Transcending the Catch 22 in all RPGs

[Katt7777]

What other ways do players spend their character's time & resources that don't involve min/maxing or becoming more powerful? I hope Skyrim provides outlets for these kinds of things.

 

Roleplaying. ;)

[Seviche]

What other ways do players spend their character's time & resources that don't involve min/maxing or becoming more powerful? I hope Skyrim provides outlets for these kinds of things.

 

Roleplaying. ;)

Oh, I try. 99 times out of 100 an encounter is weighted toward combat and a speech/charisma character is about a useful as a wet blanket in the rain. It's the way people play the game; it's seen as more fun being a melee fighter, arch-mage, or stealth assassin than it is being a weedy geek with a maxed charisma and speech. It's also easier to create encounters that have players bash, nuke, or sneak their way out of.

 

My first character is always a speech geek but I usually have to give that up and focus on some sort of combat skills. Eventually you just have to give up on the gimped character and start one that handles things with violence. As an aside, I've noticed that games with guns tend to be easier to build charisma characters in. Something about guns seems to equalize the playing field for weak characters (the saying about Samuel Colt comes to mind; God created man, but Sam Colt made them equal). In Fallout 2 and New Vegas my spindly low strength and endurance characters (3/3 - yikes!) seem to get along fine for many, many levels. Then again, those games don't really level the mobs all that much and melee combat is an afterthought.

 

Which is why, to get back to the topic, I don't like games that strive to be a constant challenge. I prefer games that have pre-established areas of challenge that don't change. You know that certain areas are full of monsters that kill you if you're not prepared, and there's places full of monsters that you're going to walk over after a certain level. It actually makes it so you can challenge yourself without the game telling you "No, you'll do this at the pace I tell you." It's why I thought Fallout 3 and New Vegas did it pretty decently. Certain areas were full of mobs of a certain level and you just didn't go their until your level/ load-out was sufficient for the challenge. It was always fun to try and take out mobs before you should have been able to. A game that levels with you almost forces you to min-max in order to not fall behind the monsters. An in-game arms race is never fun.

 

With all that said, I'm alright with the main quest leveling with you, to a point. That failure point is the point at which the difficulty of the opponent strips that of the non-quest world. Like the Oblivion gates; when junk comes out of the gate that slaughters town guards (because you're at "that" level), it's a bit hard to listen to an NPC say "I'll tell my men to stop closing the gates." Obviously your men won't be closing the gates because they can't even get near the gates before they die because due to the leveled monsters pouring out of it. That breaks part of the immersion. :unsure: