The "Difficulty" Question

[BRC]

So, I've heard this from a few different DMs, where they ask their players some variant on "How hard do you want Combat to be?"

And Players often come back with some variant of "Give us a challenge!" or "Oh, we want high lethality"

As has often been noted, what players usually want is some variant of "We want to always Win, but feel challenged". Few players want to come out and say "Give us easy fights that pose no real challenge".


So, the question is, what is the best way to approach the Combat Difficulty conversation such that you get a good idea of what player's want without them feel like they're asking for you to softball them?

Off the top of my head, I think a good starting point is to break down what sort of things a player might enjoy out of a game and ask them to compare those things.

Rather than say "How hard should combat be, on a scale of 1 to 10", ask them to rate various statements alongside each other, like

"Combat should be a test of our ability to make tactically correct decisions" vs "I care more about being creative in combat than making optimal moves". Frame combat not as a sliding scale of difficulty, but as a test vs an opportunity for expression.

Or, ask how stressful combat should feel. Frame choosing "easy" not as admitting you CAN'T win hard combats, and more about choosing a more relaxing, less stressful experience.

Anybody else have thoughts on how to approach this?

[Zuras]

Normally players aren’t interested in generic “difficulty”, they’re interested in verisimilitude. They want the opponents that should be dangerous to feel dangerous. They don’t need every fight to be dangerous, they just need a few periodically where they feel threatened.

The ideal setup for player satisfaction is when they have a fight where they’re ambushed themselves, or otherwise fight without any advantages, and feel like they barely survive, then later fight the same or similar opponents on the party’s terms, and curb-stomp them.

As long as the players feel like their choices and tactics matter, they will usually be happy.

[PhoenixPhyre]

As a side note, players (at least in my experience) are notoriously lousy at determining actual difficulty. They'll be like "phew, barely scraped through that one" when, from my side, it was an easy victory. Basically, if they had to use any significant resource, it was a "hard fight". And if anyone went to zero, it was a "really really hard fight".

[BRC]

As a side note, players (at least in my experience) are notoriously lousy at determining actual difficulty. They'll be like "phew, barely scraped through that one" when, from my side, it was an easy victory. Basically, if they had to use any significant resource, it was a "hard fight". And if anyone went to zero, it was a "really really hard fight".
This can be a side-effect of D&D's resource-based game-play, where individual encounters are expected to form a gauntlet.


For example, an encounter against a big group of weak enemies may feel trivial if the Spellcaster starts throwing fireballs, or soul grindingly difficult if the spellcaster either decides to save their slots, or has already used them up. Spending resources doesn't usually FEEL like triumphing over difficult odds unless you are backed into a corner and have no choice but to use something you were saving. You rarely know how hard the fight would have been had you NOT used those resources.

[Kurt Kurageous]

I think this is really part of the session zero, "How do you feel about character death?" It's not specific to combat, but implies combat because that's the source of most fatality in the game.

I try to create combats that are significant in purpose to the story. Combat is a form of conflict. Conflict is essential to a story.

Sure the party can win, and will win, but what is the price of victory? Is this fight unavoidable? Is there a better way? Is there another purpose at work?

Don't forget, there are two sides to a fight. If you are dealing with intelligent foes, remember they get a vote, too. If they attacked first, they most have thought they could win. Why did they think so? Or were they on orders to do a suicide mission? What happened to motivate them so highly?

If you are dealing with unintelligent foes, you may often have short and pointless fights, or highly dangerous ones with implacable senseless foes. Oozes that live in a cave that attracts unwitting creatures will become a cave with a lot more oozes.

[Talakeal]

I would assume that one of my posts likely inspired this thread, but I will throw my 2cp in nonetheless.

I find that my players grossly overestimate the difficulty of any encounter.

If they have a "close call" where loss was actually a possibility, it must have been a horribly over-tuned impossibly deadly scenario that they only survived due to luck or brilliance.

What they consider a "balanced" fight is one which is easy enough for them to lose no matter how bad their dice rolls or tactics.


I have always looked for an objective measure of balance, and I generally shoot for "each adventuring day uses up most of the party's resources" leaving them with between 1 and 25% of spell slots, HP, and charged items / abilities remaining, assuming average dice rolls and tactics.

Of course, exactly where this lies depends on party synergy, player experience, and how well their specific builds do against the obstacles in question (for example, undead will be easier for a cleric and a paladin than a mind controller and a rogue in 3.5).

[Zuras]

This can be a side-effect of D&D's resource-based game-play, where individual encounters are expected to form a gauntlet.


For example, an encounter against a big group of weak enemies may feel trivial if the Spellcaster starts throwing fireballs, or soul grindingly difficult if the spellcaster either decides to save their slots, or has already used them up. Spending resources doesn't usually FEEL like triumphing over difficult odds unless you are backed into a corner and have no choice but to use something you were saving. You rarely know how hard the fight would have been had you NOT used those resources.

It’s also just the perspective of controlling a single character versus a small army. GMs get desensitized to how threatening it feels to be one good hit away from being knocked out when it’s your only unit.

[Ionathus]

Echoing some of the other sentiments in here: my players respond positively to having more creative choices and feeling like they're up against a smart opponent.

Actual challenge is secondary to the fight "feeling" good, of it having moments of high drama where a single action changes the course of the battle, and having moments where everyone goes "oh ****, the monster's breath can do 74 damage" and having to think on the fly.

This is just speculation on my part, based on what my players react positively to, but I think when players say they want "challenge," they're often talking about unpredictability. If the outcome of the fight is obvious to everyone, why are we still rolling dice? Nobody wants to slog through fighting low-level bandits if the stakes are 10-15 HP on your level 12 paladin.

At the end of the day, D&D is not a perfectly-tuned and balanced tactical wargame. "Difficulty" in D&D isn't just about HP and modifiers and probability of dying. It's also about the difficulty of analyzing the situation and thinking creatively, and finding a way to tell the best story for yourself and your friends. Finding a way to reward that mental game without veering into Calvinball is a huge balancing act of every combat I run.

[icefractal]

I have always looked for an objective measure of balance, and I generally shoot for "each adventuring day uses up most of the party's resources" leaving them with between 1 and 25% of spell slots, HP, and charged items / abilities remaining, assuming average dice rolls and tactics.YMMV, but to me it would feel like a desperate situation if we were regularly ending the day with our resources down to 1% or even 10%.

Like, IC, there's not a concept of "encounters per day". The fact that we've already faced five encounters doesn't mean nothing else will attack us that day (nor does the fact that we've only faced one encounter guarantee that anything will). So being unable to take on another encounter means "we're in great danger, we need to retreat ASAP and hope nothing attacks us - and really we should have retreated at least one encounter earlier"

That happens once, and it's just "wow, we had a tough time that day". It happens consistently and it's more like "we're in over our heads, barely managing to keep up with the onslaught, but so far we've survived". Which might be fine if that's the intended tone, but don't be expecting my character to act confident in such a situation unless they're a daredevil.


On the more general question of combat difficulty, my personal feeling would be -
If the average fight is deadly enough that making non-optimal moves* spells defeat, then the difficulty is too high.
Some fights can be that challenging. But to me, if I just wanted pure sweaty** combat I'd play a competitive video game - TTRPG fights should (usually) have room for the RP.

*I'm not talking about ridiculous moves, just stuff like "I'll give them one chance to surrender instead of going straight to CdG", or "I'm going to keep attacking the guy who personally kicked my dog rather than go after this random minion who would be more tactically ideal"
**Sweaty in the sense of intense focus and effort

[Talakeal]

YMMV, but to me it would feel like a desperate situation if we were regularly ending the day with our resources down to 1% or even 10%.

Like, IC, there's not a concept of "encounters per day". The fact that we've already faced five encounters doesn't mean nothing else will attack us that day (nor does the fact that we've only faced one encounter guarantee that anything will). So being unable to take on another encounter means "we're in great danger, we need to retreat ASAP and hope nothing attacks us - and really we should have retreated at least one encounter earlier"

That happens once, and it's just "wow, we had a tough time that day". It happens consistently and it's more like "we're in over our heads, barely managing to keep up with the onslaught, but so far we've survived". Which might be fine if that's the intended tone, but don't be expecting my character to act confident in such a situation unless they're a daredevil.

I posit that anyone who isn't a daredevil wouldn't be an adventurer. Dungeons are full of monsters and treasure! It is the very definition of a high stakes high reward occupation!

That being said, its more to do with the nature of the game as being about resource depletion. If you don't grind the PCs down, there is literally zero challenge or danger.

To use a real life analogy, its more like setting a budget for a business than playing Russian roulette. And, much like a business, if you do happen to go over on occasion, it isn't the end of the world, you just dip into your slush fund or take out a loan (in an RPG this usually means potions, scrolls, and favors from NPCs).

Although I do agree 1-10% is cutting it pretty close, 15-20% is a much more common number.

[Xervous]

Difficulty isn’t as clear cut as raising the number slider on a Bethesda game.

To start this conversation I’d ask the players what their expectations are for: a small group of orcs, one lone town guard, a whole orc encampment, a dragon, an orc assassin ambush. I’d ask what other games the players have sampled and if their expectations are easily summarized with those games.

“So there’s a dragon living in Mt Certain Death. You could go there if you’d like. What do you expect to happen if you do?”

“So there’s a large fortress full of angry orcs, again it’s your choice to go here. What do you expect to happen if you go here?”

There are no wrong answers from the players here. It gives me an opportunity to say “well that would probably lead to X because of how I run things...” which in turn could prompt the players to reply.

Player: “Oh a dragon we can go to? Let’s fight it!”

GM: “Okay everyone dies.”

Player: “What? You said we could go there. Why let us waste time just to die?”

Or

Player: “Let’s financially take over the nearby towns and get some trade going with the nearby dwarf city for some equipment and...”

GM: “Look, I’m not here to play a city and politics simulator. There’s a big world to explore, this system is suited to combat, I’d have offered to run XYZ if we were shooting for more political stuff.”

Player: “Could we build influence with the rulers by solving problems at our pay grade and use the good favor to assemble an expedition to take down the dragon?”

The topic of difficulty isn’t so much a number, it’s a pattern. It’s about knowing the answer to “knock knock”, the meaning of life and everything, or there are 10 kinds of people in this world. It’s about presenting stuff that meets expectations, preferably by setting up your players’ expectations.

[Telok]

Funny. I just say "Opposition will be based on the logical consequences of the setting, the npc's situation & abilities, and the parties actions. Combat is up to you".

The primitive tribals with flint tipped spears don't get more powerful because the party is kitted out with power armor and jet packs and laser cannons, the supermax prison of the chaotic evil trickser god does not have lesser guards or defenses because the party is a bunch of ugly stupid sword weilding face stabbers with no magic or technology. Deal with it.

Held true even in D&D. No problems.

[Easy e]

If you ask a person what they want a few things happen:

1. They don't know how to express what they want
2. They don't know what they want
3. They tell you what they think you want to hear
4. They actually tell you what they want

The problem is, you don't know which of those things has happened until you do something and see how the people react to it. If it is a positive reaction, you can do more of it. If it is a negative reaction, you need to stop doing it immediately.

Of course, don't be a jerk to other people, use your safety tools, and constantly get feedback.

TLDR: Play your game and see what happens.

[icefractal]

To use a real life analogy, its more like setting a budget for a business than playing Russian roulette. And, much like a business, if you do happen to go over on occasion, it isn't the end of the world, you just dip into your slush fund or take out a loan (in an RPG this usually means potions, scrolls, and favors from NPCs).Maybe it's different in your system, but IME I've never found any of those things to be much of a backup plan.

Like, potions and scrolls can help stretch your resources out, make it take longer before you're in the danger zone. But once you are at "we can't take on another fight", the danger is just as much. Because scrolls and potions mostly suck for in-combat use. And NPC favors? Sure, those are nice, but it's not like you can generally access them from inside a dungeon.

And (IMO obviously) but if the reason we're adventuring is just profit then that's going to:
A) Make me less of a daredevil. Fight until I can barely stand in order to save a bunch of people? Sure. Fight until I can barely stand to get a bit further into a promising ruin? Nah, it'll still be there the next day, or if not then something else will - in fact, lets go buy a herd of sheep first, I'm getting tired of these traps.
B) Make spending resources like potions and scrolls less appealing. If the whole point is to get rich, spending permanent resources is the opposite of that.

[Talakeal]

Maybe it's different in your system, but IME I've never found any of those things to be much of a backup plan.

Like, potions and scrolls can help stretch your resources out, make it take longer before you're in the danger zone. But once you are at "we can't take on another fight", the danger is just as much. Because scrolls and potions mostly suck for in-combat use. And NPC favors? Sure, those are nice, but it's not like you can generally access them from inside a dungeon.

And (IMO obviously) but if the reason we're adventuring is just profit then that's going to:
A) Make me less of a daredevil. Fight until I can barely stand in order to save a bunch of people? Sure. Fight until I can barely stand to get a bit further into a promising ruin? Nah, it'll still be there the next day, or if not then something else will - in fact, lets go buy a herd of sheep first, I'm getting tired of these traps.
B) Make spending resources like potions and scrolls less appealing. If the whole point is to get rich, spending permanent resources is the opposite of that.

I agree, resources are better spent proactively; although in my experience players tend to be too miserly to use them as such.

Typically, you can either summon something or cut a deal with something in the dungeon.

Ideally, you get more out of the dungeon than you put in. If that's not the case, you write this one off and fall back. But as they say, sometimes you have to spend money to make money.


As I have mentioned a lot in previous threads, RPGs are kind of bad because they are based on resource management, but those resources are often gated to time, which is often an unlimited resource. Mechanically, a party that pulls out when they get low will be flat out weaker than one who sticks to it because they will have less gold and XP (and goodwill from the people whom they help). From a narrative perspective, in a world where the first arrow is as likely to be a kill-shot as the 30th, its downright suicidal to go on a whole other expedition that might or might not pay off when you are already here and 1 or 2 rooms away from the big score.

[Mastikator]

Vary it. Some easy, some medium, some hard, some very hard. Sometimes even present challenges where a combat approach is likely to lead to character death but other approaches are available. When I GM I most often let the players choose if there is going to be a fight, few NPCs will attack on sight, and most will accept a surrender if offered. Not that players will ever not murderhobo, but that's their choice :smallbiggrin:

[Reversefigure4]

As a side note, players (at least in my experience) are notoriously lousy at determining actual difficulty. They'll be like "phew, barely scraped through that one" when, from my side, it was an easy victory. Basically, if they had to use any significant resource, it was a "hard fight". And if anyone went to zero, it was a "really really hard fight".

Of course, the GM side has perfect information, which makes it a lot easier to read the difficulty. The GM knows that the players started in the hardest room of the dungeon, that the kobolds rolled a lot of 15+ on their rolls, and that the only thing remaining in the dungeon is an old blind kobold who poses no threat. From your point of view, they've basically won the dungeon at the cost of several HP and a few spells.

From the players point of view, the first room badly injured them, and they only have enough resources left to take on one more fight like that. And who knows what's beyond the red door? All they can see is a little old kobold who might have 10 levels in Monk!

It's just a part of the tradeoff. Everything looks more threatening from the player side of the table, because it's an unknown.

[Quertus]

I mean, I prefer Simulationist CaW "let the dice fall where they may", "If your 1st level characters fight the dragon, you're dead (unless you're my brother, because blessed by Arangee, goddess of luck)". Where the GM has the skills to train the players to be on the same page wrt information gathering, level of detail, amount of telegraphing, etc. Where the players can break to OOC (and the GM will break to OOC) over Gamist concerns like, "So, I could spend the next 4 hours micro-detailing exactly how I verify the reliability of this merchant, but... is that necessary? Can we just say 'I purchase a meal here without being poisoned' without that 4 hour minigame? Or is it worth our time to go through those details?"

I want the level of challenge of the combat to feel appropriate to the information we have and the choices we have made. I don't want Narrative contrivance of "cut-scene awesome" or "to ratchet up the tension", I want the Agency of a world that makes sense.

That said, among the 8 Kinds of Fun, Challenge isn't one I particularly care about. Give me a well-deserved cake walk, or a well deserved loss, over an unrealistic challenge any day.

[False God]

I let my players pick their stats, 3-23, and pick their level, 1-20.

They'll usually show me just by the character they made what kind of game they want.

[Pauly]

I like stupidly dangerous combat. Games like Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulhu do it well.

What I mean by stupidly dangerous is that if you do something stupid you will die.

The difficulty doesn’t come from how dangerous the opponent is, because all opponents are potentially lethal. The difficulty comes from using fire and movement, cover, terrain, knowing when to disengage and knowing when to charge in.

[stoutstien]

So, I've heard this from a few different DMs, where they ask their players some variant on "How hard do you want Combat to be?"

And Players often come back with some variant of "Give us a challenge!" or "Oh, we want high lethality"

As has often been noted, what players usually want is some variant of "We want to always Win, but feel challenged". Few players want to come out and say "Give us easy fights that pose no real challenge".


So, the question is, what is the best way to approach the Combat Difficulty conversation such that you get a good idea of what player's want without them feel like they're asking for you to softball them?

Off the top of my head, I think a good starting point is to break down what sort of things a player might enjoy out of a game and ask them to compare those things.

Rather than say "How hard should combat be, on a scale of 1 to 10", ask them to rate various statements alongside each other, like

"Combat should be a test of our ability to make tactically correct decisions" vs "I care more about being creative in combat than making optimal moves". Frame combat not as a sliding scale of difficulty, but as a test vs an opportunity for expression.

Or, ask how stressful combat should feel. Frame choosing "easy" not as admitting you CAN'T win hard combats, and more about choosing a more relaxing, less stressful experience.

Anybody else have thoughts on how to approach this?

Something I realized over the years is that it's rarely consistent from session the session or even throughout a single meeting. It's not something you can ask at the beginning of a game and forget about. You need to keep a finger on the pulse and periodically check back in and readjust.

I tend to set a theme and play the rest by ear. I build my world's fair and play to 'win' in regards to npc motivations but fate is always slightly in the hero's favor.

[Quertus]

I like stupidly dangerous combat. Games like Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulhu do it well.

What I mean by stupidly dangerous is that if you do something stupid you will die.

The difficulty doesn’t come from how dangerous the opponent is, because all opponents are potentially lethal. The difficulty comes from using fire and movement, cover, terrain, knowing when to disengage and knowing when to charge in.

This is interesting. Would a marine be desperately evaluating cover and terrain when they kick a puppy? Would a pimp be risking his life every time he slaps his blind, crippled hooker? I think not, I think that the system and setting and expected content are pulling a fast one, resulting in scenario design that focuses on a certain style of challenge. I expect that I could write content for those systems that completely lack challenging engagements, or that I could write content for other systems where every encounter risks death to fools.

For instance, long ago, someone posted a thread about “what would an intelligent, immortal undead caster do” when an armored knight, religious nut job, slinking coward, and guy in a bathrobe invaded his lair? Also, the undead has just invented a new multi-target fire Spell they’re just dying to try out (so, Scorching Ray).

Different people gave different responses wrt what counted as intelligent vs what counted as metagaming levels of genre savvy, or even what the “right” answer was.

Me? I said that an intelligent Undead wouldn’t target any of the adventurers. Instead, they would have prepared multiple targets for their spell. For example, a paper machete patch over a weakened ceiling ready to collapse, to damage and trap intruders. A vat of explosive, poisonous liquid, to damage and poison intruders. A flammable material to make smoke to remove vision and eat the oxygen. Etc.

And any idiots who charged in expecting only a stand-up fight will die to the preparations of the immortal undead.

[kyoryu]

How hard should a combat be is an irrelevant question, because people don't agree what a "5" would mean. I mean, I'd suspect most people would say an average combat should be 5 difficult, right? They'll just define that differently.

I'd probably ask a few questions:

"Take an average encounter. Describe to me what that's like, in terms of difficulty. Does anyone die? Go unconscious? How many of your resources do you use up?"

"Okay, so now a hard encounter - like, the hardest one you might find in a typical session. What does that look like?"

"How bad do things have to go for a character to do? How much bad luck, and how many bad choices do they have to make? What about a TPK?"

In my experience most players want "deadly" games that boil down to "if we screw up, WE'LL TOTALLY DIE, but we're so good that we never screw up". I could get more into this, but it seems to be a reaction to almost always winning combats to ramp up the perceived danger of loss to try to maintain some tension.

[Vahnavoi]

You can't say or do anything intelligent about game difficulty without first examining what your players do in a game and what skills they use to do it.

The proxy values people use for measuring difficulty, such as win or death rate or portion of resource consumption, are at best useless without that additional context, and at worst actively misleading.

To understand why, let's talk about randomness for a moment:

It's been shown that, in games of chance where player skill makes no difference, even when players know they are playing such games of chance, they still attribute success and failure to skill in a predictably biased way. Namely, person A will attribute their own random success to their own positive personal qualities, while dismissing their own random failure as result of externalities. However, at the same time, they will attribute random success by others to externalities, while attributing random failure by others to negative personal qualities in them.

Simply: If I win, it's because I'm good; if I lose it's just bad luck; If you win, it's just a fluke; if you lose, it's because you suck.

What does this have to do with roleplaying games? Well, many tabletop roleplaying game are at their core just glorified dice games. Skill has negligible effect, the players will just roll dice, then roll dice some more. Yet the players will have a subjective feeling of difficulty depending on sequence of rolls they made, and how often they won.

