Re: [s-d] The idea of a chess-subgame

[Antonio Dolcetta <zagarna@xxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Lepage wrote:
> On Sep 28, 2005, at 9:41 PM, Dan Schmidt wrote:
>
> > I had an idea for a chess subgame thingy. It would be
> > a normal (By nomic standards) game of chess except
> > that rather than have one player control a side each
> > player is a Piece. So one player would be a Pawn, and
> > another would be a Knight, and so on.
> >
> > Any thoughts?
>
>
> Mostly, I'm thinking it would suck to be a Pawn.
>
> Which is really the fundamental problem with many of the subgames we've 
> had so far. Some of them allow players to grow stronger and more 
> powerful. The House is, at the moment, a good example of this: I'm a lot 
> more powerful than most people, just because all Talismans cost 
> Genechips, and I have an absurd number of those. While this can be fun 
> for the powerful players, it's not for the weaker ones, who have little 
> hope of contending with the higher-level players, and who in some past 
> subgames had little hope of advancing to higher levels either, since the 
> powerful players could just swat them to keep them down.

Well, this is a problem in all mmorpg-like games (assuming that Haunted 
House can be called a mmorpg :-). In all the implementations I've seen 
skill matters only up to a certain point, what really matters is time 
available for playing. If a given player spends more time on the server 
he will become more powerful and will be able to kick sand in the face 
of players that have spent less time building up their charachter.
Normal table-based roleplaying games avoid this issue because usually 
the game is played in small groups and everyone advances together.

In Haunted House's case the problem I think is sharing resources between 
 bnomic and it's own subgames. Influences in the maingame->subgame 
direction are harmful of balance. I have just joined and have no 
genechips, that's ok, Daniel has been on bnomic since ages and has 
accumulated a lot of genechips, and that's ok too. The problem is that, 
were HH to restart from scratch today, I would still be at disadvantage, 
since Daniel can leverage the resources accumulated in the "main game".

Do you think that reducing the possibility of the main game influencing 
the subgame would reduce enjoyability of subgames ?



--

	Antonio
    http://gelo.dolcetta.net
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