But doesn't min-maxing involve a pretty in depth knowledge of game mechanics? Mechanics that a first time player or the PC himself would have no access to?
Yes, and that's fine. I'm not asdfjkl the level 22 dwarf warrior and he isn't me. Some games are essentially impossible if you don't use information your character "shouldn't" have access to, and that's ok.
I think that for the most part, I find the idea of an herbalist character boring and incongruent with the personalities of the PC's that I play (I don't see a paladin as having much interest in gardening, basically). So, wouldn't that form of out of character min-maxing be in conflict with role-playing? Heck, what if the best min-max approach is to play a race/class that you don't even really like? That sure seems like it would interfere with roleplaying.
1) My roguelike characters don't have personalities, they're automatons that exist only to do my bidding and achieve my goals. I'm not saying that I'd never play a game with my character's intentions in mind, but roguelikes are generally a bad choice for that, for a number of reasons. So are most RPGs, but games like, say, King of Dragon Pass or X-Com become even better if you take the things that happen seriously both in a mechanical sense and a narrative sense. It helps that those are both games where playing your role "correctly" doesn't involve crippling your effectiveness, imo.
2) What's wrong with a paladin gardener? Knights need hobbies too, and gardening is as good as any. Paladins are still human beings, you know? They're individuals with their own preferences. That sort of thing is a big part of why I can't even begin to take video game and fantasy stories seriously. No one tries anything new, no one has any standards, and no one thinks about why they're doing what they're doing. Race and profession are used as stand-ins for real personalities. My elf wizard is mysterious and likes nature because he is a wizard and an elf, my archer kills people all the time for no reason because she is chaotic evil, and so forth.
I guess to most people, maybe the developer themselves is the opponent, and the game is about outsmarting them? Again, that's just alien to me. I look at the developer as having the role of a storyteller, rather than a competitor. I do get that these games should be hard, and that the threat of death should be real, but, I dunno, it seems like something important is being lost here.
Whether the "real" opponent is the game designer, the AI, or the game isn't important (for this argument, though the question is in other contexts).
I don't want the game to be hard so it's fair to my opponent (whoever that is). I want the game to be hard so that it's fair to me. I will probably have a lot more fun with a game where I fail fifty times before I finally succeed and a lot less fun with a game where I succeed on my first try. Tactical challenges are fun. Learning how to manipulate a game's rules in my favor is cool.
Why is it bad to use everything at my disposal to defeat Andor Drakon, but okay to do the same against the White King? What difference does it make if my opponent is a human with equal resources or a computer with asymmetrical resources?
I agree that the stories for roguelike games could be improved a lot, but I also feel like what you are saying is an oversimplification and unfair. I think a lot of these stories boil down to archetypes, and stories about archetypes are often going to seem "cartoony" as you say. Think about the mythological source material for a lot of the stock characters and classes in these games. Myths, in general, are not known for their well developed, multi-dimensional characters.
And, I think you could make that argument about the plots of a lot of fantasy media. I feel like what you are saying is "bad plots are bad". Roguelike plots do need to be better, it's true, but the act of participating in a story, even a mediocre one, combined with grave consequences for your character if you make a bad decision, can still be really engrossing, I think.
Well yeah, maybe I'd take video game and fantasy stories more seriously if they weren't a complete wasteland, but that's not changing anytime soon. Even in a hypothetical world where video games stories were consistently great, I'd still defend mechanics-focused games.
Like, I'm not saying narrativist and simulationist games shouldn't exist, but they aren't the superiors of or successors to "gamist" games.
But I feel like that avoids directly addressing the issue of quantifying difficulty by being vague. Lets look at it this way: How many deaths per hour should an “average” player suffer when playing an ideal roguelike game. Another way of looking at this would be: what is the mean cumulative playtime until death and stardard deviation from that mean. Assume a roguelike that takes 20 hours to complete, on average.
There's no such thing as a singular ideal roguelike and there isn't one right answer to this question.
Another question related to that (that maybe I asked in this thread?) is: what percentage of players do you think should be able to exploit the game to the point that it becomes trivial? This assumes they are not using the internet to search for exploits, just that they come up with it on their own. Essentially, I just want you to set a threshold here.
Assuming that we're talking about games built to challenge their players? Zero percent. Difficulty-trivializing exploits shouldn't exist in games like that. In something like Morrowind where the difficulty doesn't matter, go ahead and throw in crazy exploits. But in roguelikes, shoot em ups, fighting games, TBS, etc. they're serious problems and need to be dealt with.
I'll read and maybe write responses to the rest of the thread later.
E:
Despite all of that, you are correct that many roguelike elements (permanent consequences esp. permadeath, high replayability, high levels of variance between monsters, items, and areas) would make for much better roleplaying games.