Adjusting numbers will do nothing to actual game difficulty in such a game. At best, it creates an illusion of difficulty, a magic trick pulled on the players, hoping they won't notice.

In order for there to be real difficulty to affect, there must be more to a game than rolling dice, and you have to recognize and filter any player feedback on difficulty that is just them reacting to random noise.

The next step up is a game of shifting probabilities, such as a betting game. Here, how hard the game is depends on how hard it is to calculate the best betting strategy or strategies. This kind of mathematical problem scales well, from trivial to gradeschoolers to making a professional mathematician cry. But this has nothing to do with win rates or anything like that! It's possible to have two very different betting games where the hard ceiling for win rates is 95% in both, but in one it takes a minute to figure out in your head, and in another you have to program a computer to simulate the game a few million times to get an approximation because the explicit solution goes way over your head.

And counting probabilities is one class of math problems out of of a huge design space you could use for core of a game. For every different type of problem a game includes, there's an aspect of difficulty that might not influence how often players win or lose at all, but will increase the time and effort it takes them to progress.

[King of Nowhere]

In my experience most players want "deadly" games that boil down to "if we screw up, WE'LL TOTALLY DIE, but we're so good that we never screw up". .

This sums it up nicely.
It's also roughly equivalent to the idea that the players want to have choices and be rewarded for smart playing. This includes the possibility of death or generally other unpleasant things in case of serious mistakes, because if you can play dumb and still win there's no incentive to be smart and no sense of accomplishment.

[Jay R]

First, players aren’t all the same. They don’t all like the same kind of encounter any more than they all like the same ice cream flavor or pizza toppings.

Also, you can’t get the answer by asking the players directly, because what they think changes – and they may not know it themselves.. My rule of thumb, based on my players, is expressed in my Rules for DMs:


3. What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked as if they were all about to die.

In practice, this requires an encounter to *look* more difficult than it is.

But the crucial fact is this: players are not all the same.

My current group all played AD&D, and more than half of them played original D&D. They grew up in this game with the assumption that characters could and would die, depending on their choices and die rolls. Many newer players assume that we are just telling the story of heroes who are going to win, and even the [I]possibility of not succeeding seems unfair.

So know your current players, and tailor the game to them. But don’t focus only on what they say while playing, or even at the end of the session. As my rule above indicates, your best indicator is how they’re talking about last week’s session.

[kyoryu]

This sums it up nicely.
It's also roughly equivalent to the idea that the players want to have choices and be rewarded for smart playing. This includes the possibility of death or generally other unpleasant things in case of serious mistakes, because if you can play dumb and still win there's no incentive to be smart and no sense of accomplishment.

Yeah that's what's said.

But when you try to get people to put numbers on it, they get awfully cagey. "Yeah, you should die if you play poorly and/or have bad luck". "Well, okay, how much?". "Well, I don't think there's a number."

If you're playing a recreational sports league, I'll give you a number - a given team/participant should probably be winning 33%-66% of the time. I don't think that's necessarily the right number for roleplaying games, to be clear. If a team is winning more than 80% of the time? They probably need to be in a higher league. That starts becoming Not Fun for everyone else.

So, okay, then you ask "how bad do you have to play? How bad does your luck have to be?" And you can put numbers on that, too. "Okay, so if you break up your play into 10% increments, from your worst off night to your best most genius one, and you do the same with your luck, which groups do you have to be in, or below, for death to occur?" And they'll still be cagey. Because I think that many RPG players are used to the "always win" model that linear games encourage, and because player death frankly sucks.

This is one of hte major reasons I really really like to focus on non-death stakes, and get irritated that the default assumption is that loss has to equal death in RPGs. It just makes it harder to really talk about this and make real tension.

(Interestingly I think, when you had a stable of characters like in really old-school D&D, I think PC death worked a lot better. It was losing a soldier in XCOM, not deleting your Skyrim save).

[PhoenixPhyre]

If you're playing a recreational sports league, I'll give you a number - a given team/participant should probably be winning 33%-66% of the time. I don't think that's necessarily the right number for roleplaying games, to be clear. If a team is winning more than 80% of the time? They probably need to be in a higher league. That starts becoming Not Fun for everyone else.


Although that presumes a competitive scenario where "winning" and "losing" is really a big thing.

I've had tables that were very happy with constant cakewalks, where all that matters is what they decided to do, not whether they succeed at doing so. And tables who didn't care much about choosing what they were doing (ie were happy with a very linear campaign) but cared a lot about success/failure chances.

[icefractal]

I think the problem with any reasonable-for-sports win/loss rate is that not only does a sports team not die when they lose a match, they don't even stop playing for that season!

Like, non-death consequences often come up as a panacea, but IME, most of the "you didn't die, but ..." results are still pretty harsh, and spell the loss of whatever over-arching goal the battle was part of.

Say for example -
You tried to sabotage Baron Evil's siege engine and got defeated. But you weren't killed, he just throws you in the dungeon, and then a couple weeks later you get the chance to escape when one of his guard-golems goes berserk and causes chaos in the tower. Well it's still way too late to save the town that was the reason you came here. That siege already happened, they're all dead, fled, or enslaved. That's not any kind of "mixed result", you just straight-up lost.

And sure, nothing wrong with failing sometimes. But if you have, say, a 60% chance to win each fight, and a quest/goal requires five fights on average, then you've got about a 7% chance to succeed at that goal. That's not good odds. You're not going to seem like a competent group.

So you'd need consequences that don't individually stop you from reaching your goals, although they could cumulatively stop you (like say, score during a season). And while there are some contexts where that makes sense, it's tricky to justify in most.

And that's assuming non-death consequences that affect only yourselves and have no lasting effects! Lots of the suggestions I've seen are worse than that, sometimes to the extent that my feeling is "screw that, I'd rather just die if I lose", because they result in a death-spiral / despair-spiral in the longer term.

So (IMO) at the point where fate is in the PCs' favor enough to say things usually work out ok when they lose, that prisons will have a chance to escape, foes won't do anything to take them out of the action for too long, gear will be recovered if needed - then why not just let them win most battles in the first place? That seems less contrived TBH.

[Ionathus]

This is one of hte major reasons I really really like to focus on non-death stakes, and get irritated that the default assumption is that loss has to equal death in RPGs. It just makes it harder to really talk about this and make real tension..

Agreed. Failed combat where there are narrative stakes is a lot more tolerable.

The idea that there should always be "a chance" of death is very risky when you're DMing. Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that you and your players were all capable of looking at a combat setup and saying "this combat poses an X% chance of the party dying." What % would your players find tolerable?

If they want combat to feel "dangerous" they might pick a double-digits number, say 10%. But then, do they plan to have 10 dangerous combats across the campaign? I'm sure they expect to have double or triple that. And most TPKs are seen as a pretty significant "fail state" for most players (not that TPKs are all that common, especially in 5e). So to mitigate that, the DM might reduce monster strength until objective risk is down to 5%, maybe 3%, maybe even 1%. But what's the point of that, even? Now sure, there's a "chance" of death, but is it meaningful? Did quantifying it make everyone feel better about the "risks" involved in encounter design? I'd be inclined to doubt it.

That's a totally made-up example. But I hope it communicates my point that many RPG players aren't actually looking for real danger. I think many players are more like the audience in a theatrical swordfight or a fire-breathing show or a circus acrobatics act. They are there to do something dangerous and thrilling, but the prospect of something actually going worst-case-scenario wrong does not appeal to them at all. Many players want the illusion of danger. They want to be thrilled by the dangerous monster, they want to be scared like in a thriller or a horror movie or a rollercoaster. They want that little gut-punch of fear when the villain tips their hand and shows that they're a credible threat.

But at the end of the day they know that this is all made up, and so they're not likely to keep watching and clapping if the trick actually gets messed up. It turns out, yeah, I don't actually like watching somebody get horribly burned, even if five minutes ago I was saying "oh my gosh, he could get horribly burned if this went wrong, this is so exciting!" The illusion of danger is a powerful entertainer, but the safeguards have to be there.

That's for your average group, IMO. There are absolutely hardcore players who really want to push the limits and get into actual deadly encounters in RPGs constantly. I haven't really met them at my tables. I have met players who say "oh yes, absolutely, I would be okay with my character dying" and then got to two failed death saves in 5e and very quickly realized they were wrong, they don't actually want to see the firebreather get horribly burned, please turn the safety rails back on.

I think D&D is one of the games that thrives on those safety rails, and introducing narrative stakes for defeat (rather than perma-death for the whole party) is a great way to do that.

[Vahnavoi]

Win rate of a sportsteam only tells how well they do compared to their competitors. It alone tells nothing how difficult maintaining that rate is.

In theory, in any fair competition of equally skilled competitors, whether said competitors are teams or individuals, over time win rates ought to gravitate towards 1 divided by number of competitors. For example, in a duel each participant has 50% chance. Practical win rates will be something else and influenced by format of competition - for example in single elimination tournament the ultimate winner perforce has 100% win rate. But in a fair competition said winner probably had to give their all every step along the way and only won through extreme difficulty.

Outside a competition, looking at rates becomes even more asinine. For example, puzzles are typically made to be solved and anyone with cognitive capacity to solve them at all will do so given enough time. People who lack the capacity, never do. So rather than looking at how often any person solves a puzzle, it would be better to look at how much time they took and how much frustration they displayed. Practical puzzle game design looks for puzzles that are solved in reasonable time by intended audience, with good balance of frustration versus joy of accomplishment, rather than puzzles that are only solved by some fraction of players. This principle generalizes to all other games where you want to let player win but also want them to feel like they worked for it.

EDIT:

@Ionathus: What you're saying is not wrong... but anyone who approaches a game like a rollercoaster or a horror movie, deserves to lose.

Player of a game isn't just an audience member to be entertained, they are an active participant; what they're doing needs skill and with any non-trivial game, the expectation should be that effort needs to be put into the thing or they'll suck.

Looking at the possibility of loss in terms of percentages is, again, useless at best or misleading at worst; random chance doesn't have to factor into it. For example, in all my games, combat always has possibility to be lethal... because players can always choose to have their characters be passive and take all the hits. "Player characters can die" is hence a true statement independent of any probabilistic or frequentist function. The question facing the players during gameplay is not "how often do you want to die?", it is much more straightforwardly "do you want to die?"

Talking about safety rails, in even in analogy, just doubles on the wrong mindset. Safeties are for mitigating consequences of realized risks. They are unrelated from how difficult it is to avoid those risks to begin with. No safety rails are needed when a road is wide enough for everyone to comfortably walk without falling off.

[Talakeal]

I think the problem with any reasonable-for-sports win/loss rate is that not only does a sports team not die when they lose a match, they don't even stop playing for that season!

Like, non-death consequences often come up as a panacea, but IME, most of the "you didn't die, but ..." results are still pretty harsh, and spell the loss of whatever over-arching goal the battle was part of.

Say for example -
You tried to sabotage Baron Evil's siege engine and got defeated. But you weren't killed, he just throws you in the dungeon, and then a couple weeks later you get the chance to escape when one of his guard-golems goes berserk and causes chaos in the tower. Well it's still way too late to save the town that was the reason you came here. That siege already happened, they're all dead, fled, or enslaved. That's not any kind of "mixed result", you just straight-up lost.

And sure, nothing wrong with failing sometimes. But if you have, say, a 60% chance to win each fight, and a quest/goal requires five fights on average, then you've got about a 7% chance to succeed at that goal. That's not good odds. You're not going to seem like a competent group.

So you'd need consequences that don't individually stop you from reaching your goals, although they could cumulatively stop you (like say, score during a season). And while there are some contexts where that makes sense, it's tricky to justify in most.

And that's assuming non-death consequences that affect only yourselves and have no lasting effects! Lots of the suggestions I've seen are worse than that, sometimes to the extent that my feeling is "screw that, I'd rather just die if I lose", because they result in a death-spiral / despair-spiral in the longer term.

So (IMO) at the point where fate is in the PCs' favor enough to say things usually work out ok when they lose, that prisons will have a chance to escape, foes won't do anything to take them out of the action for too long, gear will be recovered if needed - then why not just let them win most battles in the first place? That seems less contrived TBH.

I have recently had trouble with this.

For my players, the game is a power fantasy, and they value their pride and their money far more than plot influence, character arcs, or even character power.

They flat out prefer death to defeat. They will never surrender or retreat willingly, and when they do it is always extremely bitter and they consider it a "favor" to the DM.

Recently two characters went down and were captured by the enemy, and the rest of the party ransomed them, but said that if they were in the same boat, they much would have preferred their companions let them die rather than suffering such a hit to their wallets and pride.

Also, the despair spiral is very real. My players are very hesitant to even try a second approach if their first doesn't work, instead preferring to assume the DM put them into an "impossible" situation or into a railroad with only one solution.

[Ionathus]

Outside a competition, looking at rates becomes even more asinine. For example, puzzles are typically made to be solved and anyone with cognitive capacity to solve them at all will do so given enough time. People who lack the capacity, never do. So rather than looking at how often any person solves a puzzle, it would be better to look at how much time they took and how much frustration they displayed. Practical puzzle game design looks for puzzles that are solved in reasonable time by intended audience, with good balance of frustration versus joy of accomplishment, rather than puzzles that are only solved by some fraction of players. This principle generalizes to all other games where you want to let player win but also want them to feel like they worked for it.

Puzzles are a good comparison. A more interesting question for most RPG tables is "when, how, and how easily" the players will win, not "if."


@Ionathus: What you're saying is not wrong... but anyone who approaches a game like a rollercoaster or a horror movie, deserves to lose.

Player of a game isn't just an audience member to be entertained, they are an active participant; what they're doing needs skill and with any non-trivial game, the expectation should be that effort needs to be put into the thing or they'll suck.

Looking at the possibility of loss in terms of percentages is, again, useless at best or misleading at worst; random chance doesn't have to factor into it. For example, in all my games, combat always has possibility to be lethal... because players can always choose to have their characters be passive and take all the hits. "Player characters can die" is hence a true statement independent of any probabilistic or frequentist function. The question facing the players during gameplay is not "how often do you want to die?", it is much more straightforwardly "do you want to die?"

Talking about safety rails, in even in analogy, just doubles on the wrong mindset. Safeties are for mitigating consequences of realized risks. They are unrelated from how difficult it is to avoid those risks to begin with. No safety rails are needed when a road is wide enough for everyone to comfortably walk without falling off.

Disagree pretty hard with your first statement there. Players who want the illusion of danger don't "deserve to lose" - it's a basic conceit of the game!

To bring in the second point of discussion here (the percentages thing): a general conceit of D&D is that you're going to face off against terrifying things that appear to be way more powerful than your heroes. If the relative power in an encounter isn't roughly equal, if it's totally and obviously one-sided, then everyone at the table is going to be bored. For big climactic battles, I wouldn't be surprised if (in-character) the PCs felt they had roughly 50/50 odds of surviving, or frequently even worse. People love an underdog story, but we also want to be the underdog.

So you've got this weird kayfabe going on, where the characters are routinely getting into life-threatening scrapes against lethal threats, but the players aren't interested in replacing their character every 2nd battle. The players want to keep winning against impossible odds. Just like the heroes of their favorite fictions.

It's almost impossible to tell an interesting story where the obviously more competent and capable side keeps winning against every threat - that's boring. We want to see the hero struggle and scramble for a desperate solution, and win because they did something clever, or because they believe in the power of friendship, or because the villain's moral foibles backfired. So you all have to sit down and pretend that, yes, that Adult White Dragon is gonna wipe out the whole party if they make even so much as the slightest mistake, and the quest walks a knife's edge, and it's gonna be a close call. When in reality there's less than a snowball's chance in hell that this party wipes to this dragon.

That's the disconnect I was trying to communicate with the percentages thing. You want the combat to seem scary and interesting, but in order for that to be plausible, we all pretend that the threat is there...when in reality, for most modern parties that are interested in telling a compelling, narrative, character-driven story using improv and dice, the guardrails are up and everybody at the table is pretending not to notice.

[King of Nowhere]

I have recently had trouble with this.

For my players, the game is a power fantasy, and they value their pride and their money far more than plot influence, character arcs, or even character power.

They flat out prefer death to defeat. They will never surrender or retreat willingly, and when they do it is always extremely bitter and they consider it a "favor" to the DM.

Recently two characters went down and were captured by the enemy, and the rest of the party ransomed them, but said that if they were in the same boat, they much would have preferred their companions let them die rather than suffering such a hit to their wallets and pride.

Also, the despair spiral is very real. My players are very hesitant to even try a second approach if their first doesn't work, instead preferring to assume the DM put them into an "impossible" situation or into a railroad with only one solution.

your players are not a good sample.

none of my players ever displaied such attitudes. and if they try something and fail, they learn from the experience and come back with a better plan. or when they are higher level.

[Ionathus]

your players are not a good sample.

none of my players ever displaied such attitudes. and if they try something and fail, they learn from the experience and come back with a better plan. or when they are higher level.

Same. My players took one betrayal quite hard, but they rolled with it. Seeing natural setbacks as opportunities is critical to enjoying the game in a healthy way. Seeing any in-universe setback as DM railroading misses the entire point of how RPGs are unique as a collaborative challenge.

[Quertus]

"Take an average encounter. Describe to me what that's like, in terms of difficulty. Does anyone die? Go unconscious? How many of your resources do you use up?"

"Okay, so now a hard encounter - like, the hardest one you might find in a typical session. What does that look like?"

"How bad do things have to go for a character to do? How much bad luck, and how many bad choices do they have to make? What about a TPK?"

In my experience most players want "deadly" games that boil down to "if we screw up, WE'LL TOTALLY DIE, but we're so good that we never screw up". I could get more into this, but it seems to be a reaction to almost always winning combats to ramp up the perceived danger of loss to try to maintain some tension.


So, okay, then you ask "how bad do you have to play? How bad does your luck have to be?" And you can put numbers on that, too. "Okay, so if you break up your play into 10% increments, from your worst off night to your best most genius one, and you do the same with your luck, which groups do you have to be in, or below, for death to occur?" And they'll still be cagey. Because I think that many RPG players are used to the "always win" model that linear games encourage, and because player death frankly sucks.

Well, at this point, I think that I, personally, would almost be ready to answer you, as a hypothetical GM.

As a (mildly) paranoid CaW player, I'm perfectly happy spending multiple sessions preparing for one dangerous encounter, if necessary. So I'd open with,
At an upper bound, let's say at most one encounter per session should have a greater than 0% chance of [[[massive setback]]] (which includes but is not limited to death) without truly brain-damaged, any random 5-year-old would tell me I"m an idiot, "???"-ranked moves; this encounter should not be time-sensitive, and should be open to tools like Investigation and Preparation, which should be well-worn, well-tested tools - the GM should train us and ensure our ranks in Knowledge:GM are all in order before including such encounters. As to how bad our moves have to be in this one encounter in order to experience a massive setback? Let's set the bar at "before accounting for bonuses from CaW preparation, dramatic failure / massive setback can occur in the event of 2 moves at the bottom 10% of my performance". Only it's not "2 moves", it's "2 uncorrected moves", meaning that a) others at the table could catch my mistakes in my stated/intended actions; b) after the actions resolve, the damage could be corrected by future actions.

Is that my actual preferences? No. And, in fact, questions like "how many bad moves before failure" depend greatly on how many moves in total one expects to make in a given scenario.

But I think, at that point, I'd be willing to engage a GM in a conversation about what, exactly, I think a Fatal Error should look like, and give it a test run.


and because player death frankly sucks.

Depends on whether they've already paid for / eaten their share of the pizza or not. :smalltongue:

[Vahnavoi]

Disagree pretty hard with your first statement there. Players who want the illusion of danger don't "deserve to lose" - it's a basic conceit of the game!

It's not. The "basic conceit" of a game is that a player is an active participant, which is closer to attempting a stunt rather than spectating one - the "danger" is real and the player has responsibility to act in a specific way, to do things to prevent it from being realized. That's the difference between a game, versus a movie or a rollercoaster.


To bring in the second point of discussion here (the percentages thing): a general conceit of D&D is that you're going to face off against terrifying things that appear to be way more powerful than your heroes. If the relative power in an encounter isn't roughly equal, if it's totally and obviously one-sided, then everyone at the table is going to be bored. For big climactic battles, I wouldn't be surprised if (in-character) the PCs felt they had roughly 50/50 odds of surviving, or frequently even worse. People love an underdog story, but we also want to be the underdog.

So you've got this weird kayfabe going on, where the characters are routinely getting into life-threatening scrapes against lethal threats, but the players aren't interested in replacing their character every 2nd battle. The players want to keep winning against impossible odds. Just like the heroes of their favorite fictions.

I don't recognize any version or clone of D&D that I actually play or have played from the above two paragraphs. The games I did and do play were, to a large degree, honest-to-God dice games, with calculable floor and ceiling to character success. Replacing characters was common to the degree that it has special protocol. The actual challenge was a betting game, finding the way most likely to achieve game goals, with character death often being acceptable price for them.

This "kayfabe" you talk about, all these narrative concerns you mention - I don't traffic in them. If I want to make a scenario where players are guaranteed to win but feel challenged, I just make an honest-to-God puzzle or a series of puzzles that works at the edge of my players' skills. Which also means ditching D&D and all other dice-based games if necessary.


