Player Challenge vs. Character Challenge

[Catullus64]

I'd like to talk about differences in playstyle, specifically in terms of challenges directed at players, and challenges directed at their characters, and how to balance the two concerns.

By default, game rules and discussions thereof tend to bias towards challenges directed at characters, simply because characters and their ability to resolve challenges are what exist in the realm that the rules deal with. But I, just for one example, seem to have a relatively high desire for player-directed challenge, both as a player and as a DM.

In online discussions, the two areas where this difference in preference comes up the most is in puzzles and social roleplay; while I enjoy playing or crafting a challenge in either of these arenas, I do have some sympathy for the players who don't want to be challenged directly by these things. After all, the challenge is very DM-centric; your DM's idea of a logical or clever solution, your DM's idea of what is a persuasive argument or convincing lie is what ultimately matters.

And while I do think that the game has gone overboard in recent years with emphasis on power fantasy and getting to be cool and special in the game world, that is still a valuable part of the game which player-directed challenge can cut against. Myself, I tend to have a pretty inflated opinion of my own charisma and intelligence, and so welcome being challenged on them, but a player who is less confident in these things should have some chance to play a character with them. We don't require deadlifting or juggling to play characters with high Strength or Dexterity, after all.

I'm constantly trying new approaches to balance between these concerns, especially since I run for a group of players with very different preferences. In the past, my main approach has been to make the player's skill (at roleplay or problem-solving) the primary determinant of DCs for ability checks, but there are flaws in that approach, namely that it can still result in good solutions failing or bad solutions succeeding by dumb luck.

Right now, my main approach centers around ability checks as means of alleviating player challenge while not bypassing it. This works really well for Intelligence checks, which can provide puzzle clues, or determine whether or not a character remembers a key piece of information that the player has forgotten. But I haven't yet found a way to make this work all that well for social interactions. In particular, I really dislike the Insight skill, and the way in which some players seem to want it to function as a mechanical cheat to avoid actually interpreting and thinking about the characters they're interacting with.

I haven't said much about combat, but this difference in playstyles is also very much relevant there too, both in terms of optimization/tactics, but also how much the DM wants the players to be creative and come up with lateral solutions to combat problems.

Let me know where you and your players fall on the scale of player vs. character challenge, and what approaches you've tried to balance the two preferences in your games!

[GloatingSwine]

The solution to a problem should always reference something on the character sheet. The challenge to the player is deciding which of their character's abilities or possessions are the best way to approach the problem.

[Guy Lombard-O]

My own preference is to have such puzzle and social challenges hinge primarily upon the players themselves, rather than the characters, as the first line of overcoming said challenges. The skill checks of the PCs are there more for backup and a clarifier, than the main engine of resolution.

By this I mean that for puzzles, I view it more as a "game within a game", where the players themselves attempt to figure out the puzzle and possibly have their characters attempt things in game as they try to figure it out. It's the players' intelligence and ideas that matter most in the situation, not the PCs' scores (and possibly skills). Where the skill checks come in is when measuring the success of the PCs' explorations or interactions with individual aspects of the puzzle (jumping something or spotting something), or possibly Int or Insight checks for clues if the players get stuck.

Likewise, I feel like if the players put forward persuasive, logical and convincing reasons to the NPCs for why the NPC should go along with the PCs' wishes, then reducing all of that to the same Persuasion roll with the same chance of success as if the player just said "I want them to give me their clothes"? That's a boring, uninteresting way to play the game. Whether it's a "yeah, the NPC sees your point and agrees, no need to roll" or just "that made a lot of sense, roll persuasion with advantage", I think it depends upon the situation and what the players say. But making the players' input to the resolution of the social challenge all but meaningless, completely subsumed into the raw skill check roll, discourages active interaction, thought and effort on the players' part.

[Catullus64]

The solution to a problem should always reference something on the character sheet. The challenge to the player is deciding which of their character's abilities or possessions are the best way to approach the problem.

Is that an articulation of how you like to play and run the game, or a normative statement about how the game ought to be run in all cases? If the former, that's good to know, but if the latter I expect you'll encounter some controversy.

[da newt]

Personally I prefer the Player's choices and actions to drive the success or failure of a 'challenge' but I can also understand that this is a personal preference not the RIGHT answer.
As a DM I do my best to allow the Players to decide how they wish to resolve a challenge - figure it out OR roll for it based on their character sheet.
My goal is to allow the player who thinks they are clever to try to be clever (and to challenge them), and the person who would rather go with a D20 roll and the PC's stats to allow their PC to be clever (via good stats or a lucky roll).

[Psyren]

I heavily weight character ability over player ability. If someone has built their character to be charismatic, even if the player is shy or doesn't make the best or wittiest arguments, I will allow the character to shine by prompting or helping them realize that aspect of their build, including allowing them to crowdsource ideas from the rest of the party for things their character might say that align with a great roll. Similarly, if someone has built their character to be particularly perceptive or insightful, I'll pass them notes with things their character notices that the player (especially if they're less experienced at roleplaying) might not have thought to ask about. (Note: this technique is a great way to allow Wis-based classes like Monks and Druids to contribute to social encounters.)

For example, in one game we had a Monk who took a vow of silence, but was highly proficient in both Perception and Insight to the point that he was almost the party's human lie detector. Whenever an NPC tried to be shifty or shady with the party and he successfully picked up on it, he would pointedly glare, clear his throat, hum, or "slap a mosquito on his arm" to tip off their less insightful party face. It was an easy and fun way to get multiple characters involved in conversations rather than that part of the game just becoming the Bard or Paladin show. I'd also let a wildshaped druid growl, purr, or whine to similar effect so long as the party worked such signals out ahead of time.

[Mellack]

One of my issues with having the player rather than the character be the deciding factor is that it unbalances things. If I am a persuasive player, my characters never need to invest in charisma or social skills. If I am great at puzzles and remembering things, I don't need to invest in intelligence. Why not play a brute barbarian and max all the physical skills if I can just substitute the social and mental skills with my own abilities as a player? It is not like I have to explain how I am breaking down the door, I can just use my strength stat. But when it comes to persuading the lord to aid us, if my speech as a player is all that is needed, why spend valuable game recourses on it?

[NichG]

I'd like to talk about differences in playstyle, specifically in terms of challenges directed at players, and challenges directed at their characters, and how to balance the two concerns.

By default, game rules and discussions thereof tend to bias towards challenges directed at characters, simply because characters and their ability to resolve challenges are what exist in the realm that the rules deal with. But I, just for one example, seem to have a relatively high desire for player-directed challenge, both as a player and as a DM.

In online discussions, the two areas where this difference in preference comes up the most is in puzzles and social roleplay; while I enjoy playing or crafting a challenge in either of these arenas, I do have some sympathy for the players who don't want to be challenged directly by these things. After all, the challenge is very DM-centric; your DM's idea of a logical or clever solution, your DM's idea of what is a persuasive argument or convincing lie is what ultimately matters.

And while I do think that the game has gone overboard in recent years with emphasis on power fantasy and getting to be cool and special in the game world, that is still a valuable part of the game which player-directed challenge can cut against. Myself, I tend to have a pretty inflated opinion of my own charisma and intelligence, and so welcome being challenged on them, but a player who is less confident in these things should have some chance to play a character with them. We don't require deadlifting or juggling to play characters with high Strength or Dexterity, after all.

I'm constantly trying new approaches to balance between these concerns, especially since I run for a group of players with very different preferences. In the past, my main approach has been to make the player's skill (at roleplay or problem-solving) the primary determinant of DCs for ability checks, but there are flaws in that approach, namely that it can still result in good solutions failing or bad solutions succeeding by dumb luck.

Right now, my main approach centers around ability checks as means of alleviating player challenge while not bypassing it. This works really well for Intelligence checks, which can provide puzzle clues, or determine whether or not a character remembers a key piece of information that the player has forgotten. But I haven't yet found a way to make this work all that well for social interactions. In particular, I really dislike the Insight skill, and the way in which some players seem to want it to function as a mechanical cheat to avoid actually interpreting and thinking about the characters they're interacting with.

I haven't said much about combat, but this difference in playstyles is also very much relevant there too, both in terms of optimization/tactics, but also how much the DM wants the players to be creative and come up with lateral solutions to combat problems.

Let me know where you and your players fall on the scale of player vs. character challenge, and what approaches you've tried to balance the two preferences in your games!

I tend to look at it that a game is a low-stakes way of exploring and learning and trying things that would be hard or dangerous or even unethical or immoral to learn in real life the same way. So fundamentally I am looking for a set of things that my particular players would be interested in working through, and I want the game to provide resistance and challenges in those directions, but also assistance (training wheels, etc) to make it easier to learn. It's important that whatever mechanical assistance there is doesn't replace learning or working through it.

So IMC, I'd advise a player going for a social archetype to do so only if they're interested in actually exploring social dynamics. I'd figure out ways to have their character abilities give them information or confirmation or inspiration, but ultimately not to replace their own insights nor to limit them. So IMC you never have to invest character resources to justify something you can figure out via OOC skill - you'll never be told 'roll a check to see if you actually figured that out'.

Usually though most of the player 'skill' stuff I run is much larger scale than what a single roll would do. It's noticing patterns across multiple sessions, planning a heist, answering questions that have no correct answer like 'how should the world be?' or 'how do we want to navigate a compromise where there are incompatible but real needs on different sides?'. Or they're just not linear obstacles to get over.

Creating a runic programming language and asking a player who wants to invent new spells to figure out how to program them, for example, would fit in my games.

If someone really did want to learn how to be physically more dextrous IRL, I don't think that would be a bad thing to have a game around. I just think that's a much more challenging tabletop game to create than using RP to broaden someone's understanding of economics or geopolitics or life counseling or whatever. E.g. if there were something with full body VR suits and you had to execute sword maneuvers yourself, that's not automatically a bad roleplaying game to me. And I suppose there are actually some LARPs that go in that direction.

[GloatingSwine]

Is that an articulation of how you like to play and run the game, or a normative statement about how the game ought to be run in all cases? If the former, that's good to know, but if the latter I expect you'll encounter some controversy.

The characters are the ones acting in the world, so the challenges should be designed such that the characters have to act on them. The role of the player is to think in character, think about what their character can do and possesses, and choose what they think is the best way for their character to solve a problem.

Don't be Bioware from that period where they put an irrelevant Towers of Hanoi puzzle in every game.

[Psyren]

The characters are the ones acting in the world, so the challenges should be designed such that the characters have to act on them. The role of the player is to think in character, think about what their character can do and possesses, and choose what they think is the best way for their character to solve a problem.

Don't be Bioware from that period where they put an irrelevant Towers of Hanoi puzzle in every game.

Hey, it beat Sudoku everywhere :smallsigh: #andromeda

[Catullus64]

The characters are the ones acting in the world, so the challenges should be designed such that the characters have to act on them. The role of the player is to think in character, think about what their character can do and possesses, and choose what they think is the best way for their character to solve a problem.

Don't be Bioware from that period where they put an irrelevant Towers of Hanoi puzzle in every game.

Normative statement. Got it.

The problem with such a strict view is that there are fun things to do with the game that just plum don't make sense within a narrative/character-driven context. Puzzles are the most obvious instance: it usually requires some pretty tortured logic for a tomb or demonic temple to have defenses keyed around riddles and color-matching puzzles. Characters would generally have to be lunatics to look at obscure pieces of writing or weird statuary and say "I bet that if I jiggle the statues around right or solve this riddle, a door will open!" But that's exactly the kind of lunacy required for puzzle-focused gameplay, which I happen to adore.

Combat is another arena where the fun can come from actions taken outside the character. Simply put, the player is experiencing the combat with great clarity of information and theoretically infinite time to observe, plan, and make rational decisions. Having the time and leisure to do these things makes for a fun tactical experience which is decidedly not being shared by your characters as they engage in a chaotic sword-and-sorcery brawl with monsters.

[BRC]

Right now, my main approach centers around ability checks as means of alleviating player challenge while not bypassing it. This works really well for Intelligence checks, which can provide puzzle clues, or determine whether or not a character remembers a key piece of information that the player has forgotten. But I haven't yet found a way to make this work all that well for social interactions. In particular, I really dislike the Insight skill, and the way in which some players seem to want it to function as a mechanical cheat to avoid actually interpreting and thinking about the characters they're interacting with.
I treat Insight the same way you describe treating Int Checks, it's not just a lie detector, it's a way to provide clues about an NPC. The old skill name "Sense Motive" was clunky, but more evocative I think. Insight isn't mind reading, it's clues and hints about what the NPC might be thinking about while they talk. It shouldn't bypass thinking about the NPCs, it should give you more to think about.

The only times it should be as simple as telling the PC's obvious facts is if the NPC is lying and you saw through it, or if the NPC is trying to hint at something.

For example, if the Harbormaster says "Well I'm not supposed to let any ships leave port, but if it's important business I can make an exception" you could make an insight check to indicate that he's trying to ask for a Bribe, because he's trying to tell you something. However, it won't usually be that straightforwards. Most of all, it will tell the PC's what the NPC WANTS out of this conversation.


If the Harbormaster says "Order from the King is that no ships are to leave port, except on official business, until this whole mess is sorted and the thieves are found" An Insight check shouldn't tell you that some Merchant Houses have bribed him to let their ships leave port under the guise of "official business".

Break the statement into parts, let the insight check add some details onto each part, plus an overall "What is their goal"
"Order from the King is that no ships are to leave port": He seems resigned and a bit angry about this.
"Except on Official Business", he rushes through that bit, he doesn't want the PC's thinking too hard about what is meant by that, since anybody with eyes can see ships belonging to the wealthy merchant houses have been leaving port without issue.
"Until this whole mess is sorted and the thieves are found". He's angry at the theft and looks forwards to the thieves being caught. The check probably shouldn't say if he's angry that the Theft happened, or that it led to his port getting shut down, the PC's will need to press him more on that.

Finally, his goal: He wants the PC's to go away and stop bothering him.


None of this outright TELLS you That he's actually something of a Patriot, who is deeply offended that the Thieves stole valuable tomes from the royal library. It doesn't tell you that he disagrees with the order because he's proud and confident that were the Port open, he's sure the Thieves would get caught by his men if they tried to leave by ship, and actually somewhat relishes the idea of being the one to capture them. He's been accepting bribes only from reputable merchant houses that he trusts wouldn't work with the Thieves, still he knows it's wrong to disobey the King, and he doesn't want to get caught.
The PC's could possibly get that info out of him by talking to him more, or getting information from elsewhere, but the single insight check doesn't bare his soul. It tells you how he feels about what he's saying, and what he wants out of the conversation.



as for the actual question, I'm willing to let the dice decide things, but I like to get some direction from the players. If they want to make a Persuasion check, "I Persuade the merchant to give us a discount" isn't enough, I need to know what argument they're trying to make, but I don't need exact words or perfect acting, just enough of a sense to understand how susceptible that particular NPC will be to that argument.

My general rule is that challenges can be solved in one of three ways: Luck, Expense, or Creativity.

Luck: Roll well on the dice with consequences for failure.
Expense: Spend some resource you'll miss later (Like, casting a spell)
Creativity: Figure out some creative solution to the problem.

the first two test the charcter, the last tests the player, any are acceptable.

[Psyren]

The problem with such a strict view is that there are fun things to do with the game that just plum don't make sense within a narrative/character-driven context. Puzzles are the most obvious instance: it usually requires some pretty tortured logic for a tomb or demonic temple to have defenses keyed around riddles and color-matching puzzles. Characters would generally have to be lunatics to look at obscure pieces of writing or weird statuary and say "I bet that if I jiggle the statues around right or solve this riddle, a door will open!" But that's exactly the kind of lunacy required for puzzle-focused gameplay, which I happen to adore.

Fun player puzzles and in-character knowledge are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the two can go together quite well. For example, if someone in the party is playing a genius or a divination specialist, they become an ideal mouthpiece for you to convey puzzle parameters and hints to the rest of the party. For example, you can have the high-Investigation character convey a detail like "hey, I think there's a numeral hidden in each of these paintings" or "wait, what if each color light corresponds to a school of magic?" without outright handing them the solution. In doing so, the player feels like their character matters without feeling like the dice are running the show.

The reverse is true too; I've had very puzzle-savvy players play dumb meathead characters, and they "solve" puzzles by having their bored barbarian innocuously lean on the right lever or "get frustrated with the eggheads" and stomp on the correct pressure plate.

In short, it's true that resolving a puzzle with a simple die roll can be boring, but designing puzzles that take what's on the players' sheets into account instead of totally ignoring them shows even greater creativity on the DM's part.

[Keravath]

Edit: Duplicated post

[Keravath]

It is an interesting dichotomy. It is also difficult at times to separate player abilities from character abilities.

However, I think it is important to keep in mind that the players are role-playing the characters on the sheet in front of them, they aren't role playing themselves (unless you generated the characters to mimic the players).

The fun of the game comes from exercising the mental faculties, the imagination, problem solving abilities, and social interactions of the players while always representing their characters.

In practice, for me, this means a hybrid approach to puzzles and similar challenges. If the players are good at solving puzzles and they are happy doing it themselves then why interfere? However, a player who is playing a high intelligence wizard with knowledge relevant to the challenge SHOULD be playing a leading role in the solution - if not then the characters just aren't being role played.

It is up to the DM to balance these situations by offering hints, skill checks, ideas, information all funneled through the characters with the requisite stats and skills.

It is also incumbent on the player who chose to role play the 8 int character to actually role play their character at least some of the time. If their character is the one who solves all the puzzles then perhaps they are some sort of savant but the alternative is for that player to actually role play the character they chose to run and perhaps not speak up all the time allowing the other players/characters in the party solve the puzzles that their characters are more suited to solving.

The point is that it is a role playing game and it is the character sheet that defines the role the player chose to play.

I've played characters with 8 charisma, perhaps proficient with persuasion, who have some convincing reasons for an NPC to take certain actions ... however, the DM then calls for a persuasion check which is failed more often than not BECAUSE the character is not as convincing as the player. It can be frustrating, enough so that any character I play is usually proficient in the persuasion skill just to give them a chance at success.

However, in my opinion, this is the way it SHOULD be. The player has good ideas, convincing arguments, but it is always the character that is presenting these in the game world, the player isn't there, only the character is present and it is the character's skills that matter in resolving in game challenges.

Perhaps if I had chosen to play a charismatic character with expertise in persuasion the DM would have decided that the same words would simply have automatically succeeded in convincing the NPC. That too is perfectly ok and the way it should be since it is the character skills and not the player ones that matter in a role playing game.

P.S. By always keeping the characters in mind, it allows the players to assume roles that are outside the type of person they are in the real world - not some odd combination of the real world player and the in game character. It also allows players that aren't as persuasive, or as quick to solve problems, or good at math, or sudoku, or color matching, or the memory game to still shine when role playing their character.

As a player, it is very frustrating to play a quick witted bard who is suave, convincing and can always say the right thing at the right time when the player isn't that type of person. This is made even more frustrating when the DM appears to expect the player to be suave, convincing, quick witted when they face challenges being that character, and the DM ignores the character abilities, expecting to see the player "role play" something they can't do.

So the bard sits there quietly, saying nothing while the talkative barbarian with 8 charisma played by a person who has no problems in social situations dominates the in game conversations and either the DM allows them to solve the social challenges by being convincing as a person (breaking the game immersion and not role playing at all) or they fail the social checks because their character isn't good at it.

Intelligent characters are the other common problem. A 20 int wizard should be smart but most players I've met aren't in that category. It is up to the DM to let the characters shine without expecting the impossible from the players.

[Keravath]

Fun player puzzles and in-character knowledge are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the two can go together quite well. For example, if someone in the party is playing a genius or a divination specialist, they become an ideal mouthpiece for you to convey puzzle parameters and hints to the rest of the party. For example, you can have the high-Investigation character convey a detail like "hey, I think there's a numeral hidden in each of these paintings" or "wait, what if each color light corresponds to a school of magic?" without outright handing them the solution. In doing so, the player feels like their character matters without feeling like the dice are running the show.

The reverse is true too; I've had very puzzle-savvy players play dumb meathead characters, and they "solve" puzzles by having their bored barbarian innocuously lean on the right lever or "get frustrated with the eggheads" and stomp on the correct pressure plate.

In short, it's true that resolving a puzzle with a simple die roll can be boring, but designing puzzles that take what's on the players' sheets into account instead of totally ignoring them shows even greater creativity on the DM's part.

Sometimes I wish this forum had a like button :). Good post :)

[Easy e]

Before a player roles a skill check, I do ask them to give me an idea of what exactly they are trying to accomplish with the roll, and not just rolling a skill check with broadest parameters of success possible. Therefore, the Player is directing the character on what exactly they are at least trying to accomplish with any particular roll of the skill checks.

GM: You walk into a room.
Player: I want to roll Investigation on the room! <Rolls dice> I got a 19!
GM: Okay, is there something you are trying to find or look for?
Player: Umm, secret doors I guess?
GM: Okay, like the whole room, that will take you 15 minutes, while the party can do other things.
Player: Yes.
GM: Yes, what?
Player: Ummmm.... the whole room .... I guess <looks around the table, who nod approvingly>
GM: Great, you got a 19? You begin your investigation?
Player 2: Meanwhile, what is in the room he is investigating?
GM: I am glad you asked, you see a simple wooden chest tucked under a wooden desk covered in papers.
Player: What, why didn't I find those? I am investigating.
GM: Because you haven't gotten to that part of the room yet, you are too busy inspecting the mortar on the wall next to you.

[da newt]

Some folks like to RolePlay others prefer to Roll. Either way is just fine, but I find puzzles/plots/social interactions etc to be more enjoyable / engaging if they are RolePlayed. If it becomes "I try to solve the riddle - rolls a D20, does a 18 INT check succeed?" then everything is just as engaging as a rogue picking locks. But it does really take the pressure off the DM to be creative, and allows the players to skip all the tedious conversations etc - just name a skill check and a DC and move on to the next combat. Who wants all that narrative getting in the way?

I also completely agree with Keravath's post - it's great to acknowledge the PC's skills and also hard for players to roleplay things that are well outside their comfort zone / abilities, or suppress their own skills / strengths while roleplaying a PC without those same skills / strengths. Somewhere in all of this there ought to be a good Goldilocks objective - not too much Player, not too much just PC stats, but plenty of both to find you a nice cozy middle zone with roleplaying and rolls.



Pet Peeve: I hate insight checks used to tell a Player what their PC believes from a conversation. Don't tell me how my guy interprets what he just heard - all that does is remove player agency and role play. Additionally, IRL many folks say things that they fully believe to be true but are in fact lies. It doesn't matter how high your wisdom is, if the idiot you're talking to doesn't know they are lying (but I get it - insight is supposed to represent how observant you are of people who are consciously telling lies).

[5eNeedsDarksun]

I can see both sides of this, but at our table interest and tension definitely go up when the players actually have to solve the problem. I don't do it much, but after thinking about this post, I'm bringing back the puzzles that don't revolve around rolling dice.

[tchntm43]

Another vote for "the game is more fun when you let the players solve the puzzles."

A few years back we did this tower adventure and I set up a pretty complicated set of glyph patterns on one floor. There were hints previously gathered regarding navigating the glyphs. It was actually that there were 3 different glyphs and each one had a different cycle length. For example, one of them would repeat on a 1,2,1,2 pattern, one of them would repeat on a 1,2,3,1,2,3 pattern, and the third was on a 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 pattern. To navigate the maze of glyphs, you just had to make sure that you always stepped on the tile that had the next iteration for all three patterns. It took the party a few painful mistakes before they finally figured it out. I could tell they felt a sense of accomplishment having done that which would never have been obtained if they had just rolled dice to see if they had solved it.

[JonBeowulf]

GM: You walk into a room.
Player: I want to roll Investigation on the room! <Rolls dice> I got a 19!
GM: Okay, is there something you are trying to find or look for?
Player: Umm, secret doors I guess?
GM: Okay, like the whole room, that will take you 15 minutes, while the party can do other things.
Player: Yes.
GM: Yes, what?
Player: Ummmm.... the whole room .... I guess <looks around the table, who nod approvingly>
GM: Great, you got a 19? You begin your investigation?
Player 2: Meanwhile, what is in the room he is investigating?
GM: I am glad you asked, you see a simple wooden chest tucked under a wooden desk covered in papers.
Player: What, why didn't I find those? I am investigating.
GM: Because you haven't gotten to that part of the room yet, you are too busy inspecting the mortar on the wall next to you.

I've got an entry in my Session 0 notes for this very thing. Any skill check made without my request will be ignored.

Don't roll a d20 and look at me (or announce the result on Discord). Tell me what your character is doing and we'll take it from there.

To the OP, when I'm not the DM the quickest way to get me to tune out is to throw a puzzle at the party and sit there while the players try to figure it out. You don't make the Bard player sing a song, you don't make the Barb player smash stuff, you don't make the Cleric or Paladin player cite prayers... don't make the players try to solve the puzzles that you thought were fun.

[Psyren]

I've got an entry in my Session 0 notes for this very thing. Any skill check made without my request will be ignored.

Don't roll a d20 and look at me (or announce the result on Discord). Tell me what your character is doing and we'll take it from there.

This. "I want to roll Investigation!" is not how it works in 5e.



Pet Peeve: I hate insight checks used to tell a Player what their PC believes from a conversation. Don't tell me how my guy interprets what he just heard - all that does is remove player agency and role play. Additionally, IRL many folks say things that they fully believe to be true but are in fact lies. It doesn't matter how high your wisdom is, if the idiot you're talking to doesn't know they are lying (but I get it - insight is supposed to represent how observant you are of people who are consciously telling lies).

I agree that Insight is not mind reading or a polygraph.

I like to use it as a means of clueing the players in when they're getting close to (or straying too far away from) an NPC's Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws. If the Duke thinks his son might be possessed by a demon but is scared to say so out loud, and the party asks the Duke whether there is any trouble happening that they can help with (especially in his household or family), I would let the Insightful party member notice that the Duke's hands started trembling, he went pale, and he refused to make eye contact while he stammered about how everything is fine and that you all can feel free to leave.

[Goobahfish]

This is super interesting.

It does also apply to combat despite people not really thinking it does? I have a table of wargamers. They wargame. This lets me assume their characters are going to do the most logical DPS thing each turn... except, most of them actually roleplay. Which means they do "stupid" things all the time. I have another table where the Wizard (with Int 20) is not a wargamer... and does... questionable things in combat (they really should just be a sorcerer).

General point... you can roleplay down easily enough. Roleplaying 'up' is virtually impossible.

Puzzles
Are you playing D&D? Or are you playing some other kind of game. I have... challenges, but only in a few games (with specific players) do I have explicit 'puzzles'. Now even if they aren't explicit puzzles (i.e. sudoku-lite) then the 'cleverest' player at the table will come up with the best 'plans' whereas the 'cleverest' character will remain quiet. I think the only way around this conundrum is to have puzzles/challenges where different players can have different level of access to observations/ideas.

I.e., the 'smart' player will be more certain that a plan will work or as DM you can use the 'yes, but you'll need to worry about X' whereas the dumb player will get... 'you think it is a great idea'. This kind of relies on the DM being pretty savvy too (although they have perfect 'knowledge' so this can be mitigated).

I have certainly had Intelligence 4 characters who acted like 18 Int characters and my general vibe was 'please stop' which eventually became, 'you think you are doing X but actually you do Y instead <insert something dumb an Int 4 character would do>' until they got the message.

Roleplaying
I think this works best via narration. I give a rousing speech. It is a player choice as to what/how they want to say things. I persuade/intimidate/threaten/cajole etc. Players whose RP ability is good can RP how their character would act and those that don't, describe what they want.

[animorte]

I have another table where the Wizard (with Int 20) is not a wargamer... and does... questionable things in combat (they really should just be a sorcerer).
Be careful with that one. There are some of us who prefer Sorcerer > Wizard that make good decisions, might take this the wrong way. :smalltongue:


General point... you can roleplay down easily enough. Roleplaying 'up' is virtually impossible.
Very nicely put!

I was in a game with mostly newer players and had a DM that, in an innocent attempt to immerse the players into the game, started telling us players that there could be minor penalties for not making more effort to role-play. It is a role-playing game. This… was a mistake. After just one session of that, one of the players consistently had an excuse to not be there. A couple others were noticeably less enthused.

I talked to him about it. Just because it’s easier and more fun for some of us does not mean that it should be the standard for everybody.

[GloatingSwine]

Normative statement. Got it.

The problem with such a strict view is that there are fun things to do with the game that just plum don't make sense within a narrative/character-driven context. Puzzles are the most obvious instance: it usually requires some pretty tortured logic for a tomb or demonic temple to have defenses keyed around riddles and color-matching puzzles. Characters would generally have to be lunatics to look at obscure pieces of writing or weird statuary and say "I bet that if I jiggle the statues around right or solve this riddle, a door will open!" But that's exactly the kind of lunacy required for puzzle-focused gameplay, which I happen to adore.

Combat is another arena where the fun can come from actions taken outside the character. Simply put, the player is experiencing the combat with great clarity of information and theoretically infinite time to observe, plan, and make rational decisions. Having the time and leisure to do these things makes for a fun tactical experience which is decidedly not being shared by your characters as they engage in a chaotic sword-and-sorcery brawl with monsters.

The thing to do with puzzles is to change how you think of them.

The puzzle for the players should be "figure out an order of steps for your characters to take, then decide who's going to do each step based on your abilities and possessions." Then any necessary rolls for things determine whether the approach was within their abilities to execute.

Something like a "rearrange the statues" puzzle without any tactile sense of interacting with things isn't as satisfying, and if you're not going to make the characters in the game relevant to solving the problems they face why have character sheets?

[da newt]

ProudPig - I respectfully disagree wholeheartedly. If you reduce challenges to only a series of ability checks, you loose out on the experience of role playing.

IMO the DM should allow the Players to approach challenges in their preferred manner - figure it out, talk with your party in character, role play your way through it OR distill the challenge to a series of successful or failed ability checks that determine the result. There is no good reason to limit your players to just one methodology.

I prefer role play over letting the dice decide, but I understand that is my personal preference and others are allowed to have their preferences too. I enjoy trying to figure out the right thing to say or the solution to the riddle / problem. I don't like it when a challenge is just a DC XX ability check. (AL mods often have this issue - they are written to include periods of everyone roll an athletics check DC 16, if you fail you take damage, and there is no alternate to mitigate / succeed / do anything that makes sense - all you can do is roll a D20 and suck or save, no player agency.)

[Keravath]

Before a player roles a skill check, I do ask them to give me an idea of what exactly they are trying to accomplish with the roll, and not just rolling a skill check with broadest parameters of success possible. Therefore, the Player is directing the character on what exactly they are at least trying to accomplish with any particular roll of the skill checks.

GM: You walk into a room.
Player: I want to roll Investigation on the room! <Rolls dice> I got a 19!
GM: Okay, is there something you are trying to find or look for?
Player: Umm, secret doors I guess?
GM: Okay, like the whole room, that will take you 15 minutes, while the party can do other things.
Player: Yes.
GM: Yes, what?
Player: Ummmm.... the whole room .... I guess <looks around the table, who nod approvingly>
GM: Great, you got a 19? You begin your investigation?
Player 2: Meanwhile, what is in the room he is investigating?
GM: I am glad you asked, you see a simple wooden chest tucked under a wooden desk covered in papers.
Player: What, why didn't I find those? I am investigating.
GM: Because you haven't gotten to that part of the room yet, you are too busy inspecting the mortar on the wall next to you.



Two comments :)
1) The DM calls for the checks. If the player says I am investigating and rolls the die - it gets ignored - the player says what their character is doing and the DM resolves. Often the player can guess what the DM will want but not all the time so skill checks are completely up to the DM.
2)
"I am glad you asked, you see a simple wooden chest tucked under a wooden desk covered in papers. "
"you are too busy inspecting the mortar on the wall next to you"

I would never do this to a player to penalize them for rolling a die. I would just let them know that any skill check is invalid until the DM asks for it after they describe what their character is doing.

In addition, unless that wooden chest was explicitly hidden, it is likely to be noticed by anyone glancing at the room as the first part of any investigation. I don't require skill checks for something that is obvious. If the chest was hidden underneath or behind something then sure but just sitting in plain view under a desk, no. Unless the character has particularly low intelligence, the character isn't going to start peering in detail at mortar by the door and then effectively bypass the character's action in favor of another player.

I don't like the "Gotcha" style of DMing in which no matter how stupid the player comment, the character does it anyway or the DM interprets the stated action with the most literal reading.

"You didn't say you were pulling out your weapon before you opened the door."
"You didn't say you had your shield equipped"
"You didn't mention you were eating and drinking all day so you are now exhausted"
"You didn't say what you were looking at when you start investigating the room so you start with the mortar on the wall by the door without even glancing at the rest of the room and noticing there is a desk with a chest under it"


Some folks like to RolePlay others prefer to Roll. Either way is just fine, but I find puzzles/plots/social interactions etc to be more enjoyable / engaging if they are RolePlayed. If it becomes "I try to solve the riddle - rolls a D20, does a 18 INT check succeed?" then everything is just as engaging as a rogue picking locks. But it does really take the pressure off the DM to be creative, and allows the players to skip all the tedious conversations etc - just name a skill check and a DC and move on to the next combat. Who wants all that narrative getting in the way?


Role play and roll play are both fine play styles :) ... but in either case, it is the DM that asks for the roll (if any) after hearing what the character plans to do. Would the roll played character solve the puzzle immediately based on one die roll? Likely not in a game I was running, but they would likely get more information/hints/clues and eventually a solution while giving the players who like solving problems/puzzles a chance to participate the way they like to do it. The party needs to accommodate both play styles.



I also completely agree with Keravath's post - it's great to acknowledge the PC's skills and also hard for players to roleplay things that are well outside their comfort zone / abilities, or suppress their own skills / strengths while roleplaying a PC without those same skills / strengths. Somewhere in all of this there ought to be a good Goldilocks objective - not too much Player, not too much just PC stats, but plenty of both to find you a nice cozy middle zone with roleplaying and rolls.

Pet Peeve: I hate insight checks used to tell a Player what their PC believes from a conversation. Don't tell me how my guy interprets what he just heard - all that does is remove player agency and role play. Additionally, IRL many folks say things that they fully believe to be true but are in fact lies. It doesn't matter how high your wisdom is, if the idiot you're talking to doesn't know they are lying (but I get it - insight is supposed to represent how observant you are of people who are consciously telling lies).

I think DMs are likely always searching for that cozy middle ground between role playing and rolls and the location of that middle ground depends a lot on the players in the particular group and their preferred play styles.

As for insight, as several folks have mentioned it isn't a lie detector though some DMs play it that way. Insight gives the character/player some "insight" into the speakers point of view and motivations. Do they sound passionate about the subject, committed, involved, aloof, pretending to be knowledgeable, a know it all who is or is not an expert? ... insight doesn't tell your character how to interpret something you just heard, it provides some of the sub-text that you would have if you were actually there, in person, looking to the person speak. Did they appear inspirational or shifty to you? Did you get the feeling they might have left something out?

Last comment, in my opinion, a character should very rarely actually roll insight. Insight is a skill applied throughout a conversation, speech, presentation that could last a minute or an hour. It definitely fits the description of a skill used repeatedly like using passive perception (for a character who is actively looking) to find secret doors. So, most of the time, I would use passive insight to add the subtext for a conversation. Rarely however, an NPC will make one statement or a short comment which could have subtext and in that case I might have the character make a roll since the skill isn't being applied repeatedly but trying to figure out the context of a single statement.

[Catullus64]

To the OP, when I'm not the DM the quickest way to get me to tune out is to throw a puzzle at the party and sit there while the players try to figure it out. You don't make the Bard player sing a song, you don't make the Barb player smash stuff, you don't make the Cleric or Paladin player cite prayers... don't make the players try to solve the puzzles that you thought were fun.

I don't believe I'm capable of making my players do anything, but I see your point. I would certainly want to encourage all those examples you mention of roleplaying, although I would request the Barbarian player not smash any of my things.

I definitely have had players who aren't interested in spending ages working out a puzzle solution with only occasional dice-rolling. Something I've tried for such players is the 'indefinite puzzle.' You put a series of evocative elements in a room, like statues, engraved words, geometric patterns, with something clearly blocking progress. You describe the elements, and you let the players come up with solutions to the perceived puzzle. You encourage them to explain and actually try out the patterns and solutions. The trick is that you don't have a fixed solution: you're waiting for the players to come up with something that sounds plausible and well-argued. Once they do that, they succeed at the puzzle and can make progress.

I don't do this all the time, but it's great if you want to give the players the sense of having done something clever without spending ages working on it. I've never once had the players realize what I was up to, because by definition the solution is one that made sense to them and that they argued for. It's also perfect if you're running a game on the fly.

[GloatingSwine]

I don't believe I'm capable of making my players do anything, but I see your point. I would certainly want to encourage all those examples you mention of roleplaying, although I would request the Barbarian player not smash any of my things.

I definitely have had players who aren't interested in spending ages working out a puzzle solution with only occasional dice-rolling. Something I've tried for such players is the 'indefinite puzzle.' You put a series of evocative elements in a room, like statues, engraved words, geometric patterns, with something clearly blocking progress. You describe the elements, and you let the players come up with solutions to the perceived puzzle. You encourage them to explain and actually try out the patterns and solutions. The trick is that you don't have a fixed solution: you're waiting for the players to come up with something that sounds plausible and well-argued. Once they do that, they succeed at the puzzle and can make progress.

I don't do this all the time, but it's great if you want to give the players the sense of having done something clever without spending ages working on it. I've never once had the players realize what I was up to, because by definition the solution is one that made sense to them and that they argued for. It's also perfect if you're running a game on the fly.

So basically you threw a wall of meaningless nonsense in front of them until their monkey performances had sufficiently entertained you and you allowed them to proceed with the game? And none of it was relevant to the characters they brought either as people or as mechanical expressions of gameplay ideals.

This is the other side of the out-of-game puzzle. It doesn't change depending on which characters the players brought. A "step on the tiles in the right order" puzzle doesn't care if you're a Barbarian or a Rogue or a Wizard. Once you've figured out the pattern out-of-game the characters have nothing to do with it. For that sort of thing make a simple and obvious set of right and wrong spaces and then put an easy but not trivial combat on it with enemies that don't have to respect the pattern, so the characters have to actually interact with it and may have choices depending on who they are (like a high-HP martial tanking the "bad" space to smash an enemy faster.

[KorvinStarmast]

The solution to a problem should always reference something on the character sheet. Nope. That's a needlessly limiting approach to the game.

The characters are the ones acting in the world, so the challenges should be designed such that the characters have to act on them. The role of the player is to think in character, Your approach to this is unfair to the players. How much a player gets into their character varies - level of immersion varies. It is unfair of you to dictate this to players who may prefer less immersion than more. The myth of player character separation lives on, I suppose.

It is an interesting dichotomy. It is also difficult at times to separate player abilities from character abilities. It isn't even necessary in the vast majority of cases, IME.


The fun of the game comes from exercising the mental faculties, the imagination, problem solving abilities, and social interactions of the players while always representing their characters. Spot on.

Before a player roles a skill check, I do ask them to give me an idea of what exactly they are trying to accomplish with the roll, and not just rolling a skill check with broadest parameters of success possible. Therefore, the Player is directing the character on what exactly they are at least trying to accomplish with any particular roll of the skill checks. Yes.

GM: Because you haven't gotten to that part of the room yet, you are too busy inspecting the mortar on the wall next to you.
Chuckle :smallsmile:[/QUOTE]

I can see both sides of this, but at our table interest and tension definitely go up when the players actually have to solve the problem. I don't do it much, but after thinking about this post, I'm bringing back the puzzles that don't revolve around rolling dice. Yes. I still use puzzles sparingly, as compared to how we did it back in the day.

I've got an entry in my Session 0 notes for this very thing. Any skill check made without my request will be ignored. Don't roll a d20 and look at me (or announce the result on Discord). Tell me what your character is doing and we'll take it from there. That's how I prefer to do it.

ProudPig - I respectfully disagree wholeheartedly. If you reduce challenges to only a series of ability checks, you loose out on the experience of role playing. That's my experience as well.

[Goobahfish]

The trick is that you don't have a fixed solution: you're waiting for the players to come up with something that sounds plausible and well-argued. Once they do that, they succeed at the puzzle and can make progress.

This is very wise. I think the biggest issue with the word puzzle is its tacit 'solution'. Hence, the word challenge is probably better suited.

I've even had players come up with solutions to... non-problems? Like, they argue themselves into something which wasn't true (some door is magically sealed - it was originally 'just heavy') and then went through an entire song and dance around it breaching non-existing seals. Now, because the players didn't know the door wasn't magically sealed... well now it is magically sealed and their magic seal destruction was successful and the door is no longer 'heavy'. Yep... that is how loose I am with the truth.


I would never do this to a player to penalize them for rolling a die. I would just let them know that any skill check is invalid until the DM asks for it after they describe what their character is doing.

My usual reply to a random dice roll is "Why are you rolling a die?"


Be careful with that one. There are some of us who prefer Sorcerer > Wizard that make good decisions, might take this the wrong way.

Ha ha, I have no issue with a clever sorcerer. This wizard basically is a "blaster-only" who didn't augment their spellbook with anything (until we pointed out that it was kind of important). Kind of fits the sorcerer mechanics (rather than aesthetics) better.

I did draw the line with the Int-4 Barbarian acting like a lawyer. I mean... Int 4. We're getting close to animal-level intelligence here...

[GloatingSwine]

Nope. That's a needlessly limiting approach to the game.
Your approach to this is unfair to the players. How much a player gets into their character varies - level of immersion varies. It is unfair of you to dictate this to players who may prefer less immersion than more. The myth of player character separation lives on, I suppose.


I'm not really talking about immersion as I am talking about thinking "what can my character do and what do they own and how can I use that here?".

If you're not going to use some element of the character in a scene, why have the character?

[Catullus64]

So basically you threw a wall of meaningless nonsense in front of them until their monkey performances had sufficiently entertained you and you allowed them to proceed with the game? And none of it was relevant to the characters they brought either as people or as mechanical expressions of gameplay ideals.

This is the other side of the out-of-game puzzle. It doesn't change depending on which characters the players brought. A "step on the tiles in the right order" puzzle doesn't care if you're a Barbarian or a Rogue or a Wizard. Once you've figured out the pattern out-of-game the characters have nothing to do with it. For that sort of thing make a simple and obvious set of right and wrong spaces and then put an easy but not trivial combat on it with enemies that don't have to respect the pattern, so the characters have to actually interact with it and may have choices depending on who they are (like a high-HP martial tanking the "bad" space to smash an enemy faster.

I would prefer to say that I put some elements in front of my players and let them look for the meaning. And when they have good ideas, I listen. Please don't imply that I was acting with contempt for my players so flippantly.

It's clear from your posts that the relevance of particular characters to the solution of problems is of great importance to you. And that's good, but it also seems to be manifesting in contempt for approaches that don't meet your standards, which is less good. The simple fact is that there are fun avenues of play that are more disconnected from character abilities, and no amount of high-sounding value statements about character or narrative are going to make those avenues not fun for the players who enjoy them.

As for the second paragraph of your post... yeah, that sounds pretty awesome. I adore that kind of thing, although making the puzzle simple and obvious enough that players grasp it in the middle of combat is a challenge in its own right. It's in no way incompatible with more long-form, out-of-character-focused puzzles.

[GloatingSwine]

I would prefer to say that I put some elements in front of my players and let them look for the meaning. And when they have good ideas, I listen. Please don't imply that I was acting with contempt for my players so flippantly.

But that's the thing. There weren't any good or bad ideas in that scenario beyond how much they entertained you in the moment, it's like asking "what have I got in my pockets" in a riddle game. It relies on tricking your players into thinking they're interacting with the world of the game in a meaningful way when no such way ever existed for them.

[Dr.Samurai]

"Player challenges" always seem to me like the DM is an armchair psychologist trying to figure the rest of us players out and poke and prod and "encourage" behaviors that they want to see, etc.

In other words, I'm not a fan. Leave me alone and just run the game world for my character.

[Catullus64]

It relies on tricking your players into thinking they're interacting with the world of the game in a meaningful way when no such way ever existed for them.

I have bad news for you, friend: that describes the entire job of being Dungeon Master.

[noob]

"Player challenges" always seem to me like the DM is an armchair psychologist trying to figure the rest of us players out and poke and prod and "encourage" behaviors that they want to see, etc.

In other words, I'm not a fan. Leave me alone and just run the game world for my character.

A player challenge could be "here there be a cr 40 dragon" on a map and the player could decide if he invents an assault tactic then sends his character to fight it to save travelling time or make a detour to avoid encountering it.

[Dr.Samurai]

A player challenge could be "here there be a cr 40 dragon" on a map and the player could decide if he invents an assault tactic then sends his character to fight it to save travelling time or make a detour to avoid encountering it.
I think this is just part of the game.

"Player challenge" reads to me more like the DM knows what his players are like, and wants to make them think/squirm/change so they devise a challenge targeted/tailor-made specifically for that or those players, with an opportunity for the DM to get the results the DM specifically wants to see.

That's quite a different thing, and a little too controlling for my tastes. In other words, in a normal challenge the DM doesn't so much care what the players decide, it's up to the players to consider the options and choose and deal with the consequences.

In a "player challenge", the DM wants to see a certain outcome, because they've judged the player skillset and are targeting those skillsets/comfort zones/etc. with the aim of "challenging" the player. The DM wants to see certain behavior (a player thinks outside of the box, uses an ability they normally ignore, engages more in a social encounter, etc.).

[GloatingSwine]

I have bad news for you, friend: that describes the entire job of being Dungeon Master.

No?

The entire job of a being Dungeon Master is to do the opposite of that. To make the gameworld sufficiently real enough that the players can use their characters to interact with it. And honesty when you're using the omniscient voice of the DM is important to doing that.

What you described was a scenario which relied on you being dishonest with the players in that omniscient voice, you described a situation which made them think their characters were acting in the gameworld, when the real challenge was for them to entertain you in the real world. They "succeeded" when they made *you* happy, not when they genuinely engaged with the gameworld as real.

[clash]

No?

The entire job of a being Dungeon Master is to do the opposite of that. To make the gameworld sufficiently real enough that the players can use their characters to interact with it. And honesty when you're using the omniscient voice of the DM is important to doing that.

What you described was a scenario which relied on you being dishonest with the players in that omniscient voice, you described a situation which made them think their characters were acting in the gameworld, when the real challenge was for them to entertain you in the real world. They "succeeded" when they made *you* happy, not when they genuinely engaged with the gameworld as real.

Imo you're both wrong. Both of you are describing approaches to dming not the actual job of the dm. The job of the gm is to facilitate a fun experience just as the job of an actor is to entertain. Whether that experience be achieved by a well defined world with answers to every challenge or through improv in reaction to player actions really doesn't matter so long as those players are having fun. Some people prefer watching scripted movies with special effects and others prefer watching improv acting. Niether one is the one true way to be an actor.

Answering the original question I think comes down to asking what your players want. Do they want to be challenged as players or just want to roll dice in character. I think it's better to ask those questions in session 0 than to just dictate to your players how it will be run.

[Catullus64]

No?

The entire job of a being Dungeon Master is to do the opposite of that. To make the gameworld sufficiently real enough that the players can use their characters to interact with it. And honesty when you're using the omniscient voice of the DM is important to doing that.

What you described was a scenario which relied on you being dishonest with the players in that omniscient voice, you described a situation which made them think their characters were acting in the gameworld, when the real challenge was for them to entertain you in the real world. They "succeeded" when they made *you* happy, not when they genuinely engaged with the gameworld as real.

I fail to see how, if I had come up with a fixed solution to the same puzzle, that would somehow be more "real." None of this is real. The only difference is when I arbitrarily decided on the solution to this imaginary problem: ahead of time, or after hearing a possible solution and deciding that I like it. Within the constructed illusion that is the game world, there is no difference.

I meant what I said about that being the job of a Dungeon Master: to create a convincing illusion that the game world is real and that the player choices matter, because it isn't and they don't. I'm not going to hamstring my ability to deliver on that illusion because of some arbitrary criterion about what is more "real" than something else.

Also, you've introduced and keep using this language of my players "entertaining" me. While watching my players suffer is certainly fun (I wouldn't be a Dungeon Master if it wasn't?), if watching them squirm was all I cared about, I would give them puzzles with no solutions. I use this kind of puzzle to help the players feel clever, not humiliate them for my own amusement, and I wish you'd stop implying otherwise. I feel I'm reading your arguments with a fair amount of intellectual charity, and would like it if my efforts were reciprocated.

[Psyren]

General point... you can roleplay down easily enough. Roleplaying 'up' is virtually impossible.

It's never impossible, it just needs the DM's help. Roleplaying a genius? A diviner? A master detective? The DM should be passing you notes to help you feel smarter, or they should be telling you to play something else if they're not willing to help you have fun with that concept.



I have certainly had Intelligence 4 characters who acted like 18 Int characters and my general vibe was 'please stop' which eventually became, 'you think you are doing X but actually you do Y instead <insert something dumb an Int 4 character would do>' until they got the message.

I've never needed to get to this punitive level, usually if I have someone with 6-8 Int they're quite eager to play dumb at the table and not be the planner or tactician.

[GloatingSwine]

I fail to see how, if I had come up with a fixed solution to the same puzzle, that would somehow be more "real." None of this is real. The only difference is when I arbitrarily decided on the solution to this imaginary problem: ahead of time, or after hearing a possible solution and deciding that I like it. Within the constructed illusion that is the game world, there is no difference.

I meant what I said about that being the job of a Dungeon Master: to create a convincing illusion that the game world is real and that the player choices matter, because it isn't and they don't. I'm not going to hamstring my ability to deliver on that illusion because of some arbitrary criterion about what is more "real" than something else.

If the problem had a fixed solution expressed in terms of things that the characters had to do in the world of the game, then the world of the game is reacting in a consistent and "real" way. If the world has enough detail for the players to come up with an unexpected solution to you but still valid given the capabilities of their characters, the world is acting in an even more real way.

If there isn't a fixed solution then the world of the game is not reacting at all. The gameworld is doing nothing, it is inert and does not care what the characters are doing in it.


Also, you've introduced and keep using this language of my players "entertaining" me. While watching my players suffer is certainly fun (I wouldn't be a Dungeon Master if it wasn't?), if watching them squirm was all I cared about, I would give them puzzles with no solutions. I use this kind of puzzle to help the players feel clever, not humiliate them for my own amusement, and I wish you'd stop implying otherwise. I feel I'm reading your arguments with a fair amount of intellectual charity, and would like it if my efforts were reciprocated.

No sequence or combination of activities which their characters took could allow them to proceed until they hit a threshold that only existed in your brain at the moment they did it. That's why I say they were doing it to entertain you, they weren't trying to solve anything in the world of the game which you had defined in a way that you needed to honestly stick to, they were trying to find the magic words to get past the obstacle of you the DM thinking they should do something they weren't interested in. The players only got to feel clever because they didn't know that you were lying about them solving a puzzle.

[Catullus64]

If the problem had a fixed solution expressed in terms of things that the characters had to do in the world of the game, then the world of the game is reacting in a consistent and "real" way. If the world has enough detail for the players to come up with an unexpected solution to you but still valid given the capabilities of their characters, the world is acting in an even more real way.

If there isn't a fixed solution then the world of the game is not reacting at all. The gameworld is doing nothing, it is inert and does not care what the characters are doing in it.

I feel like we're talking past each other here. You keep making arguments about what makes the game world real or not. I've been implying an argument that I feel I should spell out more clearly:

1. In general, the game world is not real.
2. The game world is real only to the extent that it is perceived as such by the players.

1 and 2 both being true:

3. If the players perceive something to be real in the game world, it is real in the game world.

(Yeah, I know that's not a proper syllogism. I'm not Aristotle.)

Now, as clash has rightly called us on, this is not the only set of values for playing the game. But it is very fundamental to how I approach DMing. If we recognize each other's values, we can have a productive conversation about how to achieve our valued outcomes at our respective tables.



No sequence or combination of activities which their characters took could allow them to proceed until they hit a threshold that only existed in your brain at the moment they did it. That's why I say they were doing it to entertain you, they weren't trying to solve anything in the world of the game which you had defined in a way that you needed to honestly stick to, they were trying to find the magic words to get past the obstacle of you the DM thinking they should do something they weren't interested in. The players only got to feel clever because they didn't know that you were lying about them solving a puzzle.

Ok, so... what's the problem? You're willing to agree to my stated outcome: that the players felt clever and had fun. Sincerely, I ask, why should it matter to me how consistent the made-up world is in my own head, if the players find it convincing, are convinced that they actually did something meaningful? As I've pointed out before, I'm lying about everything in the game world, and you mostly seem to object to the fact that my lies aren't all decided on ahead of time.

The fact that these thresholds only exist in my brain before the players interact with them is something I'm willing to say is universally true of being a Dungeon Master, and I try not to make universal claims like that lightly.

[MoiMagnus]

If the problem had a fixed solution expressed in terms of things that the characters had to do in the world of the game, then the world of the game is reacting in a consistent and "real" way. If the world has enough detail for the players to come up with an unexpected solution to you but still valid given the capabilities of their characters, the world is acting in an even more real way.

If there isn't a fixed solution then the world of the game is not reacting at all. The gameworld is doing nothing, it is inert and does not care what the characters are doing in it.

If there isn't a fixed solution, that usually means that the world is highly under-specified and under-described. The world "react" by the specified part behaving in "logical ways" while the unspecified parts being filled-in to make the player suggestions work (under some reasonable limits).

A non-simulationist GM (which is IME as a player, what lead to the most interesting campaigns) usually aims at a balance of enough specified things to give ideas to the players, and to give some challenge by restricting what one can do, while letting enough unspecified things to have some margin of manoeuvre and allow for player's creativity to influence the narration (without needing to retcon previously established facts, since that's annoying).

Because in the end, the fictive world doesn't exists. What exists is the narration (in the general sense of "what's happening and how it's happening", not in the restricted sense of "the story as unilaterally told by a narrator"), and that's what the players are influencing, that where they get a meaningful influence.



The players only got to feel clever because they didn't know that you were lying about them solving a puzzle.


Creativity is a kind of cleverness. When you allow only one solution, you're only allowing players to show their problem solving skills. When you are more vague in what it possible, you allow both players with pure rational thinking to come with a solution that "must logically work" to succeed, and players with a more creative approach to come with unique ideas that you can help shape into an actual solution in order for them to also succeed.

[GloatingSwine]

I feel like we're talking past each other here. You keep making arguments about what makes the game world real or not. I've been implying an argument that I feel I should spell out more clearly:

1. In general, the game world is not real.
2. The game world is real only to the extent that it is perceived as such by the players.

1 and 2 both being true:

3. If the players perceive something to be real in the game world, it is real in the game world.

(Yeah, I know that's not a proper syllogism. I'm not Aristotle.)

Now, as clash has rightly called us on, this is not the only set of values for playing the game. But it is very fundamental to how I approach DMing. If we recognize each other's values, we can have a productive conversation about how to achieve our valued outcomes at our respective tables.

The disconnect comes in how we percieve 2. In order for the gameworld to be percieved as real by the players, it must have a threshold level of internal consistency and that relies on the DM being honest when using their omniscient DM voice. And that means that when you are doing something like setting up a puzzle for the characters to solve you need to keep yourself honest by having at least one predefined solution to it. There must be a way to solve it which you promise to yourself will work for the players.


Ok, so... what's the problem? You're willing to agree to my stated outcome: that the players felt clever and had fun. Sincerely, I ask, why should it matter to me how consistent the made-up world is in my own head, if the players find it convincing, are convinced that they actually did something meaningful?

You got away with it because they didn't find out. If they did, they'd feel cheated out of the success that they thought they were getting at the time.

When I say "lying" I really do mean it. You aren't sharing a fiction with them in a way that lets them play with it if you do something like this, you are deceiving them about the real world things they are doing. They were not interacting with a shared fiction, they were just futzing around until you thought they'd done enough now, but you lied to them about what they were doing.


As I've pointed out before, I'm lying about everything in the game world, and you mostly seem to object to the fact that my lies aren't all decided on ahead of time.

Well don't. Make a fiction and be honest about what it contains so that your players can share and play with it, and be honest about what they're doing when they sit at your gaming table.

If you're using a pseudopuzzle where their actions don't matter just tell them "none of this is part of the game I just want you to pretend to do a puzzle because I think they're neat".



Creativity is a kind of cleverness. When you allow only one solution, you're only allowing players to show their problem solving skills. When you are more vague in what it possible, you allow both players with pure rational thinking to come with a solution that "must logically work" to succeed, and players with a more creative approach to come with unique ideas that you can help shape into an actual solution in order for them to also succeed.

It's not about only allowing one solution, it's about making sure there's always at least one real solution which you have decided in advance to definitely allow. It's a promise to yourself that the world has fixed rules that you also agree to abide by when the players start playing with it.

[lall]

Before every session, our DM administers a PT test. We generally lift weights during other players’ turns. Snacks are allowed, but only if they taste horrible. Degrees from military academies are preferred, but not required. Personal references are required: at least one colleague, one friend, and one significant other (otherwise, confessions of being a loser must be signed). Verified documentation of an IQ test with results within the past six months is also required, but I feel like some of this goes without saying.

[Pex]

I learned the hard way a long time ago not to have so many puzzles in the game. However, that's not the same thing as no puzzles ever. A puzzle or riddle contributes to the game part of being a roleplaying game, if a bit on the nose. If you have at least one player in the group who likes to figure out a puzzle it's fine to have one, but they should be rare in the overall campaign and never Must Solve Or Else The Campaign Is Over. If none of your players like them then don't use them. If you don't know if your players like them or not, have one. Their reaction to having to do it will tell you what you need to know.

[NichG]

I think this is just part of the game.

"Player challenge" reads to me more like the DM knows what his players are like, and wants to make them think/squirm/change so they devise a challenge targeted/tailor-made specifically for that or those players, with an opportunity for the DM to get the results the DM specifically wants to see.

That's quite a different thing, and a little too controlling for my tastes. In other words, in a normal challenge the DM doesn't so much care what the players decide, it's up to the players to consider the options and choose and deal with the consequences.

In a "player challenge", the DM wants to see a certain outcome, because they've judged the player skillset and are targeting those skillsets/comfort zones/etc. with the aim of "challenging" the player. The DM wants to see certain behavior (a player thinks outside of the box, uses an ability they normally ignore, engages more in a social encounter, etc.).

As someone who does build their campaigns and systems around player challenges, I'd say... sort of?

Generally step one of making a good long-term player challenge is to ask a question that demands response, but which I don't actually know how I'd answer. So I'm not looking for a specific answer, but I am definitely wanting the players to be dealing with that question and with the factors that made it difficult for me to come up with my own answer.

And to be clear, I'm not talking about set-piece encounters like solving puzzles. I mean things like 'In this campaign, souls take up space, the afterlife is finite, and people keep getting born and dying. This is causing problems. Once you seize the reins of power, become gods, etc, what sort of system will you institute?' or 'In this campaign, the present determines the past; the history of the world has been forgotten and the present is one of eternal timewar. You have the ability to determine your own past consciously, and you can see what that leads to. As things escalate, more and more of the past is within your collective purview. What do you choose for the history of the world to have been?'

These are absolutely challenges, far more so than any particular combat or social encounter or whatnot. But the ones who determine if they've passed or failed the challenge - inasmuch as its even possible - are the players themselves, as they decide whether or not they're satisfied with their answers. Another part of this is that understanding the situation enough to actually make these choices in a meaningfully informed manner means gathering and synthesizing a lot of information from the world, figuring things out, etc. Again, none of it is structured with particular 'correct answers', but its definitely something where its clear when some players first 'get it' and then the group discusses and tries to come to a common understanding.

If there is an obvious 'good answer' that I can come up with when designing the campaign, then that was a bad question to build a campaign around.

But you're right in that all of these processes are things I want to be taking place as part of play. I don't have a particular thing I want the players to choose or believe or whatever, but I do want the players to be engaged in the processes of 'figuring things out' and 'clarifying their vision of how the world should be to themselves' and so on. That's basically the game I'm offering to run, and stuff like character abilities and so on are all there to make these abstract things concretely interactable, through the lens of the characters. It's roleplay not in the 'I will demonstrate my archetype by playing its stereotypes' sense but rather in the 'I'm not the president of a country in real life, so I'm going to step into the role of a president in this game [and the GM will try to create an experience that will let me engage with what it would be like to be a president]' sense.

[Easy e]

I have bad news for you, friend: that describes the entire job of being Dungeon Master.

Oh boy, this thread is about to explode now!


Just so everyone knows, the blue text is sarcasm or humor. Some people seem to have missed that in my earlier narration.




Answering the original question I think comes down to asking what your players want. Do they want to be challenged as players or just want to roll dice in character. I think it's better to ask those questions in session 0 than to just dictate to your players how it will be run.

The problem is, this changes session to session.

Therefore, the GM has to read the room and control the pace and flow of the game.

[Catullus64]

The disconnect comes in how we percieve 2. In order for the gameworld to be percieved as real by the players, it must have a threshold level of internal consistency and that relies on the DM being honest when using their omniscient DM voice.

As you later point out, in this instance my players were fooled and all was well, meaning this isn't true 100% of the time. Internal consistency is a really valuable tool help make your world believable, but it's not a strict prerequisite.



And that means that when you are doing something like setting up a puzzle for the characters to solve you need to keep yourself honest by having at least one predefined solution to it. There must be a way to solve it which you promise to yourself will work for the players.

Indeed. It's not as though I don't think up some plausible answers to the puzzle on my own. I just don't confine myself to that solution, and reject the players' good ideas just because they're not the ones I came up with.



You got away with it because they didn't find out. If they did, they'd feel cheated out of the success that they thought they were getting at the time.

When I say "lying" I really do mean it. You aren't sharing a fiction with them in a way that lets them play with it if you do something like this, you are deceiving them about the real world things they are doing. They were not interacting with a shared fiction, they were just futzing around until you thought they'd done enough now, but you lied to them about what they were doing.

I'm pretty frank with my players about the fact that I frequently improvise, and that I sometimes change everything from character motives to monster HP on the fly. If one of them ever expressed the level of discomfort with that reality that you seem to feel, I'd dial it back, but so far none of them has. In fact, they've expressed surprise that much of it wasn't planned from the beginning. In general, they're not fooled because I'm oh-so-much-cleverer than they are, they're fooled because they want to be; because they are willing participants in the lie. So I don't consider this sort of lie to be abusive towards my players.

Also, as a matter of making the lie more convincing, note that this sort of open-ended affair is a fraction of the puzzles I run, with puzzles themselves being an even smaller fraction of overall playtime. If any player was trying hard to see through the illusion (which, again, they generally don't do, because they're co-illusionists), they might have a hard time spotting which puzzle they solved by hitting upon the pre-ordained solution and which one they solved by coming up with a solution I found convincing.


Well don't. Make a fiction and be honest about what it contains so that your players can share and play with it, and be honest about what they're doing when they sit at your gaming table.

Look, man, we clearly have different approaches to DMing and mine clearly isn't right for your table. I'm in no way trying to say that it should be. But you seem really quite certain that my approach is intrinsically bad, that the way I deceive my players is wrong, and that this wrongness somehow makes the fun that this approach produces invalid. There's a term for that line of argument, and it's not generally considered a flattering position to adopt.

[Dr.Samurai]

As someone who does build their campaigns and systems around player challenges, I'd say... sort of?

Generally step one of making a good long-term player challenge is to ask a question that demands response, but which I don't actually know how I'd answer. So I'm not looking for a specific answer, but I am definitely wanting the players to be dealing with that question and with the factors that made it difficult for me to come up with my own answer.

And to be clear, I'm not talking about set-piece encounters like solving puzzles. I mean things like 'In this campaign, souls take up space, the afterlife is finite, and people keep getting born and dying. This is causing problems. Once you seize the reins of power, become gods, etc, what sort of system will you institute?' or 'In this campaign, the present determines the past; the history of the world has been forgotten and the present is one of eternal timewar. You have the ability to determine your own past consciously, and you can see what that leads to. As things escalate, more and more of the past is within your collective purview. What do you choose for the history of the world to have been?'

These are absolutely challenges, far more so than any particular combat or social encounter or whatnot. But the ones who determine if they've passed or failed the challenge - inasmuch as its even possible - are the players themselves, as they decide whether or not they're satisfied with their answers. Another part of this is that understanding the situation enough to actually make these choices in a meaningfully informed manner means gathering and synthesizing a lot of information from the world, figuring things out, etc. Again, none of it is structured with particular 'correct answers', but its definitely something where its clear when some players first 'get it' and then the group discusses and tries to come to a common understanding.

If there is an obvious 'good answer' that I can come up with when designing the campaign, then that was a bad question to build a campaign around.

But you're right in that all of these processes are things I want to be taking place as part of play. I don't have a particular thing I want the players to choose or believe or whatever, but I do want the players to be engaged in the processes of 'figuring things out' and 'clarifying their vision of how the world should be to themselves' and so on. That's basically the game I'm offering to run, and stuff like character abilities and so on are all there to make these abstract things concretely interactable, through the lens of the characters. It's roleplay not in the 'I will demonstrate my archetype by playing its stereotypes' sense but rather in the 'I'm not the president of a country in real life, so I'm going to step into the role of a president in this game [and the GM will try to create an experience that will let me engage with what it would be like to be a president]' sense.
I think the place where we may be getting a little lost is in the difference between players being challenged, and setting out to challenge the players specifically.

I expect players to feel challenged as they play the game because ultimately it's the players that are gathering and interpreting information and coming up with solutions to problems, whether that's tactically beating a combat encounter, or navigating a social interaction.

But the way you design a "challenge" is by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the characters. If I want to challenge the barbarian character, I might put in some flying monsters that are difficult to reach and limit his attacks to throwing a javelin. The "player" may find this challenging, but it's a challenge specifically for the barbarian's strengths/weaknesses.

When someone wants to design a challenge for the player, they are noticing that player's strengths and weaknesses, and that's the part of the this process that doesn't sit right with me. I don't think, that by virtue of being a Dungeon Master, you suddenly have the finesse and skill to do this. I'm not so much interested in playing in my DM's encounter based on their interpretation of what I like/don't like and am good at/bad at. I don't want that lens on me and I'd rather just play through the encounters they come up with without feeling like a lab rat.

[NichG]

I think the place where we may be getting a little lost is in the difference between players being challenged, and setting out to challenge the players specifically.

I expect players to feel challenged as they play the game because ultimately it's the players that are gathering and interpreting information and coming up with solutions to problems, whether that's tactically beating a combat encounter, or navigating a social interaction.

But the way you design a "challenge" is by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the characters. If I want to challenge the barbarian character, I might put in some flying monsters that are difficult to reach and limit his attacks to throwing a javelin. The "player" may find this challenging, but it's a challenge specifically for the barbarian's strengths/weaknesses.

When someone wants to design a challenge for the player, they are noticing that player's strengths and weaknesses, and that's the part of the this process that doesn't sit right with me. I don't think, that by virtue of being a Dungeon Master, you suddenly have the finesse and skill to do this. I'm not so much interested in playing in my DM's encounter based on their interpretation of what I like/don't like and am good at/bad at. I don't want that lens on me and I'd rather just play through the encounters they come up with without feeling like a lab rat.

I guess I don't think that something has to be tuned to a particular target in order to be 'a challenge'. In that sense of the phrase, I wouldn't want to be trying to specifically construct challenges to tax particular characters either.

Rather, for me, 'challenges' are things that exist within scenarios due to tensions and relationships between things in that scenario, rather than being things that exist for sake of a particular recipient. Someone might come along who can easily cut through those difficulties, or you could get stuck on them. But the question is whether its fine to have things where if there's an easy way to cut through or resolve it, that way exists within the player rather than within the character. E.g. in the 'afterlife is overflowing with souls' campaign, if one of the players is like 'well, lets just cram the ones we don't like into a tiny box until they turn into literal nightmare fuel that we can use to power our cosmic speedboats', yes, that quickly resolves the difficulty of the scenario. But if they're satisfied with that outcome and can convince the other players to be as well, great!

So in that latter sense, I want my campaigns to be filled with things that evoke thoughtful engagement from my players using their own skills and understanding, especially in those directions that the players themselves communicate to me that they wish to explore or develop further. I do not particularly want the campaign to be filled with things whose purpose is to 'defeat the players' skills' or 'defeat their characters' skills'. They're not 100% disconnected, as in order to e.g. explore complex political maneuvering the campaign cannot be entirely formed out of things which are solved trivially by making attack rolls for example. But that's not quite the same as setting up a gotcha where making an attack roll seems like it should be reasonable but then is thwarted.

[Dr.Samurai]

@NichG: I think what you're describing I take as a given for any game. It is difficult for me to imagine a game without the things you're explaining. I expect the game to be generally challenging, it's part of the soul of the game. In that sense I don't differentiate too much between player/character challenge. By virtue of playing the game as designed, the player and their character will be challenged without taking into account the specific qualities/traits of a player.

But if you read the OP, they mention things like basing ability check DCs on the actual player's skill at roleplaying or problem solving, and the DM wanting the players to have "lateral solutions" to combat problems.

This approach to me is too involved and meta, as opposed to organic and simply setting the stage for the players to interact with. The DM here is more of a puppeteer, to my mind, taking stock of their players and crafting things to get them to "be creative".

[NichG]

@NichG: I think what you're describing I take as a given for any game. It is difficult for me to imagine a game without the things you're explaining. I expect the game to be generally challenging, it's part of the soul of the game. In that sense I don't differentiate too much between player/character challenge. By virtue of playing the game as designed, the player and their character will be challenged without taking into account the specific qualities/traits of a player.

But if you read the OP, they mention things like basing ability check DCs on the actual player's skill at roleplaying or problem solving, and the DM wanting the players to have "lateral solutions" to combat problems.

This approach to me is too involved and meta, as opposed to organic and simply setting the stage for the players to interact with. The DM here is more of a puppeteer, to my mind, taking stock of their players and crafting things to get them to "be creative".

I mean, I think it helps a lot to clear confusion to start from an explicit purpose - 'why am I doing this activity?'. Then, having your answer to that, it becomes much easier to determine how you'd want to handle things like a social interaction. I think some of the awkward solutions like judging the player's skill but then trying to numerically convert that into character skill bonuses come from not actually having a clear purpose in mind for the game but just trying to fit pieces together.

So e.g. since I want the game to be about exploring and expanding one's own abilities in the context of a role that one cannot take in real life, its very clear to me that I don't want there to be things in the systems I use like 'roll to see if you come up with a good argument' or 'roll/invest resources to have permission to use skills you possess in real life'. Since my motivation for the game is not for it to act as a demonstration of the selected attributes of each character, I don't worry at all about things like 'but what if the low Cha character convinces someone and the high Cha character fails?'.

That said, I definitely prefer when players feel that resolving combat via lateral solutions is not only on the table, but is a good and approved way to proceed. So you can call that me wanting players to have lateral solutions to combat problems I suppose. Because it fits the overall purpose I have in playing or running the game more than if combat were protected and separate from that sort of thing.

Anyhow, I guess my point is, it might be implicitly acceptable to have certain layers be player-driven and other layers be character-driven, but without explicitly stating the motivation behind decisions in terms of 'what is this game trying to achieve?' then stuff gets very messy and you end up with awkward solutions the moment things become even a bit ambiguous. You'll get arguments about RAW and RAI and 'well, we don't do X, so why should we do Y?' and so on. But if you approach that with clarity about why you're doing things, its easy to cut through the arguments that basically aren't relevant to that purpose. And of course other people can have other purposes to play or run games, and that's fine too - if you identify that that's the main reason for the disagreement, it becomes easy to at least reach a conclusion of 'we want different things' without making unnecessarily sweeping statements.

[RazorChain]

Player challenge can mean many different things. Is it meant for the player to bypass mechanical challenges in the system using their own ability or reasoning? The player who is eloquent persuades the guards that these are not the droids they are looking for instead of rolling? The smart player discovering and disarming traps without rolling?

If it is then we should apply it to combat as well. The savvy player will hamstring his enemies before he stabs them in the eye or he will describe how his mage lights up the robed enemy priest up like a torch with his fire spell. Then the physicist in the group will describe how he will insulate his plate armor so lightning spells won't harm his character or describe how a telekinesis spell that can lift move something that weighs 1000 pounds 30 feet up in the air in 6 seconds could easily propel a small object the size of a cannonball at high velocity.


I'm all for creative solutions and good speeches aiding in roleplaying or having some benefit but I for example run games for the Autism Association where there are mostly teens that have never played before. My son is one of those teens and he wants to play a charismatic warlock so do I destroy his fantasy because he is anything but eloquent or do I use the mechanics of the game to assist him in fulfilling his fantasy?

I think there is no clear answer. It is very much dependent on the individuals playing the game.

[NichG]

Player challenge can mean many different things. Is it meant for the player to bypass mechanical challenges in the system using their own ability or reasoning? The player who is eloquent persuades the guards that these are not the droids they are looking for instead of rolling? The smart player discovering and disarming traps without rolling?

If it is then we should apply it to combat as well. The savvy player will hamstring his enemies before he stabs them in the eye or he will describe how his mage lights up the robed enemy priest up like a torch with his fire spell. Then the physicist in the group will describe how he will insulate his plate armor so lightning spells won't harm his character or describe how a telekinesis spell that can lift move something that weighs 1000 pounds 30 feet up in the air in 6 seconds could easily propel a small object the size of a cannonball at high velocity.

Sure, why not, as long as the abstraction layer for resolution is chosen consistently you could have games where any of these things would be welcome. I mean, I've been in a World of Darkness campaign where I was engineering things out of the interactions between properties of magical metals described by the GM in order to keep up as a (more or less) mortal scientist character. That did involve working out the calculations OOC on how to e.g. use a metal whose inertial mass changed depending on the density of a magical field nearby in order to construct a reactionless drive for an airship. Closest thing I've experienced in gaming to 'being an engineer in a magical world'.



I'm all for creative solutions and good speeches aiding in roleplaying or having some benefit but I for example run games for the Autism Association where there are mostly teens that have never played before. My son is one of those teens and he wants to play a charismatic warlock so do I destroy his fantasy because he is anything but eloquent or do I use the mechanics of the game to assist him in fulfilling his fantasy?

I think there is no clear answer. It is very much dependent on the individuals playing the game.

And dependent on the reason why those individuals are playing. Fulfilling a fantasy is one thing someone might want a game to do, but it isn't the only valid thing for a game to be for doing, nor is it necessarily even something that would be good for a given game to try to do.

[Goobahfish]

"Player challenge" reads to me more like the DM knows what his players are like, and wants to make them think/squirm/change so they devise a challenge targeted/tailor-made specifically for that or those In a "player challenge", the DM wants to see a certain outcome, because they've judged the player skillset and are targeting those skillsets/comfort zones/etc. with the aim of "challenging" the player. The DM wants to see certain behavior (a player thinks outside of the box, uses an ability they normally ignore, engages more in a social encounter, etc.).

There is definitely room in D&D for this kind of thing. Specifically, setting challenges for the players where the character has a 'defining' trait and the player feels uncomfortable about acting out that defining trait and you put them in situation where there is a pretty obvious dichotomy between 'player actions' and 'character actions'.

Also, some groups like puzzles. "Speak Friend and Enter" is 100% a meme that many groups want to repeat (with variation), a kind of expectation of the genre.


It's never impossible, it just needs the DM's help. Roleplaying a genius? A diviner? A master detective? The DM should be passing you notes to help you feel smarter, or they should be telling you to play something else if they're not willing to help you have fun with that concept.


That is true. Roleplaying up without 'cheat-codes' (i.e. DM input) is impossible but a good DM should be able to 'bridge the gap'.


I've never needed to get to this punitive level, usually if I have someone with 6-8 Int they're quite eager to play dumb at the table and not be the planner or tactician.

Yes... it was a harrowing experience. They also liked to narrate the outcomes of their actions. It was... frustrating.



If there isn't a fixed solution then the world of the game is not reacting at all. The gameworld is doing nothing, it is inert and does not care what the characters are doing in it.

This is misguided thinking. It is entirely valid to run a 'schroedinger' world in which all possible solutions are in a super-state and only collapse when the world collapses. It has nothing to do with 'amusement' but rather.. #1: The game not becoming boring, #2: Players are often more creative than the DM.

What matters is the narrative satisfaction... this is a Roleplaying game after all. Story >> Rules (I'd say ~95% of the time).


A non-simulationist GM (which is IME as a player, what lead to the most interesting campaigns) usually aims at a balance of enough specified things to give ideas to the players, and to give some challenge by restricting what one can do, while letting enough unspecified things to have some margin of manoeuvre and allow for player's creativity to influence the narration (without needing to retcon previously established facts, since that's annoying).


Hear hear.


And that means that when you are doing something like setting up a puzzle for the characters to solve you need to keep yourself honest by having at least one predefined solution to it. There must be a way to solve it which you promise to yourself will work for the players.

Big nope. In my experience, I don't need to come up with solutions... ever. Players do that. I come up with problems. Having a 'solution' tends to create animosity to 'creative alternate solutions'. Generally not a good idea.

In fact, if you think about it, having a 'known solution' to every challenge inherently breaks verisimilitude because the real world doesn't work that way. Some things don't have neat solutions. I pose impossible problems to players occasionally (usually they find some kind of work around). Sometimes they give up and look elsewhere...

[animorte]

In fact, if you think about it, having a 'known solution' to every challenge inherently breaks verisimilitude because the real world doesn't work that way. Some things don't have neat solutions. I pose impossible problems to players occasionally (usually they find some kind of work around). Sometimes they give up and look elsewhere...

I second this. A lot of the times the DM can forget that it’s easy because you know it and it’s right in front of you. It makes sense to you because you know the answer. You either read the problem-solution from another idea or you came up with it yourself.

Assuming the players are not privy to this information, they will naturally approach the problem in different ways with various ideas that make sense to them, either as a group or individually. Much of that may differ from what you have prepared.

Yes, make them work for it, but a certain level of frustration accompanies enough failed attempts/ideas.

[Keravath]

It is interesting to watch the different philosophies about DMing clashing in this thread.

1) Some folks consider the DM to be the neutral adjudicator of character actions as they interact with the game world. The game world has consistent and persistant elements in addition to plot lines that are proceeding independent of the character actions as well as a game world internal logic. There are NPCs and groups of NPCs causing shifts in the politics, allegiances, and other game world elements that exist in the imagination of the DM or in their notes. All of this may change and respond to the choices made by the PCs.

If you follow this philosophy of DMing then having a puzzle incorporated into the storyline that doesn't have a solution until the DM hears the ideas of the players and decides "Hey! That will do fine." just sounds "wrong". The DM is improvising content that doesn't exist in the moment, they aren't adjudicating anything, they are just making it up as they go along which leads to the other extreme of DMing philosophy.

2) At the other end of the spectrum, is the improvisational DM. They don't necessarily have a game world in mind except in some general sense. They may not have a plot line, adventure or narrative, the entire adventure can be based on what sounds good in the moment. If the players make some comment then the DM can pick up on it and amplify it so that the player's idle speculation becomes the plot line and the player feels really good for figuring out what the DM had in mind and guessing the direction of the narrative (even though the entire thing was improvised to fit the comments of the players).

I've done this. Sit down at a table with a bunch of players with nothing but a few vague ideas of the plot line in your head. Invent all the NPCs depending on where the players decide to go and what they decide to do. Perhaps one of the NPCs decides to hire them to deliver a wagon load of agricultural goods (or something more interesting). The quest didn't exist before the players said they wanted to check out the agricultural factors shop. It can be loads of fun and honestly cuts prep time to a fraction. If you are running a game this way it is important to keep notes so that you can keep the spontaneously created world consistent when the characters come back. The campaign just grows spontaneously and "organically". :)


3) The category where most DMs fall is likely a combination of 1 and 2. Some improvisation based on a narrative and overall storyline that the DM developed as the basis for the campaign.

------

The interesting thing is that from the PLAYER perspective, both styles of DMing appear the SAME. The players can't tell the difference because the player interaction with the game world is moderated by the DM and only the DM knows whether the world itself is a "simulation" or "improvisation". However, it is usually much easier for the completely improvisational DM to put in inconsistent game elements or accidentally run the plot line off a cliff especially if they don't take good notes but with experience the improvisational DM can avoid most of the plot line pitfalls that would derail their improvised campaign.

In either case, the players never know. The difference is in terms of DMing philosophy and approach to DMing, the player facing content is apparently identical so the player experience is the same.

I think many new DMs start closer to planned campaigns and with experience improvise more.

[Easy e]

From a player perspective, it kind of bothers me when I come up with a good idea, or persuasive argument based on known NPC motivations; but then a roll on a d20 foils it. Especially when I have a high Int, but average Cha and little or no bonus in persuasion. Kills the fun, and makes me not want to think about the game to much.

I have learned, if I come up with a persuasive argument, to tell it to the party "Face" and have them repeat it to the NPC, so if they have to roll they will pass. That kinda sucks.

A bit of an opposite issue than the one we have been discussing though.

[Psyren]

That is true. Roleplaying up without 'cheat-codes' (i.e. DM input) is impossible but a good DM should be able to 'bridge the gap'.

It's a win-win. The player of the genius character gets to feel like they're roleplaying their concept. And the DM gets to provide the party with breadcrumbs in an organic way if they start to get off track.

One of my current characters is an Artificer/Wizard, and he's the only character in the party with History (and 20 Int). The DM uses me to provide setting and background exposition to the group all the time, letting me deliver it in character, and that has helped us keep all the various factions and their motivations straight.



Yes... it was a harrowing experience. They also liked to narrate the outcomes of their actions. It was... frustrating.

Yeah this is definitely a player issue. The DM should be the one narrating outcomes. They can delegate that task to a player if they wish, but the players should not be narrating any outcome unless given express permission to do so. Players say what they want to do, not what happens.

[Keravath]

From a player perspective, it kind of bothers me when I come up with a good idea, or persuasive argument based on known NPC motivations; but then a roll on a d20 foils it. Especially when I have a high Int, but average Cha and little or no bonus in persuasion. Kills the fun, and makes me not want to think about the game to much.

I have learned, if I come up with a persuasive argument, to tell it to the party "Face" and have them repeat it to the NPC, so if they have to roll they will pass. That kinda sucks.

A bit of an opposite issue than the one we have been discussing though.

Very valid issue though. It may have more to do with a bit of a mismatch between what the player put on the character sheet and the role they want to play in the game. If it happens regularly then it may be an indication that the player would be happier running a different type of character for that game.

Personally, I've found that I often put persuasion down as a proficient skill on almost every character I make since from a player perspective I like having at least a minimal chance of success. I also think of it as part of the cost of deciding to play a low charisma character is sacrificing some effectiveness in social situations. A low charisma character just isn't that convincing even if I, as a player, can come up with some convincing and logical arguments.

Finally, as DM, there will be times when a good, convincing, logical idea or argument fits so well for an NPC that it will be an auto-success no matter what the character's charisma. I may not use it often since it devalues the contributions of players who invested in charisma and being good at social situations but it also gives me the option to just let the NPC be convinced and move the narrative along while allowing the low charisma character with a charismatic player an occasional success.

[KorvinStarmast]

I'm not really talking about immersion as I am talking about thinking "what can my character do and what do they own and how can I use that here?" That's a part of play, sure. But I was trying to make the point of not limiting what a player comes up with to only what's on their character sheet.

"Player challenge" reads to me more like the DM knows what his players are like, and wants to make them think/squirm/change so they devise a challenge targeted/tailor-made specifically for that or those players, with an opportunity for the DM to get the results the DM specifically wants to see. Huh? Maybe that's one way to do that, but I like to set up various situations and see what the heck my players do with them. Sometimes is as predicted, other times it's something else and we roll with it. Happened in Salt Marsh on Monday night; they went off that away and I had to adapt/adjust. Good fun. :smallsmile:

In a "player challenge", the DM wants to see a certain outcome, because they've judged the player skillset and are targeting those skillsets/comfort zones/etc. Hmm, that's not how I see it, but perhaps that's one way folks interpret that term.

