Getting It Wrong

Some people mentioned yesterday about reloading when things don't go well, and there isn't a whole lot I can do about that. I could disable saving and use checkpoints, but that would be punishing normal players for save scummers and I don't really want to do that. Instead, I thought I'd just make a few points about why that attitude might not be the best one to have toward the game.

1. You will still level - XP is the main currency of the game, like any other RPG, and you always get XP. Even if you get wounded, or have to pay a toll, or some other negative effect of having bad luck or failing a check, you'll still be leveling up. 

2. It might deny you later content - The event pool is dynamic, what happens in some events determines what new events get added to the pool. Failing one might open up an avenue to new rewards. For example, in my ideas file is the old D&D staple of the player being placed in the middle of solving a murder and identifying the correct suspect. If the player chooses correctly, it is wrapped up nicely, but if they choose wrong (or perhaps even allow themselves to be bribed), later they may find another body with the same strange wounds....

3. It defeats the purpose of stats - The whole point of progression in the game is to allow you to build your Rowan (or later characters) however you want. If the player is just going to cheap their way through all skill rolls, there's no point even having stat based modifiers in the first place.

4. It might not even work - Some outcomes are determined by things outside of the event, so reloading it will just give you the exact same outcome. One example of this, again from the ideas file, is a map that can be bought by the player that may or may not lead to treasure. Since going to the map location is the second event in the chain, and whether the map is real or not is determined by the first event, scumming the second event will not give you treasure if the map is a fake. 

So there you have it, a few reasons why getting it wrong isn't the worst thing in the world. I take the role playing part of RPG seriously, and for me, what I want with this game, is to get you to focus more on that than on numbers or 'winning'. I will have succeeded in what I want to do with the game if I can get you to care about the choices you make in the world, and not that fact one will give you gold and one won't.