It's almost impossible to tell an interesting story where the obviously more competent and capable side keeps winning against every threat - that's boring. We want to see the hero struggle and scramble for a desperate solution, and win because they did something clever, or because they believe in the power of friendship, or because the villain's moral foibles backfired. So you all have to sit down and pretend that, yes, that Adult White Dragon is gonna wipe out the whole party if they make even so much as the slightest mistake, and the quest walks a knife's edge, and it's gonna be a close call. When in reality there's less than a snowball's chance in hell that this party wipes to this dragon.

That's the disconnect I was trying to communicate with the percentages thing. You want the combat to seem scary and interesting, but in order for that to be plausible, we all pretend that the threat is there...when in reality, for most modern parties that are interested in telling a compelling, narrative, character-driven story using improv and dice, the guardrails are up and everybody at the table is pretending not to notice.

It's not impossible at all even in terms of non-game fiction, you are falling into a trap of genre stereotypes and cliches. But more importantly, the disconnect comes from treating a game in terms of non-game media. In actual reality, for example in many videogames, ludo-narrative dissonance runs the exact other way: the player character is, on paper, an unstoppable badass or a literal god, and the narrative that unfolds is a praise of their never-ending victories... but the player struggles as they have to use their own insight, theories and plain trial and error to progress.

In other words, games can get away with waste-of-space stories because real difficulty keeps player engaged and keeps the game from being boring.

This goes for actual narrative games too - there, the challenge, the actual difficulty, is telling an engaging story despite the fact that everyone knows the bad guy dies in the end. But the games of this sort that I actually play, have zilch to do with D&D mechanically. They're freeform and often game masterless too. I don't talk about difficulty in combat when playing those games because combats are not a challenge at all in them.

[gbaji]

YMMV, but to me it would feel like a desperate situation if we were regularly ending the day with our resources down to 1% or even 10%.

Like, IC, there's not a concept of "encounters per day". The fact that we've already faced five encounters doesn't mean nothing else will attack us that day (nor does the fact that we've only faced one encounter guarantee that anything will). So being unable to take on another encounter means "we're in great danger, we need to retreat ASAP and hope nothing attacks us - and really we should have retreated at least one encounter earlier"

That happens once, and it's just "wow, we had a tough time that day". It happens consistently and it's more like "we're in over our heads, barely managing to keep up with the onslaught, but so far we've survived". Which might be fine if that's the intended tone, but don't be expecting my character to act confident in such a situation unless they're a daredevil.

As a couple people have already noted, this is a flaw with the "X encounters of Y difficulty" scheme. It's a good guideline for GMs to avoid over taxing the PCs in their game. It is *not* really supposed to be what you actually expose the PCs to every single day on an adventure. Most days, the PCs should come no where near to their limits. Those limits on for really tough sets of "clustered" encounters, where they can't just walk away and rest (well. Talakeal's players excepted I suppose).

If you've set up a evil lair, with a main bad guy, and a bunch of minions working for said bad guy, and the PCs are going to try to take out the bad guy, or rescue his prisoners, or steal his macguffin, then the entire thing needs to be scaled as a set of encounters that fit within those guidelines. But that's it. This should not be a measureing stick for how many combination planned and random encounters they will have and then the day stops. When you do that, the players will either come to expect that and assume that nothing can happen outside those guidelines or they will be constantly thinking "OMG. We're about to die if we get attacked one more time today" because the GM is constantly running them right up against the wall of their capabilities out of a sense of "balance".

I prefer to set up encounters as logical extensions of the circumstances themselves. So yeah, sometimes there will be things "over there" that are impossibly hard to deal with. Othertimes, they may be easy. Different challenges may require different approaches (not everything is an enemy to be defeated in combat). And I find that players appreciate this a lot. In a recent game session the PCs were basically hunting down this group of bad guy minions who had kidnapped some folks (yeah, standard bit, there was more to the backstory though). But these were actually quite skilled opponents. Not so much in direct combat, but they were clever and had picked a good hidding spot, and set things up well. They basically got funneled into a cavern where the bad guys were warned they were coming and had an ambush set up. An additional set of more sneaky rogue types were also alerted and were heading in from another tunnel that the party passed by, and would hit them from behind. Even as a group, the bad guys were not nearly as tough as the PCs, but were skilled "enough", that this would be an effective tactic. Unfortunately for the players, they went down the wrong tunnel (ideal would have been hit the rogues first, defeat them, then fight the more straight up melee folks). But fortunately for them, they detected the ambush ahead of time (via a couple methods actually), and were doing quite well against the main group. And they were able to bottle up the folks hitting them from behind into a single file tunnel and just one of them was able to cover the rear (and the player had actually specifically stated that he was having his character do this ahead of time).

When the battle was done, the players actually commented on how well set up the ambush was and that had they just walked all the way into the chamber and to the far end, then enagaged the folks entering from two tunnels at that end, then had the folks hidden in the room pop out and hit them on their flanks, and then had the rogue types come in a round or two later from behind, in combination with the spell casters hitting them from a distance, it would have been incredibly tough. As it was, they were hindered a bit. A couple of them injured or taken out for periods of time, but otherwise were able to defeat a larger number of foes without too much difficulty (and rescued the prisoners!). The point being that they recognized both that the encounter as designed by the NPCs would have been brutally difficult, and also recognized that as it actually played out, it was not terribly dangerous, but also took great pride in the fact that they had managed to avoid walking right into the trap.

So they "won", not because they just had better skills or hps or magic than ther opponents (it was not about resources), but because they took good precautions when wandering into the enemies hiding area, and those precautions paid off. And I've found that players take a heck of a lot more satisfaction in that sort of victory than the mere mathematical one of rolling dice and having bigger numbers of abilities/spells/whatever on their side. Also, having consequences beyond "death or resources" make "winning" vs "losing" a different calculation.


What I mean by stupidly dangerous is that if you do something stupid you will die.

Hah! Love this. Pretty much the norm for those types of games. Can be a lot of fun. And keeps the players on their toes.



If you're playing a recreational sports league, I'll give you a number - a given team/participant should probably be winning 33%-66% of the time. I don't think that's necessarily the right number for roleplaying games, to be clear. If a team is winning more than 80% of the time? They probably need to be in a higher league. That starts becoming Not Fun for everyone else.

Yup. But in a RPG, where the consequences for losing is likely death, this is waay too dangerous. So there's a disconnect there I think. If one out of every 5 encounters result in death, then the rewards have to be sufficient that said death rate still results in some sort of progress (or at least "fun", however that's defined). Or (as below) you create different consquences for losing.


This is one of hte major reasons I really really like to focus on non-death stakes, and get irritated that the default assumption is that loss has to equal death in RPGs. It just makes it harder to really talk about this and make real tension.

Absolutely. The major obstacle to this in some campaigns is that this requires that the players actually be invested to a decent degree in the game setting itself. Which can be tricky. I've played at a lot of tables that were basically "Create characters of X level/power, then run through this scenario. Then we're done, never to touch those characters or setting again, and move on to the next thing". At that sort of table, actual investment in the game setting is minimal, so the players don't really care much about loss (except that they "lost" the scenario itself maybe from a game play perspective).

I find that consequences based on setting investment can work really well in longer running game settings. The players become invested in their characters and advancement (which means that "low death rate" is kinda important), but also become more invested in other things going on. They care if Town X gets sacked by pirates. They care if the Baron they've been working with gets killed and replaced with a lizard person duplicate. They care if that local merchant dies. Failing to stop the fire god from causing the nearby volcanoe to erupt killing tons of people actually matters to them. So in that situation, consequences other than death does affect them, and they are motivated to avoid them. Which gives you the ability to make encounters and sets of encounters not super deadly per encounter, but still be situations where they may survive but fail at the objective, and therefore <something bad happens>.

[Jay R]

Outside a competition, looking at rates becomes even more asinine. For example, puzzles are typically made to be solved and anyone with cognitive capacity to solve them at all will do so given enough time. People who lack the capacity, never do. So rather than looking at how often any person solves a puzzle, it would be better to look at how much time they took and how much frustration they displayed. Practical puzzle game design looks for puzzles that are solved in reasonable time by intended audience, with good balance of frustration versus joy of accomplishment, rather than puzzles that are only solved by some fraction of players. This principle generalizes to all other games where you want to let player win but also want them to feel like they worked for it.

Yep. A friend of mine once said (and I quoted it in my "Rules for DMs"):


b. The purpose of a death trap is not death; it is to make the players feel clever. Don't build one to cause death, and more importantly, don't build one to make them feel stupid.

[Telok]

But in a RPG, where the consequences for losing is likely death,

I find this to be a very system specific assumption. Many of the games I've run in the past decade have had "losing" and defeats in combat that included no PC deaths. Sometimes they've even "won" a fight by kmocking out or forcing a retreat of the opponents, and then and then lost the encounter by ignoring the reason why they were fighting.

The trick of course is this spanned five different systems that weren't D&D and had fatigue, stun, or injuries that could take out a character before they suddenly just drop dead.


Yep. A friend of mine once said (and I quoted it in my "Rules for DMs"):


b. The purpose of a death trap is not death; it is to make the players feel clever. Don't build one to cause death, and more importantly, don't build one to make them feel stupid.

Funny. For me the purpose of a death trap is death. NPCs build them (PCs can too but they don't for some reason) to kill people who are in the wrong place doing things they shouldn't be doing. If the PCs are in that place doing those things, well then the trap goes off. What they aren't, however, is subtle or surprising or instant (they may well be inescapable though, depending on the creator). The players know at certain points, told in or out of character, that they're facing a person or place with a death trap. Sometimes they may even have written instructions on how to disarm or avoid it.

But if they bop in and trigger it, or pull the lever "just to see what it does", or just blow a huge hole in the side of the space station while they aren't wearing space suits.... I have no pity.

The warning signs are posted. It's their fault if they want to french kiss the 13 billion volt light socket.

[Duff]

I think you're right. "How hard should combat be" is not a very useful question.

How do you feel about character death? Should it be always on the table, only there for big fights, only there for big screw-ups, big fights where the party also screw up biggly or should it be only there for story drama with the player's buy in?

Do you want "combat as sport" or "combat as war"? *

Do you want combat to push you to make the right decision quickly?
Do you want it to push you to make the best possible choice but give you time?
Do you want to generally just use your tactical instincts?

How do you feel about less than death experiences? Do you want fights where just getting hit by the shadow will mean you're weaker for a week? Do you want to fight, declare a rest, and have your character back to full strength for the next fight?


* Short version - combat as sport means any combat encounter should be reasonably winnable, fights are part of the play and non combat encounters should be recognisable as such. If your 1st level D&D party meets a dragon, it's not going to attack you unless you do something dumb.
Combat as war - You should take every opportunity to get yourself an unfair advantage. If you can ambush the enemy at night while they camp at the bottom of a cliff, while you shoot from the top of the cliff after you lit them up by throwing torches down and that makes it a curb stomp, you've doe combat as war correctly. The GM shouldn't be trying to do this to you, but the enemies should. You see a dragon, you probably just want to want to hide, because it might just want to eat you,
Thi

[Vahnavoi]

@Telok: if you're putting up enough warning signs that any reasonable player would avoid the death trap, you're still following the principle me and Jay R are talking about. The in-character reasoning for why a puzzle is in place is secondary to the game design concern of making the puzzle winnable.

Having no pity for players who flubb the solution anyway is along the same lines as my explanation to Ionathus about players who deserve to lose. If a puzzle is solvable to any reasonable person, no benefit of doubt needs to be given to failed attempts: a player is not doing what they ought to in the game and deserve a game penalty for it.

---

@Duff: "how hard should combat be?" is a correct question for any game where combat is meant to be a challenge. It only seems useless because people insist on using weird proxy values for difficulty instead of things that directly have to do with difficult.

[MoiMagnus]

I think there are a few questions that should be talked about in session zero that are more specific than "the difficulty":

(1) How much pre-planning/scouting is expected?

(2) When taken by surprise by a fight (ambush, unexpected opposition, ...), will you expect to get destroyed unless you run away (because you know, intelligent enemies will not willingly attack you if they have no chance to TPK you) or just to have a difficult but winnable fight (so following the usual trope of enemies attacking the heroes despite have no reasonable chance)?

(3) Same question for "obviously difficult" enemies. Like encountering the BBEG earlier than planned by the GM.

(4) How forgiving should the enemies be? Should they exploit your flaws and mistakes?

(5) On the following scale, what do you consider "difficult but fair":
- Every major blunder leads to spending/losing some resources/HP, but losing a difficult fight should only happen when we basically asked for it.
- If we make multiple major blunders, we lose. But even in difficult fight there should be ways to compensate for blunders.
- If we make a major blunder, we lose. But minor mistakes should only result in losses of resources.
- Following the standard battle plan without any creativity will be barely enough to win, good ideas allow to win by consuming less resources/losing less HP, while minor mistakes can lead to defeat.
- We need some good ideas to win.
- Just a few good ideas won't be enough to win, we need to outplay the opponent (probably by surprising the GM with unexpected tactics).

[Satinavian]

Few players want to come out and say "Give us easy fights that pose no real challenge".

I mostly do have players with whom i can talk about difficulty honestly and who are not to proud to say "I want easy fights".

Doesn't solve all the problems though. There is still the matter of differing tastes within a group.

[Jay R]

Part of the problem with answering the question is that how hard an encounter is can depend on what the PCs do leading up to it.

I recently had a mostly political scenario, which would end with a siege of only 34 fighters (plus the 4th level PCs) against an invading army of about 150. A further complication came from a gang of magic-using teenaged lawbreakers harassing the PCs. The siege was going to be the big, dangerous climax of the session.

So half the party had went off ("Don't split the party!") and recruited 100 allies to bring to the siege, and the other half subverted the gang and had them harassing the besieging army. By the time the army arrived, it was only about 100 dispirited soldiers, facing a fully manned fortress and half the party, while the other half was back in town, easily taking over the fortress they came from.

The siege was not much more challenge than a speedbump – because the players were clever and foresighted. For a party who didn’t change the conditions, it would have been an extremely difficult challenge.

[kyoryu]

This sums it up nicely.
It's also roughly equivalent to the idea that the players want to have choices and be rewarded for smart playing. This includes the possibility of death or generally other unpleasant things in case of serious mistakes, because if you can play dumb and still win there's no incentive to be smart and no sense of accomplishment.

But, what I'm talking about here is a fairly curious cycle.

Basically, it looks like the "kayfabe" situation - there's an illusion of danger, but no real danger. Like, if you say your worst 10% of your play + luck still isn't enough to cause failure (often death). So players quickly realize that they're not being rewarded for smart play, because they're not being penalized for poor play. Maybe they don't realize it consciously, but you can start to see that they get bored at things which "should" have them on the edge of their seats.


First, players aren’t all the same. They don’t all like the same kind of encounter any more than they all like the same ice cream flavor or pizza toppings.

Exactly, which is why the questions I originally proposed both interrogated the likelihood of failure as well as what that failure would look like.


Although that presumes a competitive scenario where "winning" and "losing" is really a big thing.

Not really competitive, I don't think. Single player video games aren't "competitive", and yet losing is still a thing. Video game developers definitely monitor, during develop, where people are more likely to lose in a level and use that to tweak it. And, relevant, most of them also include difficulty levels (even Dark Souls and its brethren often include implicit difficulty levels in many ways - using magic in most Souls games is much easier, for instance).


I've had tables that were very happy with constant cakewalks, where all that matters is what they decided to do, not whether they succeed at doing so. And tables who didn't care much about choosing what they were doing (ie were happy with a very linear campaign) but cared a lot about success/failure chances.

For sure! I think that's a totally valid preference.

What I think is weird is the cycle where players want to think they're playing a really hard game, but ultimately also don't want to fail, ever. Causing the GM to have to pump up the illusion of risk more and more and more to maintain that tension, while still pulling out every trick in the book to ensure that the players don't ever actually fail. IOW the GM is asked to continually up the illusion of risk to compensate for the players' in-game experience that, really, there isn't any (as evidenced by the fact that apparently risky situations never actually deal those consequences).


I think the problem with any reasonable-for-sports win/loss rate is that not only does a sports team not die when they lose a match, they don't even stop playing for that season!

Yes, correct. That's why my questions also included "what does a hard encounter look like", which might just include resource loss, narrative stakes, etc.


Like, non-death consequences often come up as a panacea, but IME, most of the "you didn't die, but ..." results are still pretty harsh, and spell the loss of whatever over-arching goal the battle was part of.

Badly done things are bad, yes.


Say for example -
You tried to sabotage Baron Evil's siege engine and got defeated. But you weren't killed, he just throws you in the dungeon, and then a couple weeks later you get the chance to escape when one of his guard-golems goes berserk and causes chaos in the tower. Well it's still way too late to save the town that was the reason you came here. That siege already happened, they're all dead, fled, or enslaved. That's not any kind of "mixed result", you just straight-up lost.

Yes, this is badly done.


And sure, nothing wrong with failing sometimes. But if you have, say, a 60% chance to win each fight, and a quest/goal requires five fights on average, then you've got about a 7% chance to succeed at that goal. That's not good odds. You're not going to seem like a competent group.

Combinatorial math is a pain, yes. And each given fight/encounter/scene, if losable, should still allow for overall success at the goal, even if it adds costs, makes it harder, or turns it into a partial success. If you win 4/5 scenes, you should be pretty successful at the overall goal.


So you'd need consequences that don't individually stop you from reaching your goals, although they could cumulatively stop you (like say, score during a season). And while there are some contexts where that makes sense, it's tricky to justify in most.

Agreed on what you need. Disagree that it's tricky to justify.

Now, if you take something like the typical linear game/adventure path, and try to graft on some kind of story consequence? Yeah, that is absolutely going to be hard to do, because you're dealing with things written for a structure that presumes success. Also, most linear adventure path type stuff is deliberately designed to create an imperative to do certain things - that makes it hard to recover from failing at those things.

I always recommend this article as a starting point: https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-never-write-action-scenes-into-your-tent-511712234

Maybe I should start a thread on that :) I'd be happy to look at situations.


Agreed. Failed combat where there are narrative stakes is a lot more tolerable.

The idea that there should always be "a chance" of death is very risky when you're DMing. Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that you and your players were all capable of looking at a combat setup and saying "this combat poses an X% chance of the party dying." What % would your players find tolerable?

If they want combat to feel "dangerous" they might pick a double-digits number, say 10%. But then, do they plan to have 10 dangerous combats across the campaign? I'm sure they expect to have double or triple that. And most TPKs are seen as a pretty significant "fail state" for most players (not that TPKs are all that common, especially in 5e). So to mitigate that, the DM might reduce monster strength until objective risk is down to 5%, maybe 3%, maybe even 1%. But what's the point of that, even? Now sure, there's a "chance" of death, but is it meaningful? Did quantifying it make everyone feel better about the "risks" involved in encounter design? I'd be inclined to doubt it.

No, because it exposes the man behind the curtain. (And, yeah, combinatorial math is harsh).

I'd also argue that when you get into the 1% range, it doesn't feel like a consequence for poor play any more. It starts to feel random and arbitrary.


That's a totally made-up example. But I hope it communicates my point that many RPG players aren't actually looking for real danger.

I sorta agree, and sorta don't. My experience is that when people figure out there's no actual danger, they start to disinvest. You see them get bored.

I view it as something like tension = stakes * probability. So if we want to create tension, we have two handles. The problem with 'stake = death' is that most people really really don't want that, so we drop the probability lower and lower, and try to then compensate by increasing the stakes. Which means we go from "death" to "super death" to "totally gonna be death" but it really doesn't happen.

And I think this is why a lot of people push back against less-than-death consequences, because at some point they realize that the odds of failure are low, and so if you just make the consequences less bad it's boring.

Again, it's really just this weird cycle I find odd - where the GM and players don't actually want to kill PCs, so they keep increasing the theoretical threat without ever realizing it, and then congratulate themselves on what a tough game it is. I remember one thread here a while back where someone was congratulating themselves on what a deadly game they played - and one PC had died two years prior.


It turns out, yeah, I don't actually like watching somebody get horribly burned, even if five minutes ago I was saying "oh my gosh, he could get horribly burned if this went wrong, this is so exciting!" The illusion of danger is a powerful entertainer, but the safeguards have to be there.

Right, and I don't advocate for that. What puzzles me is that they don't look at the question of "hey, what stakes would be acceptable?" and change those to be the real stakes of the game.


That's for your average group, IMO. There are absolutely hardcore players who really want to push the limits and get into actual deadly encounters in RPGs constantly. I haven't really met them at my tables. I have met players who say "oh yes, absolutely, I would be okay with my character dying" and then got to two failed death saves in 5e and very quickly realized they were wrong, they don't actually want to see the firebreather get horribly burned, please turn the safety rails back on.

Interestingly enough, back in 1e days, the kind of presumption (by the designers, how anyone played is a different story) is that the game was run with whoever showed up any given night, and that a player might have multiple characters to choose from. Losing your PC was like losing a soldier in X-Com. It sucked, but it wasn't the end of the game for you.


I think D&D is one of the games that thrives on those safety rails, and introducing narrative stakes for defeat (rather than perma-death for the whole party) is a great way to do that.

Yeah, couldn't agree more.


Puzzles are a good comparison. A more interesting question for most RPG tables is "when, how, and how easily" the players will win, not "if."

Puzzles don't have lose conditions, though. Most combats do.

I don't know that the players need to "win" every encounter, even if the game is tilted for them to "win" in the end.


So you've got this weird kayfabe going on, where the characters are routinely getting into life-threatening scrapes against lethal threats, but the players aren't interested in replacing their character every 2nd battle. The players want to keep winning against impossible odds. Just like the heroes of their favorite fictions.

Bingo. There's a few elements that I think just kinda create weirdness:

1. Death is considered the default or only loss state in many cases
2. Players really don't want to permakill their PCs for various reasons
3. Players want the threat of loss to create tension

This is really three facts that work against each other in various ways, and resolves itself in various ways.


It's almost impossible to tell an interesting story where the obviously more competent and capable side keeps winning against every threat - that's boring. We want to see the hero struggle and scramble for a desperate solution, and win because they did something clever, or because they believe in the power of friendship, or because the villain's moral foibles backfired. So you all have to sit down and pretend that, yes, that Adult White Dragon is gonna wipe out the whole party if they make even so much as the slightest mistake, and the quest walks a knife's edge, and it's gonna be a close call. When in reality there's less than a snowball's chance in hell that this party wipes to this dragon.

Right. And the problem here is that the first Adult White Dragon is scary, and you think "I'm gonna get wiped!" But then the second one looks scary and you realize.... "wait, we totally beat the last one". And then it's "we beat the last ten of these things." So the GM has to escalate the appearance of danger, and create ever-more scary looking threats, and keep reducing the margin of success.

.... and I think the easiest way to break this cycle, and actually increase tension, is to back off of the "loss = death" part of the equation. Then when players go "oh, wow, we could really lose here!" and they do, they learn that that sense of risk is real. And that adds tension to the game.


That's the disconnect I was trying to communicate with the percentages thing. You want the combat to seem scary and interesting, but in order for that to be plausible, we all pretend that the threat is there...when in reality, for most modern parties that are interested in telling a compelling, narrative, character-driven story using improv and dice, the guardrails are up and everybody at the table is pretending not to notice.

Right. 100%. And I think the ideal answer to that is really "use stakes that you're willing to follow through on". The guardrail is "most of the time, PC death isn't what will happen if you fail." Now you can have real risk, even if what you're risking is potentially less critical. I mean, I've seen it work. And I've asked those players if they thought my game was "easy mode" and they stared at me in abject horror.



Yup. But in a RPG, where the consequences for losing is likely death, this is waay too dangerous. So there's a disconnect there I think. If one out of every 5 encounters result in death, then the rewards have to be sufficient that said death rate still results in some sort of progress (or at least "fun", however that's defined). Or (as below) you create different consquences for losing.

Emphasis mine.


Absolutely. The major obstacle to this in some campaigns is that this requires that the players actually be invested to a decent degree in the game setting itself. Which can be tricky. I've played at a lot of tables that were basically "Create characters of X level/power, then run through this scenario. Then we're done, never to touch those characters or setting again, and move on to the next thing". At that sort of table, actual investment in the game setting is minimal, so the players don't really care much about loss (except that they "lost" the scenario itself maybe from a game play perspective).

I haven't really found this much. The key is to make the stakes clear and surface-level meaningful. I mean, people get invested in 90 minute movies all of the time. They get invested in reading short stories. I can't buy that it takes months of time to get people invested in things.

"Oh, the tax rate is going up and that means that suuuuper myserious things might be happening!" is bad as an intro stake. "The evil Duke's men are breaking in to kidnap your mentor" or whatever can work.


I find this to be a very system specific assumption. Many of the games I've run in the past decade have had "losing" and defeats in combat that included no PC deaths. Sometimes they've even "won" a fight by kmocking out or forcing a retreat of the opponents, and then and then lost the encounter by ignoring the reason why they were fighting.

This hits an important point, I think. Specifically, that fights, ideally should be about something. There should be a goal beyond "kill the bad guys". People don't want to die, so why are they fighting instead of running away? Killing the bad guys is the means to your end, not the end in and of itself.


I think you're right. "How hard should combat be" is not a very useful question.

I think it is. Just not by itself. It's one part of the equation. And too often the other parts are unexamined.

[Telok]

@Telok: if you're putting up enough warning signs that any reasonable player would avoid the death trap, you're still following the principle me and Jay R are talking about. The in-character reasoning for why a puzzle is in place is secondary to the game design concern of making the puzzle winnable.

You wouldn't think so the way some people go on about these things. Really though, I absolutely don't put in death traps as a puzzle for players to 'win' or 'lose', they're there if and only if it makes sense for the installer to put it in. I've had them in friendly and neutral NPC's homes/lairs that I never intended the PCs to trigger. The warnings have been as simple as "this person has TPKed elite assassin teams in their home and will not come out of the house" or that the entire ceiling of the grand ballroom is covered in a wide variety glowing magic runes.

Simply put; when I do something like have an NPC say "the ultra-secure storage has a death trap on it, here are the written instructions to bypass it", that's not a puzzle or intelligence test. It's simple world building (and a reason for the big demon to stay trapped in the storage area for a few weeks) and an NPC who wants the party to do something on the other side of it. That one was very very close to being truly inescapable once triggered, and designed to kill powerful creatures with more immunities & toughness than PCs in the system had individually.

It's been more than fifteen years and we still tease that player about "I want to see what it does" sometimes.

[kyoryu]

As an aside, in a lot of cases I've found that "let's see what that does" type players are really just pushing to do something, anything to have some agency and impact on the world.

Had a friend that was known for that. First game with me, he did some stuff like that, and found that his actions did have an impact. And from that point on in my games, he started acting in a more moderated manner.

[Telok]

As an aside, in a lot of cases I've found that "let's see what that does" type players are really just pushing to do something, anything to have some agency and impact on the world.

Had a friend that was known for that. First game with me, he did some stuff like that, and found that his actions did have an impact. And from that point on in my games, he started acting in a more moderated manner.

I wish. This guy... still like that. Still pulls the levers, boops the self destruct button, opens doors with danger signs, breaks the seal on the evil crypt, etc.

[gbaji]

I find this to be a very system specific assumption. Many of the games I've run in the past decade have had "losing" and defeats in combat that included no PC deaths. Sometimes they've even "won" a fight by kmocking out or forcing a retreat of the opponents, and then and then lost the encounter by ignoring the reason why they were fighting.

Yeah. Probably should have left off that first comma (how do we do nested quotes again? Can never remember). I intended that to be conditional, as in "when playing RPGs where death is a likely consequence of loss...". Obviously, if there are other consequences, then you can include losses more frequently. And I mentioned that concept later in my post.


I sorta agree, and sorta don't. My experience is that when people figure out there's no actual danger, they start to disinvest. You see them get bored.

Yeah. Which ties in to what you were previously speaking about in terms of making things appear to be dangerous/risky but perhaps not always. Uh... But that can have risks as well (which I think you mentioned as well).


And I think this is why a lot of people push back against less-than-death consequences, because at some point they realize that the odds of failure are low, and so if you just make the consequences less bad it's boring.

I think there needs to be a balance here, but amazingly enough (given this thread), finding that balance is tricky. And I do think a lot of it is going to depend on the specifics of the gaming table. Different players prefer different things.



Interestingly enough, back in 1e days, the kind of presumption (by the designers, how anyone played is a different story) is that the game was run with whoever showed up any given night, and that a player might have multiple characters to choose from. Losing your PC was like losing a soldier in X-Com. It sucked, but it wasn't the end of the game for you.

My primary gaming group plays this way still. And yeah, I'm often somewhat surprised when I play in games where everyone has just one character and plays that one until they die or something. I've even seen players who just play the same character across multiple different game settings, and even game systems. I guess that's a way to play, but I've always questioned how much RP you're doing if every character you play is the same character.

Which leads to some odd variations on this subject. I've also seen the concept that the same player just re-makes the same character for the next game, so "death" isn't really "death" to them. Which, I suppose, is one way to manage this. Maybe?

This really really depends on what style of play is going on. I've seen a wide variety of different ways of handling characters in games, and IME any method can work. They just work differently, and will maybe affect how the GM approaches difficulty and especially PC death.



Right. And the problem here is that the first Adult White Dragon is scary, and you think "I'm gonna get wiped!" But then the second one looks scary and you realize.... "wait, we totally beat the last one". And then it's "we beat the last ten of these things." So the GM has to escalate the appearance of danger, and create ever-more scary looking threats, and keep reducing the margin of success.

Yup. I refer to that as "power creep" in a game. As the players overcome powerful opponents, they will think that's the "new normal", which pushes you as the GM to provide even more challenging opposition, which requires providing more powerful items/treasure to the PCs, making them more capable, which leads to more difficult things to challenge them, which then keeps looping until you have silly powerful near gods walking around being played by the players. Which some folks find super fun. I'm not so impressed with this.

You can address this easily with shorter campaigns with clearly defined endpoints (which could very well be "our characters are gods and reshape the entire universe to our whim). It's far far far more difficult to do this in a long running campaign with multiple characters played by each player. In that environment, power creep becomes a real problem. Every strange artifact or magic armor becomes another step in the process, so you have to be very careful.


.... and I think the easiest way to break this cycle, and actually increase tension, is to back off of the "loss = death" part of the equation. Then when players go "oh, wow, we could really lose here!" and they do, they learn that that sense of risk is real. And that adds tension to the game.

Yup. Different stakes work well.



I haven't really found this much. The key is to make the stakes clear and surface-level meaningful. I mean, people get invested in 90 minute movies all of the time. They get invested in reading short stories. I can't buy that it takes months of time to get people invested in things.

Yeah. I meant to add a bit more to that. Short campaigns can work (and work well). It's just a very different mindset.

Shorter campaigns actually have a huge advantage in that you can put in a lot higher "risk of death", without feeling like this is a huge problem. I've played a heck of a lot of Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu games that were more or less single shot adventure arcs and they were fantastic. But yeah, there's a different investment level in the characters themselves.

It's like the difference between a feature film and a TV series. You expect main characters to die off in the film in the course of resolving whatever the plot requires. Doesn't matter. You aren't thinking about the sequel, and figure whomever writes that can figure out who to include in that film. On the other hand, you're going to be a lot more hesitant to kill off major characters in a TV series, since you might want to keep these characters around for future development. And, as you develop characters in a TV series, you become even more hesitant to kill them off, because then you might feel that all that development was wasted.

So yeah. Is your game a feature film? Or a long running TV series?

[Vahnavoi]

@Telok: no such thing as simple worldbuilding; every interactive element in a game acts as a test whether you meant for it to be so or not. In your specific example, impulse control test would be more fitting than intelligence test, but those two are genuinely related in reality, so it's not even that big of a distinction.

Put differently, for every death trap or instruction manual to bypass one you could include "because it makes for the NPCs/world/whatever", there's some minimum of skill and cognitive capacity required of a player to understand them. Those are the real parameters of difficulty and create tangible win and loss conditions for players even if you don't think of them as such yourself.

I, too, occasionally place stuff in my games "just" based on internal logic of a game world, but when I do so, I do it with understanding that game difficulty is going to be a crapshoot. Hence the conditional with which I began my last comment to you. Because if you don't put enough warning signs for any reasonable player to avoid the death traps, the predictable result is that some perfectly reasonable players will trigger those traps and suffer the consequences.

[Telok]

Yeah. Probably should have left off that first comma (how do we do nested quotes again? Can never remember). I intended that to be conditional, as in "when playing RPGs where death is a likely consequence of loss...". Obviously, if there are other consequences, then you can include losses more frequently. And I mentioned that concept later in my post.

Fair. But it made me think of a supers game I ran. Players knew there was a nasty gas bomb somewhere and went after the villian in his mansion. They bust into the lair and see the TV screens pointed at bad looking devices on top of a 15000 seat football stadium where a game soon starting. Cue the fight.

If they lose the fight, it's a supers game so they get thrown in a cell and have a one hour timer to bomb time. There's literally a bit in the game saying death is optional no matter how bad a hero is hurt. If they're going to win the villian grabs 1 of 6 jetpacks, starts a 5 minute bomb countdown, and flies off. If 4/5 PCs grab jetpacks they get to the stadium in under 2 minutes and disarm the bombs (there's no tricks except they all link ti each other, just yank the wires out at the same time). Or they could quick tech fake the shutdown signal that's in the plans on the desk. Or, or, and or a couple other ways to stop the bombs too. Backup plans ya know? You build that stuff in for a supers game because players.

The PCs were winning and the villian did the emergency exit plan. Two PCs grabbed jetpacks to chase the villian. Another PC left to literally walk 20 miles home. The other two players and I were... a bit shocked.

But anyways. Point was there's plenty of game systems where losing a fight isn't death/TPK or a mission failure. But it's easy to have scenarios in any system where winning a fight isn't an automatic success condition.

[King of Nowhere]

on the other hand, did anyone consider that asking too many, too detailed questions at your players is most likely to result in annoyance and "enough of questionaries, we want to play"? some of the answers I've seen look quite bizantine and burocratic, and may be worse than the problem they set to solve.
In my experience, with all problems in life it's good to analyze, but you eventually reach a point where overanalyzing becomes detrimental. it's often more desirable to try, and see what happens, and correct from there.


But, what I'm talking about here is a fairly curious cycle.

Basically, it looks like the "kayfabe" situation - there's an illusion of danger, but no real danger. Like, if you say your worst 10% of your play + luck still isn't enough to cause failure (often death). So players quickly realize that they're not being rewarded for smart play, because they're not being penalized for poor play. Maybe they don't realize it consciously, but you can start to see that they get bored at things which "should" have them on the edge of their seats.

which is why I insist the danger should be real. if you are playing dumb and are unlucky and still don't die, then the game is too easy for my tastes.
which is why, that time I chased a high level rogue inside a fog cloud and ended up dead for it, I was happy (ok, I was also unlucky that all attacks hit, but I had been foolhardy). I don't know how common that is across players, but for me a real danger is required for combat to be meaningful. just like different possible outcomes are necessary for character interactions to be meaningful.
which incidentally is why resurrection spells exhist and have collateral costs; so that doing something stupid does not ruin a character into which you invested years, but still end up having a real cost that you'll feel.



Yup. I refer to that as "power creep" in a game. As the players overcome powerful opponents, they will think that's the "new normal", which pushes you as the GM to provide even more challenging opposition, which requires providing more powerful items/treasure to the PCs, making them more capable, which leads to more difficult things to challenge them, which then keeps looping until you have silly powerful near gods walking around being played by the players. Which some folks find super fun. I'm not so impressed with this.

I don't think the reason for power creep is that you need more powerful villains to make the players feel threatened. rather, I think it's the fact that the players gain power at all. so they need more powerful foes because they themselves are more powerful.
but just needing new, more powerful enemies because they did defeat the last ones? not necessarily. not if the encounters were close enough.
in my campaigns, the villains have access to resurrection too. the really powerful end game bosses also have enough money and connection to replace their gear. they also have enough sense that their team generally teleports away when they are losing, carrying away as much equipment as they can. and I make those guys powerful enough that they could realistically defeat the party in the right conditions - those encounters are supposed to be close things where one or two pc deaths are expected even if the party wins.
and as a result of all that, I can keep using the same villains, and I've not seen any issue with "we already defeated them, it's not interesting". it's more like "that time we managed a good ambush and we won easily. the next time we didn't, and it was mostly a draw. the third time we won cleanly, but if the rogue had tanked the saving throw against the implosion he wouldn't have been able to finish the enemy fighter and the whole fight would have been completely different". The same enemies keep being dangerous, and the party always have to find some way to get an edge - or they have to rely on luck.
then something will break the stalemate at some point. maybe the party manages to capture an enemy alive, so that he cannot return to fight. maybe they manage to loot some unique artifact, permanently reducing the power of an opponent. maybe I just declare that the enemies finally run out of resources to replenish their gear that the party keeps looting. maybe the whole point of the fight was not to kill the opponents, but to achieve some other objective that would cripple the villain's power base.
either way, at this point the villains are defeated. the party got loot aplenty, possibly a level or two, possibly some unique plot power, possibly some new allies and political power. and at this point power creep sets in, because the party is stronger than before and so they need stronger foes.
even then, I can still recycle most defeated foes with a villain teamup. which, story-wise, works a lot better than introducing some new totally powerful new guy that you never heard of before despite all of his power, and that never did anything relevant to interact with events so far even though he totally should have. Once I establish that some people are the most powerful villains in the setting, I try to be consistent. It's not just a way to be lazy with npc creation efforts.

[Mechalich]

A key point with regard to difficulty is to differentiate character cost from [/i]player[/i] costs, with the significant notice that while character costs can be measured in almost anything, especially in fiction universes where death is not final, player costs are measured in basically two things: emotional investment and time.

Emotional investment varies vastly from player to player and is extremely difficult to compensate using any sort of design principle. Plenty of players, even if told their characters will inevitably die, will still get overly invested in them to the point of railing when that death ultimately arrives. Time, on the other hand, is amenable to at least some design management. Notably, 'difficulty' and 'danger' need to be constructed in such a way as to minimize the time that they remove the player from the game.

For example, across various editions of D&D the amount of time necessary to 'roll up a new character' has varied massively, including across class and level. Replacing a level 1-3 fighter in 1e or 2e AD&D could be done, potentially, in seconds. Replacing a 15th level 3.5e wizard, by contrast, takes hours. In the latter situation this means that the GM basically cannot deal out permanent death, because the moment they do the player might as well just go home.

[Telok]

Put differently, for every death trap or instruction manual to bypass one you could include "because it makes for the NPCs/world/whatever", there's some minimum of skill and cognitive capacity required of a player to understand them. Those are the real parameters of difficulty and create tangible win and loss conditions for players even if you don't think of them as such yourself.

"Stove hot, will hurt if touch it" is freaking 2 year old child levels of "minimum of skill and cognitive capacity".

Sorry, I'm just not buying it. If I write up some NPC paranoid who is going to deathtrap their house when I'm world building, then that almost always happens before I even know who'll be playing the game, much less before a single character is generated. I'm not intending or trying to challenge or reward or punish players. I just want a setting that gets past basic fridge logic and works decently. My death traps aren't about win and loss conditions. They're meant to kill something in the game world to the best of the creator's ability.

If figuring out "Stove hot, will hurt if touch it" is the sum total requirement of defeating a death trap challenge... I dunno.. I think you lost me somewhere.

[TaiLiu]

As I have mentioned a lot in previous threads, RPGs are kind of bad because they are based on resource management, but those resources are often gated to time, which is often an unlimited resource.
I think it really depends on the system. D&D-like systems are all about resource management (which sometimes surprises new players). Other systems have little to no resources to manage.


You want the combat to seem scary and interesting, but in order for that to be plausible, we all pretend that the threat is there...when in reality, for most modern parties that are interested in telling a compelling, narrative, character-driven story using improv and dice, the guardrails are up and everybody at the table is pretending not to notice.
Kinda. I'm not sure guardrails and pretending are the best metaphors for this kind of play. It's more like there's a fiction that everyone generally believes in and is choosing to uphold. The combat is scary and interesting cuz everyone has agreed that it is.

Of course, it's true that they're pretending, but TTRPGs are all about pretend. So the fact that they're pretending is not very interesting. It's just that this fiction doesn't totally map onto statistical models of victory and loss based on the game engine. Some people might prefer games where there's a closer relationship between the fiction and the engine, but that's just a different kind of pretend—no better or worse than the first kind.


Part of the problem with answering the question is that how hard an encounter is can depend on what the PCs do leading up to it.
For sure, though it does depend on whether the game runs on combat-as-sport or combat-as-war. If it's the former, then combats are more like set pieces and characters are more limited in what they can do to influence how they look.

[King of Nowhere]

Replacing a 15th level 3.5e wizard, by contrast, takes hours. In the latter situation this means that the GM basically cannot deal out permanent death, because the moment they do the player might as well just go home.

opening a tangent here, but i disagree with this general philosophy that the player without character has nothing to do at the table and may as well go home. if that was the case, i'd have left the rpg business long ago. heck, in a regular 4-people party you are doing nothing for 75% of the time while the other players act. add in the time the gm also takes for the opponents, you're actually taking your turn maybe one/sixth of the time. doesn't seem enough to justify sitting at the table unless you are having fun even when you have no character to direct.
in a healty table you should be having fun when it's not your turn, and by extension this means having fun even in case your character is out for a session.

opening a tangent to a tangent, I can't understand those super serious tables where they're like "no chatter" "no talking out of turn" "no meddling with other people's turns" "only speak in character", as those tables look like the ones where you actually get bored when it's not your turn.

[Vahnavoi]

"Stove hot, will hurt if touch it" is freaking 2 year old child levels of "minimum of skill and cognitive capacity".

Yes, and? That's not being contested. The point being made is that neither a death trap nor a manual to bypass one are naturally in this difficulty class. If all death traps in your game are equivalent to hot stoves, that's an active design decision on your part - a decision that's within limits of the principle me and Jay R talked about.

That's why I contrasted what you do with what I do when I follow internal logic of my settings; when I place traps where "it would make sense", they won't all be hot stoves, because that wouldn't "make sense". The inevitable conclusion is that some reasonable people will walk to their deaths in my games.


