[MUD-Dev] Levels, classes and choice

[cruise]

An article in the April Scientific American got me thinking about
classes and character design from a differenrt perspective.  The
article dealt with choice, and the various levels of happiness
produced by providing differing amounts of choice.

Thre reasearch involved described people along a range, from
"maximisers" to "satificers", who, respectively, must always make
the best possible decision, to simply what is good enough.

Maximisers will spend hours agonising over the best possible choice,
and even when they finally decide, they worry that it might not be
the best, and wistfully think of the benefits they missed out on the
alternatives. The researchers found that such maximising tendencies
coupled strongly with depresssion.

In a nutshell, while limited choice is good, past a certain point,
the more options available, the more anxiety results (for everybody,
though the effect is more pronounced in maximisers). With too much
choice, the array of options becomes immediately depressing.

I'm curious as to other's thoughts on how this applies to character
design in an RPG. Does this mean that the limited class-based system
is actually better, because it limits choice? Or does the
replayability mean that agony over "what-might-have-been" is
reduced, because a player can simply try another character at any
time?

I have always felt that the difficult choices in a game were the
source of enjoyment - "+2 sword, or +1 dagger and +1 fire magic?"
debates are my most treasured moments in RPG's, though, bizarrely,
in real life I'm very much toward the satisficer end of the
scale. Would a maximiser get the same enjoyment? Is the promise of
some kind of "best choice" in an RPG their goal? Would a completely
even playing field cause them more agony as they tried to find the
non-existing best, or would the release from searching be more fun?

What proportion of a playerbase is strongly maximising compared to
"satisficing"? Anybody with any figures that might indicate what
type of games these different personalities prefer?

--
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / transference.org ]
   "quantam sufficit"
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