Before every session, our DM administers a PT test. We generally lift weights during other players’ turns. Snacks are allowed, but only if they taste horrible. Degrees from military academies are preferred, but not required. Personal references are required: at least one colleague, one friend, and one significant other (otherwise, confessions of being a loser must be signed). Verified documentation of an IQ test with results within the past six months is also required, but I feel like some of this goes without saying. Laughed, I did. :smallsmile:

Therefore, the GM has to read the room and control the pace and flow of the game. I would have written that point as follows:
Therefore, the GM needs to read the room and adjust the pace and flow of the game.
Mostly the same but slightly different.

[cZak]

From a player perspective, it kind of bothers me when I come up with a good idea, or persuasive argument based on known NPC motivations; but then a roll on a d20 foils it. Especially when I have a high Int, but average Cha and little or no bonus in persuasion. Kills the fun, and makes me not want to think about the game to much.

I have learned, if I come up with a persuasive argument, to tell it to the party "Face" and have them repeat it to the NPC, so if they have to roll they will pass. That kinda sucks.

A bit of an opposite issue than the one we have been discussing though.

I've actually considered this as supportive of the PC's ability
Few have an INT or Chr 18+ in real life; the table support of ideas for the player to utilize that stat seems reasonable to me

[Composer99]

To my mind, it is impossible to challenge the characters; you can only ever challenge the players. The players are the real people sitting at the table with you, and the characters, along with everything else in the in-game fiction, are pure fabrication. There's nothing there to challenge.

Here's something I wrote in a forum post on another site about being challenged as a player of an RPG:

To my mind, being challenged in RPG gameplay is first and foremost about testing your skills as a player, whether that's your system mastery, your care and attention to the description of the world around your PC and such deductions that you can make about that world as a result, your clever use of [ed. your character's] equipment and personal resources to bypass or resolve obstacles, your leveraging of [ed. your character's] social relationships in the fiction, and other skills besides. [Editorial remarks mine.]

The topic of that thread was expected likelihood of success of in-game activities deemed to be "difficult", and I made that point in disagreement with the idea that low chances of success was an "objective" or "reliable" marker of challenge as such, so I didn't mention challenging the players to portray or make decisions for their characters in a manner consistent with the traits or characteristics they themselves have assigned to their characters (including ability scores in the case of D&D 5e), but I would see that as part of the challenge to players as well.

Because we are talking about RPGs, to my mind these most of these ways of challenging players involve them engaging with the fiction in the capacity of their player characters - although depending on the preferences of you and your players and the game you are playing, they will do so to some greater or lesser extent.

Given the topic of that thread, I also distinguished players being challenged from players feeling challenged; the latter being a matter of player psychology, since different players will feel challenged by different things to different extents, which a DM needs to keep in mind. And of course some players don't particularly want to feel challenged while playing an RPG, either; well and good.

Overall, I think what I have to say is this:
(1) You can only ever challenge the players because they are the only real people in front of you.
(2) The manner in which you challenge the players in an RPG usually but not always involves them engaging with the in-game fiction in the capacity of their player characters.
(3) The manner in which and extent to which you challenge the players will depend on (a) the expectations of the specific game you are playing, (b) your gameplay preferences as DM/GM, (c) each of your players' gameplay preferences, and (d) any compromises or negotiations made (or not made?) when preferences or system expectations come into conflict.
(4) Because different people have different preferences and different games have different expectations, there can be no one-size-fits-all or objective/universal standard to challenge in RPG gameplay writ large.

[GloatingSwine]

That's a part of play, sure. But I was trying to make the point of not limiting what a player comes up with to only what's on their character sheet.

The character sheet's pretty broadly applicable, that's what attribute checks represent.

There always needs to be an element of using it though, because the characters are the ones acting in the world. If a challenge goes away as soon as the players figure out what to do, then there was no point having the characters for that challenge and you might as well have posed it as a riddle down the pub instead of putting it in the RPG session.

Somebody should roll or expend something, and the challenge for the players should be figuring out who and what.

[NichG]

The character sheet's pretty broadly applicable, that's what attribute checks represent.

There always needs to be an element of using it though, because the characters are the ones acting in the world. If a challenge goes away as soon as the players figure out what to do, then there was no point having the characters for that challenge and you might as well have posed it as a riddle down the pub instead of putting it in the RPG session.

Somebody should roll or expend something, and the challenge for the players should be figuring out who and what.

The character can be relevant by being the context in which the challenge makes sense. That's different than everything passing through the bottleneck of a roll or resource expenditure or ability on a sheet.

The player of the princess of a kingdom has bought into dealing with the challenges of scheming nobles, reputation amongst the peasantry, succession wars, etc. You could post 'if you were the princess of a kingdom, first in line for the throne, and your three brothers all want you dead, what would you do?' to the wall of a pub, sure. And if someone engaged with that 'riddle', they would be roleplaying that character too!

You could say, why make character build choices in that case? But just because there are challenges where character build choices may not end up being relevant to the chosen path of action, that doesn't mean that there could not have been paths of action in which those choices would have been relevant, or that those things did not create access or opportunity to information which would change the dynamics of the players making decisions. Those things exist as options, but IMO it's on the players to decide whether or not those options are the ones they would like to use, and the existence of paths that don't require or test against those things is fine.

[GloatingSwine]

The character can be relevant by being the context in which the challenge makes sense. That's different than everything passing through the bottleneck of a roll or resource expenditure or ability on a sheet.

The player of the princess of a kingdom has bought into dealing with the challenges of scheming nobles, reputation amongst the peasantry, succession wars, etc. You could post 'if you were the princess of a kingdom, first in line for the throne, and your three brothers all want you dead, what would you do?' to the wall of a pub, sure. And if someone engaged with that 'riddle', they would be roleplaying that character too!

A character in an RPG persists beyond that individual instance though, if you don't use any feature of the character that brought them to that place (attributes and skills) or that they will take away from it (current resources), you haven't used them.

And if it's just a "what would Grug do in this situation" question (who the character is not what they can do) then it's not a challenge situation (unless the answer is "smash" in which case smash what and are we rolling Strength or Initiative now).

[KorvinStarmast]

To my mind, it is impossible to challenge the characters; you can only ever challenge the players. Very good post, thank you for articulating that.

The character sheet's pretty broadly applicable, that's what attribute checks represent.
OK, I think that you and I are going to disagree here, at least in the theoretical sense. What you are giving me is a constraining point of view, with the constraints being the boundaries of the character sheet, and your

Somebody should roll or expend something, and the challenge for the players should be figuring out who and what. doubles down on that.
That is to me too limiting.

We may be crossing wires here, but my preferred approach is to try and put myself into the situation and engage as the character with a reference to the environment and use the character sheet as a supplement to that where necessary. Yes, when there is a resource or game currency expenditure it needs to be within the limits of what's on the sheet (if I am out of arrows, no, I can't loose another arrow, for example, and if I want to cast True Polymorph but have not got that spell, no, I can't do that) but what I want to avoid advocating is to look at the character sheet as the primary source of answers. I tend to view it as a point of departure.

[False God]

IMO: the player should always be able to roll for the character to figure out the answer. But as much as the dice can empower character skill, the dice should also limit player skill.

A player should not be able to make character who dumps stats and skills relevant to the task at hand, and succeed anyway simply because the player is skilled in those areas. If the player wants to bring the IRL skills into their character, then that character needs to also have an appropriate level of skill in those skills.

While it can be fun for a player to be able to play whatever they're good at, we're not playing ourselves unless we build a character that represents that. Our characters are someone else and that someone else knows things we don't, and doesn't know things we do.

If we allow players to simply insert all their skills and knowledge into the character when the character has no reason for knowing those things or beings skilled in those things, we undermine many core concepts of the game, and punish people who do not themselves possess useful skills.

[NichG]

A character in an RPG persists beyond that individual instance though, if you don't use any feature of the character that brought them to that place (attributes and skills) or that they will take away from it (current resources), you haven't used them.

And if it's just a "what would Grug do in this situation" question (who the character is not what they can do) then it's not a challenge situation (unless the answer is "smash" in which case smash what and are we rolling Strength or Initiative now).

That's a narrower view of both the concepts of 'character' and 'challenge' than I ascribe to.

Grug's family was killed by elves. Grug made friends with a masked figure, slew giants together with them, etc. Then after a few adventures and general good feeling, Grug discovers that the masked figure is an elf. That is a player challenge situation. Grug's character is relevant context for the situation. The challenge does not have to be resolved by going through Grug's sheet at all. The player could choose to involve Grug's sheet in the resolution (by e.g. deciding to attack the masked elf), or they could choose not to. The question that the challenge poses is not 'does Grug defeat the elf?', its 'player, who is Grug?'

[GloatingSwine]

That's a narrower view of both the concepts of 'character' and 'challenge' than I ascribe to.

Grug's family was killed by elves. Grug made friends with a masked figure, slew giants together with them, etc. Then after a few adventures and general good feeling, Grug discovers that the masked figure is an elf. That is a player challenge situation. Grug's character is relevant context for the situation. The challenge does not have to be resolved by going through Grug's sheet at all. The player could choose to involve Grug's sheet in the resolution (by e.g. deciding to attack the masked elf), or they could choose not to. The question that the challenge poses is not 'does Grug defeat the elf?', its 'player, who is Grug?'

To me that's a roleplaying event not a challenge.

A challenge is "can you do a thing?" not "what thing will you do?". If there's no defined success/fail state it's not a challenge situation.

And that's the context the OP was asking in as well. Do you use player or character when resolving uncertain success in a game.

[NichG]

To me that's a roleplaying event not a challenge.

A challenge is "can you do a thing?" not "what thing will you do?". If there's no defined success/fail state it's not a challenge situation.

And that's the context the OP was asking in as well. Do you use player or character when resolving uncertain success in a game.

Okay, then I guess I would say by that definition 'I do not use challenges in my campaigns at all - player or character'.

[Dr.Samurai]

To me that's a roleplaying event not a challenge.

A challenge is "can you do a thing?" not "what thing will you do?". If there's no defined success/fail state it's not a challenge situation.

And that's the context the OP was asking in as well. Do you use player or character when resolving uncertain success in a game.
I do think the confusion here is how people are defining “challenge”. Many define it as stuff that I think is just normal role playing in a game and I would not consider a challenge.

Challenge to me indicates success/fail conditions.

[Goobahfish]

A challenge is "can you do a thing?" not "what thing will you do?". If there's no defined success/fail state it's not a challenge situation.

So what would you consider 'Luke not turning to the dark side'. If the DM gave the player the choice, would that be wrong? Should a dice have been rolled?

IMO, that is a challenge. It is just a roleplay challenge. I.e. the player has to think very hard about what 'the right thing to do is'. It is a basic form of puzzle (what would my character do, what will the outcome be). Just because there are no dice involved doesn't mean it is not a challenge to the character. Moreover, it is also a challenge to the player (at least in a meta-sense).

Another good example of challenging a player is "Do I as Robb Stark, kill Lord Karstark for his defiance". The player obviously knows this is stupid, but the character is purported to be lawful. Actually making the decision is not really a challenge for the character (because the character knows what they would do) rather it is a challenge for the player to enact the character. I do this ALL the time as a DM. Make the players wrestle with the character (not skill) choices they have made.

[GloatingSwine]

So what would you consider 'Luke not turning to the dark side'. If the DM gave the player the choice, would that be wrong? Should a dice have been rolled?

IMO, that is a challenge. It is just a roleplay challenge. I.e. the player has to think very hard about what 'the right thing to do is'. It is a basic form of puzzle (what would my character do, what will the outcome be). Just because there are no dice involved doesn't mean it is not a challenge to the character. Moreover, it is also a challenge to the player (at least in a meta-sense).

Another good example of challenging a player is "Do I as Robb Stark, kill Lord Karstark for his defiance". The player obviously knows this is stupid, but the character is purported to be lawful. Actually making the decision is not really a challenge for the character (because the character knows what they would do) rather it is a challenge for the player to enact the character. I do this ALL the time as a DM. Make the players wrestle with the character (not skill) choices they have made.

Those are roleplaying, there's no obstacle between the player and their desired outcome other than deciding what outcome they desire.

It's like saying it's a challenge to order from a menu in a restaurant where you like all the dishes. It isn't, you can just do it.

If it was a menu in a foreign language you didn't understand and a third of the things on it had an ingredient you were seriously allergic to, now it's a challenge because there's an obstacle to success and a way to fail.

[RSP]

I’m a big fan of Character RP determined actions over Player ones, so I like character challenges.

Our last campaign on my current table where I’m a Player, was SKT, which I had previously played, and partly DMed. If I were to approach the campaign as a “Player challenge”, I’m basically just cheating through the whole thing (or at least the parts I remember).

As it played out, I would rely on Character RP to determine actions (or sit out decision-making when I knew what had to be done).

[Dr.Samurai]

The example given isn’t as obvious to me because who says the player will “wrestle” at all with simply role playing through the actions of his consequences.

Again, this strikes me as the DM targeting the perceived player “deficiencies”, like the player won’t understand what they are doing and will find themselves struggling at a crossroads. How is that necessarily a challenge? When I roleplay my characters it’s thoughtful and I wouldn’t be taken aback or challenged by the consequences of my previous decisions generally.

[Keravath]

IMO: the player should always be able to roll for the character to figure out the answer. But as much as the dice can empower character skill, the dice should also limit player skill.

A player should not be able to make character who dumps stats and skills relevant to the task at hand, and succeed anyway simply because the player is skilled in those areas. If the player wants to bring the IRL skills into their character, then that character needs to also have an appropriate level of skill in those skills.

While it can be fun for a player to be able to play whatever they're good at, we're not playing ourselves unless we build a character that represents that. Our characters are someone else and that someone else knows things we don't, and doesn't know things we do.

If we allow players to simply insert all their skills and knowledge into the character when the character has no reason for knowing those things or beings skilled in those things, we undermine many core concepts of the game, and punish people who do not themselves possess useful skills.

I agree. :) Nice post. The entire point of a role playing game is that the player is role playing a character and the character provides both inspiration and constraints on the role playing aspects of the player.

If you play the game and the player does whatever they like and succeeds because their plans are thoughtful, clever and well laid out and the player arguments are convincing then what is the significance that the character they are playing is a Bugbear monk with 8 int and 8 charisma?

I never expect a player to play unintelligently or to be less social than they are (they are welcome to do so if they want to characterize the constraints of their character that way or they are inspired to do so because of the numbers on the sheet) BUT there will be skill checks in many of these situations because the character actually isn't very good at these things even if the player is amazingly good at them.

The dice give the character a chance to succeed at the ideas the player came up with. From the perspective of in game justification for this, the character may be good at knowing what they want to do or say or plan but they are bad at implementation and expressing themselves so the ideas they come up with often aren't as effective as the character imagines they should be.

If the player really wants to be very good in the role playing game at being clever and persuasive or charismatic then they need to choose to play a character that is reasonably smart and charismatic with proficiency in the relevant skills to support that style of role playing. It is a balance.

The entire point of a "role playing" game is to play a role and in 5e the constraints, limitations, inspirations, proclivities, specializations etc are defined by the contents of the character sheet and how the player decides to represent that at the table as they "role play" the character. A player that ignores the contents of the character sheet and uses their own skills to try to succeed within the game world isn't role playing the character they decided to play, they are role playing themselves. This is why the DM uses skill checks rather than auto-successes in most cases since it helps prevent the GWM/PAM barbarian a player built who is amazing in combat from also being the most effective conversationalist and most knowledgeable in the party. Why have a shy player decide to play a charismatic bard when the player running the barbarian can convince the NPCs of anything with their suave and sophisticated arguments?

There is always a balance in these things and I know I push the edges myself when playing characters with 8 int, 8 charisma or 8 wisdom - but in those cases my character will do their best to express their ideas to the party and hope that someone more suitable might decide to make use of them.

As DM, I'll let the players come up with the cool ideas and run with them but if the smart, charismatic player with low int, charisma character keeps pushing on the ideas without getting the rest of the party involved then they will be facing skill checks that they will often fail because the character just isn't very good at the skill the player is trying to use.

P.S. The flipside is that as DM, I will try to actively assist characters that are good at something by giving them extra insight or information that they can choose to pass along to the party (or not), even if it isn't a strength of the player. e.g. A smart player with high passive investigation would likely get some additional information when looking through a room even if the player doesn't explicitly take the actions that a really intelligent or perceptive character might decide to take. It can be tough to figure out the exact type and kind of assistance or information to offer but I try to give them something. It is a similar situation for a shy player with a charismatic character - I'll try to engage the player a bit directly in situations and give the player information or success from in game social interactions to help offset the player's challenge in role playing the character.

Since it is a role playing game - both the DM and the players are engaging with the characters and the character interactions with the game world as much as reasonably possible.

[NichG]

Those are roleplaying, there's no obstacle between the player and their desired outcome other than deciding what outcome they desire.

It's like saying it's a challenge to order from a menu in a restaurant where you like all the dishes. It isn't, you can just do it.

If it was a menu in a foreign language you didn't understand and a third of the things on it had an ingredient you were seriously allergic to, now it's a challenge because there's an obstacle to success and a way to fail.

Those examples were kind of flat, but in general it will be more like: its a menu, there are lots of options, you can just do any of them, but you do have to eat what you order and even if you do sort of know what the dishes are maybe you haven't eaten at this restaurant before or you've only tried one or two of them. You can just order anything, you get a meal, but you might find out after the fact that you would have rather ordered something else. But there is no objectively wrong meal to order here, its up to your tastes and your ability to align the outcomes with your tastes.

That's why I said that by this narrow definition of challenge, I don't use challenges in my campaigns. Even for something like a combat there are different outcomes in detail, and often none of them are objectively incorrect outcomes or overt failure states. Furthermore, the achievable outcomes may not have a commonly agreed upon order of preference for all players at the table. Get the loot but the enemy gets away vs kill the enemy but the loot is destroyed vs capture the enemy alive to interrogate them but get exposed to a memetic hazard they transmit with their speech vs get captured by the enemy and find out the location of the BBEG's base by virtue of now needing to escape from it vs ... Or you have fights where yes technically there's a failure state but its basically impossible that the party is going to end up in it, and the fight is there for the players to try out abilities and see how things work. So technically perhaps a challenge, but not really used as such.

Essentially the challenge as I would define it in any of my campaigns is to make decisions such that you're happy with the way the world looks at the end of it all. Which isn't trivial to do, does require finding out why things are going the way they're going, how the world works, understanding the motivations of other characters, etc. But there isn't a pre-determined path with the objectively best outcome lying at the end of it. It's possible for my players to decide 'let it all burn' and destroy the world to build something new from the ashes, as it is for them to try to save everything, as it is for them to try to evacuate what they care about and ignore the apocalyptic prophecy to go traveling the stars in an ark made of the shell of the Tarrasque or whatever. That doesn't mean that everyone would be equally satisfied by all of those outcomes - its not a menu where everyone likes everything the same.

[Goobahfish]

Those are roleplaying, there's no obstacle between the player and their desired outcome other than deciding what outcome they desire.

It's like saying it's a challenge to order from a menu in a restaurant where you like all the dishes. It isn't, you can just do it.

If it was a menu in a foreign language you didn't understand and a third of the things on it had an ingredient you were seriously allergic to, now it's a challenge because there's an obstacle to success and a way to fail.

OK, so lets step back a bit. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here.

If I understand the argument correctly, the 'challenges should always reference something on the character sheet'. What I don't understand is, that if the players are only there to 'select options from the character sheet' are they even playing at that point? It almost sounds like you could replace the players with an 'ability selection machine'.

There is also this weird 'roleplaying' isn't a challenge vibe. What about the classic trolley problem? Save these people or those people? They are clearly roleplaying challenges. You are making decisions with uncertain outcomes. Even if no rolls are involved (because you don't have DM knowledge of what happens in each case). The player gets to pick the outcome, but then most of D&D the player gets to pick the outcome. There is a lone goblin. Math dictates that one goblin vs 4 party members, the party members win. Now because there isn't any meaningful randomness, is that a roleplay decision? I can't see a meaningful line here.

Whenever a player comes up with a 'cunning plan' that could be executed by any character (i.e. you close that door), is that now not a character challenge because it doesn't reference anything on the character sheet. The player who came up with the 'cunning plan'... are they no longer playing D&D? Like, I get that playing 'tower of hanoi' in the middle of a D&D game is a bit weird, but firstly a lot of players 'love that stuff', and secondly, the line between 'tower of hanoi' and 'kill the goblins' doesn't have any clean transitions that would demand categorization. Most combats are just sophisticated 'tower of hanoi' games.

[Lucas Yew]

The solution to a problem should always reference something on the character sheet. The challenge to the player is deciding which of their character's abilities or possessions are the best way to approach the problem.

I could never have worded this better. Just let me roll my CHA check to overrule my RL awfully bad communication skills!

[Easy e]

I could never have worded this better. Just let me roll my CHA check to overrule my RL awfully bad communication skills!

Tell me more about how this plays out at the table? I am curious how this looks, feels, smells, tastes, and sounds like?

[GloatingSwine]

OK, so lets step back a bit. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here.

If I understand the argument correctly, the 'challenges should always reference something on the character sheet'. What I don't understand is, that if the players are only there to 'select options from the character sheet' are they even playing at that point? It almost sounds like you could replace the players with an 'ability selection machine'.