Sorry, I'm just not buying it. If I write up some NPC paranoid who is going to deathtrap their house when I'm world building, then that almost always happens before I even know who'll be playing the game, much less before a single character is generated. I'm not intending or trying to challenge or reward or punish players. I just want a setting that gets past basic fridge logic and works decently. My death traps aren't about win and loss conditions. They're meant to kill something in the game world to the best of the creator's ability.

You're not buying what? Again, nothing about why you put a thing in a game changes the fact that all interactive elements have minimum level of skill and cognitive capacity to comprehend them, and thus create win and loss conditions for players even if you don't think of them as such.

Here, consider this example outside your own games: a videogame developer leaves a tall pillar in their game's overworld as an oversight. It has no relevance to rest of the game, but format of rest of the game suggests that is has or that it might have some hidden reward on top. This alone, regardless of the developer's intentions, compels some portion of players to climb the pillar.

If it is very easy to climb - anyone who could reasonably play the game can do it - almost everyone will complete this implicit challenge, but no-one will remark on it, because it is trivial.

If it is of moderate difficulty but still doable by pretty much anyone, you are likely to see a lot of people annoyed that there was nothing on top - the (null) prize was not worth the effort. You will likely see a metagame where experienced players will either troll new players to climbing the pillar or tell them "don't climb it, there's nothing on it, it's a waste of time."

If it's of high enough difficulty thaf a lot of people can't do it in reasonable time, most players will give up in frustration - then later go to messageboards asking "so is it possible to climb that stupid pillar??? IS THERE ANYTHING ON IT??????" It vexes them that they failed a challenge and feel like they're missing something, even though it was never meant as a challenge and there is no prize to it beyond completion itself.

If it is of very high difficulty but still seemingly possible, you might see crowds of people trying to get to the top for years just to see if it can be done - and even after it's known there's nothing on it, you might see an entire competition format based around who can climb it the fastest. The challenge itself is interesting enough for people to get invested in it and feel rewarded for it - again, though it was never meant to be a challenge and this whole thing is an accident.

Every thing you add to your game "just because it makes sense for NPCs/world/whatever" falls somewhere on that continuum. It doesn't matter if you considered where beforehand or not. Hence, no such thing as "simple worldbuilding".


If figuring out "Stove hot, will hurt if touch it" is the sum total requirement of defeating a death trap challenge... I dunno.. I think you lost me somewhere.

Again, the point is that it doesn't have to be, so if it is, that's an active design decision on your part.

[Satinavian]

For example, across various editions of D&D the amount of time necessary to 'roll up a new character' has varied massively, including across class and level. Replacing a level 1-3 fighter in 1e or 2e AD&D could be done, potentially, in seconds. Replacing a 15th level 3.5e wizard, by contrast, takes hours. In the latter situation this means that the GM basically cannot deal out permanent death, because the moment they do the player might as well just go home.
And, why is that a problem ?

In nearly every case so far i experienced a character death as something with quite some impact where the player in question did not play someone else this evening and took the time until the next session to say goodbye to the lost one, come up with a new concept, confer with the GM on how to insert it in the ongoing campaign and build it.

And that was never seen as a problem.

[Vahnavoi]

I'd say the problem comes from unstated assumption that the player is supposed to be involved for duration of a whole session; anything stopping this is hence bad.

Even a quick look across wider realm of games shows this is an unnecessary assumption. Player elimination is an ubiquitous game mechanic, for good reasons. In roleplaying games, character death and player elimination go together naturally pretty well - it's pretty easy to understand that when you're playing a role, the end of that role is also end of play for you. (It's not how it has to be, I'm simply pointing out that when it is, it's so for a very straightforward reason.)

If player elimination means a player might as well go home, and the player does not want to go home, in most cases this just creates an incentive for the player to play well, meaning they are less likely to be eliminated and sent home - negative reinforcement in terms of operant conditioning. But not all people can distinquish between negative reinforcement and punishment (the difference isn't always clear cut in games anyway), which leads to incorrect conclusions.

[MoiMagnus]

Even a quick look across wider realm of games shows this is an unnecessary assumption. Player elimination is an ubiquitous game mechanic, for good reasons.

No. For bad reasons. And modern boardgame design has mostly moved away from it, for good reasons.
Sure, there are situations where you can't do without it, but that's an unfortunate flaw and that's bad design habits to not at least try to get rid of player elimination.

Well, ok, to be fair it's not exactly player elimination that is the issue. The true underlying issue is when main point of the game becomes unaccessible before the end of the game. Games that technically don't have player elimination but in practice some players sit for a few hours at the end without any hope of winning are as bad if not worse than games with player elimination. On the other hand:
+ Cooperative games (including RPGs) can make player elimination not that problematic by encouraging dead players to advice/discuss with alive players or at the very least root for their success,
+ Competitive games that have a possibility for "no one wins" offer to eliminated players the role of "the bad guy trying to make sure everyone loses".
+ Party games where the actual goal of the game is not "winning" but the social interactions don't suffer from player eliminations (in fact, being a spectator is sometimes funnier than actually playing)
+ etc

But player elimination is still a flaw most of the time, and you have to work for it not to be a negative point.

[Vahnavoi]

No. For bad reasons. And modern boardgame design has mostly moved away from it, for good reasons.
Sure, there are situations where you can't do without it, but that's an unfortunate flaw and that's bad design habits to not at least try to get rid of player elimination.

Well, ok, to be fair it's not exactly player elimination that is the issue. The true underlying issue is when main point of the game becomes unaccessible before the end of the game. Games that technically don't have player elimination but in practice some players sit for a few hours at the end without any hope of winning are as bad if not worse than games with player elimination.

Congratulations on immediately undermining your own argument. The issue of a player being forced to stick around well after they've lost is not caused by player elimination, it's a much harder problem that has to do with difficulties of predicting whether a game is or remains solvable at all.

Contrary to what you say, in many games, player elimination alleviates this problem because it frees a player from the game. Indeed, the standard way to get out of an unwinnable game is self-elimination through forfeiture. A lot of games also have a natural quality of speeding up as number of participants goes down (less information to process), so swift elimination actually reduces amount of waiting all around. Equating elimination with being stuck in an unwinnable state is based on the assumption that an eliminated player has to hang around doing nothing, which is unwarranted.

[Quertus]

opening a tangent here, but i disagree with this general philosophy that the player without character has nothing to do at the table and may as well go home. if that was the case, i'd have left the rpg business long ago. heck, in a regular 4-people party you are doing nothing for 75% of the time while the other players act. add in the time the gm also takes for the opponents, you're actually taking your turn maybe one/sixth of the time. doesn't seem enough to justify sitting at the table unless you are having fun even when you have no character to direct.
in a healty table you should be having fun when it's not your turn, and by extension this means having fun even in case your character is out for a session.

opening a tangent to a tangent, I can't understand those super serious tables where they're like "no chatter" "no talking out of turn" "no meddling with other people's turns" "only speak in character", as those tables look like the ones where you actually get bored when it's not your turn.

Eh, this is an “8 Kinds of Fun” issue. Someone with a high Abnegation rating can enjoy being told a story, even if they are not an active participant. Someone with a high Fellowship rating can enjoy hanging out with friends regardless of the quality of the game. Someone with neither would stare at you like you’ve grown a third head, and have no appreciation for what you just said.

There are things that are lost by not having an active character that matter enough to some people that, if that state is to continue for an extended period of time, they may as well go home.

[Telok]

Re: character death mid game.

I always like having familiars, pets, henchies, and followers for this reason. Current game I'm in if my character gets taken out (twice in over a year, only once was death) the imp familiar suddenly gets a lot more active and personable. I also get to try talking the other PCs into selling their souls, which is fun. I may moan and bitch about hour long combats where my total active time is barely 6 minutes (I keep stats), but not when my PC gets knocked out because I've got a backup (usually).

Re: death trap stuff

I think what's going on is similar to you're trying to talk art theory to someone who paints for fun. I understand sentences and words being posted, but they have no relationship to my process or intent. I think you're right in gerneral about that meta ideal stuff around traps, encounters, stuff maybe. But it has no connection to me with what I'm doing in relation to deadly traps in my games. So its like having someone analyzing color composition and light-dark balance while I'm all "I paint pretty kitty picture! Kitty!"

I'm currently looking for a place to put a tavern in a setting I'm working on. There will be a lever that opens hatches in the ceiling and pours lava all over the place. Not because of challenge or "you must be this tall to ride" stuff, nor with any intent the PCs will visit and get roasted. But because I want an insane dorf architect and a lava bar in the setting, I think it's funny. Yeah, there will a chain and a "do not pull" sign on it. But that's because the locals are insane, not stupid. Not because of any meta concepts or gameplay concerns that I don't care about and don't think about for this.

[Talakeal]

So I talked to my players; let's see if anyone can help unpack this one:

They say that the reason they hate alternate loss conditions and would rather die is because "Video games have conditioned us to believe that losing a fight and progressing the storyline are mutually exclusive."

Any thoughts on how to deal with this?


No. For bad reasons. And modern boardgame design has mostly moved away from it, for good reasons.
Sure, there are situations where you can't do without it, but that's an unfortunate flaw and that's bad design habits to not at least try to get rid of player elimination.

Well, ok, to be fair it's not exactly player elimination that is the issue. The true underlying issue is when main point of the game becomes unaccessible before the end of the game. Games that technically don't have player elimination but in practice some players sit for a few hours at the end without any hope of winning are as bad if not worse than games with player elimination. On the other hand:
+ Cooperative games (including RPGs) can make player elimination not that problematic by encouraging dead players to advice/discuss with alive players or at the very least root for their success,
+ Competitive games that have a possibility for "no one wins" offer to eliminated players the role of "the bad guy trying to make sure everyone loses".
+ Party games where the actual goal of the game is not "winning" but the social interactions don't suffer from player eliminations (in fact, being a spectator is sometimes funnier than actually playing)
+ etc

But player elimination is still a flaw most of the time, and you have to work for it not to be a negative point.

I remember playing the movie trivia board game "Scene-It" with my family, and getting so far ahead of everyone else that I effectively put myself out of the game; you see there is a mechanic to force another player to lose their turn, and since I was so far ahead everyone at the table used it on me, meaning I just sat there the entire night and watched them play the game without ever taking a turn. When I complained that it was no fun for me because I didn't get to play, they said I was just being a sore loser.

[kyoryu]

So I talked to my players; let's see if anyone can help unpack this one:

They say that the reason they hate alternate loss conditions and would rather die is because "Video games have conditioned us to believe that losing a fight and progressing the storyline are mutually exclusive."

Any thoughts on how to deal with this?

Yeah. I have this conversation frequently with new players, for that exact reason.

"A lot of RPGs are structured where the encounter is a challenge to overcome, and the game mostly assumes you're going to beat them. The goal is to see how good you are at getting past the obstacle.

"This game is a little different - the point of the encounter or scene is to figure out what happens. It could go you way, or not. Think of movies - in Star Wars, the Falcon gets captured by the Death Star - not what they wanted to happen, but the movie kept going. They get forced into the trash compactor - same thing. So if you 'lose', things will still keep going. The game doesn't end. It might just not go the way you want. You don't always get your way, but the game and story does keep moving forward.

"And if you think about it, in Star Wars they still beat the Death Star at the end, even though they didn't always 'win' at every moment. Empire Strikes Back was nothing but the good guys losing the whole time - and they still came back and destroyed the second Death Star in Jedi.

"That happens in most movies, books, and TV shows. It's part of what makes them interesting. Having a setback or having things not go the protagonists way doesn't make them lose overall, and it doesn't mean they're weak or powerless. It's part of what makes the story exciting."

It then helps to demonstrate this very concretely in game with an early loss that adds some level of complication but, really, isn't that big of a deal. (I wouldn't railroad it, of course, but putting them in over their heads so they'll likely need to retreat is a good place to start).


I remember playing the movie trivia board game "Scene-It" with my family, and getting so far ahead of everyone else that I effectively put myself out of the game; you see there is a mechanic to force another player to lose their turn, and since I was so far ahead everyone at the table used it on me, meaning I just sat there the entire night and watched them play the game without ever taking a turn. When I complained that it was no fun for me because I didn't get to play, they said I was just being a sore loser.

Yeah, I think that if people sit down to play a game, it's usually a good idea to let them actually play the game for most of the time. Complete elimination for hours isn't ideal, and neither, really, is "you've basically lost but are forced to continue the game". Neither of those are fun, for the most part. I'm not going to say "never never use that", but it seems like a good thing to generally avoid.

[gbaji]

I don't think the reason for power creep is that you need more powerful villains to make the players feel threatened. rather, I think it's the fact that the players gain power at all. so they need more powerful foes because they themselves are more powerful.

It can be a combination of the two. There is a tendency for players (and GMs) to want to "amp up" the threat/power of the opponents. It's a common trope in storytelling as well, and tends to get emulated in any series of games. Last season, our heroes defeated the Mayor of the local down. This season they've graduated and are dealling with a government funded frankenmonster. Next season, they'll have to fight an actual hellgod. It happens. There is pressure to make each successive "thing (season on a TV show, film sequel, book in a series) more exciting with "bigger" things to deal with, broader scope, more risk, etc.


either way, at this point the villains are defeated. the party got loot aplenty, possibly a level or two, possibly some unique plot power, possibly some new allies and political power. and at this point power creep sets in, because the party is stronger than before and so they need stronger foes.

And this is the other factor. The characters actually get more powerful as a result of defeating the last foe, so they need a bigger badder challenge this time around.

If you are running a single "run through" set of scenarios in a campaign, this is maybe not a problem (PCs progress in power over time, defeat bigger and badder enemies, and then "win" and retire. Then we start a new campaign). It's a brutally important thing to pay attention to as a GM if you're trying at all to run a longer term continous game setting though. You can make individual characters more powerful, but have to be very careful not to introduce setting unbalancing items/powers into the game. It's trickier than many might think.



I'd say the problem comes from unstated assumption that the player is supposed to be involved for duration of a whole session; anything stopping this is hence bad.

Yeah. Which goes to the concept of "why are you here?". If it's strictly to mechanically play your character, then this is a problem for that player. But most players are there for the social interaction and "fun". Even if your character is dead or unplayable at the moment, you are still (hopefully) invested in the outcomes anyway, and should enjoy watching/kibitzing/whatever.

And yeah. This is part and parcel to playing these games. The only alternative is never ever have PCs die.

Um... We do manage this (and not just PC death btw), by having players play two characters on longer/bigger adventures. (usually also the ones where it's hardest to just slot in a new character if something happens). Works remarkably well. Also vastly increases the likelihood of players actually playing some of those more utility characters that maybe aren't terribly exciting.


I'm currently looking for a place to put a tavern in a setting I'm working on. There will be a lever that opens hatches in the ceiling and pours lava all over the place. Not because of challenge or "you must be this tall to ride" stuff, nor with any intent the PCs will visit and get roasted. But because I want an insane dorf architect and a lava bar in the setting, I think it's funny. Yeah, there will a chain and a "do not pull" sign on it. But that's because the locals are insane, not stupid. Not because of any meta concepts or gameplay concerns that I don't care about and don't think about for this.

How exactlty do you set that up in the first place? Or... reset it once someone pulls the chain?



I remember playing the movie trivia board game "Scene-It" with my family, and getting so far ahead of everyone else that I effectively put myself out of the game; you see there is a mechanic to force another player to lose their turn, and since I was so far ahead everyone at the table used it on me, meaning I just sat there the entire night and watched them play the game without ever taking a turn. When I complained that it was no fun for me because I didn't get to play, they said I was just being a sore loser.

Perception problem IMO. Every single person who plays that card on you to make you lose a turn, first lost a turn by rolling a buzz card and getting that card (as opposed to getting to actually play a scene and potentially advance further in the game). Same deal with skip cards in phase10. Yes. The perception is that you are the one losing ground because you're stopped and everyone else is getting to move, and it's turn after turn instead of just each other player effectively losing a turn occasionally along the way. And concentrated on *you* instead of spread out amongst everyone. So yeah. Can suck.

Ironically, mechanics like that are actually intended to solve the problem mentioned earlier. Where one player is so far ahead that the other players can't possibly "catch up". But still have to sit there, turn after turn, waiting for the game to end. These sorts of things are attempts to make the game "close" and "exciting", and not blowouts. But yeah. I can see how that can be frustrating.

[Ionathus]

Yeah. Players are very conditioned to expect that if it's a game, "losing" is always a bad thing to be avoided. Comparing TTRPGs to fiction (even introducing the players to something like Darths & Droids) could be a great way to break your players out of the "never lose" thinking.

We never expect the hero of a story to win every challenge, first try. There's always a give-and-take where they struggle, get pushed back, then usually overcome by the end. "Evil always triumphs in the middle" and all that. Like you said, the Falcon gets captured, they get forced into the garbage compactor, Obi-Wan gets killed...a lot of things that would look like "losing" if they played out at a table, but they're just logical narrative beats that progress the story.

It can sometimes take a long time to become willing enough to let go and trust your DM that if you "fail" something even as minor as a skill check, it will still advance the story and that your failure isn't a stain on the storytelling...it's part of it!

[kyoryu]

Yup! That's why the pattern is basically:

Acknowledge the default
Explicitly explain how it's different
Show examples of how this works in relatable ways
Demonstrate it in play, usually with some level of going really soft to start

The first two steps make it conscious, so people aren't running into the "implicit assumption" problem. Once it's conscious instead of unconscious, people can start reasoning about it.

The third step is about giving examples where they know how it works, and can get very explicit about what I'm talking about.

The last one is building trust.

The fun part is also after doing this, when you start saying "nope, failure here will mean death" the players can be pretty sure you mean it. Because you do.

[atanamis]

The kind of questions I ask to tune this are:
- How comfortable are you with your character being killed? If you are willing to have them killed at all, does it have to be for a pre-planned story moment? Or just a fight against a big bad that your character makes a heroic sacrifice during? Would you get mad if a random encounter happened and a monster got in a lucky crit against you and you died?

- If a player is UNWILLING to have their character die, that says something big about what kind of combat they want. They aren't willing to face ultimate consequences. But if a player group tells me they are find losing their characters on a regular basis if I let them re-roll characters of the same levels, I can give them deadly combat at the end of each story arc.

- I also ask them how CAREFUL they want to be during combat. Do they want space to do the cool flashy thing, or do they want to have to optimize their every turn lest someone die. Of course they want it to FEEL hard, but do they want to run combat as a tactics sim, or do they want to waltz across the battle field taking off heads. Even if the don't want to die, I can knock them all out and make them lose the combat.

Generally, what I do is to set up combats that are not strictly fair or winnable, but then award crazy perks for creativity. If they just try to throw powers off their sheet at me, they lose. If they try to do something clever, I give them advantage and bonus damage and it demoralizes my monsters. I let the players feel like the combat WAS unwinnable, without them being so clever. I tell them stats on my monsters after, and what would have happened had they not kept breaking the spellcasters concentration each round, or whatever they actually did. But if they just try to grind it out? They win or lose fast and we move on to something more fun.

Above all though, no matter what they say before, you need to watch how the players feel DURING. Are they enjoying agonizing whether they should move 10 feet or 15? Do they like debating how many lair actions the monster can take? Are they complaining that the combat is too easy if only one party member got knocked out? Watch how they feel, and react. Because ultimately, you need to be able to react to the experiences of your players to be a good game master.

[atanamis]

They say that the reason they hate alternate loss conditions and would rather die is because "Video games have conditioned us to believe that losing a fight and progressing the storyline are mutually exclusive."Ultimately, you might have to just adjust to what they are expecting. The point of the experience is for everyone to have fun, not to teach a lesson in epic story telling.

That said, I would try to help them understand that you see this "game" as more of an improvisational story telling framework where lost fights can become part of the ongoing tapestry of the story. In real life, MOST combat doesn't end with the death or one side or the other, and a side will back off when it becomes clear they are unlikely to win. Lose the fight at the front gate and sneak in through a window instead. And maybe you later encounter that gate guard who apologizes for having been on the wrong side of things because he didn't understand what was going on at the time.

But if what they want is a tactics sim, decide if that's something you are willing to provide and maybe that's what your combats are. There is no right or wrong way to do this, you guys just need to figure out what everyone wants and can have fun doing together. I have a friend who will get bored at any session that doesn't have a fight. I have another who would role play a conversation for 3 hours. Keeping them both happy at a table is hard, and sometimes I try to run them in different games as a result.

[Vahnavoi]

There are things that are lost by not having an active character that matter enough to some people that, if that state is to continue for an extended period of time, they may as well go home.

If they might as well go home... why don't they? What's the problem with an eliminated player leaving, "good game, see you next week"?

I thought to put this in my earlier post, but decided against it, because it felt unnecessary. I'm now getting back to it to, again, draw attention to unstated assumptions behind statements like these. (It isn't a criticism of you in particular, Quertus. Everything you said about "8 kinds of fun" (or aesthetics of gameplay, as I would say it) is in principle correct.)

---



I think what's going on is similar to you're trying to talk art theory to someone who paints for fun. I understand sentences and words being posted, but they have no relationship to my process or intent. I think you're right in gerneral about that meta ideal stuff around traps, encounters, stuff maybe. But it has no connection to me with what I'm doing in relation to deadly traps in my games. So its like having someone analyzing color composition and light-dark balance while I'm all "I paint pretty kitty picture! Kitty!"

That's a fair analogy, but a better one would be: you are talking about how you wanted to paint a pretty kitty, I'm talking of what makes your painting recognizable as a pretty kitty to other people.

Your reasoning behind placing your death traps isn't being contested; I'm talking of principles that apply to them even if you've never consciously considered them.

---


So I talked to my players; let's see if anyone can help unpack this one:

They say that the reason they hate alternate loss conditions and would rather die is because "Video games have conditioned us to believe that losing a fight and progressing the storyline are mutually exclusive."

Any thoughts on how to deal with this?

One: "If you were conditioned to believe one way by playing particular kind of games, you can be conditioned to believe another way by playing different games."

Two: "If you acknowledge you've been conditioned by external factors, you can at least try to consciously alter your behaviour when it's apparent your conditioning is no longer useful."

Three: "So? You being conditioned does not mean I or anyone else has an imperative to appeal to your past conditioning."

Four: actually give them a list of videogames that require a player to lose to progress a storyline to demonstrate just how full of it they are. (This is a well-established trope in computer roleplaying games, you can likely find a list ready made on TV tropes or something.)

Now to something different.


I remember playing the movie trivia board game "Scene-It" with my family, and getting so far ahead of everyone else that I effectively put myself out of the game; you see there is a mechanic to force another player to lose their turn, and since I was so far ahead everyone at the table used it on me, meaning I just sat there the entire night and watched them play the game without ever taking a turn. When I complained that it was no fun for me because I didn't get to play, they said I was just being a sore loser.

They said you were being a sore loser, because you were. Other people (predictably) used that mechanic to stop you because if they hadn't, the game wouldn't have been fun to anyone else. The (likely, unlearned) lesson there is to quit a game if you outclass others to the degree they feel like doing this, or play more evenly compared to others so they don't feel the need to do this.

You complaining about it not being fun to you was meaningless; it wasn't supposed to be fun to you.

---



Yeah, I think that if people sit down to play a game, it's usually a good idea to let them actually play the game for most of the time. Complete elimination for hours isn't ideal, and neither, really, is "you've basically lost but are forced to continue the game". Neither of those are fun, for the most part. I'm not going to say "never never use that", but it seems like a good thing to generally avoid.

Of course neither are fun. They are supposed to be unfun, otherwise there is no incentive for a player to behave in a way that would avoid them. Games are full of unfun things that happen if players don't play well, and elimination of those things is one way a game signals a player that they've improved.

Corollary being, you don't want to avoid those things in game design, you want to avoid a situations that would prevent a player from changing their behaviour in a way that would avoid those things. Another way to out this is, don't do the player's job on game design level; give them the tools to do it.

Beyond that, we get back to unstated assumptions. Why does an eliminated player stick around for hours? What, exactly, forces a player to continue a game that's already been lost?

[gbaji]

Generally, what I do is to set up combats that are not strictly fair or winnable, but then award crazy perks for creativity. If they just try to throw powers off their sheet at me, they lose. If they try to do something clever, I give them advantage and bonus damage and it demoralizes my monsters. I let the players feel like the combat WAS unwinnable, without them being so clever. I tell them stats on my monsters after, and what would have happened had they not kept breaking the spellcasters concentration each round, or whatever they actually did. But if they just try to grind it out? They win or lose fast and we move on to something more fun.

If that works for you and your players then that's great. For me, that's a little too scripted and contrived. I'm not personally a fan of "unwinnable combat unless you figure out a trick" methods. It just smacks too much of ST:TNG where they would like be sitting there in the biggest baddest starship in the fleet, faced with some tiny ship and "winning" by matching the frequency of their phasers to the power flucuation rate of the power systems in the enemy ship, or something else silly. Um... You have lots of guns. Just fire.

Yes. I do reward clever play, but only based on what actual game effects that play causes. I'm never going to have a mass of enemies that you can't defeat, but if you do something crazy like drop your pants and run around clucking like a chicken, they somehow get so confused that they now become an easy win or something. The players are expected to actually look at the situation, assess it, see what they can do (yes, based on actual items/skills/powers/spells written on their character sheets), and then take action. That action could very well be "retreat", if that's their best choice.

Now figuring out how to use terrain features to their advantage always works. Clever use of stealth abilities will work (to some degree). But what I like to avoid is the players deciding that their success or failure is less dependent on their characters actual abilities and actions and more on whether *they* (the players) come up with something that amuses the GM. That's just too subjective and IME will almost always lead to problems over time.

But hey. If it's working, go for it. Different tables, right?

[Quertus]

The kind of questions I ask to tune this are:
- How comfortable are you with your character being killed? If you are willing to have them killed at all, does it have to be for a pre-planned story moment? Or just a fight against a big bad that your character makes a heroic sacrifice during? Would you get mad if a random encounter happened and a monster got in a lucky crit against you and you died?

- If a player is UNWILLING to have their character die, that says something big about what kind of combat they want. They aren't willing to face ultimate consequences. But if a player group tells me they are find losing their characters on a regular basis if I let them re-roll characters of the same levels, I can give them deadly combat at the end of each story arc.

- I also ask them how CAREFUL they want to be during combat. Do they want space to do the cool flashy thing, or do they want to have to optimize their every turn lest someone die. Of course they want it to FEEL hard, but do they want to run combat as a tactics sim, or do they want to waltz across the battle field taking off heads. Even if the don't want to die, I can knock them all out and make them lose the combat.

Generally, what I do is to set up combats that are not strictly fair or winnable, but then award crazy perks for creativity. If they just try to throw powers off their sheet at me, they lose. If they try to do something clever, I give them advantage and bonus damage and it demoralizes my monsters. I let the players feel like the combat WAS unwinnable, without them being so clever. I tell them stats on my monsters after, and what would have happened had they not kept breaking the spellcasters concentration each round, or whatever they actually did. But if they just try to grind it out? They win or lose fast and we move on to something more fun.

Above all though, no matter what they say before, you need to watch how the players feel DURING. Are they enjoying agonizing whether they should move 10 feet or 15? Do they like debating how many lair actions the monster can take? Are they complaining that the combat is too easy if only one party member got knocked out? Watch how they feel, and react. Because ultimately, you need to be able to react to the experiences of your players to be a good game master.

If I were to sit down at your table, and be asked those questions without the context of this thread, I might well give you bad answers. Because while I'm perfectly happy having a character die an ignoble but realistic death, I'm less interested in defining how careful we need to be in combat than in ensuring we have good communication wrt how careful we are and need to be before / between / in preparation for combats, or even (and perhaps especially) non-combat encounters. Do we need to purchase space-suits before ever leaving the atmosphere? Purchase spares? Perform careful inspections of those suits? Frequently? That's where I'll feel a "gotcha", if our Gamist desire for quick play meets a Simulationist "the merchant sold you shoddy suits, which you should have known from the fact that the rest of the goods he was selling were clearly from a scavenged Firefly, which hasn't seen production in decades... and the enemies think like PCs and hacked your airlocks; you really should have been inspecting your suits daily, and sleeping in them if you didn't want to die" game.

Still, I think you've hit on something important, with your comments about needing to be able to react to the players. I've been thinking for a while now that one of my best GMs may well have been so good simply by applying Sense Motive rolls to every decision they made. Because, while they could make occasional mistakes, there was a really high correlation between the feel of how they adjudicated situations and the tenor of the room at the moment.


If they might as well go home... why don't they? What's the problem with an eliminated player leaving, "good game, see you next week"?

I thought to put this in my earlier post, but decided against it, because it felt unnecessary. I'm now getting back to it to, again, draw attention to unstated assumptions behind statements like these. (It isn't a criticism of you in particular, Quertus. Everything you said about "8 kinds of fun" (or aesthetics of gameplay, as I would say it) is in principle correct.)

Well, that's a good question. And, IME, it depends on the individual and the group. It's fine if the player enjoys the game anyway and stays. It's mostly fine if the player doesn't enjoy such a scenario, and goes home. The problem is when the other players don't share the same mindset, and either badmouth / look down on the player for going home (not understanding their reasoning, because not everybody understands 8 Kinds of Fun), or the player feels the social pressure from the Abnegation or especially Community players, and stays out of a sense of responsibility / necessity, despite not having fun themselves. "Well, Bob stayed when his character died, why didn't you?"

There's a little more to it, but I think that covers the basics pretty well? No, not quite. One more thing that's important to the basic first level here. And I'm sure I could make a Big Bang Theory reference, but... the player may well have, you know, not done other things in order to actually show up - there's a theoretical opportunity cost to their attendance. And repaying their commitment to the game with such treachery deserves punishment on some layer of Hell - a layer that Sheldon doubtless occupies.

There's more complex answers, but I think them's the basics.

[gbaji]

They said you were being a sore loser, because you were. Other people (predictably) used that mechanic to stop you because if they hadn't, the game wouldn't have been fun to anyone else. The (likely, unlearned) lesson there is to quit a game if you outclass others to the degree they feel like doing this, or play more evenly compared to others so they don't feel the need to do this.

I was trying to be more kind in my response, but yeah. That's like complaining about how unfair it is that you were the first to get to 9th level in Munchkin, and were well ahead of everyone else, went to fight a monster, and everyone at the table dumped stuff on you to stop you. Then did it again the next turn. Then someone else snuck up to 9th level and won because everyone was out of nasty cards to hit them with, and isn't that just unfair.

Yeah. That's every game of Munchkin ever played. The whole strategy is to pretty much never be the first one, running in the lead. That's the player that gets dumped on. You wait in second or third position, let the other folks draw the fire, then you swoop in for the win.

Guess what? When you get close to winning in Catan, magically people stop trading stuff to you that you need. That's kinda unfair too, right?

Lots of games have mechanisms within the game specifically designed to make it difficult to just blow out the other players and win, and to give other players a chance to catch up to an obvious leader, and frankly to make the game more interesting to all players at the table and not just the one person doing super well that evening. And one of the most common is having things that other players can do that are nasty to another player, but perhaps harm themselves in some way as well (you're spending your turn or other game resources hindering them instead of helping yourself).

Most games only have a limited degree to which the other players can do this though, so you can sometimes just bash your way through if you are far enough ahead. Or, you have to be more clever and loiter around "near" the finish line, but try to get folks to target someone else first.

And honestly? It's a game of scene-it. It's supposed to just be a fun thing. You don't actually win anything for winning. Enjoy socializing. That's the point.

[Talakeal]

Perception problem IMO. Every single person who plays that card on you to make you lose a turn, first lost a turn by rolling a buzz card and getting that card (as opposed to getting to actually play a scene and potentially advance further in the game). Same deal with skip cards in phase10. Yes. The perception is that you are the one losing ground because you're stopped and everyone else is getting to move, and it's turn after turn instead of just each other player effectively losing a turn occasionally along the way. And concentrated on *you* instead of spread out amongst everyone. So yeah. Can suck.

Ironically, mechanics like that are actually intended to solve the problem mentioned earlier. Where one player is so far ahead that the other players can't possibly "catch up". But still have to sit there, turn after turn, waiting for the game to end. These sorts of things are attempts to make the game "close" and "exciting", and not blowouts. But yeah. I can see how that can be frustrating.

It was over a decade ago so I don't remember the precise details. But it seemed to me like the game didn't anticipate a very large group (both my family and my brother's girlfriend's family were playing) all focusing their "lose a turn" cards on a single person, so while they all lost 1/8 turns or so, I sat out the entire back half of the game and went from being the clear winner to having no chance; but I suppose that is the optimal way to play


They said you were being a sore loser, because you were. Other people (predictably) used that mechanic to stop you because if they hadn't, the game wouldn't have been fun to anyone else. The (likely, unlearned) lesson there is to quit a game if you outclass others to the degree they feel like doing this, or play more evenly compared to others so they don't feel the need to do this.

Bored =/= upset at losing.

For example, I lose against my dad at Chess / Checkers pretty close to every time we play. Not 100%, but damn close to it. I still enjoy playing against him.

But in this case, I was literally prevented from playing because I couldn't take a turn, it was just me watching everyone else play the game for an hour while I sat out.

It's relevant to this thread because its a reverse of the usual situation, rather than having the person in last place get eliminated from the game and no longer able to participate, the person in first place get's locked out and is no longer able to participate. Its honestly kind of a weird and counterintuitive mechanic that I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.


You complaining about it not being fun to you was meaningless; it wasn't supposed to be fun to you.

Meaningless or not, that is absolutely terrible game design. Games are supposed to be fun and to reward the effort and dedication to get better at them.

I am pretty sure a game that is designed to be less fun the better you are at is a very *valid* criticism even if it isn't a "meaningful" one, whatever that means.


Ultimately, you might have to just adjust to what they are expecting. The point of the experience is for everyone to have fun, not to teach a lesson in epic story telling.

That said, I would try to help them understand that you see this "game" as more of an improvisational story telling framework where lost fights can become part of the ongoing tapestry of the story. In real life, MOST combat doesn't end with the death or one side or the other, and a side will back off when it becomes clear they are unlikely to win. Lose the fight at the front gate and sneak in through a window instead. And maybe you later encounter that gate guard who apologizes for having been on the wrong side of things because he didn't understand what was going on at the time.

But if what they want is a tactics sim, decide if that's something you are willing to provide and maybe that's what your combats are. There is no right or wrong way to do this, you guys just need to figure out what everyone wants and can have fun doing together. I have a friend who will get bored at any session that doesn't have a fight. I have another who would role play a conversation for 3 hours. Keeping them both happy at a table is hard, and sometimes I try to run them in different games as a result.

The problem is that a game where you can't lose doesn't really work as a game / tactics simulator either.

Out of curiosity, what exactly do you mean by a lesson in epic story-telling here? I feel like there is a lot to unpack there and it could be read in a lot of different ways, but


This may touch on what you were saying (I don't want to assume) but my players feel like its unfair that I, as the GM, care far more about the lore and the storyline, and have to put far more effort into designing the campaign. So that by suffering setbacks that hurt their pride and, often, have mechanically penalties, they are being punished for doing me a favor by not suiciding their characters and forcing me to come up with a new campaign for them, and that this "generosity" only extends so far.


Yeah. I have this conversation frequently with new players, for that exact reason.

"A lot of RPGs are structured where the encounter is a challenge to overcome, and the game mostly assumes you're going to beat them. The goal is to see how good you are at getting past the obstacle.

"This game is a little different - the point of the encounter or scene is to figure out what happens. It could go you way, or not. Think of movies - in Star Wars, the Falcon gets captured by the Death Star - not what they wanted to happen, but the movie kept going. They get forced into the trash compactor - same thing. So if you 'lose', things will still keep going. The game doesn't end. It might just not go the way you want. You don't always get your way, but the game and story does keep moving forward.

"And if you think about it, in Star Wars they still beat the Death Star at the end, even though they didn't always 'win' at every moment. Empire Strikes Back was nothing but the good guys losing the whole time - and they still came back and destroyed the second Death Star in Jedi.

"That happens in most movies, books, and TV shows. It's part of what makes them interesting. Having a setback or having things not go the protagonists way doesn't make them lose overall, and it doesn't mean they're weak or powerless. It's part of what makes the story exciting."

It then helps to demonstrate this very concretely in game with an early loss that adds some level of complication but, really, isn't that big of a deal. (I wouldn't railroad it, of course, but putting them in over their heads so they'll likely need to retreat is a good place to start).



Yeah, I think that if people sit down to play a game, it's usually a good idea to let them actually play the game for most of the time. Complete elimination for hours isn't ideal, and neither, really, is "you've basically lost but are forced to continue the game". Neither of those are fun, for the most part. I'm not going to say "never never use that", but it seems like a good thing to generally avoid.

As usual, this is great advice, thanks Kyoru!

Unfortunately, my players are not newbies and I have been giving them some variant of this speech for years now with not much luck!


I was trying to be more kind in my response, but yeah. That's like complaining about how unfair it is that you were the first to get to 9th level in Munchkin, and were well ahead of everyone else, went to fight a monster, and everyone at the table dumped stuff on you to stop you. Then did it again the next turn. Then someone else snuck up to 9th level and won because everyone was out of nasty cards to hit them with, and isn't that just unfair.

Yeah. That's every game of Munchkin ever played. The whole strategy is to pretty much never be the first one, running in the lead. That's the player that gets dumped on. You wait in second or third position, let the other folks draw the fire, then you swoop in for the win.

Guess what? When you get close to winning in Catan, magically people stop trading stuff to you that you need. That's kinda unfair too, right?

Lots of games have mechanisms within the game specifically designed to make it difficult to just blow out the other players and win, and to give other players a chance to catch up to an obvious leader, and frankly to make the game more interesting to all players at the table and not just the one person doing super well that evening. And one of the most common is having things that other players can do that are nasty to another player, but perhaps harm themselves in some way as well (you're spending your turn or other game resources hindering them instead of helping yourself).

Most games only have a limited degree to which the other players can do this though, so you can sometimes just bash your way through if you are far enough ahead. Or, you have to be more clever and loiter around "near" the finish line, but try to get folks to target someone else first.

And honestly? It's a game of scene-it. It's supposed to just be a fun thing. You don't actually win anything for winning. Enjoy socializing. That's the point.

Again, this isn't about losing. It's about being forced to sit out the entire game and not participate while everyone else plays.


Edit: I haven't played Mario Kart since N64, but I hear a lot of discourse about the blue shells. I feel like this is a related issue?

[Telok]

How exactlty do you set that up in the first place? Or... reset it once someone pulls the chain?
Well, first you select a site near hot springs or an active volcano. Then dig down to the magma and install some pumps. It's a good idea to over build here, not for robustness or quakes or anything, but because it's more fun with highly pressurized lava than with oozing lava. Then you build as much of the tavern as possible out of lava-proof materials. Resetting is just a matter of either letting it cool and mining out the rock or, if you're impatient, installing drains and dumping out as much lava on whoever is living downhill from you as fast you can before it hardens.


Your reasoning behind placing your death traps isn't being contested; I'm talking of principles that apply to them even if you've never consciously considered them.

Now that's an interesting statement. Principles are the fundamental axioms or ideas behind an action or activity to give it direction and meaning. So what then are the principles of traps (or on topic more generally the idea of "difficulty") in an RPG? I think that would be different for different games.

In AD&D, within it's resource management paradigm for game play, they're an avoidable resource drain. The principles would probably be something like 1) must be avoidable/solvable 2) must drain a resource (time, hp, magic, party member, carrying capacity, etc.). More generally the principles of difficulty for AD&D (which may well be the same as or directly opposed to the principles for fun depending on people) would seem about the same, stuff must be possible to drain resources yet also be able to be overcome.

But I'm not running AD&D and I'm not using a resource drain paradigm for my games. So those principles don't seem to apply. My games run more along the lines of living world sandboxes with **** hitting the fan and the PCs being involved/affected until their actions take over and start directing the game. My paradigm is an evolving sandbox for players to interact with. That "stuff must be possible to drain resources yet also be able to be overcome" is useless and meaningless in this game. I can set up perfectly good situations for the game that don't do anything to resources or scenes with things that can't be overcome, no problems. My principles are more like 1) involve the PCs, 2) interesting & exploding scenery, 3) keep the players from stalling out by having people with guns show up (link back to 1).

[King of Nowhere]

So I talked to my players; let's see if anyone can help unpack this one:

They say that the reason they hate alternate loss conditions and would rather die is because "Video games have conditioned us to believe that losing a fight and progressing the storyline are mutually exclusive."

this seem... either very stupid, or dishonest.
I mean, videogames have conditioned us to believe that you kick the door open, kill whatever creature you find inside, and get stronger. yet the majority of us somehow resists the urge to kick down doors and slay our neighboors in the hope of gaining enough xp to pass that university exam. videogames have conditioned us to be able to reload whenever things don't go our way, and yet people engaging in real life sports don't expect to have a reload button whenever a goal is scored against them.
my point is, just because something happens in videogames, it does not become our golden standard for how things should be in real life. and if someone plays with other people and expects the same kind of experience of a videogame, I have no words to describe how moronic that attitude is. though it fits well with what we know of your players; their idea of "we are missing stuff" if they fail a roll, that's how I play a videogame. live, it's completely another matter. when playing with people, you are never missing on content - because whatever happpens, the dm will make new content.
with that close-minded attitude one may as well keep playing videogames, so he won't have to wait for other humans turns.




And this is the other factor. The characters actually get more powerful as a result of defeating the last foe, so they need a bigger badder challenge this time around.

If you are running a single "run through" set of scenarios in a campaign, this is maybe not a problem (PCs progress in power over time, defeat bigger and badder enemies, and then "win" and retire. Then we start a new campaign). It's a brutally important thing to pay attention to as a GM if you're trying at all to run a longer term continous game setting though. You can make individual characters more powerful, but have to be very careful not to introduce setting unbalancing items/powers into the game. It's trickier than many might think.

both my campaigns lasted two real life years. I know that very well. yes, you need to keep power creep to a manageable level in that scenario.

