Are you serious? You never know when you might need it! ;)

In the middle of the night? :P

All from Morrowind.

I have the habit of looking under people's pillows, just to check whether they are hiding something there.

Steal ALL the pillows and build a fort on the roof of my stronghold :D

Museum. In my (Hlaalu) stronghold I always esablish a museum. 1 of each type of weapon and armor are "exhibited" somewhere in a corner. Special weapons, armors, and jewelries are on display as well. I used a mod to make the stronghold a bit bigger for this.
And I always make a skooma corner. With lots of moon sugar and skooma lying around :P

Get a full set of Ebony armor right at the beginning of the game at lvl 1. Just because I can.
- make Archery a main skill
- get money from Caius+steal some items to buy: 1 potion of invisibility, 1 potion of levitation, 1 potion of mark+recall, and bow+as many arrows as I can
- mark Caius' house
- go to Vivec, donate the levitation potion for the 1 day lvl 100 levitation blessing
- use the guild guide to teleport to Ald'ruhn, then use the silt strider to go to Maar Gan
- fly to Khuul, and enter the daedric ruin next to town (Ashalmawia)
- drink potion of invisibility
- go to the Sunken Vault
- there is a hostile guy there wearing full ebony. he has no ranged attacks, so just float at the center of the room and snipe him down. a LOT of arrows are needed though
- there are some stuff hidden at the ceiling, and some nice stuff on the ground floor ar well. collect them all, grab his ebony armor and daedric weapon, and use the recall potion to get back to Caius' house :D

Rena as physical attacker is a very risky move because while her punch is good her defence is weak. My strategy is usually defensive so I never consider this. Impressive ☺

The idea is that I want the strategy to not be about not dying at all, but rather about dying at the right time. In particular, deciding when you want to die would be part of the challenge.

(Interesting example: Rogue Legacy. In that game, once you have earned enough money and maybe found a blueprint, if you want to actually benefit from it you need to die. On the other hand, if you don't have enough money for an upgrade, the money is wasted because you lose it when you re-enter the dungeon with your next character.)

Also, with damage boosts, you do need to be careful, because you have limited health. Sometimes you need to choose between damage boosting and conserving health. Similarly, if you reach a new level of the game and are low on health, you might decide that it is worth dying right then for a health refill.

Here is an interesting challenge speedrun (of Ninja Gaiden) that illustrates some points about damage boosting and intentional deaths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_JeooffKp0

Mentioning morrowind in this thread is almost cheating. There are so much absurd things we can do in morrowind. Especially when alchemy is involved

But getting ebony armor at level 1, that's 1st time I ever heard it. Impressive

Alright, I misunderstood that point. There is still strategy and challenge involved there. Sort of reminds me in Company of Heroes 2, when playing the Germans if you expect lots of your men are about to die, you can activate a timed ability that will call in reinforcements for free for every squad you lose. It can be crucial to activate that at the right time.

Booze bottles everywhere. Skooma. Moon sugar. Pipes and bottles hiding underneath beds. Flying, suicidal mages. Homoerotic dancing at Vivec.

Morrowind was clearly coded by drug addicts and perverts.

Now it all makes sense

So when the going gets tough in a video game you want it to ease up? Then how does it ever get challenging? How do you even get better at playing and learning the mechanics? I know Max Payne had an auto-adjusting difficulty but it didn't work as well as it should, the game got hard faster just by merely playing it and getting through without dying too much. But if you have such a problem with being punished then your best bet is to just play on the easy or baby difficulty or whatever constitutes casual for small children and grandmas these days.

I only have a problem with difficulty in a game if they didn't balance it properly or it doesn't exactly reflect what it says on the tin. Easy should be just that, easy, not counting late game where things are expected to get harder but it won't be overwhelmingly so. Normal should be a fine line between not being easy/too easy or too hard, I realize this isn't easy to accomplish but some games have done this and Unreal 1 IMHO has correctly labeled difficulties that deliver exactly what the player requests. And hard should be very challenging but not unfair/bullshit. If there is an unfair/bullshit difficulty level make it clearly marked so I know what I'm in for.

Otherwise I'm most least fond of being cheesed in any difficulty mode by some overpowered enemy attack.

Here's a idea; allow the player to retry the challenging part of the game without having to trudge through easy sections, or worse, unskipable non-interactive cutscenes. This way, the player can practice the part of the game until, eventually, she manages to get past it.

Also, having the option to temporarily lower the difficulty would be a good idea in case the game gets so hard it stops being fun. This is especially true if the game is poorly balanced at that point, or if the game suddenly switches to a genre the player isn't good at (note that I consider such a genre shift to be bad game design).

This sounds more like a problem with games that use checkpoint systems without the option of quicksaving, that can be annoying, like F.E.A.R. 2. Unskippable cutscenes is another issue but thankfully not all games suffer from this. Turret sections in shooters where you're at the mercy of the game's new fangled mechanics and not being able to withdraw/heal outside of it can be annoying as well (F.E.A.R. 2, Quake 4). Or if the game wasn't designed around stealth or platforming and it expects you to do it with the bad AI or jumping height (Red Faction, whatever isn't Turok). But again this is arbitrary difficulty, which is not skill-based difficulty. Luck-based difficulty is bad too, when there is no real strategy involved except hope you don't fuck up.

Some games let you change the difficulty mid-game, like F.E.A.R. once again. F.E.A.R. seems to be a game that is very balanced difficulty mode-wise however. The highest is very tough but it isn't ever BS or unfair and you can kill as easily as you are killed in return.

Actually, this reminds me of another absurd thing I did in a game, and which is a problem that can happen when a game allows you to save anywhere.

Ys III: Wanderers of Ys (SNES): I was abusing the fact that, if you save and reload, most enemies will be gone. However, at one point, after reloading, an enemy would be right on top of me, killing me before I could do anything. (Notice, I said *most*, not *all*.) I managed to survive only by repeatedly pressing the button to open the menu until I managed to open it while still alive, then equipping the Shield Ring, allowing me to survive one hit, which was enough to salvage the save file.

Incidentally, my mother ran into this problem in Final Fantasy Adventure, and had to abandon the save because of it.

Also, while young, I ran into this problem in Final Fantasy Legend (SaGa). It is especially a problem there because the RNG is so bad (that is, so not random) that getting lucky was impossible.

Saving at any time does carry this territory of screwing yourself if you wind up in a bad spot, but you have only yourself to blame for that. I'm guilty of doing it too sometimes in the heat of combat. What's worse though, having to restart a hard fight with a renewed valor or trying to make-do in the thick of it with no health or ammo left? I'd rather choose the former if possible since the latter will cause even more frustration than necessary.