Yeah, they're playing a character who isn't them. What the character can, can't, would, and wouldn't do is not the same as them, and the can and can't stuff is encapsulated by the character sheet. When you're approaching some sort of mechanical resolution challenge in the game world (the stuff this thread started by talking about) what your character can and can't do is what matters, and that's what you need to pick from.


There is also this weird 'roleplaying' isn't a challenge vibe. What about the classic trolley problem? Save these people or those people? They are clearly roleplaying challenges. You are making decisions with uncertain outcomes. Even if no rolls are involved (because you don't have DM knowledge of what happens in each case). The player gets to pick the outcome, but then most of D&D the player gets to pick the outcome. There is a lone goblin. Math dictates that one goblin vs 4 party members, the party members win. Now because there isn't any meaningful randomness, is that a roleplay decision? I can't see a meaningful line here.

Exactly, the player gets to pick the outcome. Whether they like the outcome they picked or not doesn't have any bearing on whether it was a challenge. It's a challenge if you don't get to pick the outcome and always have that outcome happen, it's a challenge if you get to decide what you would like the outcome to be but then have to do something else to find out if that outcome actually happens.

The "something else" needs to be something on the character sheet. You don't find out your score on a strength check by testing how many pushups you can do in 30 seconds because you aren't doing it, your character is.


Whenever a player comes up with a 'cunning plan' that could be executed by any character (i.e. you close that door), is that now not a character challenge because it doesn't reference anything on the character sheet.

No. If there's no obstacle to the character succeeding at it once it is decided, how can you call it a challenge?


The player who came up with the 'cunning plan'... are they no longer playing D&D?

Sure, they're playing D&D, they're just in a situation where their characters are not currently being challenged, which is most of the time. Situations where nobody is being challenged are not relevant to this thread though.


Like, I get that playing 'tower of hanoi' in the middle of a D&D game is a bit weird, but firstly a lot of players 'love that stuff', and secondly, the line between 'tower of hanoi' and 'kill the goblins' doesn't have any clean transitions that would demand categorization. Most combats are just sophisticated 'tower of hanoi' games.

But, and this is the important thing, the allowed moves and moves which are likely to be successful in combat are circumscribed by the character sheet. Once you have chosen a non-trivial action in a combat you have to do something to find out whether it works (and sometimes how well it works), and deciding between all of your possible actions and choosing one which has the best balance of likelihood to work and impact on the situation is the challenge for the player.


Tell me more about how this plays out at the table? I am curious how this looks, feels, smells, tastes, and sounds like?

"I talk to the guard in a friendly tone, I sympathise with him about being out on this cold wet night and how little pay he gets for it. Not enough to trouble himself with me surely, whilst slipping a generous amount of coin out of my pocket".

Adjectives, tone, and specific supporting details. Then you roll.

[Lucas Yew]

Tell me more about how this plays out at the table? I am curious how this looks, feels, smells, tastes, and sounds like?

@GloatingSwine worded my go-to solution like they've somehow read my mind.


"I talk to the guard in a friendly tone, I sympathise with him about being out on this cold wet night and how little pay he gets for it. Not enough to trouble himself with me surely, whilst slipping a generous amount of coin out of my pocket".

Adjectives, tone, and specific supporting details. Then you roll.

Actually talking out in-characters "dialogues" are highly daunting for me. If a random GM forbids me from playing a CHA class character with Persuation proficiency just because I'm pants with talk no jutsu, they'd just lose a potential player right on the spot, forever...

[MoiMagnus]

Tell me more about how this plays out at the table? I am curious how this looks, feels, smells, tastes, and sounds like?

GloatingSwine gave an example of how it looks like when peoples who know how to talk use indirect speach.
When it is peoples that are a little more awkward, it looks more like that:

"I try to be friendly with the guard. I ... I talk about weather or stuff... Actually, maybe I can corrupt him? You said his equipments was crappy so maybe he's not paid well? I said that to him. He's probably not paid enough to suicide himself by attacking us, right? ...well obviously I don't say that like that, that would be intimidation and I only have +2, so I want to use corruption instead. I'm ready to give him some gold coins if that can help."

[Goobahfish]

Yeah, they're playing a character who isn't them. What the character can, can't, would, and wouldn't do is not the same as them, and the can and can't stuff is encapsulated by the character sheet. When you're approaching some sort of mechanical resolution challenge in the game world (the stuff this thread started by talking about) what your character can and can't do is what matters, and that's what you need to pick from.

So the problem with this argument is it ignores that fact that 95% of the character isn't on the character sheet. There is a huge number of 'challenges' that never need to reference a character sheet because they are challenges for the player, not the character because naturally the character could do them but the player has to think of it.


Whether they like the outcome they picked or not doesn't have any bearing on whether it was a challenge.

Huh? Wrestling with an ethical dilemma isn't a challenge? What?... I feel like we are talking cross purposes at this point because that to me is a really strange stance.

So consider, I want to jump a gap. You consider it a challenge because I suppose someone rolled a dice which referenced 'Athletics' on a character sheet.

But if the players can do what they want without a roll it isn't a challenge? So when you have to pick from two uncertain outcomes, that isn't a challenge? Like... when you decide whether to jump the gap or not? If that were really the case, then wouldn't players spend a lot less time making these decisions? I mean... like 90% of my table time is taken up in planning and decision making which very rarely has anything to do with what is written on a character sheet. If it takes that long, isn't it inherently... a challenge? Like... you are going to go into the desert for a week. Time to plan? They can buy the stuff they need, but the must figure out where to get water, store water, what to do if there are storms. None of those decisions really have much to do with the character sheet (gold maybe?) but players spend ages on decisions that don't really consider rolls or anything. If these aren't challenges I feel like the word has lost a lot of meaning.

The "something else" needs to be something on the character sheet. You don't find out your score on a strength check by testing how many pushups you can do in 30 seconds because you aren't doing it, your character is.




No. If there's no obstacle to the character succeeding at it once it is decided, how can you call it a challenge?

The outcome is uncertain? The player's action succeeds but the consequence isn't prescribed? You take the red pill... you take the blue pill... that is inherently a challenge because you don't know what will happen. You can freely pick the pill... but there is so much more going on than that.

[Sigreid]

I'm of the opinion that challenges should be able to be solved either way unless it's a challenge with no associated risk; then it's ok to make them work it out. For example: the Skyrim puzzle lock doors dont have any cost except time and maybe frustration if the player doesnt figure them out right away.

[GloatingSwine]

So the problem with this argument is it ignores that fact that 95% of the character isn't on the character sheet. There is a huge number of 'challenges' that never need to reference a character sheet because they are challenges for the player, not the character because naturally the character could do them but the player has to think of it.



Huh? Wrestling with an ethical dilemma isn't a challenge? What?... I feel like we are talking cross purposes at this point because that to me is a really strange stance.

So consider, I want to jump a gap. You consider it a challenge because I suppose someone rolled a dice which referenced 'Athletics' on a character sheet.

But if the players can do what they want without a roll it isn't a challenge? So when you have to pick from two uncertain outcomes, that isn't a challenge? Like... when you decide whether to jump the gap or not? If that were really the case, then wouldn't players spend a lot less time making these decisions? I mean... like 90% of my table time is taken up in planning and decision making which very rarely has anything to do with what is written on a character sheet. If it takes that long, isn't it inherently... a challenge? Like... you are going to go into the desert for a week. Time to plan? They can buy the stuff they need, but the must figure out where to get water, store water, what to do if there are storms. None of those decisions really have much to do with the character sheet (gold maybe?) but players spend ages on decisions that don't really consider rolls or anything. If these aren't challenges I feel like the word has lost a lot of meaning.

The "something else" needs to be something on the character sheet. You don't find out your score on a strength check by testing how many pushups you can do in 30 seconds because you aren't doing it, your character is.




The outcome is uncertain? The player's action succeeds but the consequence isn't prescribed? You take the red pill... you take the blue pill... that is inherently a challenge because you don't know what will happen. You can freely pick the pill... but there is so much more going on than that.

Yeah, because the consistent theme of all of these things is that you can't fail any of them (save by having an IRL tantrum and walking away from the table). Without the possibility of failure, there's no challenge. Getting an outcome you chose but didn't want isn't a failure, it's just another part of the story.

(Prepping for desert survival is a bad example because there are plenty of character sheet features which apply to that, Survival proficiency, availability of Create Food and Water, carrying capacity, overland travel skills, access to mounts, bonds or local contacts, Knowledge (Geography or Local).)

[Goobahfish]

Getting an outcome you chose but didn't want isn't a failure, it's just another part of the story.

Ok... so this discussion is becoming asinine.

Getting an outcome you didn't want isn't failure? So like when you make a check and roll low... that is an outcome you chose but didn't want...

Where is this distinction you are alluding to? I am seriously struggling here.

---

Let's keep it simple. You are doing a murder mystery plot (a very common D&D thing). You are given clues. You accuse a person erroneously because you misread the clues. No dice are rolled. This is an example of a puzzle that at its core is not roleplaying (because no one needs to say anything). All the clues are too obviously present to make any checks necessary... you pick the wrong person. That is a failure... and a challenge...

The point I am trying to make is that challenging the players being limited to reading a character sheet sounds like an awful version of D&D to me and super roll-centric. I totally agree that arbitrary puzzles are kind of pointless, but there is a lot of grey in between to the extent that there isn't a clear boundary anywhere along this spectrum.

---

Another example... what in your mind is different between...

There is a door through which there is some objective. It requires a Thieves tools check which has a 50% chance of success/failure.

There are two doors, one which leads to the right location, the other which leads the wrong way. You have a 50% chance of success/failure.

One references a character sheet, the other... doesn't?

[GloatingSwine]

Ok... so this discussion is becoming asinine.

Getting an outcome you didn't want isn't failure? So like when you make a check and roll low... that is an outcome you chose but didn't want...


No, because you didn't choose that. (Unless you use loaded dice)

That's the point of the dice, to make it so that you don't have full control and uncertainty exists.


Another example... what in your mind is different between...

There is a door through which there is some objective. It requires a Thieves tools check which has a 50% chance of success/failure.

There are two doors, one which leads to the right location, the other which leads the wrong way. You have a 50% chance of success/failure.

One references a character sheet, the other... doesn't?


If you go the wrong way, you can come back and go the other way instead once you find out it was the wrong way. If you fail to unlock a door the door is still locked and you aren't going anywhere until you pass.

[Goobahfish]

If you go the wrong way, you can come back and go the other way instead once you find out it was the wrong way. If you fail to unlock a door the door is still locked and you aren't going anywhere until you pass.

I'm out. This is not useful.

[Dr.Samurai]

So the problem with this argument is it ignores that fact that 95% of the character isn't on the character sheet. There is a huge number of 'challenges' that never need to reference a character sheet because they are challenges for the player, not the character because naturally the character could do them but the player has to think of it.
How can it possibly be a challenge for the player when the player is roleplaying a character?

This is my issue with this sort of definition of "player challenge". The moral/ethical dilemma should be for the character, not the player. Like... imagine creating an ethical dilemma completely removed from the character but somehow "challenges" the player. What does that even look like? "Oh, the character I'm playing could choose either one of these options and not care about either choice or its consequences, but I as a player am deeply invested in this choice and am struggling to decide". This sounds like the player is removed from the game and has a story already in mind that the DM is deviating from. Is that what people mean?

DM: I know this has nothing to do with my player's character, but it will really make my player struggle so I'm going to do it...

Leave players alone. You're the DM, not god.

[MoiMagnus]

Yeah, because the consistent theme of all of these things is that you can't fail any of them (save by having an IRL tantrum and walking away from the table). Without the possibility of failure, there's no challenge. Getting an outcome you chose but didn't want isn't a failure, it's just another part of the story.

Failure is self-imposed. If I want to obtain a specific result and obtain instead (through mistakes, unknowns and randomness) a result I don't like, that's a failure.

Sure, if I take a relativist approach of "almost whatever happens, the story is going forward so that's a win", then I significantly decrease the amount of failures I will perceive. And if I take an even more extreme take of "it's just a game, so nothing matters", then I literally can't fail.

When you set up a challenge for your players, you usually use your own definition perception of "what is a failure". Which can lead to underwhelming challenges if they don't match up with the players (e.g. if the only risk of a challenge is the death of NPCs the players don't care about), or frustrating games if that's the other way around (e.g. you Devil Ex Machina something that destroy what the players care about without giving them an opportunity to do anything against it).

[KorvinStarmast]

The point I am trying to make is that challenging the players being limited to reading a character sheet sounds like an awful version of D&D to me and super roll-centric. I totally agree that arbitrary puzzles are kind of pointless, but there is a lot of grey in between to the extent that there isn't a clear boundary anywhere along this spectrum.

Another example... what in your mind is different between...

There is a door through which there is some objective. It requires a Thieves tools check which has a 50% chance of success/failure.

There are two doors, one which leads to the right location, the other which leads the wrong way. You have a 50% chance of success/failure.

One references a character sheet, the other... doesn't? And the wrong way tends to have something nasty waiting there. The consequence is burned resources to resolve that before getting back on the right track.

[NichG]

How can it possibly be a challenge for the player when the player is roleplaying a character?

Because there are different schools of thought as to what it means to roleplay. In the school of thought that the goal of roleplaying is to accurately depict a character, the way an actor would, then yes this doesn't make sense.

In the school of thought that roleplaying is about stepping into a different role (as in a relationship to a context) and experiencing that different role as yourself, the idea of 'challenging the character' is inherently nonsensical.

There is no inherent 'should' that obligates everyone involved in tabletop RPGs to only belong to one of these philosophies and not the other.

[Mellack]

The difficulty is when your playstyle is "experiencing that different role as yourself" when that role has dramatically different abilities and skills. I know almost nothing about survival. If my character is caught in a blizzard, I wouldn't be able to try to give any useful ideas myself. But how does that match up with me playing a 12th level ranger with a massive survival skill? Does my character freeze to death because I don't know what to do, or do I get to use the character as written and have them successfully find shelter? If the party finds a sudoku type puzzle in the dungeon, shouldn't the wizard with a 20 INT and a background in Astrology have a much easier time solving that than I do myself? Unless your character matches closely to the skills of the player, I would suggest that one method is better than the other.

[Easy e]

"I talk to the guard in a friendly tone, I sympathise with him about being out on this cold wet night and how little pay he gets for it. Not enough to trouble himself with me surely, whilst slipping a generous amount of coin out of my pocket".

Adjectives, tone, and specific supporting details. Then you roll.

I am probably getting my poster's confused, but how does any of this come from the character sheet?




I mean, this is generally how I do it as well. Describe the goal, what action my character took, and then roll the dice to see the result.

[NichG]

The difficulty is when your playstyle is "experiencing that different role as yourself" when that role has dramatically different abilities and skills. I know almost nothing about survival. If my character is caught in a blizzard, I wouldn't be able to try to give any useful ideas myself. But how does that match up with me playing a 12th level ranger with a massive survival skill? Does my character freeze to death because I don't know what to do, or do I get to use the character as written and have them successfully find shelter? If the party finds a sudoku type puzzle in the dungeon, shouldn't the wizard with a 20 INT and a background in Astrology have a much easier time solving that than I do myself? Unless your character matches closely to the skills of the player, I would suggest that one method is better than the other.

So in the school of thought of stepping into a role yourself, the payoff of the scenario of roleplaying being lost in a blizzard is that you can feel out different survival strategies and try different things and see what happens, without actually freezing to death in a blizzard yourself. To the extent that the role you step into has different abilities, that matters more in the sense of those things being a different set of affordances - a different body that you get to pilot with your own mind. Within that school of thought, it doesn't matter so much that an unrealistic outcome could occur (the experienced woodsman fails to practice basic survival techniques and freezes to death in a blizzard). At the same time, it doesn't invalidate the exercise either to obtain various kinds of training wheels which would help you the player make the correct survival decisions.

What wouldn't serve the ends of that particular school of thought would be if as the player you make incorrect survival decisions for that situation but because the character fictions says 'this character should be able to survive this situation', the character abilities mean that you survive anyhow. Because in that case, the player's presence in the role didn't actually matter. And in that school of thought the player's presence in the role is the point of the exercise.

On the other hand, if you're taking the viewpoint of 'portraying a character', its completely reversed, and it serves the goals of that school of thought much better for the character fiction to determine the outcome first, and then the player depicts that determined outcome to the best of their abilities as an actor.

Neither is 'correct', they're both just things people might want out of playing the game. So talking in terms of 'shoulds' is counter-productive, because it implicitly assumes that the people you're talking to want the same things out of the game as you do. And that might not be the case.

[Composer99]

I'm quite comfortable saying that any attempt to define "challenge" in an RPG so narrowly that the only thing that qualifies as a "challenge" is "did you have to pick up a die and roll it?" is fundamentally wrong, both on its own terms and given that it, in effect, denies that Classical and OSR/FKR-style gameplay (both of which tend to eschew die rolls; the former partly due to lack of procedures/structures, the latter deliberately) are even legitimate ways of playing an RPG!

I don't know if that last consequence is intended, but unintended consequences are consequences nonetheless.

"A challenge in an RPG only counts as such if you picked up a die and rolled it" comes across as GloatingSwine's position, despite there being several denotations (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/challenge) of challenge that could apply to an RPG. If that's not a fair summary, I look forward to being corrected.

Moving on to some more specific items...


How can it possibly be a challenge for the player when the player is roleplaying a character?

This is my issue with this sort of definition of "player challenge". The moral/ethical dilemma should be for the character, not the player. Like... imagine creating an ethical dilemma completely removed from the character but somehow "challenges" the player. What does that even look like? "Oh, the character I'm playing could choose either one of these options and not care about either choice or its consequences, but I as a player am deeply invested in this choice and am struggling to decide". This sounds like the player is removed from the game and has a story already in mind that the DM is deviating from. Is that what people mean?

DM: I know this has nothing to do with my player's character, but it will really make my player struggle so I'm going to do it...

Leave players alone. You're the DM, not god.


The difficulty is when your playstyle is "experiencing that different role as yourself" when that role has dramatically different abilities and skills. I know almost nothing about survival. If my character is caught in a blizzard, I wouldn't be able to try to give any useful ideas myself. But how does that match up with me playing a 12th level ranger with a massive survival skill? Does my character freeze to death because I don't know what to do, or do I get to use the character as written and have them successfully find shelter? If the party finds a sudoku type puzzle in the dungeon, shouldn't the wizard with a 20 INT and a background in Astrology have a much easier time solving that than I do myself? Unless your character matches closely to the skills of the player, I would suggest that one method is better than the other.

I'm on the record upthread pointing out that I have the rather firm view that one cannot ever challenge a character in an RPG; that is impossible. There's no character to challenge. One can only ever challenge the real person sitting at the gaming table - the player.

Some ways one can challenge a player that tie back into these specific remarks above include:
- Challenging their system mastery. Can you build a character that is effective in situations in the game that call for mechanical resolution? And since D&D 5e generally assumes that PCs are working together in parties that cover individuals' gaps in effectiveness, does your party do so?
- Challenging their attention to detail and ability to prepare. If you're traveling into an area during wilderness exploration, do you know enough about it to make informed decisions about how to be prepared for what might occur - packing cold weather gear and perhaps tents to help fend off the hazard of blizzards, for instance? (Making sure this is relevant is on the DM, both by making such concerns matter during gameplay and by making enough information available to players that they have something to work with.)
- Challenging them to imagine their character as someone other than or different from themselves, and then make decisions as to how their character will act in the in-game fiction with those imagined distinctions in mind.

For instance:
- Presenting a moral dilemma in the fiction that a player, acting in their capacity as a player, might not concern themselves with, is clearly challenging them to imaging their character as someone other than or different from themselves, and with that in mind consider how their character would view the dilemma.
- Presenting a survival challenge in the fiction is a question of both system mastery and attention to detail/preparation. Does someone in the party have skills appropriate to surviving hazardous situations in the wilderness? And does the party have proper equipment?
- Presenting a puzzle in the fiction could be a question of challenging the player to make decisions with their character's distinctiveness in mind ("you're the big, dumb, fighter, you wouldn't know how to solve this puzzle") as well as system mastery ("make an Intelligence check to solve the puzzle") - but in OSR/FKR-style gameplay, the puzzle is there to challenge the players.

As a footnote about OSR/FKR, I trust that most readers know what OSR is. For any who aren't familiar, FKR (Free Kriegsspiel Revolution) is, you might say, the most... OSR-iest of OSR trends, taking ideas like "play worlds, not rules" to their logical extreme. It takes its name from the free Kriegsspiel variant of the wargame used by the Prussian Army (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel#The_free_Kriegsspiel_movement) in the 19th century.

I'm not a fan of OSR-style play, for my own part, but it is to my mind a perfectly legitimate style of RPG gameplay for those as like it.

[Mellack]

So in the school of thought of stepping into a role yourself, the payoff of the scenario of roleplaying being lost in a blizzard is that you can feel out different survival strategies and try different things and see what happens, without actually freezing to death in a blizzard yourself. To the extent that the role you step into has different abilities, that matters more in the sense of those things being a different set of affordances - a different body that you get to pilot with your own mind. Within that school of thought, it doesn't matter so much that an unrealistic outcome could occur (the experienced woodsman fails to practice basic survival techniques and freezes to death in a blizzard). At the same time, it doesn't invalidate the exercise either to obtain various kinds of training wheels which would help you the player make the correct survival decisions.


.

What I don't understand is that using this playstyle, you always have choices that didn't matter. If the character freezes to death because the player didn't know about survival, what was the purpose of making a character that is an experienced woodsman? You are placing yourself as a player in these imagined scenarios, not the character. It would seem to me there is no reason to create a character at all, since that imagined character has no real relevance to how the game gets played in such a method. You only ever get to play yourself. I would find that boring, and far too limiting.

[Dr.Samurai]

Because there are different schools of thought as to what it means to roleplay. In the school of thought that the goal of roleplaying is to accurately depict a character, the way an actor would, then yes this doesn't make sense.
Yes, we can call this the "D&D school of thought".

In the school of thought that roleplaying is about stepping into a different role (as in a relationship to a context) and experiencing that different role as yourself, the idea of 'challenging the character' is inherently nonsensical.
It seems to me that virtually anything the player did would be considered a "challenge" by this definition, given that most players don't know a single thing about being a fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric, casting spells, swinging swords, climbing volcanoes, holding their breath for 4 minutes, taking acid damage from an ooze, running up walls, etc, etc, etc, etc.

There is no inherent 'should' that obligates everyone involved in tabletop RPGs to only belong to one of these philosophies and not the other.
This is not as helpful as I suspect you think it is. The OP, as an example, mentions balancing between character and player challenges, whereas your school of thought would, by your own definition, make the idea of challenging characters inherently nonsensical.

Yes, some people play a different way. If those people amount to 4 out of 10 million, then this is largely a technical point.

[NichG]

What I don't understand is that using this playstyle, you always have choices that didn't matter. If the character freezes to death because the player didn't know about survival, what was the purpose of making a character that is an experienced woodsman? You are placing yourself as a player in these imagined scenarios, not the character. It would seem to me there is no reason to create a character at all, since that imagined character has no real relevance to how the game gets played in such a method. You only ever get to play yourself. I would find that boring, and far too limiting.

Well its the entirety of the context. I'm not the president of a country in real life, nor am I ever likely to be, but I can step into the role of someone who is in that position and feel what it might be like to be making those decisions, imagine even in a flawed way experiencing the sorts of challenges or difficulties that come with such a role, and possibly in the end understand things about that job better than if I hadn't played make-believe about it. Still likely to be a flawed understanding of course, but much lower risk, lower cost, and more accessible.

Or I can choose a part of myself to explore that would be unwise or unsafe to pursue in real life and find out how I feel about it in the context of a very low-consequence world. How does it feel to play an assassin or vigilante who ignores abstract philosophical moral theory considerations and just kills those that seem like they deserve it? How does it feel to throw myself into every experience with abandon without any fear of death or harm or risk or consequence, being the ultimate hedonistic sensate? My goal there isn't to depict the vigilante or depict the hedonist, but to feel what it is like to work through those ways of thinking. And as such, fundamentally this kind of thing doesn't require a 'character sheet' at all.

Now as to 'why have a character sheet at all?', the things on the sheet are jumping off points, tools, and inspirations that can be used to help better make contact with the context. E.g. if I'm playing the president of a country, one part of that context is that I could order my army to conduct a maneuver. The decision of whether or not to do that, and what maneuver to conduct, and so on is what I'm exploring in stepping into that role, so it serves the purpose to have that tool be present. On the other hand, if I had something on my sheet that said 'use this to determine if you should order your army to do something', it wouldn't actually serve this particular purpose because it would be replacing my own experience of the role with the GM's. And if there was something that basically abstracted away the entire commanding the army thing, like 'roll Strategy to see if you win a war', then I'm just removing that element of the experience entirely - which is fine if I don't want to actually experience that or am not trying to, but it's counterproductive if what I'm trying to do is feel what it is to be commanding armies.

That's why often the conflicts around this kind of thing (like whether there should be 'social mechanics') center around the difference between people who build a character to engage with something they want to do more of, versus people who build a character to allow them to skip things they don't like or want to personally have to do. E.g. do you build a social butterfly character because you want to engage with complex and deep social scenarios, or do you want to be able to say when a social challenge comes up 'my character deals with this, now lets get back to other parts of the game'?

Personally - and this doesn't have to hold for anyone else's table - the way that works best for me is to find out what people are actually interested in, make the game about what people actually want to be mentally engaged with, avoid including things in the game that force people who don't want to engage with those things to deal with them, and design the game mechanics to provide interesting 'limbs' like a ruler's army that let players touch the world in new ways that are inherently interesting for the players themselves to explore (in the context of what they've said they're interested in). Embrace the 'what if?' sort of thinking and beeline to the stuff that inspires and motivates people to dream.

[Greywander]

But I haven't yet found a way to make this work all that well for social interactions.
The rules you're looking for are on pages 244 and 245 of the DMG. They're also explained in this Animated Spellbook video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4tFyuk4-uDQ).


We don't require deadlifting or juggling to play characters with high Strength or Dexterity, after all.
No but we do require them to exercise tactical thinking and good judgement during combat.

Games have never been just entertainment, they've always been a means to train ourselves to be more competent adults. Tabletop games sharpen your mind, while sports hone your body. D&D is a mental exercise that is all about player challenge. Yes, characters have stats, but the character challenge is part of the player challenge. You might have a silver tongue in real life, but if your character dumped CHA then you'll only have limited success. You can't talk your way out of everything in real life, so this is sort of simulating situations where talking might not work, so you can mentally prepare yourself to deal with those situations in real life, too.

If a D&D player were to get Isekai'd to a fantasy world, they would have a much easier time than the average person. D&D doesn't make you any more physically fit, but it does prepare you to deal with a very wide array of situations you would likely never encounter in real life. You've slain dragons, negotiated with bandit lords, and bamboozled liches. Sure, it may have all been fiction, but you still had to think about the problem, find a potential solution, act it out, then deal with the consequences.

My point is, roleplaying isn't just something we do for fun. It's something that teaches us better social skills, problem solving, and teamwork. Social encounters should use your RL charisma because part of the point is to provide a fun and low risk environment to practice and improve your social skills. The DMG rule above strikes a great balance, giving roughly equal weight to RL skill as to the die roll.

[NichG]

(bit ninja'd on this response, so responding separately)


Yes, we can call this the "D&D school of thought".

No, not at all. If anything, I'd say the 'depict' school of thought is far more common in strong narrative games like World of Darkness and its cousins where there's lots of explicit stuff in the rules saying e.g. you are playing a vampire, vampires are parasites and mockeries of life and constitutionally cannot contribute to improving the world, being a vampire is a constant existential torment that should feel bad at some level even as you slide into corruption, etc. D&D has a bit of this in alignment, but by and large its toothless and not much page space is spent on it.

But of course there are groups that play Vampire as 'we have superpowers and are an antihero team, yay!' and there are groups that play D&D as amateur theater. That's the thing, people totally mix this in D&D and elsewhere. It's much more about the players and what they're looking to get out of the activity than the system, and people will happily ignore the bits of the system that don't align with the experiences they're looking to have. 'We ignore alignment' is a very common houserule for D&D after all. Less common but I've still seen it is to push D&D the other direction and have people write down explicit lists of priorities and motivations and bonds for their character. Heck, I've seen both happen at the same table, with the GM letting people choose and some players erasing alignment from their sheet while others went and added the more complex affiliation system.


Yes, some people play a different way. If those people amount to 4 out of 10 million, then this is largely a technical point.

Unless you think there are 10 million people on GitP, this is far far lower than any reasonable current estimate one could make even just looking at this thread. Maybe, maybe I could buy 2 in 10 here. I'd personally guess more like 50/50 though based on groups I've interacted with over my gaming career. And there's a large middle ground where people want both, but want each thing to take place in specific sub-parts of the game and not to take place in other sub-parts of the game. Lots of people want to use their character sheet for social interactions but would really hate it if combats were boiled down to a Tactics check for example. Plenty of people find their personal player challenge in navigating thousands of pages of complex rules to create builds, but then just want to see how those builds perform and aren't that interested in either of the schools of roleplaying I mentioned. Lots of people enjoy aspects of all three and tolerate all three and will play whatever.

But more to the point, its not just 'largely a technical point' because if you actually understand that the people you're talking to may want something fundamentally different from the game than you do, you can understand the reason for their position. Whereas if you just assume they must want the same thing as you, you're going to argue in circles forever and never actually reach any kind of conclusion or compromise. It's so much cleaner to be able to say 'you're arguing that


It seems to me that virtually anything the player did would be considered a "challenge" by this definition, given that most players don't know a single thing about being a fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric, casting spells, swinging swords, climbing volcanoes, holding their breath for 4 minutes, taking acid damage from an ooze, running up walls, etc, etc, etc, etc.

I mean, it can be, if people find it meaningful to explore those things. Caring about the outcome and caring enough about the activity itself to engage in trying to do it 'well' rather than 'poorly', as well as the ability to make choices that impact the outcome are are prerequisites for something to be a challenge though. In that sense, not knowing about 'taking acid damage from an ooze' doesn't make it a challenge since there's no meaningful decisions to make about it (at least in D&D), and generally its not something that players are motivated to care about inherently as opposed to the broader consequence of the character dying. You could absolutely make an RPG with detailed locational damage and damage avoidance rules and turn 'taking acid damage from an ooze' into a player challenge: is it better to take it on your clothed arm or your bare face or your metal chestplate? If you dodge this way to take it on the chest, does that expose you to a headshot by the bugbear to your east? D&D isn't currently that game.


This is not as helpful as I suspect you think it is. The OP, as an example, mentions balancing between character and player challenges, whereas your school of thought would, by your own definition, make the idea of challenging characters inherently nonsensical.

And other people have said in this thread that the idea of challenging players is inherently nonsensical.

The 'helpful' bit is to realize - both positions can be right! If your goal is one thing, one kind of challenge is inherently un-meaningful. If your goal is this other thing, the other kind of challenge is inherently un-meaningful. The 'correct' way to balance between those kinds of challenge is to understand the distribution of motivations at your own table, then include challenges of each type that do not interfere with or exclude the other. And you can recognize if there's going to be conflicts in goals, like one player wanting to explore complex social interactions themselves, while another player wants to avoid personally engaging in those but also wants to depict a character who dominates in them by virtue of their build, which means you can understand what everyone needs when trying to seek compromises - and you can just speak plainly about when what's on offer to resolve the conflict isn't going to work and maybe a third option is needed.

Whereas 'my way is right, every other way is wrong' is just crippling your own ability to navigate that kind of situation in a way that will be satisfactory. And it means you're going to run into people who will be endlessly frustrating to you because it will just seem like they just are ignoring the facts and logic of your arguments - when really what's going on is that the actual ends you have earmarked to yourself as 'good' are to them 'bad' and vice versa.

[Goobahfish]

How can it possibly be a challenge for the player when the player is roleplaying a character?

This is my issue with this sort of definition of "player challenge". The moral/ethical dilemma should be for the character, not the player. Like... imagine creating an ethical dilemma completely removed from the character but somehow "challenges" the player. What does that even look like? "Oh, the character I'm playing could choose either one of these options and not care about either choice or its consequences, but I as a player am deeply invested in this choice and am struggling to decide". This sounds like the player is removed from the game and has a story already in mind that the DM is deviating from. Is that what people mean?

DM: I know this has nothing to do with my player's character, but it will really make my player struggle so I'm going to do it...

Leave players alone. You're the DM, not god.

I think you might have misunderstood me.
Briefly, when a player says "my character has personality trait X", my immediate reaction as DM is to think of a situation where X differs from the player's personality and generate a situation where the two are in conflict. Now this might sound a bit strange, but it is roleplaying right? I mean... if the situation doesn't force the player to do things they 'the player' wouldn't do then there is no roleplaying going on.

This is inherently a challenge. Hey player, do something you wouldn't normally do, but your character totally would. That is the first way I use 'player challenge' in a roleplay sense.

The second I think is best analogized using the murder mystery example. So, while there are probably a lot of character-centric ways of solving a murder mystery (Investigation, Deception etc.) at its core, it is a player challenge. Use these real clues to solve this mystery using your own logic. If a murder mystery came down to... I make an Insight check to say it was the butler... that would be a very unsatisfying resolution. Likewise if Murder Mysteries aren't a part of D&D... again pretty unsatisfying.

A murder mystery is probably the most explicit example but it doesn't differ massively from infiltrating a castle, or planning a journey etc etc. at its core (i.e. the players are trying to solve a problem, not really the characters).


Failure is self-imposed. If I want to obtain a specific result and obtain instead (through mistakes, unknowns and randomness) a result I don't like, that's a failure.

That's a nice way of putting it.


And the wrong way tends to have something nasty waiting there. The consequence is burned resources to resolve that before getting back on the right track.
Precisely.


The difficulty is when your playstyle is "experiencing that different role as yourself" when that role has dramatically different abilities and skills. I know almost nothing about survival. If my character is caught in a blizzard, I wouldn't be able to try to give any useful ideas myself. But how does that match up with me playing a 12th level ranger with a massive survival skill? Does my character freeze to death because I don't know what to do, or do I get to use the character as written and have them successfully find shelter? If the party finds a sudoku type puzzle in the dungeon, shouldn't the wizard with a 20 INT and a background in Astrology have a much easier time solving that than I do myself? Unless your character matches closely to the skills of the player, I would suggest that one method is better than the other.

This is all true. In the cases where the character >> player then rolling is usually one way around it and DM-fed info is a second (you as a ranger think X would be a good idea). In the sudoku case (which I think exemplifies the meaningless dungeon puzzle) if I were a barbarian, I would sit it out usually (even though I am good at sudoku). That said, sudoku puzzles mid 'multi-player' game are generally a bad idea unless other people have something they can do in the interim.

So, IMO, I don't think it is possible not to challenge the players (because as mentioned previously, system mastery is an inherent player challenge). If a Wizard decides to use web rather than scorching ray, there is some level of 'player' involved in that decision (rather than character). If a dice is rolled, well that is a character challenge right?

In terms of roleplay it is the same. Yeah, there is a moral quandary. The character should be challenged. Kill the king or let the king kill the people (good ol' Jamie Lannister). If that isn't a character challenge, I don't know what is. For the player... what would Jamie Lannister do (a kind of challenge) is it something different from what you would do (another kind of challenge), is there a third way (another kind of player challenge)?

I can't really conceive of a game which is purely one and not the simultaneously the other. What I can conceive of are situations which lean more heavily on one than the other.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I think you might have misunderstood me.
Briefly, when a player says "my character has personality trait X", my immediate reaction as DM is to think of a situation where X differs from the player's personality and generate a situation where the two are in conflict. Now this might sound a bit strange, but it is roleplaying right? I mean... if the situation doesn't force the player to do things they 'the player' wouldn't do then there is no roleplaying going on.


Strong disagree with the bold. In fact, I often set up things so that the personality trait can shine. Put the paladin in places where his Oath is the right (objectively best) way to do things. And you can have roleplaying in the total absence of challenge/situations forcing or even encouraging behavior one way or another.

Take an example that happened during my last session:


Wizard, whose personality doesn't matter much here.
Mutant, who is very much by personality the Team Mom and whose bonds are to the party, mainly because he can't remember much else.


The wizard had, in the previous fight, been killed outright (massive damage FTW). He had then been revivified by the mutant (using a boon). In the aftermath, after everyone was safe, the mutant evinced massive "clinginess" in both word and deed (holding on to the wizard) and suffering emotional turmoil caused by almost losing one of his only friends. There was nothing in the situation that compelled this behavior or the opposite. In fact, it was the purest roleplaying. And I've seen many many of those situations.

----

Of course, I'm on the third side of this debate--I don't do "challenge" as a thing. Not for players or for characters. Players and characters may be challenged as a result of the things that happen, but that's not my driving (or even major) goal. I'm totally fine with the presumption that the characters will get whatever they're attempting to get and succeed at whatever they're attempting. More interesting to me is what do they attempt and how does the world change as a result, along with how does the world react to that change. Mechanics are there merely as aids, so I don't have to do it all myself. I'd be totally fine without using them, except the effort is draining. Mechanics also provide ideas on how things react.

I don't do many puzzles unless they'd fit into the world themselves, and the answers are littered around the play field for characters to uncover. If the players figure it out without those answers...great. If not, the answers are there. But it takes more than "make an Intelligence check to know the solution", because any puzzle that has that simple of a solution isn't an interesting one. I tend to go heavy on the revealed information--I find it more interesting when the players are making informed decisions but have to actually chose between ends and among means that are meaningfully different.

But I don't claim any of that is the only or best way to play. Merely my best way to play.

[Dr.Samurai]

I think you might have misunderstood me.
Briefly, when a player says "my character has personality trait X", my immediate reaction as DM is to think of a situation where X differs from the player's personality and generate a situation where the two are in conflict. Now this might sound a bit strange, but it is roleplaying right? I mean... if the situation doesn't force the player to do things they 'the player' wouldn't do then there is no roleplaying going on.
I want to clarify that I'm speaking generally about how I perceive people to mean "player challenge" when it comes up, and wasn't specifically targeting you. That said, I really disagree with what you just said here lol, and I don't think I'm misunderstanding.

I don't get the compulsion to create this conflict for the player. It seems really strange to me. I don't agree at all that in order for this to be considered "roleplaying" you have to get the player out of their comfort zone. That's why I make the comment of "leave the player alone" and why my previous posts have said I don't like the idea of the DM judging the players and trying to play some sort of psychological game above and beyond the actual TTRPG.

I very strongly agree with what PhoenixPhyre says above about simply running the game and whatever winds up being challenging to the players/characters is challenging. This reads to me as simply running the game for the sake of playing D&D, and not like some strange fixation of the DM to engineer ethical dilemmas for their players for their amusement.

The second I think is best analogized using the murder mystery example. So, while there are probably a lot of character-centric ways of solving a murder mystery (Investigation, Deception etc.) at its core, it is a player challenge. Use these real clues to solve this mystery using your own logic. If a murder mystery came down to... I make an Insight check to say it was the butler... that would be a very unsatisfying resolution. Likewise if Murder Mysteries aren't a part of D&D... again pretty unsatisfying.

A murder mystery is probably the most explicit example but it doesn't differ massively from infiltrating a castle, or planning a journey etc etc. at its core (i.e. the players are trying to solve a problem, not really the characters).
Yeah this just reads to me like normal expectations of playing the game. If someone says "I ran a murder mystery game" it sounds pretty normal, as opposed to "I checked out what type of characters my players were playing, then mapped that against each player's personalities to determine where the conflict was so I can make them squirm". Like, just note that a player trying to solve a riddle is miles apart from what you first said in your post about their personality.

I could, as a player, go to the table and analyze my friend's DM's lab experiment's personality as well, and then base my character's actions on generating personality conflicts for my DM to get them out of their comfort zone. But I would never think of this because it isn't the point of playing the game.

With regards to NichG's comments about how "every way to play is the correct way", it's all nice and stuff, but consider that Personality Traits are one of the ways the game encourages Roleplaying, suggesting that the DM hand out Inspiration when you roleplay according to your Traits and Ideal, and the consequences of your Flaw and Bond. The immediate reaction to generate conflict with the Traits seems counter-productive to what it is there for. As PhoenixPhyre says, you want to encourage the Traits/Ideal/Bond/Flaw, not "challenge" their use. Bonds and Flaws already create tension or potential conflict for the player, if they choose to roleplay those.

And that's why this attitude of "challenging the player" seems needlessly authoritative, to me. It seems there are already structures in place from the handbooks to play the game, but the DM wants to see very specific things out of their players, based on personality. And that just seems weird to me, like above and beyond what the game is about.

[NichG]

With regards to NichG's comments about how "every way to play is the correct way", it's all nice and stuff, but consider that Personality Traits are one of the ways the game encourages Roleplaying, suggesting that the DM hand out Inspiration when you roleplay according to your Traits and Ideal, and the consequences of your Flaw and Bond. The immediate reaction to generate conflict with the Traits seems counter-productive to what it is there for. As PhoenixPhyre says, you want to encourage the Traits/Ideal/Bond/Flaw, not "challenge" their use. Bonds and Flaws already create tension or potential conflict for the player, if they choose to roleplay those.

Just to clarify, it wasn't my position in this thread that challenge was about trying to generate conflict with listed traits. You could absolutely do that, and it would be a valid way to play for certain goals people might have at the table - in the sense of e.g. helping players learn to be better actors, it'd be a pretty good exercise.

My style is more to generate situations that ask people to make abstract choices about their positions with regards to philosophical views, ideals, etc. A campaign centers around one or two underlying non-trivial abstract questions that have no easy answer, and arcs of the campaign are that question being asked in different concrete contexts. The choices the players make answer those questions, and that is a 'player challenge' in the sense that it requires thought and is non-trivial and has no obvious right answer that you're supposed to take - but the answers you give will have consequences that you may or may not end up being satisfied with. But it's a player challenge rather than a character challenge (inasmuch as anyone would even call it a 'challenge' at all) in that the character sheets do not determine the answers ultimately given or their consequences, even if the character sheets may participate in the process the players take to coming up with those answers (if the players choose for that to be the case).