[Ionathus]

this seem... either very stupid, or dishonest.
I mean, videogames have conditioned us to believe that you kick the door open, kill whatever creature you find inside, and get stronger. yet the majority of us somehow resists the urge to kick down doors and slay our neighboors in the hope of gaining enough xp to pass that university exam. videogames have conditioned us to be able to reload whenever things don't go our way, and yet people engaging in real life sports don't expect to have a reload button whenever a goal is scored against them.
my point is, just because something happens in videogames, it does not become our golden standard for how things should be in real life. and if someone plays with other people and expects the same kind of experience of a videogame, I have no words to describe how moronic that attitude is. though it fits well with what we know of your players; their idea of "we are missing stuff" if they fail a roll, that's how I play a videogame. live, it's completely another matter. when playing with people, you are never missing on content - because whatever happpens, the dm will make new content.
with that close-minded attitude one may as well keep playing videogames, so he won't have to wait for other humans turns.

You are coming in REAL hot with some very harsh judgments on these players and I don't think it's deserved at all.

You're taking the statement "videogame experiences create a certain expectation among TTRPG newbies" (which they do) and spinning a strawman about real-world behavior. Comparing it to murdering your neighbors is unhelpful in the extreme, because we're talking about two pretty-similar things (subsets of fantasy roleplay gaming), and if somebody started on Skyrim they're gonna naturally come into, say, D&D with some preconceptions. Because the two do look similar on the surface. You fight monsters, you get magic stuff, you do quests, you level up. It's far from an unreasonable comparison.

And if you're coming in from only experiencing the videogame version of that, it's a good chance you just assume videogame conventions by default: failing a "skill check" style action would permanently lock you out of certain content. Or that if you lose a fight, that's game over, just assume the campaign's done. That is by no means a fault of the player - especially when I've seen bad DMs reinforce those tropes instead of break them, because guess what, DMs can get this crap wrong too. It's just a misconception we have to break down.

In conclusion: everybody has to learn this stuff at some point (https://xkcd.com/1053/), and they deserve the benefit of the doubt while picking up on something as unique and complicated as TTRPG behavior. I just can't empathize with this apparent willingness to "bite the newbies."

[GloatingSwine]

this seem... either very stupid, or dishonest.
I mean, videogames have conditioned us to believe that you kick the door open, kill whatever creature you find inside, and get stronger. yet the majority of us somehow resists the urge to kick down doors and slay our neighboors in the hope of gaining enough xp to pass that university exam. videogames have conditioned us to be able to reload whenever things don't go our way, and yet people engaging in real life sports don't expect to have a reload button whenever a goal is scored against them.
my point is, just because something happens in videogames, it does not become our golden standard for how things should be in real life. and if someone plays with other people and expects the same kind of experience of a videogame, I have no words to describe how moronic that attitude is. though it fits well with what we know of your players; their idea of "we are missing stuff" if they fail a roll, that's how I play a videogame. live, it's completely another matter. when playing with people, you are never missing on content - because whatever happpens, the dm will make new content.
with that close-minded attitude one may as well keep playing videogames, so he won't have to wait for other humans turns.


This is considerably more of a stretch than "expectations from one medium of games will extend to another", which is the actual behaviour being described.

And yeah, videogames generally don't allow players to fail forwards and when they do it's usually mandatory.

If you want individual combats to be risky enough that players have a meaningful chance of failure* most of the time, but you also don't want to keep ditching scenarios because the players have lost, then you need varied ways to let the players fail forwards in ways that clearly signpost how they should recover from the failure and don't always feel bad to the players so they don't get detached from the game and not want to play it any more.

* Especially ways to fail before any characters are dead.

[icefractal]

And yeah, videogames generally don't allow players to fail forwards and when they do it's usually mandatory.Or to look at it another way, most video games don't really have fail states other than "stop playing".

You die in a video game and ... you just try the fight again. Depending on the game, you might have to repeat some other fights too, but outside of the uncommon games with perma-death, you either win everything necessary, or you give up trying. And those fights happen a lot faster than in a TTRPG, so "try this fight 30 times until you finally learn all the tricks and win" is actually plausible (if not something I'd want happening often) rather than the unplayable slog it would be in D&D.

The point being, video games can be lot harder than D&D in terms of win-rate without burning out the players.

[King of Nowhere]

You are coming in REAL hot with some very harsh judgments on these players and I don't think it's deserved at all.



This is considerably more of a stretch than "expectations from one medium of games will extend to another", which is the actual behaviour being described.

the issue is that those players have been playing pen&paper for years. I could understand that somebody new to rpgs has will make this faulty assumpion initially - though every single new player I've seen picking up the game never had any problem.
But those players have years of experience, and if they still haven't learned the difference - if they are not keeping their mind open enough to revise expectation - then I'm feeling entitled to some harshness.
Also, those are talekeal's players. I'm not passing judgment on them only for this specific issue.

[Mechalich]

If you want individual combats to be risky enough that players have a meaningful chance of failure* most of the time, but you also don't want to keep ditching scenarios because the players have lost, then you need varied ways to let the players fail forwards in ways that clearly signpost how they should recover from the failure and don't always feel bad to the players so they don't get detached from the game and not want to play it any more.

* Especially ways to fail before any characters are dead.

One big problem here is that low-level D&D - which is by far the most common TTRPG experience - has real design issues with this setup. In fact, in most editions it is entirely possible for PCs to experience permadeath in fights the parties are winning handily because some NPC rolled a lucky crit. There are also a wide range of enemies in low level D&D who can't or won't accept surrender and who can run down and murder PCs easily enough if they try to flee, including many animals, undead, and weak outsiders. D&D handles operational or strategic failure better than a video game: the party can leave the dungeon early, or give up and let the bandits burn the village or whatever, but tactical failure is still extremely likely to result in a TPK unless the GM explicitly inserts an out.

This trains players in bad habits with regard to difficulty when it comes to games that operate with more flexibility with regard to tactical failure.

[Satinavian]

Or to look at it another way, most video games don't really have fail states other than "stop playing".

The video games where there is only win and failure are like heavily railroaded tabletop RPGs.

But that is not the only kind of game. Most of the strategy genres allows various forms of temporary setbacks and often assumes them. All the sandbox games leave most of the goal finding to the players as well.

The primary difference seems more to be the option to continue from a safe file if something went suboptimal. But even that doesn't really exist for ironman runs.

[BRC]

The video games where there is only win and failure are like heavily railroaded tabletop RPGs.

But that is not the only kind of game. Most of the strategy genres allows various forms of temporary setbacks and often assumes them. All the sandbox games leave most of the goal finding to the players as well.

The primary difference seems more to be the option to continue from a safe file if something went suboptimal. But even that doesn't really exist for ironman runs.

I suppose this is a question around difficulty.

Let's define the true lose condition of an RPG as "The Game cannot continue in a satisfying way".

So, as far as difficulty goes, this brings out two questions

First, What is considered a "Satisfying" way of continuing? If the Party TPKs and a new party takes over their place in the adventure, is that satisfying? Will you, as a player, be satisfied if your character dies a stupid, pointless death and you're forced to make a new one? Will you be satisfied if a team of overpowered NPCs has to show up to save you? I could see some players being dissatisfied by "Well that didn't work, we have to try some other way".


Secondly, given that our fail state is SATISFYING continuation, there must be some sort of floor for player involvement. If the Players say "We sit around in the tavern and refuse to take any action", that's not satisfying continuation of play.

Similarly, if you approach combat by having the wizard try to bap enemies with their staff while the fighter throws rocks, you'll probably all die.

How many optimal decisions should the game require.



I think the question of difficulty is going to be a combination of these two factors. How much failure ruins the game for the players, and what forms/what degree of optimal play should be required to avoid that level of failure.

[Zuras]

Congratulations on immediately undermining your own argument. The issue of a player being forced to stick around well after they've lost is not caused by player elimination, it's a much harder problem that has to do with difficulties of predicting whether a game is or remains solvable at all.

Contrary to what you say, in many games, player elimination alleviates this problem because it frees a player from the game. Indeed, the standard way to get out of an unwinnable game is self-elimination through forfeiture. A lot of games also have a natural quality of speeding up as number of participants goes down (less information to process), so swift elimination actually reduces amount of waiting all around. Equating elimination with being stuck in an unwinnable state is based on the assumption that an eliminated player has to hang around doing nothing, which is unwarranted.

The terribleness of player elimination is directly related to the time commitment required of the game. If I block 6 hours of my time out for something and arrange childcare, then only get to play for 30 minutes, that’s a terrible experience. Unless the purpose of a game is primarily competitive, rather than entertainment, player elimination in any game longer than 30 minutes is a bad mechanic.

Online play and computer matchmaking can avoid the whole issue, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.

[kyoryu]

The video games where there is only win and failure are like heavily railroaded tabletop RPGs.

Though it's worth noting that there's a big difference - in video games you can (generally) restart from the last checkpoint and try again. So the model isn't (generally) "you fail and lose". It's "you fail and try again, until you succeed".


But that is not the only kind of game. Most of the strategy genres allows various forms of temporary setbacks and often assumes them. All the sandbox games leave most of the goal finding to the players as well.

Sure, and strategy games often have shorter playtimes per game, while something like Skyrim might have 100+ hours. Losing a game of Civ can be obnoxious, but it's not the same as losing your Skyrim save. I think there's some interesting correlation to how recoverable failure should be compared to the amount of investment you make.

Even in old school D&D that was kinda true - sure, your character might die, but you might also have four others you could choose from. It hurt but it wasn't the end of the world.

[Talakeal]

Or to look at it another way, most video games don't really have fail states other than "stop playing".

You die in a video game and ... you just try the fight again. Depending on the game, you might have to repeat some other fights too, but outside of the uncommon games with perma-death, you either win everything necessary, or you give up trying. And those fights happen a lot faster than in a TTRPG, so "try this fight 30 times until you finally learn all the tricks and win" is actually plausible (if not something I'd want happening often) rather than the unplayable slog it would be in D&D.

The point being, video games can be lot harder than D&D in terms of win-rate without burning out the players.



So, I think the real issue is that the ability to load from a saved file in single player games has made the players unable to deal with failure and expect perfection.


In most video games, you lose a lot, but you just keep trying. In cooperative multi-player games, you lose but (typically) suffer some sort of penalty. In competitive multi-player games, you just lose, but there is no "story".

There are tons of single player games where you have loss conditions other than death and the game keeps on going, and also lots of games where there are degrees of failure and the rewards or storyline are adjusted based on how well you do, and plenty of games where it is possible to lose / miss out on an item or an ally and have the game keep on going.

[PhoenixPhyre]

There are tons of single player games where you have loss conditions other than death and the game keeps on going, and also lots of games where there are degrees of failure and the rewards or storyline are adjusted based on how well you do, and plenty of games where it is possible to lose / miss out on an item or an ally and have the game keep on going.

For me, this latter thing (the storyline adjusting, being able to miss stuff or even find new stuff) is the vast majority of the value-add for a TTRPG over a video game. My preferred play style looks linear in retrospect (you see where it all went, all the other branches are pruned off) but the future end is flailing around as you move and only gets nailed down as you go.

So "success" and "failure" aren't properties of the game as a whole, at least outside the meta "did people not have fun? Then you failed" level. They're properties of individual actions. And failure is just "you didn't get exactly what you wanted." Things still continue onward; every action moves the narrative somewhere. No dead ends until the table decides things have reached an end.

[kyoryu]

So, I think the real issue is that the ability to load from a saved file in single player games has made the players unable to deal with failure and expect perfection.

I don't think this is true.

Look at it this way. Most TTRPGs involve players succeeding the vast, vast majority of the time. You'll have to reload a saved game (or equivalent) more often in most video games than you'll suffer TPK in a TTRPG. And the people who play TTRPGs are (generally) okay with this.


For me, this latter thing (the storyline adjusting, being able to miss stuff or even find new stuff) is the vast majority of the value-add for a TTRPG over a video game. My preferred play style looks linear in retrospect (you see where it all went, all the other branches are pruned off) but the future end is flailing around as you move and only gets nailed down as you go.

So "success" and "failure" aren't properties of the game as a whole, at least outside the meta "did people not have fun? Then you failed" level. They're properties of individual actions. And failure is just "you didn't get exactly what you wanted." Things still continue onward; every action moves the narrative somewhere. No dead ends until the table decides things have reached an end.

Samesies.

[Talakeal]

I don't think this is true.

Look at it this way. Most TTRPGs involve players succeeding the vast, vast majority of the time. You'll have to reload a saved game (or equivalent) more often in most video games than you'll suffer TPK in a TTRPG. And the people who play TTRPGs are (generally) okay with this.

Samesies.

I was specifically talking about my players.

I don't know, I am king of at a loss though.

I am still no closer to finding out why they assume a railroad and give up anytime their first attempt fails or why they would rather die than accept capture (or even terms of surrender / hospitality) than I was a decade ago.

[Vahnavoi]

Bored =/= upset at losing.

That matters not at all for what I said. Boredom is an emotional reaction just as well as upsetness and complaining about boredom can fall under sore losing just as well.


For example, I lose against my dad at Chess / Checkers pretty close to every time we play. Not 100%, but damn close to it. I still enjoy playing against him.

Irrelevant. Different game, different rules, different skills required. Showing you're not a sore loser in one game doesn't prove you weren't one in another.


But in this case, I was literally prevented from playing because I couldn't take a turn, it was just me watching everyone else play the game for an hour while I sat out.

It's relevant to this thread because its a reverse of the usual situation, rather than having the person in last place get eliminated from the game and no longer able to participate, the person in first place get's locked out and is no longer able to participate. Its honestly kind of a weird and counterintuitive mechanic that I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.

It's not reverse to "the usual situation"; actual reverse to "eliminated players lose" is "eliminated players win", which is a different but still common game design paradigm. You just don't see players of such games complaining about no longer participating, because getting out of participating is in fact a game goal they tried to achieve.

Your situation instead is an example of a very basic case of players who are behind sabotaging the one in the lead. There's nothing weird or counter-intuitive about that.


Meaningless or not, that is absolutely terrible game design. Games are supposed to be fun and to reward the effort and dedication to get better at them.

I am pretty sure a game that is designed to be less fun the better you are at is a very *valid* criticism even if it isn't a "meaningful" one, whatever that means.

It's not "absolutely terrible" game design; indeed the chief reason why I'm happy to side with your family is that the game's fine and your criticism is invalid.

Here. Look at this diagram. (https://images.app.goo.gl/b2eLr78V72LvUouw8) Challenge interacts with player skill to create emotional states. A direct corollary of the underlying theory is that there is no single level of difficulty that can be equally engaging to players of different skill. Remember what caused your situation: you got too far ahead of everyone else. Since you were playing a competitive game game, that's effectively making the game harder for every other player at the table. Corollary being, ability to sabotage the leading player exist so that the losing players can adjust the challenge to something that still gives them a chance.

Which works towards what I already said: Other people predictably used that mechanic to stop you because if they hadn't, the game wouldn't have been fun to anyone else. The lesson there is to quit a game if you outclass others to the degree they feel like doing this, or play more evenly compared to others so they don't feel the need to do this.

In addition, had you played the game with people who are as good as you are in movie trivia, or played the same game with harder trivia questions, it's unlikely anyone would have been able to gain that much a lead, meaning there wouldn't have been incentive to sabotage one player above everyone else.

If you still don't get it: consider a situation of a player who's worked hard to memorize answer to every question, versus a bunch of of players who haven't. It should be obvious that a straight quiz cannot possibly be fair in such a case. It should also be obvious that a straight quiz cannot reward or challenge the skilled player infinitely - it caps around the point where the skilled player wins all of the time. The only way to have any suspense at all with such a set of players, is to introduce a strategic element that cannot be solved simply by memorization - such as, you know, reading the room to realize that if you reveal yourself to be too good too soon, other players will effectively shut you out.

And that's why your criticism is invalid: there were two subgames in play. You aced one and failed at the other. Your boredom was a legal and purposeful penalty played on you, and meaningful criticism of the underlying system cannot be reached from simply observing you didn't have fun as a result.

---


Now that's an interesting statement. Principles are the fundamental axioms or ideas behind an action or activity to give it direction and meaning. So what then are the principles of traps (or on topic more generally the idea of "difficulty") in an RPG? I think that would be different for different games.

Your question us good, but your answer is only half right. There are indeed several different game aesthetics (at least eight are widely recognized) and different traps serve them to different degrees. However, "trap" is not a game-specific buzzword, it is also plain English, with two very clear throughlines of what the concept means. A game using "trap" for something with completely non-overlapping functional principles would, bluntly, be actively misleading to anyone who speaks English. You can substitute English for any other language and "trap" for corresponding concept in that language, the point will hold.

With that in mind, what are the two throughlines for what "a trap " is? They are: A) catching or stopping a thing and B) tricking someone or something. These two often, but not always, overlap, so in practice you have three different classes of traps:

1) traps that exist just to catch or stop a thing (f.ex. a gas trap or water trap, as in, a trap that stops flow of gas or of water)
2) traps that exist to catch or stop a thing by tricking that thing (f.ex. a concealed pit trap, where the efficacy of the trap is based on the target not knowing where it is).
3) a trap that exist to trick a thing in some other way (f.ex. a tripwire that exposes location of a thing, where, again, the efficacy is based on the target not knowing where it is, what it does, etc.)

It should be obvious how these principles apply to your death traps, or indeed, any death trap. Slightly less obviously, you might notice that traps that exist to drain resources very clearly fall under one of the three, and all death traps are subsets of resource-draining traps - because life is a resource. So are time and effort used to bypass said death traps, which would be an obvious motive for characters in your settings to put them in place. So, there is a clear similarity in principle between your traps and AD&D's. You simply missed it, because you don't explicitly think of players as targets of your traps, and because you focused too much on "able to be overcome" part which has nothing to do with traps in specific, and arguably isn't even true. (AD&D is perfectly capable of producing unbeatable traps and such traps can be included in scenario just fine according to principles of that game, provided the overall scenario remains winnable.)

Difficulty of a trap is, again, decided by skill and cognitive capacity required to understand the trap is there and what to do about it. This is an open-ended problem class that ranges from "trivial to kids" to "makes trained professionals cry". The prior principle I was trying to explain is that this stays the same regardless of why you put the traps there. Your intentions aren't being contested, they simply exist on top of all said above.

[Talakeal]

snip

A sore loser is someone who doesn't like to lose and gets upset when they don't win.

It is not the same as someone who does not enjoy suffering a punishment for losing.


I will happily play checkers even though I am not very good at the game and likely to lose.

I would not play checkers if we were betting large amounts of money on the game because I cannot afford to throw away large amounts of money and will suffer as a result of the loss.


To use an (intentionally extreme example); I would never say that someone who refuses to play Russian roulette because they don't want to die is a "sore loser".



You can also have a handicap mechanic or a catch-up mechanic that does not involve forcing the most skilled player to sit out the game. It isn't a binary.

[icefractal]

It's not "absolutely terrible" game design; indeed the chief reason why I'm happy to side with your family is that the game's fine and your criticism is invalid.I wouldn't call the game "fine", because IMO a board game where one player can be shut out of playing for an hour while still technically being in the game (and thus not able to just walk off and do something else) is pretty bad design, worse than early-elimination even.

TBH, if I was the player, then after ... IDK, three times? I'd just ask "Are you going to keep doing this? Because if so then we can just treat it as I'm eliminated." and go do something else. And if someone thinks that's being a sore loser, then I guess they think most pro-chess players are sore losers, with how they resign before waiting for literal checkmate.

[Telok]

However, "trap" is not a game-specific buzzword, it is also plain English, with two very clear throughlines of what the concept means. A game using "trap" for something with completely non-overlapping functional principles would, bluntly, be actively misleading to anyone who speaks English. ..

....in practice you have three different classes of traps:

1) traps that exist just to catch or stop a thing (f.ex. a gas trap or water trap, as in, a trap that stops flow of gas or of water)
2) traps that exist to catch or stop a thing by tricking that thing (f.ex. a concealed pit trap, where the efficacy of the trap is based on the target not knowing where it is).
3) a trap that exist to trick a thing in some other way (f.ex. a tripwire that exposes location of a thing, where, again, the efficacy is based on the target not knowing where it is, what it does, etc.)

It should be obvious how these principles apply to your death traps, or indeed, any death trap. ....

....So, there is a clear similarity in principle between your traps and AD&D's. You simply missed it, because you don't explicitly think of players as targets of your traps, and because you focused too much on "able to be overcome" part which has nothing to do with traps in specific,...

I almost always have to disagree with any statement reliant on "plain English". In this case I think "trap", as used in D&D style rpg context is a specifc use case/subset of the generic no-context definition of the word.

It is, alas, not obvious to me that those are the fundamental principles of traps in general, or of rpg traps in specific, or of my use case of traps in rpgs, and therefore that they would apply. I think perhaps it could be your use of the word "trick" which you may be using in a manner that I wouldn't ordinarily use it. Again, I find "plain English" to be vague and prone to introducing errors through unstated context and people's assumptions about what specific word mean in different contexts.

Without even managing basic agreement on the principles or definitions of traps we can't truly compare my principles on them to the principles of AD&D. And if we're talking about having different principles then the principles we're talking about can't be that fundamental or basic can they? I'm not looking for a hard answer, it's just I think our points of view or maybe approaches are different enough that we'll often end up talking at cross purposes unless we spawned a whole separate thread just for the tangent about the concepts around traps.

What I think this tangent has illustrated is that people here don't even conceptualize the basics of the games and the idea of difficulty in the same ways.

By the by, what's with the 'focused too much on "able to be overcome" part' thing? If I'm not writing traps for 'challenge' or against the PCs then how am I focused of thrm overcoming the trap?

