Lephys

*Gasp* Waaaait a gosh darn minute... You're... You're saying that the word "levels" can be used independently from the word "scaling"? ... God help us all... o_o In all seriousness, I can't miss a point I've already addressed that you keep deciding to re-iterate while disregarding my responses. Also, "changed" on the fly, or "decided" on the fly? Let me just ask you this one, simple question (well, followed by a series of contextual, follow-up questions to support the main question). We'll see if you answer it, or just pretend I said "I still have no concept of mathematically deriving level values using other level values as a basis." If a story boss is only encountered once in a playthrough, and the player gets to him, at whatever level, and he's some particular level, what was his level changed from? Was he a different level, before, when he wasn't even an entity in the game, before you got to him? Would your game experience be fine for the whole first playthrough if you didn't know the basis for his level, then immediately be ruined on your second playthrough when you found out that his appropriately-challenging level was derived from math based upon your party's levels instead of from a static value in an Excel spreadsheet?

Does he automatically have to be the best at both fighting AND magery, just because he's capable of high-quality smithing? Also, where does he get the time to, I dunno... gain 10-times his initial health in hitpoints? How does a Rogue go from barely being able to hide from a cow to hiding from Shadow Demons? Abstractions in the time requirements for character progression in an RPG are highly favorable to 300-hours of swinging a sword at a combat dummy just to go from "Extreme Novice" to "Starting to Slightly Approach The Ceiling of the Novice Bracket." That being said, the crafting of legendary items doesn't even have to be done by traditional means. I don't know that you necessarily smelt some Gods' Tear crystal into a little lump, then hammer it out into a blade. Maybe you use crazily imaginative, fictitious soul powers to merge it onto its dragon-horn hilt. *shrug* Who's to say? The developers, I suppose.

^ Aye. The possibility of some animals possessing souls is an interesting one (in the context of P:E's soul-heavy lore). Also, the tainted Bore god in Princess Mononoke creeps me the hell out... "WHAT'S IN THE BOHHHHHHXXXX...?!"

I just hate when stories have villains who are basically just hipsters. "Doing 'good' is so mainstream. I live to do the opposite of good, no matter what it is, purely because it is evil, and not for any other reason." I think villains work best when they're evil because of their actions, rather than performing their actions simply because they're evil.

No, but the question needs to be on the correct framework. In this case it's exactly as you say unlimited resting destroys the limits placed on certain abilities. But the simplest "realistic" solution is no good, by limiting rests to every 16 hours or so players can just wait past them. It's poor design to make the most boring solution the most effective one. A better solution is to have preset resting points, that way the intended limits are retained and there is no way to work around them by playing in a boring fashion. Alternatively have a time limit associated with every quest or even some simple mechanic such as food that limits the amount of times a party can rest between each safe area. I was only pointing out that disregarding realism completely would be just as silly as disregarding any other factor completely. I like the idea of food working into the limit somehow, but you couldn't base it only on food quantity, or people'd just stock up on food and rest every 10 seconds. But, some sort of cooldown might work, when you're in un-safe areas. Although, then the slow people (ignoring the people who intentionally wait for the duration of the cooldown after every single battle, just to rest as often as possible) would get access to rest again before the faster people. So, really, set rest locations is probably the best way to go. If you get through the next 6 battles in 10 minutes, or 30 minutes, you still get to rest again after the same interval of combat encounters. You might could have each rest location use a cooldown, so that people couldn't just go fight through the next encounter, then run 10 feet back to rest, then progress onward to the NEXT group of enemies, then go 40 feet back and rest, etc, as that kind of defeats the purpose of the resting limit in the first place. Either that or make them one-use places. The ones outside of dungeons and such could be infini-use. But the "checkpoint" kind inside of dungeons would need some form of use-limitation, or the maximum distance to a rest point would be halved, and the minimum distance would be point-blank.

The same thing that happens if it's a multiple-choice and they forget to include the correct answer in the reponse list, or accidentally code it wrong. QA missing a problem isn't exactly dependent upon the specifics of the problem. I'm not saying "And therefore everything you've said before was wrong." I just don't think "QA might miss it" is pertinent to how we answer riddles, specifically.