I don't think its actually all that far off PhoenixPhyre's position, except maybe the higher emphasis in my stuff on there always being some kind of non-trivial conceptual clash underlying the campaign that requires effort to even be understood, let alone to make satisfying decisions around.

[Goobahfish]

Strong disagree with the bold. In fact, I often set up things so that the personality trait can shine. Put the paladin in places where his Oath is the right (objectively best) way to do things. And you can have roleplaying in the total absence of challenge/situations forcing or even encouraging behavior one way or another.

I'm not sure we actually disagree here. Perhaps my framing was too strong. There are many things I think about and not everything I create is intentionally some kind of psychological 'SAW' game.

But... if a player's reactions and a character's reaction are the same... is that roleplaying? Like... it might be... it isn't definitively not roleplaying? Playing yourself is easy in a way. Only when the two (character reaction/player reaction) diverge does the 'real roleplaying' happen (i.e. it requires effort). Even in your example, it sounds like the player was roleplaying in so far as 'being clingy' doesn't really serve any purpose other than narrative fun. An optimiser player wouldn't engage with this because it serves no 'get XP/gold' purpose... or at least no obvious purpose (depends on how deep you get into planning).


I want to clarify that I'm speaking generally about how I perceive people to mean "player challenge" when it comes up, and wasn't specifically targeting you. That said, I really disagree with what you just said here lol, and I don't think I'm misunderstanding.

I don't get the compulsion to create this conflict for the player. It seems really strange to me. I don't agree at all that in order for this to be considered "roleplaying" you have to get the player out of their comfort zone. That's why I make the comment of "leave the player alone" and why my previous posts have said I don't like the idea of the DM judging the players and trying to play some sort of psychological game above and beyond the actual TTRPG.

Some of the above applies to this too. Don't get me wrong, this isn't my only goal, but if a player says... "my character is brave". If I as a DM am taking that statement seriously, a theme for that character has to be bravery at some level. It either means... like eldritch horror stuff (where they can be 'braver' than others), or throwing battles they have to run from (test bravery vs stupidity) or situations where running would be an awful choice (reward bravery) or the only choice (punish bravery) etc etc.. I feel like if I don't do that I'm not engaging with my player's characters properly. It's not all one end of the axis but one end of that axis is definitely going to be... save the baby from the very scary doom monster. It isn't so much about comfort zones as about buy in to the concept of character. A bit like... Faulkner's "the human heart at war with itself" or Shakespearean tragedy.


"I checked out what type of characters my players were playing, then mapped that against each player's personalities to determine where the conflict was so I can make them squirm"

I think I agree up to the last word. I prefer "roleplay". That said, this is a bit of conflation. The murder mystery part is more a reference to "players need to play intelligently" even if there are no dice (hence the challenge argument). The roleplay 'player challenge' is a slightly different concept so yeah... English sucks as a language. "Ethical Challenge" (kind of a roleplay challenge) vs "Deductive Challenge" (thinking) vs "Tactical Challenge" (do battle well). As opposed to "Character Challenge" which is basically a dice-roll. Most of my previous posts are that the first three are not just fine but probably 'good'.

[Segev]

Tabletop RPGs allow for greater variety of interactions, but stopping to think about role play in terms of cRPGs may help with figuring out how to work player and character challenge together.

View the dice and the character sheet as the controls you have to manipulate the game with. (This is not exhaustive, but let's start there.) You still decide what buttons to push and what knobs to twist and how far. You decide where to place your character on the battlefield, what actions to take , etc. You decide if you're going to sweet talk, intimidate, or bluff the NPC at the ball.

You decide whether to use fireball or magic missile. You decide whether to press the king's advisor on the lie you caught him in with that insight roll, or to seduce him because you picked up on him finding you attractive, or to break off with him now that you realize he has a rival in court who may get you what you want.

Dice rolls determine the success of your actions, how much information you glean, etc., but what actions you take and how you use that information – including whether to dig for more – is up to you, the player.

Your choices of what tactics to use and what goals to even set are all part of role playing. The character's capabilities define how well you may or may not do at various tactics.

[Dr.Samurai]

Just to clarify, it wasn't my position in this thread that challenge was about trying to generate conflict with listed traits. You could absolutely do that, and it would be a valid way to play for certain goals people might have at the table - in the sense of e.g. helping players learn to be better actors, it'd be a pretty good exercise.

My style is more to generate situations that ask people to make abstract choices about their positions with regards to philosophical views, ideals, etc. A campaign centers around one or two underlying non-trivial abstract questions that have no easy answer, and arcs of the campaign are that question being asked in different concrete contexts. The choices the players make answer those questions, and that is a 'player challenge' in the sense that it requires thought and is non-trivial and has no obvious right answer that you're supposed to take - but the answers you give will have consequences that you may or may not end up being satisfied with. But it's a player challenge rather than a character challenge (inasmuch as anyone would even call it a 'challenge' at all) in that the character sheets do not determine the answers ultimately given or their consequences, even if the character sheets may participate in the process the players take to coming up with those answers (if the players choose for that to be the case).

I don't think its actually all that far off PhoenixPhyre's position, except maybe the higher emphasis in my stuff on there always being some kind of non-trivial conceptual clash underlying the campaign that requires effort to even be understood, let alone to make satisfying decisions around.
Right. I think the issue is explaining these themes and insisting on using the word "challenge". Note that you think you're close in thought to PhoneixPhyre, who doesn't think of this in terms of player or character challenges. And when I see you and others explain what you mean by player challenge, I always feel you're just describing the default game (roleplaying).


I think I agree up to the last word. I prefer "roleplay". That said, this is a bit of conflation. The murder mystery part is more a reference to "players need to play intelligently" even if there are no dice (hence the challenge argument). The roleplay 'player challenge' is a slightly different concept so yeah... English sucks as a language. "Ethical Challenge" (kind of a roleplay challenge) vs "Deductive Challenge" (thinking) vs "Tactical Challenge" (do battle well). As opposed to "Character Challenge" which is basically a dice-roll. Most of my previous posts are that the first three are not just fine but probably 'good'.
"Players need to play intelligently" is different from "this particular player doesn't like or isn't good at mysteries, so I'm going to make them solve a mystery", which is what it sounded like you were describing before.

I just started a Greyhawk game with a character that has a tragic backstory and is currently a devotee of an evil god. The DM and I discussed some potential threads and if this plays out, the character will eventually have to make a decision to continue down the road he is on (leading likely to an evil outcome) or seek redemption. I don't consider this a player challenge. I do consider it a character challenge, the character is the one in turmoil and trying to right wrongs and contend with what has happened to them, etc. It's their choice to make, even if I, as the player am making it. If the DM piles on a whole bunch of in-character considerations in the game to make this a really super duper difficult decision for me to make, I still consider it a character challenge.

If this character is in a dungeon and has to solve a riddle to open a door, I just consider that an encounter. It's got nothing to do with me really except I have to solve the riddle, but I also have to roleplay all the time too to play the game, and fight monsters, and speak with NPCs, etc. If the riddle is a "player" challenge, it seems to me everything else is as well.

When I think of "player challenge", I think of something like "Dr. Samurai really doesn't handle goats very well, so I'm going to deliberately entwine his character arc with goats because tension/drama/conflict".

[NichG]

"Players need to play intelligently" is different from "this particular player doesn't like or isn't good at mysteries, so I'm going to make them solve a mystery", which is what it sounded like you were describing before.


I was never describing that. I think you were the one who introduced that idea to the thread actually when saying why you didn't like player challenge over character challenge.

My stance is: if I am going to choose to play or run a game that has mysteries as a central element, then for my goals as a player or DM I think it is important that the players are the ones responsible for figuring those mysteries out, rather than their characters. Their characters can matter as far as the tools that the players can use to gather or check information, access and protect evidence, stuff that can augment player ability, etc - but should not have 'skip' buttons that bypass the mystery-solving gameplay. If the person playing the Int 4 character happens to figure out what's going on and the person playing the Int 28 character doesn't, for me that is totally fine because my goal is not about people at the table accurately depicting the attributes of their characters.



If this character is in a dungeon and has to solve a riddle to open a door, I just consider that an encounter. It's got nothing to do with me really except I have to solve the riddle, but I also have to roleplay all the time too to play the game, and fight monsters, and speak with NPCs, etc. If the riddle is a "player" challenge, it seems to me everything else is as well.

Yes, this is the point, everything in the game that the player's ability engages with is a 'player challenge'. That something is challenging to a player does not imply that the DM has adversarially constructed it to attack that player. That something is challenging to a character does not imply that the DM has adversarially constructed it to undermine the character. I think that's just your hangup here, and no one else is saying that.

[Demonslayer666]

Players should roleplay their characters and not use player knowledge unless they think their character would know it. Allowing players to use player knowledge encourages them to read the monster manual to give their characters an edge, or do silly things like invent gunpowder.

Testing player knowledge should be kept light and fun with puzzles and riddles, and not be a roadblock by stopping progression of the game.

A player's limitations should not prevent their characters from accomplishing things. A shy player playing an extremely charismatic and talented, fast-talking bard should not be penalized because they can't roleplay it well. The bard is still extremely good at face skills regardless of how well the player can schmooze.

A player's talent/knowledge should not allow them to accomplish things their character has no skill/knowledge at. Allowing a player to roleplay a fast-talking charismatic character that has no social talent and a low charisma is basically cheating.

As DM, I warn players when they make mistakes if I think there character would know better.

[GloatingSwine]

I was never describing that. I think you were the one who introduced that idea to the thread actually when saying why you didn't like player challenge over character challenge.

My stance is: if I am going to choose to play or run a game that has mysteries as a central element, then for my goals as a player or DM I think it is important that the players are the ones responsible for figuring those mysteries out, rather than their characters. Their characters can matter as far as the tools that the players can use to gather or check information, access and protect evidence, stuff that can augment player ability, etc - but should not have 'skip' buttons that bypass the mystery-solving gameplay. If the person playing the Int 4 character happens to figure out what's going on and the person playing the Int 28 character doesn't, for me that is totally fine because my goal is not about people at the table accurately depicting the attributes of their characters.


But then the question is "why bring characters with mechanically defined stats?". If mystery solving gameplay can't interact with the characters, it's a bad fit for the game you're playing.

[NichG]

But then the question is "why bring characters with mechanically defined stats?". If mystery solving gameplay can't interact with the characters, it's a bad fit for the game you're playing.

Why have different characters in a game like Street Fighter, which is mostly about player skill? Those characters provide different chassis and different contexts for that player skill to engage with. But in the end, if the characters are such that it matters more that you picked Chun Li vs Zangief than that you're good at playing it would defeat the design aims of skill-based gameplay. And in the context of a skill game, someone could for example play by using only the moves that those characters have in common and ignore the special moves and still be able to win. Or even win by using nothing more than 'light punch' and really good timing.

Similarly, character abilities in tabletop games can act as extra tools that player skill can be used to wield. But at least for my reasons for playing, those things are means rather than ends. 'This thing on the character sheet was important to what happened' is not a terminal goal of play for me, any more than 'I used Chun Li's Lightning Kick to win this fight' would be the terminal goal of playing Street Fighter over 'I won this fight'. But that doesn't mean that Lightning Kick is better off not existing, or that the character sheet is better off not existing.

Concretely in terms of a mystery campaign, if someone uses character abilities to break into a government archive and access records or to magically detect traces that wouldn't be visible otherwise or to get a hint that two of the suspects seem to be hiding something or whatever (but none of which overtly puts the pieces together for the player) or to wield authority to have the cops surveil certain areas or people - that's perfectly fine by me! Those are all abilities that augment the gameplay of 'solve the mystery' rather than replacing it. And if someone figures out the mystery without ever needing to do any of that, that's fine too!. That's the point, not that character abilities must be carefully prevented from being relevant, but also that if it turns out they were relevant that's no better or worse than if they weren't. It's a neutral value, because those abilities are there for the players, not for someone looking at the game from outside and judging whether or not the characters mattered.

When I'm designing systems, this is why I tend to avoid characters having mechanically defined stats for things like 'intelligence' that overlap with what players will be doing OOC anyhow, and instead focus on things the players cannot actually take over for the character like 'perception' instead.

[Dr.Samurai]

I was never describing that. I think you were the one who introduced that idea to the thread actually when saying why you didn't like player challenge over character challenge.
I wasn't responding to you...

My stance is: if I am going to choose to play or run a game that has mysteries as a central element, then for my goals as a player or DM I think it is important that the players are the ones responsible for figuring those mysteries out, rather than their characters. Their characters can matter as far as the tools that the players can use to gather or check information, access and protect evidence, stuff that can augment player ability, etc - but should not have 'skip' buttons that bypass the mystery-solving gameplay. If the person playing the Int 4 character happens to figure out what's going on and the person playing the Int 28 character doesn't, for me that is totally fine because my goal is not about people at the table accurately depicting the attributes of their characters.
Again, I think we're really overthinking this. Even if it's "the characters" figuring it out, you can still have the Int 4 character rolling well enough to solve the mystery, unless you're specifically not allowing it to be solved by rolling.

But I could say this about anything. To quote you but swap out a few words: If I choose to run a hack and slash game with combat as a central element, then for my goals as a player or DM I think it is important that the players are the ones responsible for figuring the combats out, rather than their characters.

This is the same thing. The players choose where to move on the map, which enemies to target first and with what attacks/features/etc. You are just describing the game. That's it. You guys are talking about the game and calling it "player challenge".

Yes, this is the point, everything in the game that the player's ability engages with is a 'player challenge'.
The player "engages" with literally everything in the game. The player chooses what skills they are proficient in, when they ask the DM if they can roll, what weapon they use, which spells they know and have prepared, etc etc etc. Every choice made in the game is impacted by the player engaging. In other words, this definition is hardly useful.

That something is challenging to a player does not imply that the DM has adversarially constructed it to attack that player. That something is challenging to a character does not imply that the DM has adversarially constructed it to undermine the character. I think that's just your hangup here, and no one else is saying that.
Yes, it is a hangup of mine, and I've been pretty clear about that and clarified it again, as the person I was ACTUALLY replying to mentioned that their IMMEDIATE REACTION upon hearing a character's traits is to butt that up against the player's personality and find where they conflict. That sounds more like my hangup than your "when the players are doing stuff, that's a player challenge" position.

[GloatingSwine]

Why have different characters in a game like Street Fighter, which is mostly about player skill? Those characters provide different chassis and different contexts for that player skill to engage with. But in the end, if the characters are such that it matters more that you picked Chun Li vs Zangief than that you're good at playing it would defeat the design aims of skill-based gameplay. And in the context of a skill game, someone could for example play by using only the moves that those characters have in common and ignore the special moves and still be able to win. Or even win by using nothing more than 'light punch' and really good timing.


If you think there's ever been a fighting game where the characters are balanced and don't have profoundly different winrates in competitive play, I have a bridge to sell you.

Different characters are better in different specific matchups, and some have a better balance of matchups than others. Some are so overwhelmingly good they have to be banned entirely.

Character abilities in tabletop games are the tools which the players use to interact with the world, because the characters are the ones that are in that world. And that should be represented faithfully in all different types of activity those characters engage in. You keep going back to things like mysteries or puzzles, but what about a strength test? Do you require your players to go and bench 400lb to figure out if their character can lift a heavy thing? Do you challenge them to a duel to first blood to see who wins a combat?

I suspect not.

Because the characters are the ones doing those things.

Mysteries in the game should be written so that the skills, background, bonds, and possessions of the characters are relevant to solving them. Because the characters are the ones that are real in the place the mystery exists, not the players.

[NichG]

I wasn't responding to you...

Whoops, sorry! Ignore that then.


Again, I think we're really overthinking this. Even if it's "the characters" figuring it out, you can still have the Int 4 character rolling well enough to solve the mystery, unless you're specifically not allowing it to be solved by rolling.

Right, but I'm saying this in the context of explicitly not allowing there to be mechanics which permit mysteries to be directly 'solved by rolling' in order to explain why I want to that design decision.



But I could say this about anything. To quote you but swap out a few words: If I choose to run a hack and slash game with combat as a central element, then for my goals as a player or DM I think it is important that the players are the ones responsible for figuring the combats out, rather than their characters.

This is the same thing. The players choose where to move on the map, which enemies to target first and with what attacks/features/etc. You are just describing the game. That's it. You guys are talking about the game and calling it "player challenge".
The player "engages" with literally everything in the game. The player chooses what skills they are proficient in, when they ask the DM if they can roll, what weapon they use, which spells they know and have prepared, etc etc etc. Every choice made in the game is impacted by the player engaging. In other words, this definition is hardly useful.


It maybe sounds obvious in the context of certain decisions that have historically been the player's to decide. But every month or so there's a debate on these forums about things like 'should you have social skills and Charisma and so on let a character convince another character to do something just based on a roll?'. Without actually talking about the reasons people have for gaming, there's just a sort of arbitrary boundary that people draw - maybe because they like certain parts of the game more than others, maybe because they dislike certain parts of the game more than others, maybe because they prioritize roleplay as acting, or roleplay as experience, or because their sense of verisimilitude falls a certain way, or just because that's how they've always done it so it feels more natural to them than another way of breaking it down between player and character...

So talking about it explicitly and saying what you want to accomplish by having some things fall on the player skill side and other things fall on the character numbers side, etc, is how you cut past all of that ambiguity. That's the sense in which this definition of 'player challenge' can be useful. If in some sense it wasn't already present to some degree in pretty much all games, it would be a lot less useful, because then it would be more clearly totally alien to some tables. Whereas if all tables accept some level of player challenge and the main thing is about 'what aspects of player skill do we want this particular game to engage with?' that's much clearer.


If you think there's ever been a fighting game where the characters are balanced and don't have profoundly different winrates in competitive play, I have a bridge to sell you.

Different characters are better in different specific matchups, and some have a better balance of matchups than others. Some are so overwhelmingly good they have to be banned entirely.


The thing with competitive play is that the range of skill narrows as you get to the top, so it becomes a lot harder to actually preserve the feeling of 'I could play any character' that you have when you're still learning the game. The whole dynamics of adjusting the meta of competitive games constantly is basically chasing that dragon, trying to keep even the most skilled players in that sweet spot all the time. It's legitimately difficult to do, but it is a strong motivation to try to keep player skill relevant while allowing those choices in the design philosophy those things pursue. Even if they fail to do that, 'doing it better is considered good'. Whereas what you've been talking about is a different set of design goals - ensuring that the character choice is noticeable and important to all outcomes.

Don't conflate failing to perfectly achieve a design goal with actually wanting the opposite.



Character abilities in tabletop games are the tools which the players use to interact with the world, because the characters are the ones that are in that world. And that should be represented faithfully in all different types of activity those characters engage in. You keep going back to things like mysteries or puzzles, but what about a strength test? Do you require your players to go and bench 400lb to figure out if their character can lift a heavy thing? Do you challenge them to a duel to first blood to see who wins a combat?

I suspect not.


I don't do that in my games, but I would consider those things to be equally valid games to the things I do run. For example, LARPs with foam weapons are a valid form of roleplay to me, even if my situation is such that I'm not going to be running those sorts of games. I've been in a game where the GM offered to players that if their characters failed a Fortitude save, they could do push-ups to add +1 for every five they managed to complete. I've been in a game where a contest between my character and Death took the form of rapid-building Minecraft levels and having the other players judge them, because part of the purpose of my character to me in that game was to explore the idea of being a creator of worlds. I don't think those gameplay experiences are usually how things are done at 99% of tables, but I don't think they're badwrongfun.

The 'because' is putting a philosophical abstract above the idea that we all sit down at a table within things in mind that we want to be doing. There is no responsibility to accurately represent characters, to 'roleplay properly', etc. There's no special reward WotC will come down and deliver unto you for roleplaying 'the right way', no special afterlife for the people who never metagamed at all during their career as a tabletop gamer. 'Should' exists only relative to the goals of the people at the table, based on what they want out of that shared experience.

Your goal and my goal are not the same. What systems and rules should do for me is not what they should do for you.

[Goobahfish]

"Players need to play intelligently" is different from "this particular player doesn't like or isn't good at mysteries, so I'm going to make them solve a mystery", which is what it sounded like you were describing before.

My apologies for the lack of clarity. I try not to dish out challenges the player dislike (because I'm not crazy). It is more about challenges which split the character/player incentives. Specifically they are 'not really' challenges to the character (because to them they are just doing their thing), although sometimes they are (would you kill this orphan? how about two orphans?) but rather they exist to give the player the space to roleplay in.



When I think of "player challenge", I think of something like "Dr. Samurai really doesn't handle goats very well, so I'm going to deliberately entwine his character arc with goats because tension/drama/conflict".

ROFL... there will be goats.


Testing player knowledge should be kept light and fun with puzzles and riddles, and not be a roadblock by stopping progression of the game.
A good summary I think. The point here is that testing player knowledge shouldn't be forbidden, just not all-consuming.

As an aside:
I think solving a murder mystery by rolling is pretty bad. I feel like 'something went wrong' and as a DM, if that really happened... they would fail to solve the mystery but I would direct the play some other way (i.e. that failure has consequences but isn't a road block). I can't imagine even if a player rolled high and 'solved' the mystery that anyone would feel satisfied by the outcome. Better it remains a mystery or more clues are provided.