The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents.

Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (famous, even) never surrendered, almost never tried to flee, attacked one-by-one, and shoved no sign of tactical thinking or self-preservation instinct. Despite being armed and (by description) organised, PC could enter a narrow corridor, defeat dozen of them without taking any damage, yet there will be a waiting line eager for demise by a single hit -- even actively advancing towards it. No attempt to regroup, to take advantage of the number superiority, wait in open space, ambush from all directions, or anything like that. Same applies to most FPS: there is a Doomguy running around at unprecedented pace, slaughtering everything that moves, but we will all keep our scattered positions. (This led me to a thought, whether it would be possible to rearrange enemies in canonical Doom map so that all would attack at once at some appropriate spot and whether it would guarantee their victory or not.)

To me, these reflections upon my aggressive and violent behavior in a game are much more impactful than games that put me into dilemma situations, where you are already presented with a nicely arranged moral problem in the moment.

These are two distinct techniques and I feel the latter almost always failed to impress me much, while the first one is where I feel caught, even shocked by myself and the cold-bloodiness to (virtually) follow any suggestion to kill.

While I agree it's incredibly jarring in some games, I'm always thinking back at a presentation by David Rosen on procedural animation: "First, do no harm to the gameplay". He's talking about animations in particular, but I feel that should be a core pillar for any game designer.

Many things are unnatural in games: you don't instantly recover from a beating by eating one apple in real life, but we're ok with it in games because it makes the gameplay fun.

https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=fGFCTCHm77OJiYu3&t=260

I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated?

EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.

This is, IMO something that has infected modern mainstream TTRPG: Monsters hardly run away, even if a fireball just killed half of you. One thing B/X AD&D got right were the heavy use of Moral Checks, e.g. Check their morale on first death in enemy party, when half have died, etc. In fact, fighting is deadly and scary. And these morale checks differentiated undead as that enemy that knows no fear and had no morale checks, unless forced upon them by a Cleric's Turn Undead.