Players and Mechanics

[firstfrost]

The Dragon run last Saturday had an interesting failure mode. The party was journeying through the World Below (the land of demons), which usually means they have to interact with various set pieces and puzzles. The first puzzle they encountered - a visual thing putting together an overlapping pointillized set of circles, to determine what the picture(s) were of - I badly misjudged the difficulty. They got the first picture in about 40 minutes, which was fine, but the second picture proved to be much harder, both to put together and to recognize. After about an hour and a half, mjperson, as the demon, started trying to sell them other exits, but nobody wanted to make a deal. Because of the nature of the puzzle, I think there was very slow incremental progress being made, so people didn't want to give up, plus there was the issue of sunk costs that they didn't want to waste. In the end it took them close to three hours, with several people getting sore necks from trying to look at things sideways.

The other thing that I tend to overlook is that we actually have different visual processing abilities. I read that different people have different mixes of rods and cones in their retina, so they either have good dark vision or good color vision, but not both. I have terrible night sight, and I think it is easy to see the picture. Mike has very very good night sight, and thinks the pictures are impossible.

Comments

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

I easily see the squirrel. It's less clear in the big picture, and I can imagine myself not seeing it after being focused on the detail of assembling the circles, and maybe having the circles put together wrong for a while contaminating my brain. And of course I had seen the small picture first where I was like, yes, that is obviously a squirrel.

But it is definitely harder than the first, and is much, much more difficult close up. Did someone figure it out by jumping on the table and walking around it? I bet five, six feet of perspective would have made a lot of difference, for people who can see it at all.

Your initial point about different color vision, though, that is totally true, although I don't know if it correlates with night vision. Browns are near reds, and red/green sensitivity is a common one for people (especially men) to be weak on. Also probably you have had a discussion with someone about whether something teal or turquoise is actually blue or green. There's a site I found a while back that tests your color acuity, by having you put shades in order. I hit almost 100%, I flipped a pair in the magenta zone that I had dithered about for a long time. It was very hard, because I don't have shade memory, but I did pair wise comparison to sort sets of colors, with endpoints that didn't make sense to me. But not everyone can do it.

http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge