01-14-2014, 03:21 PM
Consider the following:
Player skill results from having a greater number of interesting, viable choices. I can charge you straight on, or I can wait for you on this hill, or I can flank you, or I can throw fireballs at you from a distance, etc. The more options I have, the more that player skill, which is to say, picking the best option, comes into play.
I want you to re-read that and think about if you agree or not, just as a stand-alone statement.
Adding a crowd control measure, such as a stun, seems to give us one more option. I can fireball you or I can stun you. Another option! Clearly, we have increased the importance of player skill by adding another option.
Or did we?
From your perspective, your options increased by +1. By stunning the enemy, however, you have decreased his options to somewhere around 0 or 1. Instead of having a huge array of things to choose from, he now possibly has no option at all or maybe a stun-breaker as his only option.
There was a tremendous net loss in battlefield options because you had a stun.
Even lesser effects like snares can do this too. I used to have a wide field of choices and now, because I am snared, my options are considerably reduced. My game now involves fewer skillful choices because I can't move very fast.
In fact, Crowd Control is meant to reduce your options -- it's what the term "crowd control" is defining! You are, to some extent, controlled by the enemy. They have reduced your options. By reducing options, we have decreased the amount of player skill involved in the game (revisit the bold sentence up top).
We SAY things like, "Well I don't want the enemy to just be able to escape" but what we're really saying is, "I want to reduce the number of skillful battlefield options so that we can wrap this up and get to the inevitable part where I win".
Do debilitating crowd control effects really increase a game's depth by adding skillful options?
Or do they, overall, actually make the game less complex, removing more options than they add?
Player skill results from having a greater number of interesting, viable choices. I can charge you straight on, or I can wait for you on this hill, or I can flank you, or I can throw fireballs at you from a distance, etc. The more options I have, the more that player skill, which is to say, picking the best option, comes into play.
I want you to re-read that and think about if you agree or not, just as a stand-alone statement.
Adding a crowd control measure, such as a stun, seems to give us one more option. I can fireball you or I can stun you. Another option! Clearly, we have increased the importance of player skill by adding another option.
Or did we?
From your perspective, your options increased by +1. By stunning the enemy, however, you have decreased his options to somewhere around 0 or 1. Instead of having a huge array of things to choose from, he now possibly has no option at all or maybe a stun-breaker as his only option.
There was a tremendous net loss in battlefield options because you had a stun.
Even lesser effects like snares can do this too. I used to have a wide field of choices and now, because I am snared, my options are considerably reduced. My game now involves fewer skillful choices because I can't move very fast.
In fact, Crowd Control is meant to reduce your options -- it's what the term "crowd control" is defining! You are, to some extent, controlled by the enemy. They have reduced your options. By reducing options, we have decreased the amount of player skill involved in the game (revisit the bold sentence up top).
We SAY things like, "Well I don't want the enemy to just be able to escape" but what we're really saying is, "I want to reduce the number of skillful battlefield options so that we can wrap this up and get to the inevitable part where I win".
Do debilitating crowd control effects really increase a game's depth by adding skillful options?
Or do they, overall, actually make the game less complex, removing more options than they add?