Heres where Im coming from. Presumably, if we cant miss, the mooks cant miss either. That means that 100% of the time you will be taking some damage per mook / per round. Yes? With that in mind now I look at the mechanic. Whatever the ratio, whatever the DR, whatever mitigating abilities, you WILL be taking damage to your health. There is no way other than resting to fix this so eventually, through sheer attrition, despise the players tactics, your entire party will reach a point of (even at full stamina) being low on health. Im ok with this so long as the "camping" mechanic isnt too punishing. Yeah. I understand where you're coming from. And I agree that the complete lack of missing does take something away from combat, regardless of how it's balanced. But, on the other hand, I think the impact of always taking SOME damage instead of sometimes taking NO damage seems way worse than it would be, once you played through a few combat encounters. And the game's going to be balanced with that finite health-pool-that-always-takes-damage-from-every-single-hit in mind. Sure, if you took Baldur's Gate and just took out all the misses and healing, and forced the P:E Stamina/Health system in there, then called it a day, the results would be utterly, utterly terrible. But, between how much health you have, how much damage you deal, how much damage enemies deal, and the spacing of "camp" areas, I doubt we'll really notice much of a problem even if they don't end up implementing some form of misses. We would just miss the ability to miss is all. The slightly different pace of combat progression. That's all I'm saying. Mathematically, it could be balanced to have almost the exact same pacing as the typical system we're used to.

Yes, "that" rat. You've missed my point, methinks. Let's go with an opponent that's a better example than a rat. How much of a difference is there, in functionality and effect, between level-scaling the "same" bandits (so that the player fights level 5 bandits at level 5, level 6 bandits at level 7, level 7 bandits at level 9, level 8 bandits at level 11, etc.) and making 4 different groups of bandits with slightly different models and textures who are, respectively, level 5, level 6, level 7, and level 8? Pretty much none. "Ohhhh, they look different... I see." A) I'd expect each individual bandit to look at least slightly different (hair, skin tint, height, size, equipment, etc.), ideally, as limited only by finite development resources. B) If A is the case, then you can't really make "Dire Bandits" like you'd do with rats or some other creature that pretty much always looks the same. This is why I used Goblins as an example so much. An intelligent, humanoid enemy can vary DRASTICALLY in combat prowess, ability, and toughness. Therefore, IF you're able to tackle a quest involving a Goblin cave at level 5 before doing some other stuff, OR do the other stuff first, THEN tackle the Goblin cave at level 9, how much sense does it make to say "Doesn't matter... the Goblin cave quest should be tailored to level 5 players, u_u."? Also, I am specifically not suggesting the scaling of the Goblin Cave to level 9 just because the player is level 9. Maybe it's level 8 when the player is level 9. Or even level 7. The point is that it COULD've been level 5, if that level of challenge were appropriate for the player's characters' capabilities when partaking in the quest. Here's another way to look at it. Take a game that isn't level-scaled, and it's 100% linear, so they know exactly what level you'll be when you get to a boss. Let's say you'll be level 5. So, let's say the boss is level 5. You can never, ever be higher than level 5 when you get to this boss, so he's set accordingly to be a good challenge. Now take the same scenario, but the game has optional content and level-scaling. You could do all the quests before facing the boss, and be level 10, or you could go straight to him and be level 5. How is making him level 5 in the linear example above ANY different from making him level 10 if you're level 10? Assuming there's still only a limited amount of XP to be gained before facing him. Whether or not you want unlimited XP gain (from respawning enemies or other repeatable content), and, thus, the ability to level far beyond any and all foes is a completely separate question. Either way, you've still got to have some level basis (or range in the case of the optional content example) for designing the challenge of the content as you go. If you're saying that the boss in a 100% linear game should be below you in level, then your goal is accomplished via difficulty settings. If you're not saying that, then why on earth would you want him to be level 5 when you're level 10? Even if you don't scale anything, and everything's level 5, you're going to have to tackle a quest or two at level 5, maybe 6, before making your progress up to the point where you're level 10 and the other stuff's still level 5. So, you're okay with the fact that the first optional quest wasn't 5 levels below you, but you DEMAND that the latter quests be ultra-easy? It seems we're having two different arguments, here. Some of us are arguing the merits of level-scaling implementations, and others are arguing the merits of level-growth limitation. The two are completely independent of one another. I'd absolutely love to know how using level numbers to present certain degrees of challenge inherently creates "fake choices," but I have a feeling you aren't going to tell me.

