Artificial Entertainment

[Don Coyote]

This game is artificially difficult

Spoken without awareness?
Spoken from a place of irony?

Artificially?

This game is a construct
   An edifice of artifice
All games are constructs
   All edifices of artifice

Don't cry
   Difficulty isn't
      You not having countless powers

Artificial Difficulty
Would be
Perfectly balanced
Encounters
That wreck
Your shit
Or
Would be
Perfectly balanced
Encounters
That have
No chance of failure

Artificially
How
Difficult
Compared to?
         Just as logical to
         Claim
         Your game is
         Artificially Easy

[Nast]

Hm...this intrigued me. I think it's about life being neither hard nor easy, because those are arbitrary qualifiers, but I'm not sure?

[Don Coyote]

It probably could be read that way, but I wrote this literally about someone who I briefly played D&D with and complained about how "artificially difficult" the version I ran was.

[Nast]

 Oh. You made me be accidentally philosophical   

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It probably could be read that way, but I wrote this literally about someone who I briefly played D&D with and complained about how "artificially difficult" the version I ran was.

[Don Coyote]

Well a professor once told me that you can't over-read into a poem so long as you can support your opinion with in the piece.

If anything, it's about the uselessness of using a term like "artificially" to describe certain concepts. In order for a thing to be artificially difficult there would need to be a natural or default difficulty.

It probably could be read that way, but I wrote this literally about someone who I briefly played D&D with and complained about how "artificially difficult" the version I ran was.

She is one person I don't really feel bad about not being friends with anymore. There was some other fallout over the situation that prompted this.

But seriously, when playing one of the earliest versions of a game, its difficulty should be taken as a default.

Shit like that, people crying about how hard the game I am running is, is why I have basically stopped trying to run anything based on D&D.

[Don Coyote]

https://soundcloud.com/ian-woolley-9/artificial-entertainment

[Edward Longpork]

I dig it. I always hear that term "artificial difficulty" from people who look down their noses at "casual gamers" and I never really got it. Look, there are some types of challenges you enjoy, some you don't. No need to hang an honorific on one.