gamerdad There is a frustration I have with RPG games that comes in the form of the difficulty curve. Oh, sure. You may be one of those people who likes tough games, but here in my late-40s I’ve realized that I play games for the zen story and flow vibe and not the epic monumental challenge.

That said, I still enjoy games like Fallout and Skyrim for their vast worlds and complex mechanics.

So, back to that frustration. The frustration is the early game when your weakaf character is constantly getting his backside handed to him and I, as the gamer, needs to revisit dungeons or fights or quests that I’ve already attempted six times but have failed because I don’t have a strong enough bit of gear or high enough stats to deal with some random boss at the end of an hour of effort working through a challenge. I call this the early game reluctance of replaying a game: knowing I’m gonna need to grind through both the tutorial stages and the weakling phase until I get to the fun beefed up phase where I can just push through and only suffer character death occasionally. It usually lasts about ten to fifteen hours in these games, a time through which I punch with impatient grind trying to up my stats in any way possible (without amping up the difficulty too much) so that the balance is better for all that zen vibe flow yadda-yadda.

I’ve been replaying Skyrim for what seems like, I wanna say, the sixth or seventh time and last night it finally started to feel like I was creeping out of the early game phase. Better loot. More manageable fights. Fewer surprise death scenes. Scumming my way past this is never my proudest of achievements, but I’m just too old to want to trigger crunch an enemy to the redline of mutual death. I just want to sit on the couch and listen to a podcast while I effortlessly thump a few baddies. Is that too much to ask?