Were our characters supposed to go "I may have been held against my will with 0% capacity to do anything about it, stripped of the lions share of my power, and even at my full power I died at the hands of not even a contestant, and to top it all off it's by a being that can turn gods on and off without it even being a thing.. Yeah! I can totally handle this! No problem."
I thought a character being demoralized at this point before any ray of hope was shown would be realistic.
It is, in fact, realistic - for the character. But I was referring to the players. This isn't a complain - maybe the game as I planned simply isn't fun. Hence why I'm considering my options.
Well, I think a big part of that was we didn't actually get to fight each other. I think solving the first problem, difficulty of the environment, may solve the second problem.
That is part of it. I wanted to see how my character stacked up. But I was expecting a lot less resistance on the maps. I mean they weren't high CR creatures but it looked like terrain aided them in every case. And no healing, or at least getting punished for using it, is going to reduce stamina. We can't go through that many monsters and put up a decent fight in the end. If we meet with less than half health. It will boil down to who won initiative.
I'm actually more fine with the PvE elements, but I would like them to be more interesting than simple roll-fests. But as I've stated, I know that's difficult to manage.
Same here, kind of in the middle--I like the idea of the PvE elements, but they do drain on stamina, time, and resources. Maybe some sort of system where clearing a PvE encounter heals you, or gives some tangible bonus like a temporary item or something? Make it more attractive to fight, add in a strategy element. Maybe it starts looking more like Battle Royale than Gladiator... but then, is that a bad thing?
In Gladiator they worked together against stronger foes with crappy weapons. Battle Royale they got random weapons. I am not opposed to either.
All good points. I think I will suspend the arenas for now, though. It's taking a while for me to update the maps, and I need to reformat the rules and all to be a bit faster as well. I'll probably propose a new game on the forums, more focused on PvE, and probably still somewhat high powered. Thanks for playing, guys! Sorry if it wasn't as fun as I anticipated.
Thanks for being willing to take the risk! Going outside of the usual bounds of the game is hard, and like any experiment, can take multiple tries to get right. Hopefully the next try will be able to use the lessons from this game to work better.
Can you make this inactive then?
Good luck with round 2!