadowed (I suspect that a lot of those round 1 folks that scraped by with 1 HP were actually in the negatives, saved by the GM, but I pray he doesn’t reveal that, least not till the end). We need to trust them to include us in their stories, and not worry that they are using gameplay mechanisms to exclude us.
Players need to trust that Balance Issues will never be prioritized over cooperative storytelling.
And thus, players need to identify Over-Complication and not bother the GMs about fixing the gameplay to resolve Balance Issues.
And, though the specific thoughts typed above haven’t occurred to me until tonight, I’d like to think that I’ve tried to resolve some of this via in-character play rather than meta-commentary. I’m one of the first players to form a convoy, the first to tip a mechanic for repair services, the first to give an unsolicited tip a to literate for their reading services, and the first to offer a LP to someone who lost a finger. And, the second, after daneel (my achilles, swoon), to publicly advocate for more explicit rewards for all. Now, Cougar is welcome, and expected, to give me the Toecutter treatment of leaving my hanging by a rope from a tree for some backstory reason. But I’ve been clear in my character portrayal that I care more about story, and have been cavalier about resources and stats, because that’s where my priorities are.
Oh dear, that went long. Still, on re-read, it seems cogent and appropriate. Let me know if you think I’m blinkered.