Something I haven't seen in an IE game before. Imagine having to "level up" your intelligent weapon? Could be awesome, but could become overpowered, unless they put some level cap in. But it's an excellent question, Atreides. Fable 3 actually had a system like this. It was just horribly done. Each weapon had 3 things you could "earn" on it, essentially. For a simple example, killing 200 bandits with one might give it fire damage. The sword would look different, too, though. The metal would sometimes change texture, or even shape, and it might deal more damage, or a different type, or even give you a non-combat bonus (such as charisma modifier or something). I love the idea behind the system. But, as I said, sadly, in Fable 3, it wasn't done very well at all. All but about 10% of the weapon effects were either useless, or were ridiculously huge chores to obtain, and sometimes both (like "Get 50 people to love you and gain 5 damage! 8D)

^ Yeah, I was thinking maybe keep the "Max roll + (value)" system, and just make the "50%" variable instead of a fixed value. In the event you can only crit at a roll of 20 (as we're using the d20 system for example's sake), you'd maybe do max + 10%? 10 is just an example number. But, that way, as you went up, your crits would get better (a roll of 20 always being the highest number... it would be 20% whenever 19 got you a crit, and 30% whenever 18 got you a crit, and so on). Balancing would tweak the percentage to a good one, but, assuming that character build is directly related to your crit range (as in, the higher your THAC0, the lower the roll you need to crit), you could build a character with oodles of finesse who produces critical hits on a more regular basis, but they wouldn't get too ridiculous. Although, with the crit frequency increasing like that, it might even be better to start at Max + 50% at a roll of 20, and decrease the bonus damage percentage as you go down (i.e. 19 would produce 140% damage, 18 would be 130%, etc.). The reduction in percentage would probably need to be less than 10, or would need to shrink as you went, so you wouldn't end up with just 100% max damage (which can be obtained in normal hits) on crits. Unless they were SO frequent that you're basically just always getting good hits. Anywho, play-testing and balancing would, again, get the math right, but I think that method might balance itself the best whilst still producing a varied "Finesse" system, so to speak. OR, another option would be to always start with max weapon damage as the base, and have the bonus damage be random. Of course, if the maximum possible bonus (+50%, in the previous examples, as the starting maximum) increased as you went, you'd pretty much have to refrain from increasing the actual range of critical rolls on the to-hit roll, as opposed to the system above where it grows as your THAC0 (or similar to-hit basis) improves. Or, you could shrink the range of randomness as you went, so that when 14s are giving you crits, your range is, say, +20-30% damage. That way, you're not consistently doing +50% damage 6-times more often than with a crit only on a roll of 20, BUT, you're also not doing possibly only max + 5% or 10% each time. *shrug* EDIT: Gah... I missed the entirety of page 12 of this thread. I'm so blond. On the note of missing, I think the "always max possible damage roll + bonus, for crits versus crit damage that's actually sometimes less than your maximum regular damage roll (12 when your weapon damage is 6-12)" situation is a perfect example of chance playing too great a role in things, which is specifically what Josh is trying to avoid. That being said, I think removing full-misses altogether goes beyond bringing the effects of chance in-check. Tips the scale a bit in the opposite direction, so to speak. I fully support misses being streamlined with the same thinking that they're using with criticals. Another very good point about misses was the example of them being the defender's responsibiliy, and not just something that can randomly occur on every attack roll. Taking that out, alone, eliminates a lot of the ridiculous miss-fest fuel. It seems that the "always at least a glancing blow" system is best for the attack-roll system, by itself, but maybe the defense aspect of combat could still produce full-misses in a much more meaningful and less-plentiful manner.

