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Totally Guy
2011-09-26, 09:23 AM
I like making decisions in my games. I’d even go so far as to say that the more decisions that I’m making the more satisfaction I’m deriving from the game. I say satisfaction over fun because I can have fun without being satisfied (but I’ve not yet experienced the other way around). This lack of satisfaction ended my involvement with the last game I played. :( So I'm looking back and thinking about it... I wish I'd been able to get these thought organised like this prior to quitting the game so that we could have talked about it.

So what elements make a meaningful decision?

A decision needs to have information provided to act on, an expected outcome for each option. Without any information the decision is arbitrary. Left door or right door with no clue or differing expectation is an arbitrary decision.

A decision needs to be non-trivial. A trivial decision is one with an optimal option. Do you want to kill the orc or kill the orc and save your friend at the same time? A decision with an optimal outcome is not really a decision at all. If an optimal solution exist but is not obvious then we are describing a puzzle.

A decision needs to have an impact on the situation. If you make a decision where all outcomes lead to the same result then it wasn’t a meaningful decision. In RPGs this is known as “illusion of choice”. This becomes a problem if it is noticeable to the decision makers.

A decision needs to be interesting. This is a hard one to identify as different people find different decisions interesting. In RPGs players tend to make characters that’ll be good at the parts of the game that interest them. If a player has written a backstory it’ll tend to be about some aspect of the game that the player cares about. Also knowing the people who are making the decision also gives you a clue about what they find interesting. Most obviously you can ask them what the most interesting part of the game is to them.


So when you present a decision to the players ask yourself whether it fulfils these properties for a, hopefully, more fulfilling game.

gkathellar
2011-09-26, 09:31 AM
A decision needs to have an impact on the situation. If you make a decision where all outcomes lead to the same result then it wasn’t a meaningful decision. In RPGs this is known as “illusion of choice”. This becomes a problem if it is noticeable to the decision makers.

Emphasis mine. In video games maintaining the illusion of choice is impossible because the player can always replay or go to a previous save — but in PnP it's much easier to do because there's no way for the players to test both options. In some cases, the difference between a good DM and a bad DM is whether you can figure out that you're being railroaded.

jseah
2011-09-26, 09:43 AM
A decision with an optimal outcome is not really a decision at all. If an optimal solution exist but is not obvious then we are describing a puzzle.
If the reason for the optimal solution not being obvious is a lack of information (but it does exist), then what we have is an investigation.

Which can be a game.

To the library! =P

--------------

The usual solution however is to make it too hard to decide for sure:

Eg. Chess, Go, Starcraft

Totally Guy
2011-09-26, 09:45 AM
In some cases, the difference between a good DM and a bad DM is whether you can figure out that you're being railroaded.

I have a strong opinion about this as a sustainable GMing strategy but it is a GMing strategy regardless of my opinion. I think I have been fair in representing it above.


If the reason for the optimal solution not being obvious is a lack of information (but it does exist), then what we have is an investigation.

Which can be a game.

That's true too. But I think that the decision to investigate more must have been a legitimate decision option to make it so.

jseah
2011-09-26, 09:52 AM
You just need to make optimal solutions hard to figure out. They have to exist since not all choices are equal (otherwise what's the point?)

But if there's a hundred moving parts to the system that interact in a combinatorial fashion, it quickly becomes impossible to know what's the *best* way.
There'll often be many good ways, but you'll never know for sure if the way you picked was the best.

If you seed some lack of information, it just got even harder.
Information that can be gotten but isn't worth of effort of getting it does exist. So deciding whether to go get a piece of information can be a meaningful decision too! (and the worth of information you don't know yet is not trivially decided either)

And of course, at each point, you can break things down further. Once the assassin has decided that obtaining the patrol routes and times of the palace guard is important, actually getting that information could be its own subset of decision problems.

Emmerask
2011-09-26, 11:06 AM
I like making decisions in my games. I’d even go so far as to say that the more decisions that I’m making the more satisfaction I’m deriving from the game. I say satisfaction over fun because I can have fun without being satisfied (but I’ve not yet experienced the other way around). This lack of satisfaction ended my involvement with the last game I played. :( So I'm looking back and thinking about it... I wish I'd been able to get these thought organised like this prior to quitting the game so that we could have talked about it.

So what elements make a meaningful decision?

A decision needs to have information provided to act on, an expected outcome for each option. Without any information the decision is arbitrary. Left door or right door with no clue or differing expectation is an arbitrary decision.

A decision needs to be non-trivial. A trivial decision is one with an optimal option. Do you want to kill the orc or kill the orc and save your friend at the same time? A decision with an optimal outcome is not really a decision at all. If an optimal solution exist but is not obvious then we are describing a puzzle.

A decision needs to have an impact on the situation. If you make a decision where all outcomes lead to the same result then it wasn’t a meaningful decision. In RPGs this is known as “illusion of choice”. This becomes a problem if it is noticeable to the decision makers.

A decision needs to be interesting. This is a hard one to identify as different people find different decisions interesting. In RPGs players tend to make characters that’ll be good at the parts of the game that interest them. If a player has written a backstory it’ll tend to be about some aspect of the game that the player cares about. Also knowing the people who are making the decision also gives you a clue about what they find interesting. Most obviously you can ask them what the most interesting part of the game is to them.


So when you present a decision to the players ask yourself whether it fulfils these properties for a, hopefully, more fulfilling game.

But wouldn´t a clever player realize that you only give them important decisions to make and therefore ponder these decisions far more then he would normally do or his character would (ie begin to metagame).

Sure important decisions that really change something are a must have to keep the players entertained but must all decisions the player gets to make really change everything?

Lets say the player is the landlord of a small castle with a village.
A new Mayor has to be reinstated by the player with 2 choices.

a) you don´t give the player the choice and there is only one new mayor
b) you give him a choice and it is "super" meaningful ie you put countless hours of work into creating these two mayors and their traits and flaws which then comes ultimately down to 2% more tax income (or something minor like that)
c) you give him the choice between those two, both are more or less equally qualified and do a good job whomever he chooses, maybe a few sessions later you tell the player what an awesome job the mayor did or somesuch, the player will be happy and will brag about his awesome choice he did, the dm could put his valuable time into more important stuff so is equally happy... win win ^^

So while in general I agree that there should be choices that really have an impact and that the players can do fully informed about what the consequences might be, I also think that some "random" "choices" make the game a bit more interesting for the players because frankly you can´t have stupendously important choices every other session.

Totally Guy
2011-09-26, 03:11 PM
But wouldn´t a clever player realize that you only give them important decisions to make and therefore ponder these decisions far more then he would normally do or his character would (ie begin to metagame).

I call that behaviour "playing".


Lets say the player is the landlord of a small castle with a village.
A new Mayor has to be reinstated by the player with 2 choices.

a) you don´t give the player the choice and there is only one new mayor
b) you give him a choice and it is "super" meaningful ie you put countless hours of work into creating these two mayors and their traits and flaws which then comes ultimately down to 2% more tax income (or something minor like that)
c) you give him the choice between those two, both are more or less equally qualified and do a good job whomever he chooses, maybe a few sessions later you tell the player what an awesome job the mayor did or somesuch, the player will be happy and will brag about his awesome choice he did, the dm could put his valuable time into more important stuff so is equally happy... win win ^^

I don't understand any of this...
Are you saying that uninteresting decisions are bad? I agree with this, you probably shouldn't prep and run a game about boring choices.
Are you saying that illusion of choice exists and is usable? I also said that it's a GMing strategy, even though it's not one I personally use.

Fouredged Sword
2011-09-26, 03:45 PM
There exists many types of choice.

good option vs better option
good option vs good option
good option vs nuteral option
nuteral option vs nuteral option
nuteral option vs bad option
good option vs bad option
bad option vs bad option
bad option vs worse option

The illusion of choice is simply having a form of G vs G, N vs N, or B vs B choice that the players see as another set. In truth they have a choice, but the choice is trivial. Convinceing them that it was not is imortant, and if overused will become transparent, breaking the effect.

All these sets have a place in a game, as they let the players control the enviorment with thier decisions. It is important to let the players discover thier power over your game world. After all if they don't have power, all they are doing is math and die rolling, and that isn't so much fun.

NichG
2011-09-26, 04:36 PM
The best choices to do this with are ones that do not easily break down into a linear evaluation of the outcome (i.e. A is 50 points, B is 52 points). If you have a linear valuation, you always have the issue of optimality. Consider, however, the following:

- A player/the party gets a choice that determines whether the rest of the game session will be about investigating a creepy mansion and uncovering the story that lead to the haunting, or about smacking down spiritual creatures on their home plane.

One might be 'easier' or 'harder' for a given party's set of abilities, but as this is a campaign neither is particularly likely to cause a TPK. However, one person might be more invested in a peaceful solution, someone else might just want to kill things, etc. So there's no simple linear valuation of the choice, and the choice is meaningful (it determines both the meta aspect of what sort of game the rest of the session will be, and the in-game aspect of whether the ghosts are put to rest or destroyed).

Choices like that are easier to fit into a 'meaningful but not a puzzle' sort of category, and if the consequences of the choice are in some way permanent then it helps avoid the all-roads-lead-to-Rome sort of scenarios.

Dark Herald
2011-09-27, 11:40 PM
Decisions that cannot easily be quantified are the most interesting decisions, and bring the personalities of the characters in real roleplay.

Moral and ethical dilemmas, like whether to turn in an escaped prisoner who claims to be innocent, are never clear cut and force the players to think of what their characters would do.

Planning or tactical decisions, like plotting a route across and island or deciding how to scale a mountain let the players choose what their characters will encounter from the environment and how they will spend their non combat time.

Finally, calling on the PCs to choose between two factions or ideas presented by NPCs allows the players to examine other people's arguments and ideals and make a judgement call, which can work well if both sides have valid positions.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-09-30, 11:37 AM
For my benefit, I'm going to condense these elements of a meaningful decision into bullet points:
(1) A meaningful decision must be informed
This is not just the requirement that information must be available regarding the likely outcomes of any given decision, but that this information must be hewed to when the decision is adjudicated by the GM. It is all well and good to say that the left door has faint groaning behind it while the right door is silent, but if it turns out that there was never anything behind the left door then the GM has failed to provide meaningful information to the Players.

This sort of outcome is more likely in fuzzier "social" decisions where the fact that, say, one of the PCs is related to the local lord is forgotten by the GM when it comes time to decide whether the local lord is going to help the PCs on their quest.

(2) A meaningful decision must be non-trivial

(3) A meaningful decision must have a meaningful impact
An expansion on another aspect of decisions being non-trivial. If the PC decides to seduce a barmaid, but then that seduction has no impact on the larger game, that decision is not meaningful even if the GM did not engage in an Illusion of Choice gambit. A GM could make that into a meaningful decision by bringing the barmaid up in a future session, even if she had no role in the original one.

Obviously, I agree with Totally Guy's paradigm here, but I thought it might be interesting to note that not all Players want meaningful decisions in their games. Beer & Pretzel gamers, for example, don't necessarily want to spend large amounts of time agonizing over momentous decisions; some players actually freeze up when presented with anything but trivial choices.

I'll not speculate on how prevalent these Player Types are in the universe of gaming, but it is good to remember that not everyone plays the way you'd expect -- it is always best to tailor your GMing style to your Players, or tailor your Player selection to your personal style :smallcool: