thread: 2006-03-06 : Unpopular Idea #2: Punish the Loser
On 2006-03-07, SDL wrote:
To echo Joshua here:
It seems to me that as long as you have real character advancement - not just equivalent character change, but actual losses or gains in ability - you are going to have a "death spiral", one way or the other.
I was suprised to see that tSOY and BW had explicit mechanics for removing powerful characters from play - but now i'm guessing that this is necessary to address the "runaway spiral" issue.
Not that these spirals cannot be good - they give you an Endgame!
(Or are we just talking about the exchanges within a conflict cycle?)
This makes SDL go "aka 'power curve'"
This makes NinJ go "It's not the character change, it's the direction."
A negative feedback loop ?????rewarding the loser ?????doesn't do the same thing. The rewards make it less likely that you'll get rewards next time because you're getting more dice.
This makes SDL go "Counter-direction of the rewards, right?"
...Any postitive feedback loop is going to run you out of game eventually; I'm really not sure what negative loops do to the game, over the long haul - i imagine a good one would work as a nice "stabilizing selection". So, call it *Temporary Advancement*?
This makes NinJ go "Here's what it's for in Shock:"
The Antagonist starts out the story with a firehose of resources. Chances for Protag success are slim. But that firehose runs dry at a certain point and the Protag can eventually throw much greater dice than the Antag. Neither is a guarantee, but by the end, the Protag, who's suffered a great deal, draws on that experience to accomplish (we hope) what sie's set out to do.
This makes SDL go "but Shock ends there, right?"
...or at least forces you to restart, and whether you keep the world you've built or start anew is about the same, effort-wise.
This makes SDL go "What i mean is..."
...that you can have a Positive FBL that runs either down to negative or up to positive fixation, or you could have a system of "static change" where you always swap one thing for another, or you could have a type of Negative FBL that (usually) spirals around some point of stability. I say "usually" because it seems that given enough time or pressure such a system always eventually runs to fixation.