That was poor wording on my part. What I meant was, throughout the game, combat is designed with the ability to reverse damage in mind, because it's some classes' core mechanic and healing potions cost money and such. It can, of course, be designed well or crappily (Dragon Age: Origins required like 800 healing potions per battle sometimes, and in some games healing potions are so useless that they're not even worth the 2 silver they cost). In other words, somewhere in the game, the method of best combat performance was to intentionally take large amounts of damage, then spend time with another character (or money and time acquiring and using potions in combat) to reverse that damage. The only tactical decision such a situation forced you to make was "Make sure I don't take two of those in a row before healing." It's like playing tug of war while trying to kill the other team at the same time. When do you spare people to go chop at the other team, and when do you run them back to pull on the rope again? Strategy involved? Yes, but I think it's better to just have deeper combat strategy and do away with the tug-of-war all together. Even in the typical system with dedicated, abundant healing, you're still expected to mitigate damage and use combat tactics. Whatever strategy is provided by the healing tug-of-war is basically just a trade-off for deeper initial mitigation tactics (which are already present, no matter what.) You can't have both without negating dedicated healing. "Oh, potions and Clerics are in, but it's actually quite, quite easy to play the entire game without them." Boom, you don't have an enemy that deals 90% of your health in damage with a single spell, because the game is balanced for the possibility that you don't have healers and potions. But, if the worst attack in the game does 10% of your health, then anyone using healing is playing the game on ultra-easy, unless potions and healing are so limited that they can only heal like 5% of your health per minute in combat, in which case you're back to the "So, wait, we essentially can't heal?" situation. So, that's what I mean by "in a game with healing, the design expects you to use it." I'm really not trying to be snide here, but that's like asking "What's the point in healing potions and spells (that rely on mana potions to be available in proper quantities) if their availability always just goes down and you can't get more until you get to a 'rest' area (aka town/merchant)?" I know it's weird because of the terminology, and we're not used to a hitpoint pool functioning like that, but your health basically is 4-times your Stamina (typically what we're used to calling "Health" in P:E) worth of healing (the same as potions and healing spells in typical games' systems). I thought the exact same thing when I first read about the system, because I was thinking "Wait... we can't heal?" But, we can heal, really. And yes, they still have to worry about resting availability, and possibly Health damage mitigation (Stamina-only damage, perhaps, as is being talked about in the Miss topic and such), and regular health pool/damage balancing (just like any other game). And yes, we don't get to manage healing separately. But, now, your health management is directly related to your tactical combat decisions, rather than being a separate decision of "Do I try to do some more damage, or do I instead stop to negate some damage?" How is this more tactical? Well, instead of saying "My fighter has twice the hitpoints of my other characters, so obviously I'll have him to absorb some damage, because then I can just heal him back up after the battle," you instead have a situation (assuming the game's designed accordingly) in which your fighter's abilities allow you to manage your health on a situational basis. i.e. "Because my fighter blocked these enemies from getting to attack anyone else and used his shield abilities to strategically reduce their power attacks to glancing blows (or maybe full misses/blocks depending on how Obsidian decides to ultimately handle that), the party's health damage was efficiently reduced." Again, the game has to be designed around this level of strategy in abilities and skills, and the general way in which combat works, but the lack of constant damage negation fully supports this level of strategy. Also, I'm not trying to be nitpicky here, but I still haven't heard any specifics about whether or not the characters' health will always be at a 4:1 ratio to their stamina. All they've said for sure (that I know of) is that the damage ratio between Stamina and Health will be 1:4. So, Health pool size could be another factor in survivability. I think he meant "resurrection" in the "Your character gets back into combat from a state of uselessness" sense, and not necessarily the "Your character is now alive again instead of actually dead" sense. Possibly.

Masterwork Steel Longsword: 100 gold. Mithril Plate Armor: 200 gold. Michael Winslow in the form of a legendary weapon: Priceless.

Sorry, I was changing pants in reaction to that second image that AGX posted. You know, the one after the completely unintimidating pansy with the blue sword. My arachnophobia has been immediately replaced with farmpeasantophobia. *assumes the fetal position* O_O

"Are we there yet?" No. "Are we there yet?" No. "What about now?" ... Haha. Or one that's a ventriloquist and mimics your characters' voices in imperative situations and gets them into trouble.

^ It's not really about realism. It's about reason. Many realistic things follow reason, because reality is subject to reason. So, if your goal with a rest mechanic is to limit spell use, say, and you allow resting every 10 seconds, say, then you're not really achieving that goal. It's silly, in that example, to say "Pssh, we should be able to rest every 10 seconds, because it doesn't need to be realistic!" Because, really, what you want then, is a lack of limitation on spell use. You don't really care how often you can rest, which is why you don't care about it being realistic. You only care that any amount of realism worsens the perceived detriment to your gameplay experience by compounding the spell usage limitations. Realism (or believability) and fun are not mutually exclusive things.

It's difficult not to evaluate missing mechanics based on realism, since missing is something that actually exists in reality. The main reason we don't ever 100% accurately represent missing in an RPG is because it would be far too complex and resource-consuming to do so. Not because we're not supposed to be very worried about realism. Some people stab themselves with box cutters, too. Doesn't mean it can't be avoided by expressing some caution and doing things properly. Stuff learned in boyscouts. "Don't cut toward yourself, always cut away." It's pretty tough to hit yourself in the leg with an axe when you're not even fighting a moving, thinking opponent, unless you're being reckless.

This is true, but my point was only that, there's a difference between the way in which level-scaling is generally implemented being terrible, and level-scaling, itself, inherently being terrible. It is merely scaling using changes in creature/character level. The ratio of those changes can be 1:1, 1:10, 5:1... anything, and can be applied to any specific portions of game content that you wish. I'd actually love to hear your opinion on it, . Really and truly. It might contain something I hadn't really thought of before, or a new perspective on something I've thought of. Well, but this is actually just level-scaling in a piddly disguise, unless the rats are a completely different creature all together. You've literally thrown rats at the player that are better than the previous rats they fought. Same as with just scaling the exact same rats up to level 8, but with a prettier package. It's kinda like those micro-transaction stores in games that now have you find "chests," and then say "Ooooh! You've got magnificent loot there! All you have to do is buy a key to open it!". Except, buying the key to open the "chest" in your possession is exactly the same thing as buying the chest in the first place and it not requiring a key to open. It's only perceived differently. I'll admit, it's more immersive to perceive the rats as different, and therefore better rats. But, in that scenario, you yourself said it would be just fine. So, my point with the "You might not even know there's level-scaling in use" bit was that, no one's complaining that they're fighting level 8 Dire Rats INSTEAD OF Level 2 Wuss Rats. But, the second you TELL someone "Hey, those are level 8 Dire Rats because we based the challenge of the foes in this area on your character's level," and they might start getting really upset. Obviously, if you present the wrong level of challenge in the wrong area, people are going to be upset. How you determine that level of challenge is completely irrelevant, so long as it's the appropriate level of challenge. So, yes, rats are a pretty good example of something that probably shouldn't ever really need much scaling. There's not much of a story reason for you to EXPECT rats to still present some form of challenge later on. However, sentient, humanoid things, like Goblins, work much better. You're much more likely to run into skilled, expert goblins as opposed to lazy, rookie goblins than you are to run into skilled, expert rats. So, IF you have a game in which goblins are there at level 5 and suck, and you need goblins in (for story/lore coherency purposes) later, I see absolutely nothing wrong with scaling them up, based on your character's level (not necessarily TO your character's level). I'd love to hear thoughts on what would be good scenarios in which to use scaling, but my point stands that, IF used in good scenarios where it makes sense, it can be a very beneficial system of delivering the appropriate level of challenge to the player at a given point in the game. You're right. Now if we just had a bunch of people complaining about how different dialogue choices leading to different outcomes was inherently "feces," that would be an extremely useful point. 8D

I love the idea of developing a structure/community as you go, with various artisans and supportive folk in your stronghold. It immediately makes me think of Suikoden, and a handful of other old RPGs that I can't think of, haha.

Except that, in other games, you're 100% expected to HAVE to use healing to complete a battle. It wasn't really a big deal that you made absolutely sure you took as little damage as possible through strategic decision-making as it was that you avoided taking too much damage in too little a time. All the damage and HP numbers were designed with healing in mind, or the dedicated healing classes and overly abundant healing potions would be useless. So, really, without those things being an integral, abundant factor in combat, you've got to deal more with your current health (in this case, stamina) values and your ability to take down foes more efficiently. Doesn't necessarily mean every rat you encounter is going to annihilate you just because you can't heal. The only difference is, the more you **** around with easy foes, the more likely you are to have a tougher time with all other foes between your current location and the next rest point. Obviously, this is going to scale with the difficulty, so, if you're playing on Easy, you aren't going to need to be a strategic genius to get from one rest point to the next. Whereas, if you're playing on Hard, you might need to be. Hitpoints, though, are no different from any other limited resource. The easier you make it to replenish them, the less you HAVE to care about conserving them. And conserving hitpoints is a part of combat strategy (within an RPG combat system). Strategy, itself, is the effort to use resources efficiently in combat, as opposed to inefficiently. Not that healing can't be part of strategy, but people keep implying that removing that does nothing but take 20% of the strategy out of combat or something. It removes something, and adds something in its absence. Their decision was based mainly on one question, I think: Is it more enjoyable and less convoluted to manage your preservation of hitpoints AND your active replenishment of them, or to simply preserve them while focusing your efforts on actively dispatching your foes efficiently? Fighting opponents, even without any healing system, already involves hitpoint management. So, while different and sometimes nice, is the reversal of damage done to you really any more strategic than a system that focuses on giving you interesting ways of preventing/avoiding that damage in the first place, within the offenses and defenses you're using no matter what?

