Which brings us back to this past night and the one friend. He's a wonderful guy and I'm fortunate to have him as a friend... but he is also two things: blunt, and... I'm going to say "empirical". What I mean is that he is very aware of his past experiences and those past experiences influence his opinion of other things perhaps stronger than many. So if a game menu, operating system, vehicle, meal or anything behaves or exists in a way that he doesn't get or doesn't go how he would have otherwise expected... he will be very quick to judge and criticize.
Quick tangent to express this point. This friend was unfamiliar with the "archer's paradox" of arrow ballistics, where a fired arrow flexes pretty dramatically upon being loosed from a bow. When Brave was coming out, he saw a commercial that showed the scene of Merida firing a bow in slow-motion, flexing arrow and all. My friend's understanding of physics didn't mesh with this, and was very vocal about how terrible the whole deal was. I spent the next five minutes assuring him that even if I couldn't remember the name of it that "it was a real thing". His interim acceptance of my words came out as a "alright, so there's at least one thing Hollywood actually did right for once..."
Can't win.
That said... it was going to be hard to win this one too. All of his gaming instincts were lighting up all his "poor game design" flags. As a party with no dedicated healer, the one support class was pretty much Paul McCartneyed into being the healer, giving her less things to do that she would prefer. The other support class was getting squished once every session. I was not taking them into consideration, and not giving them many things to kill and be proud about.
And of course, the moment you hear a sentence start with "in my other game..." or some variant thereof, well... it's a blow to the drive.
Now, these two party members with the hard time, they were very green to this sort of RPing - even greener to the game in general than I was green to running the game. One, they haven't fully realized just how free they really were with anything they did in the game. Two, they maybe haven't fully figured out all the things their characters can do. The one bard has plenty more available than just "sing" followed by "shoot bow". The one druid hasn't had a chance to dedicate spells outside of "cure light wounds". Admittedly, they are not especially straight-forward classes to play, and take a bit of time to wrap one's head around everything at their disposal.
So now I'm being told that they very well may be very frustrated and dissatisfied with the game, and that for all intents and purposes it's my fault because I'm the one designing the encounters...
