The unpredictability of Darkest Dungeon creates emotional turmoil for characters,
Always a big question on how people achieve this kind of conclusions.
DD gives an extended control over the events. It is highly predictable.
Quick example:
The crusader might start with smite (ACCuracy 80), Zealous accusation(ACC 80) and Stunning blow (ACC 85), level one skills.
Upgrading often gives a 5 ACC extra and upgrading comes fast (at week 3)
The percentage to hit is given by ACC - (enemy) DOD(ge)
Monsters at apprentice level are often DOD 0.
That means that at apprentice level, the basic chances to hit range from 80 to 90.
Adding various trinkets and buffs, increasing them is straightforward. Leading them to the 95.
Unpredictable? Highly predictable. The most unpredictable and damaging thing is the loot that might come with drawbacks (like quirks)
Other than that, it is highly predictable (you know the type of monsters you are going to face in the dungeons but not when)
They have an overall setting that implies low healing availability, with special camping skills assigned for that, yet there is a simple free healing skill that works during combat, but disabled out of combat. This leads to players artificially extending combat in order to heal up for the next encounter. This is not the first time i see game designers do exactly this kind of mistake, so I try to come up with a witty name for this specific kind of design fail. Any suggestions?
It is not about health only. It also works for mental sanity.
Buying a turn is not an artificial move in this kind of the game. It is one goal.
The basic "ugoigo" metagame includes making decisions to keep all your options during one turn while depriving the enemy of all their options.
In DD, buying a turn, whether completely or partially, is straightforward. During a turn, when the only left enemy is stunned, it is not artificial to go to the end of your turn, buffing up the rest of the party. That is what the metagame demands.
Some players could choose to abort their turn by killing outright the stunned enemy, even before their healer or stress remover gets its own turn. That is poor play relatively to the metagame.
The metagame demands to make the most of your turn while managing to deprive the enemy of most of its turn.
The suggestions are hard to come as in their original design, they provided a solution to put a lid on that aspect. They also drifted from their original design so suggestions might involve redoing a completely different game.
The current issue is that players keep an extended control on their party while they were supposed to lose control over their party, breaking points that happen when the resolve is tested.
Once the control is lost over members of the party, who, additionnally, can poison other people's mind, quickening the loss of control over the other heroes, the slack that currently exists and that makes buying turns so straightforward disappears, trying to heal a masochist or a hopeless might end in a refusal. Noticeably, once heroes' resolve is tested, the buff to decrease their stress do not remove their mental status.
Uncontrolled heroes was the original lid over optimization of a turn.
It is not so much a design flaw, much more a refusal to stick to their original design, pressured by players who do not like the feature.
Indeed, in the current state, the control over the party is such that a basic application of the metagame leads to strolls in the park. Without the lid, players are able to make the most of their turns while depriving the enemy of its turns very straightforwardly. It is a no brainer.
A correction based on the original design would mean accepting to lose control over the party members, a solution that is not accepted and rejected.
So now, they might have to revise their entire design as their original solution is rejected.
And the rest of DD was also a topical context to make the expression of a certain type of gameplay natural, it also means scrapping a lot of things, rendering them meaningless.