Oooh! There could be a move with the bow that destroys the foe's knee, ending not their life, but their adventuring career. Joking aside, I think combat animation variety is always better than none. And kill variety as separate from just-plain-hit variety is even better. Obviously only to a certain point. More variety is better than none, but more isn't always better on top of more. But, as far as anything that took longer than a regular attack for your character to fully execute, I'd only want to see something like that tied to criticals or some other such rare occasion. Say your regular hit does about 20 damage, and you crit an enemy with only about 50 health left, and your crit does 50+ damage (based on that whole "1.5x your max damage in your damage range" thing we learned). Since you're essentially killing the thing in one blow when it normally would've taken 3 more blows, I wouldn't mind the animation being a bit more elaborate and lasting slightly longer than a single attack animation. You still don't want it lasting 10 seconds, because that defeats the benefit gained by ending the foe's attack streak in fewer blows and being able to choose a new target already. As with anything, if you can work it into the rest of the design elegantly, it's quite nice. Whereas, if you just say "I don't even care what else is affected or how we do this, I want fancy slo-mo finishers in, NO MATTER WHAT!", you're just asking for problems. Sure, by itself, the super awesome finisher animation will be ultra cool and entertaining to watch. But with the rest of combat and the gameplay environment it's all working within, you're going to have mathematical dilemmas, such as "That literally slowed down my character as compared to regular attacks, for the exact same damage! Less even, since my 20-damage blow took off his last 7 hit points!"

Like the Inverse Property of Ninjas! Ever notice how the strength of a ninja is directly, inversely proportionate to the number of ninjas? 1,000 ninjas... they're all easy. 2 ninjas? Quite challenging (and usually twins, for some reason...). Only one ninja? He's a deity.

Nope. Tiny moons. BILLIONS! u_u

I'm also pretty sure he was the Nasinex cg bee, haha. But yeah. On that particular note, I like how they did... oh what's his name. Steve? The shuttle pilot in Mass Effect 3 (I can't remember his name... it's been a while). He was gay, so if you so chose (and were male), you could romance him. But, otherwise, you just find out he's gay if you talk to him more than like twice, and you could either be mean to him (like you could to anyone), be his friend, or flirt and whatnot. But there was never a standing-on-the-roof-in-the-spotlight-of-a-chopper hostage-situation "What's it gonna be, Shepard?!" moment to choose your relationship with him. Not so much in the Dragon Age games, although Zevran wasn't really that bad about it, I suppose. I think he did kinda stop and ask you several times. "So, should we hook up?" But yeah, no matter what you're doing, it shouldn't be forced. A deep relationship of any kind with any of your companions should require out-of-your-way choices, and any kind of romance should require yet another tier. Not just some "OMg, are we bf and gf now?!" note in class.

You're assuming levels will always be scaled straight to the character's current level, in every single instance of combat in the game. The fact that level-scaling can and has been used in countless other specific forms is the reason why I defend it. Personally, I agree that encounter-scaling (basically scaling the difficulty without fiddling with level numbers, as opposed to using level numbers) is the better option. But, if a developer can and wants to use levels to do what they want done, then I say go for it. The funny thing is, you might not even know if level-scaling was used, unless it was done shoddily. You get to a group of enemies, and they're as tough as you expect them to be. Boom... all is well. Does it matter that they were GOING to be 3 levels lower than they are now if you had gotten here before completing some other content? No. You didn't know that just by playing. You just knew how tough they were when you got to them. If you fight some rats at Level 3, and they're level 2. Then, you encounter some more rats in the world later on, when you're level 20, and they're level 8, is that really ruining the whole entire game so terribly much? You're still going to wipe the floor with them. Just, initiating combat and issuing attack commands won't literally take longer than actually killing the rats. Obviously, filling a level ~20 dungeon with level 8 rats would be annoying as balls, but that has nothing to do with the use of level-scaling. You can advance beyond the power of something else without getting to the point of gaining an "I literally win in an instant" button that you are forced to click every time you encounter that weaker foe. It's nice when I become more skilled than others at Halo, but I don't wanna sit down and play Halo against an unconscious person, then rejoice when I win, shouting "Yeah! I beat you SO HARD! I'm reveling in my own feeling of power and skill right now!"

Well, within the context of an RPG damage system, a miss reduces any damage value to 0, and it is "random" on the negative-effect end of the spectrum. Since a critical hit is the exact same thing, but on the opposite postive-effect end of the spectrum, I used the example of a critical hit dealing, essentially, the opposite of zero damage... infinite damage, if you will. Which, within the context of the combat, would mean a death, no matter what, because no foe would ever have infinite hitpoints. My point was merely that the difference between nothing and something is similar to the difference between all things and something. Dealing zero damage instead of 2 damage is not simply twice as bad as dealing only 1 damage instead of 2 damage.