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Mark Rosewater, the head designer for Magic: The Gathering, has written an article where he explains Lenticular Design. Some of the article uses cards from Magic: The Gathering as examples, but the main explanation is mostly generic.
The idea of Lenticular Design is that when designing a game, make some components mean different things to different levels of players so all skill levels can access them. If a component is complex, a newer player might be confused by it (which will put them off playing your game), but highly experienced players may eventually get bored with too many simple parts. Lenticular Design adds hidden complexity into components so newer players don't notice them, but more advanced players can take advantage of this additional level of complexity.
He lists a number of rules when designing (within the context of designing a card game, however the descriptions are general enough that they could apply to a lot of game types).
Rule #1 Some Complexities are Invisible to Inexperienced Players
Rule #2 Cards Have to Have a Surface Value
Rule #3 Experience Is Connected to How Far Ahead a Player Thinks
Rule #4 Novices Tend Not to Think of Causality
Rule #5 Players Will Try to Use the Cards to Match Their Perceived Function
Rule #6 Let the Players Play the Game They Want to Play
(Score: 3, Informative) by guises on Friday April 04 2014, @12:18AM
That's an interesting interpretation. Bear in mind that while the designer here is attempting to generalize to all games, he's not talking about an RPG specifically. Magic: The Gathering is a collectable card game.
I don't think you're on the mark with the first thing you said - I believe the point that he was making is that dungeon crawls (or whatever) should be rewarding for naive players who just click repeatedly, but should also have a deeper level with more interesting gameplay (and presumably greater rewards) for advanced players. This would be the traps / potions / retreats that you're talking about.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday April 04 2014, @02:06AM
Perhaps you're right about that.
I keep thinking that XP gain would be intrinsically linked towards an overall assessment of risk/reward and not be linked towards any particular monster being dealt with at the moment. Killing a dragon would of course still be a huge gain, but I'm thinking the majority of that gain would be because you actually planned something out and killed a fucking dragon. That's supposed to be a fantastic accomplishment. It's a dragon.
However, maybe you should get a similar XP reward just for managing enough NPCs to take out an entire dungeon with minimal losses and damage?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 04 2014, @03:49AM
Yeah, we seriously need more games that are fun for both noobs and nonnoobs. It's not trivial to do but it's at least an interesting challenge for a game designer (rather than do the boring minimum for the usual skinner box crap).
I tried some F2P MMO and wow it was boring, might be fun for real noobs to the game for a while but at level 50+ you were doing mostly the same things you were doing at level 1. The numbers were just bigger - health and damage. So if you were killing stuff in X shots at level 5, you were still killing stuff in X shots at level 50. The skills were mostly the same, the way you approached and attacked stuff was the same. You had more AOE skills, but that's about it. I tried SW:TOR too and it was still too similar to that for me (it reminded me too much of the crap F2P MMO ;) ).
FWIW I'm still playing Guild Wars 1, despite it losing a big chunk of its player base to GW2 and other games. In GW1 PVE you can go around in a more conventional team killing stuff slowly (or not if you fail ;) ), or you can do fancier stuff like for a team (or even split into two teams) with skills that synergize to complete/clear an area really quick: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Speed_clear [guildwars.com]
Or you can go around with an unconventional team build just for fun.
Or farm solo with overpowered special purpose builds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dYfYP8oJcA#t=2m30 s [youtube.com] ( I find such solo farming in GW1 boring, but solo farming in games like SWTOR seems like it will be even more boring, judging from the guides and videos I've seen ).