[Quertus]

I am still no closer to finding out why they assume a railroad and give up anytime their first attempt fails or why they would rather die than accept capture (or even terms of surrender / hospitality) than I was a decade ago.

Stupid question: Why not just answer it with, "because they don't find that fun", and try to build a game that doesn't include such unfun states?

And... if I had a player with depression issues, who always quit after their first attempt failed... hmmm... I guess I'd... want to be a player rather than GM in that game, so that I could pour my creative energy into giving them alternatives? Or... hmmm... maybe work with training them to talk through and perfect that first attempt, so that it actually succeeded? Or... work through teaching them to never have a "first attempt", but a "first attempt with backup plan and fallback plan"?

I mean, I've never (knowingly) dealt with that before, but there's so many possible answers, I'm not sure where I'd start.

[Talakeal]

Stupid question: Why not just answer it with, "because they don't find that fun", and try to build a game that doesn't include such unfun states?

Imagine what that game actually looks like.

I have trouble picturing it, but the closest I can come up with is "It's a Good Life" from the Twilight Zone, which, I really don't think is any fun for anyone, and will inevitably break down when the PCs turn on one another out of boredom (either directly or by crossing a moral line).

Its just not a game I think anyone wants to play, even the players who would force the game into such a direction.

[gbaji]

It was over a decade ago so I don't remember the precise details. But it seemed to me like the game didn't anticipate a very large group (both my family and my brother's girlfriend's family were playing) all focusing their "lose a turn" cards on a single person, so while they all lost 1/8 turns or so, I sat out the entire back half of the game and went from being the clear winner to having no chance; but I suppose that is the optimal way to play

No chance. Until a second player gets up near the end as well, right? Then the rest have to split their "lose a turn" cards against both of you, giving you a chance. Maybe there's enough players in the game to block two people completely. So the game continues until a third or fourth person also gets "close to winning". And now, there aren't enough "lose a turn" cards left to the remaining players to stop everyone, so someone wins.

So instead of it being "one person races ahead and wins with the rest having no ability to catch up", it turns into an "exciting" finale, with 3-4 players neck and neck, each trying to be the one who finally manages to complete the final scene, and win the game.

Um... It's also possible that you guys didn't read the box where it maybe said how many players are supposed to play. The rules say "2-4 players or teams". If you have more people, you're supposed to be in teams, not each playing individually. My guess is that this is to prevent the exact scenario you are complaining about (at least, prevent a total lock down, but not a delay).



It's relevant to this thread because its a reverse of the usual situation, rather than having the person in last place get eliminated from the game and no longer able to participate, the person in first place get's locked out and is no longer able to participate. Its honestly kind of a weird and counterintuitive mechanic that I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.

Yeah. Total lock out? Probably not great. But "ability to slow someone in the lead down a bit"? Lots of games have that sort of mechanism.



Meaningless or not, that is absolutely terrible game design. Games are supposed to be fun and to reward the effort and dedication to get better at them.

I am pretty sure a game that is designed to be less fun the better you are at is a very *valid* criticism even if it isn't a "meaningful" one, whatever that means.

You guys literally played the game wrong. The key issue is that when the number of players is very high, the odds of someone in any given round getting a "lose a turn" card is high enough that you can ensure that someone will get one, and have it, and be able to stop an in the lead player for a very long time. It's probably why there aren't supposed to be more than 4 players/teams.

I guess if I'm trying to loop this back to the larger point, it's that games need to be designed to avoid both ends of the spectrum. And most are. You need to ensure that everone playing is engaged in the game *and* also have a means of determining a "winner" that leaves sufficient room for lead switching, and a non-predetermined outcome once you get halfway through the game period.

RPGs are a bit different here because, as several people have pointed out, "winning" is not always defined the same way. Which is why the GM has to figure out what the players want, and then provide that to them. But it has to be what the players are actually looking for. It's quite common for players to say they want one thing, but in reality they aren't going to enjoy it much (too much on the "winning is inevitable" side of the spectrum). But going to hard in the other direction ("our characters die off every other game session, and I'm spending more time rolling up new ones than playing") isn't going to be terribly fun either.



This may touch on what you were saying (I don't want to assume) but my players feel like its unfair that I, as the GM, care far more about the lore and the storyline, and have to put far more effort into designing the campaign. So that by suffering setbacks that hurt their pride and, often, have mechanically penalties, they are being punished for doing me a favor by not suiciding their characters and forcing me to come up with a new campaign for them, and that this "generosity" only extends so far.

Well. I think you have to find ways to make the players interested in the lore and story. Then they'll (hopefully) have some reason to care about it enough to actually avoid suiciding their characters just to end the campaign. I've found that if you spend a silly amount of time on lore and story right up front (a mistake many GMs do), the players will just hear "blah blah, history of blah, kingdom of blah, blah, blah", and ask "where are the monsters and treasure?".

Don't overly frontload the lore. Start off slow and simple. Give them just enough to understand the immediate environment they are in, and then allow them to learn the lore and story as they go along. I can literally start out a game with nothing more than "you are in a town named X, and person Y asks you to do Z", and build a large engaging storyline around that. But they don't need to know more than that at first, so don't bother with it. Get them into some interesting and fun action, and then have them discover stuff along the way. When they ask for stuff like "who is this? and "why is that there?", you tell them.

Nothing turns off a table of players more than a GM reading them a 5 page printed bit of lore (or handing it to them as reading material or something). After they've been playing in the setting for a while and run into something big/new/interesting? Maybe. Even then, maybe a page of info at most is sufficient for each new "thing".



both my campaigns lasted two real life years. I know that very well. yes, you need to keep power creep to a manageable level in that scenario.

Two years? Amateur hour! :smalltongue:

I've had individual scenarios that lasted longer than that. Get back to me when you hit the "40+ years in a single game setting" mark. Then we can talk (seriously. Have one game setting that we've been playing in regularly since 1982).

Ribbing aside. It's an issue that most RPG gamers avoid just by having "single run" campaigns. And that's a perfectly valid way to do it. I've run (and run in) a heck of a lot of games that worked this way, and enjoyed the heck out of them. They do also free you up to do a lot more "interesting" things that you'd never do in a really long running setting.


You die in a video game and ... you just try the fight again. Depending on the game, you might have to repeat some other fights too, but outside of the uncommon games with perma-death, you either win everything necessary, or you give up trying. And those fights happen a lot faster than in a TTRPG, so "try this fight 30 times until you finally learn all the tricks and win" is actually plausible (if not something I'd want happening often) rather than the unplayable slog it would be in D&D.

The original release of the Alien vs Predator video game had no save feature. And absolutely brutally difficult levels, spots with eternally spawning opponents, so you had to move fast, keep moving, solve puzzles, find and pick up powerups,, and find your way to the end, while achieving whatever the objective was, without dying. If you died, you had to restart the entire level again. And each storyline I think had like 8 levels you had to get though in order to complete that "game" (three storylines, one colorial marine, one predator, and one alien).

Hardest. Videogame. Ever.

And this is from someone who used to routinely run through the entire original Doom game (and Doom2) without saves, on nightmare, just for a challenge. When you learn to view a shotgun as a "finesse weapon", you know that something is wrong (or really really right!).


Look at it this way. Most TTRPGs involve players succeeding the vast, vast majority of the time. You'll have to reload a saved game (or equivalent) more often in most video games than you'll suffer TPK in a TTRPG. And the people who play TTRPGs are (generally) okay with this.

Yeah. Risk of death has to be much much lower in an RPG than in a video game. But most video games are of the "turn left instead of right and you die", sort of thing. So they lend themselves to this process. RPGs require that the GM actually provide information to tell the players before they get there that "you need to go right here or you will likely die".

Some GMs don't get this. So it's not always the players that are making things feel like a video game.

[Talakeal]

Um... It's also possible that you guys didn't read the box where it maybe said how many players are supposed to play. The rules say "2-4 players or teams". If you have more people, you're supposed to be in teams, not each playing individually. My guess is that this is to prevent the exact scenario you are complaining about (at least, prevent a total lock down, but not a delay).

That seems correct.

Looking at the rulebook, it says 2 or more players! and then later says "2-4 players or teams" so I can certainly see how one could come to that conclusion.

[Mechalich]

Two years? Amateur hour! :smalltongue:

I've had individual scenarios that lasted longer than that. Get back to me when you hit the "40+ years in a single game setting" mark. Then we can talk (seriously. Have one game setting that we've been playing in regularly since 1982).

Ribbing aside. It's an issue that most RPG gamers avoid just by having "single run" campaigns. And that's a perfectly valid way to do it. I've run (and run in) a heck of a lot of games that worked this way, and enjoyed the heck out of them. They do also free you up to do a lot more "interesting" things that you'd never do in a really long running setting.

The average tabletop campaign is lucky to last six months and complete a single campaign scenario/adventure path. The majority of games fail and end long before the initially stated goals are accomplished. While extremely long-running games do exist, they are massive outliers and operate according to vastly different principles when it comes to functional design. This is actually a massive problem in the TTRPG design space. Games tend to be made by people who play far more than ordinary players and design their games on completely faulty assumptions as to how long games last, how often people play, or how long sessions go. For example, Kevin Siembieda once had a statement in the RIFTS corebook (the game he created) that a 'typical' game involved six hour sessions twice a week, which is several times more than what a normal play schedule - closer to 4 hours once a week or every other week - looks like.

Along these lines it is important to acknowledge that time spent gaming, especially among adult players (who have the money to actually support games in a way child players generally do not), is in competition with many, many other options for group activities. Time spent gaming needs to be time spent gaming, not time spent sitting around doing nothing (note that the experiences of Critical Role and other groups of actors who are performatively running a business are therefore not aligned with the incentives of people playing for leisure). Insofar as having a character removed from play forces the player to sit around doing nothing (or incentivizes them to pull out their phone) that is a design problem.

[Quertus]

Imagine what that game actually looks like.

I have trouble picturing it, but the closest I can come up with is "It's a Good Life" from the Twilight Zone, which, I really don't think is any fun for anyone, and will inevitably break down when the PCs turn on one another out of boredom (either directly or by crossing a moral line).

Its just not a game I think anyone wants to play, even the players who would force the game into such a direction.

I mean, I’ve played plenty of games where my PC didn’t die or get captured. And I’ve also played plenty of games where my first idea worked (regardless of the fact that I had plenty of alternate strategies prepped and ready to go). So I don’t have to imagine it, I just have to remember it. I’ve lived it aplenty. And I can’t imagine why you can’t picture it. It seems pretty straightforward to me. And not at all like what you described.

[Talakeal]

I mean, I’ve played plenty of games where my PC didn’t die or get captured. And I’ve also played plenty of games where my first idea worked (regardless of the fact that I had plenty of alternate strategies prepped and ready to go). So I don’t have to imagine it, I just have to remember it. I’ve lived it aplenty. And I can’t imagine why you can’t picture it. It seems pretty straightforward to me. And not at all like what you described.

Don't or can't?

I have had plenty of games where they don't as well, but failure is always a possibility.

And in my experience, players like to push the limits, both of their powers and socially, and will eventually push into something that pushes back.

I have had several players over the years (especially Bob and Dave) for whom power dynamics are really important, and will initiate life or death combat against allies, powerful NPCs, and even party members just to prove that they can't be pushed around / can push others around.

Bob has lost no less than three characters because a powerful good NPC did him a favor and asked him to not abuse the hospitality, (stuff like, help yourself to my treasury, but please don't take more than you need type stuff) and initiated lethal combat as a response to "punish them (and by extension the DM) for telling him what to do".

[Quertus]

Don't or can't?

I have had plenty of games where they don't as well, but failure is always a possibility.

And in my experience, players like to push the limits, both of their powers and socially, and will eventually push into something that pushes back.

I have had several players over the years (especially Bob and Dave) for whom power dynamics are really important, and will initiate life or death combat against allies, powerful NPCs, and even party members just to prove that they can't be pushed around / can push others around.

Bob has lost no less than three characters because a powerful good NPC did him a favor and asked him to not abuse the hospitality, (stuff like, help yourself to my treasury, but please don't take more than you need type stuff) and initiated lethal combat as a response to "punish them (and by extension the DM) for telling him what to do".

Which circles back to, "don't give them scenarios like that". I mean, why give your players games that include friendly NPCs at all? That seems antithetical to Bizarro World.

[Vahnavoi]

I wouldn't call the game "fine", because IMO a board game where one player can be shut out of playing for an hour while still technically being in the game (and thus not able to just walk off and do something else) is pretty bad design, worse than early-elimination even.

I already adressed this, multiple times. Take a good look at this diagram, (https://images.app.goo.gl/yFCXnLy4z84SkFJR6) again. Realize, again, the corollary: there is no game of set level of difficulty that can be equally engaging to people of different skill levels. A further corollary would be that for every game imaginable, there is some group of players where part of the group will be miserable.

Kicking an overly-dominant player out of the competition was the sanest thing other players could've done in Talakeal's situation, and the game was not designed wrong for giving them the ability to do it.


TBH, if I was the player, then after ... IDK, three times? I'd just ask "Are you going to keep doing this? Because if so then we can just treat it as I'm eliminated." and go do something else. And if someone thinks that's being a sore loser, then I guess they think most pro-chess players are sore losers, with how they resign before waiting for literal checkmate.

{Scrubbed}

Quitting a game when you acknowledge you've lost is not sore losing; it's fine and normal. Complaining about your loss is what makes a sore loser - it doesn't matter if the emotional motive behind that is upsetness or boredom. What makes an especially sore loser is trying to externalize your loss to a game's design, when you actually were victim of predictable and legal counterplay by your opponents, and could've averted it by acting differently.

---


A sore loser is someone who doesn't like to lose and gets upset when they don't win.

It is not the same as someone who does not enjoy suffering a punishment for losing.

See above. The emotional reaction itself, whether being upset or bored, is fine and normal. No-one's asking you to enjoy being punished. What makes a sore loser is complaining about it. Don't complain about legal blows.

What makes you a sore loser now is trying to pin your loss on a game's design, when in reality, it was a predictable result of your own play. Yes, there are handicap mechanics the game could've used; that does not prove it was badly designed. Again: kicking an overly-dominant player out of a game was the sanest thing the other players could've done, and the game's not wrong for giving them the ability. The mechanic is already non-binary, the motive to target the leading player is proportionate to how much better the leading player is doing to others.

Which gets to the point about two sub-games, which clearly flew over your head. Again: you aced one but failed another. You weren't the most skilled player, overall, in the game. You were forced to sit out because you weren't skilled at realizing other players could do that, or why. The game's purposefully designed so that other players are obstacles you need to strategize around. You aren't arguing for or against a handicap mechanic, you are arguing against an entire layer of gameplay because you were bad at it.

---


I almost always have to disagree with any statement reliant on "plain English". In this case I think "trap", as used in D&D style rpg context is a specifc use case/subset of the generic no-context definition of the word.

Are you trying to argue D&D gives tortured special meanings to common sense words in a way that's confusing to people speaking plain English? Because I totally agree. :smalltongue: I'm just not granting you that for "trap" in AD&D because I find AD&D to be in line with normal use of it; any special game definitions exist on top of it, not in contradiction with it.


It is, alas, not obvious to me that those are the fundamental principles of traps in general, or of rpg traps in specific, or of my use case of traps in rpgs, and therefore that they would apply. I think perhaps it could be your use of the word "trick" which you may be using in a manner that I wouldn't ordinarily use it. Again, I find "plain English" to be vague and prone to introducing errors through unstated context and people's assumptions about what specific word mean in different contexts.

{Scrubbed}

Yes, English, and all other natural languages, have some degree of ambiguity. That does not mean words are empty symbols that can mean absolutely anything or that there's significant ambiguity of the issue at hand. There was already basic agreement over what definition of a "trap" and "trick" as direct result of us tacitly agreeing to have this discussion in English; you backed out of it by bringing up the possibility of special definitions.

As an illustration of why people would talk in cross-purposes, that's fine. As an explanation of why people would find it hard to do analysis and spot previously unacknowledged similarities, your post is good. But for me, who's genuinely trying to discuss what traps are and what makes them difficult, all it means is I'll have to pick a dictionary and beat you over the head with it until you understand what words mean.


By the by, what's with the 'focused too much on "able to be overcome" part' thing? If I'm not writing traps for 'challenge' or against the PCs then how am I focused of thrm overcoming the trap?

You were focusing on it too much in your analysis of AD&D. "Being able to be overcome" being part of basic principle of traps in AD&D is dubious, focusing on it makes traps seem more different than they are between AD&D and your game. I'm not proposing you are following that principle in your games.

[King of Nowhere]

I already adressed this, multiple times. Take a good look at this diagram, (https://images.app.goo.gl/yFCXnLy4z84SkFJR6) again. Realize, again, the corollary: there is no game of set level of difficulty that can be equally engaging to people of different skill levels. A further corollary would be that for every game imaginable, there is some group of players where part of the group will be miserable.

Kicking an overly-dominant player out of the competition was the sanest thing other players could've done in Talakeal's situation, and the game was not designed wrong for giving them the ability to do it.

no. and that diagram proves absolutely nothing.
In any board game, there is some mechanic to hurt another player. without that mechanic, it's not a group game, it's rather a bunch of isolated people each playing their own individual game with no interaction.
but i've never seen a board game where you could completely shut down another player. slow him down so that others can catch up, absolutely. stop him completely, not at all. that's bad game design. in a game designed right, the other players interfering with talekeal would have brought him down to their level, no more and no less.

by the way, i'm curious; at first talekeal was dominant, and everyone focussed on him and stopped his progress. but after a while of this, surely some other player picked up some progress and managed to get close to victory. at this point, did the rest of the table switch target and obstacle them?
because in games i know, the outcome of those interactions is that there will be more players closely tied up for first place. unless someone manages such a great position (or luck) that he stays dominant even with the rest of the table focusing against him, which happens rarely.


See above. The emotional reaction itself, whether being upset or bored, is fine and normal. No-one's asking you to enjoy being punished. What makes a sore loser is complaining about it. Don't complain about legal blows.

disagreement here too. at any board game, there is one winner and many losers. for the experience to be pleasant, it must be pleasant even if one loses - else it's going to be miserable for the majority of the table. So, if losing makes the experience unpleasant, one is a sore loser. whether he actively complains or not is only a test of emotional maturity.


What makes you a sore loser now is trying to pin your loss on a game's design, when in reality, it was a predictable result of your own play. Yes, there are handicap mechanics the game could've used; that does not prove it was badly designed. Again: kicking an overly-dominant player out of a game was the sanest thing the other players could've done, and the game's not wrong for giving them the ability. The mechanic is already non-binary, the motive to target the leading player is proportionate to how much better the leading player is doing to others.

Which gets to the point about two sub-games, which clearly flew over your head. Again: you aced one but failed another. You weren't the most skilled player, overall, in the game. You were forced to sit out because you weren't skilled at realizing other players could do that, or why. The game's purposefully designed so that other players are obstacles you need to strategize around. You aren't arguing for or against a handicap mechanic, you are arguing against an entire layer of gameplay because you were bad at it.
and that's again a different point: not being a sore loser by itself, but being one in regard to perceived injustice. most people who are not sore losers will be unhappy if they perceive they were wronged.

and bringing that into the game mechanic... well, you are right in that there is a social aspect of the game, as in "don't get targeted". and there are good and bad applications of that mechanic. I've seen good applications of it, where you always have to gauge how many resources you want to spend to hinder another player; that was engaging. And I've seen bad applications, where the resulting strategy was basically to keep all your cards in your hand and try to act nonchalant, until somebody suddenly exclaims "I won"; that was boring. can't really judge without knowing specifics of the game.

However, just because a game mechanic to hinder other players is good, it does not mean that any such game mechanic is good. in particular, if that mechanic is too strong - if other players can hurt each other for no real cost - then it really tends to become a toxic mechanic.

[Talakeal]

Which circles back to, "don't give them scenarios like that". I mean, why give your players games that include friendly NPCs at all? That seems antithetical to Bizarro World.

I thought this post was about difficulty, not tailor making a game for my player's specific eccentric tastes.

First off, my players aren't a hive mind, what would please one wouldn't please the others.
Second, they don't even give me clear consistent feedback (even if I assume they are wholly honest with themselves) so I wouldn't know how.
Third, I have no interest in trying to set up such a game. There is nothing in it for me to enjoy on any level.
Fourth, I can't help but feel like the players would swiftly turn on each other even if there were no NPCs who could / dared to stand up to them.


See above. The emotional reaction itself, whether being upset or bored, is fine and normal. No-one's asking you to enjoy being punished. What makes a sore loser is complaining about it. Don't complain about legal blows.

What makes you a sore loser now is trying to pin your loss on a game's design, when in reality, it was a predictable result of your own play. Yes, there are handicap mechanics the game could've used; that does not prove it was badly designed. Again: kicking an overly-dominant player out of a game was the sanest thing the other players could've done, and the game's not wrong for giving them the ability. The mechanic is already non-binary, the motive to target the leading player is proportionate to how much better the leading player is doing to others.

Which gets to the point about two sub-games, which clearly flew over your head. Again: you aced one but failed another. You weren't the most skilled player, overall, in the game. You were forced to sit out because you weren't skilled at realizing other players could do that, or why. The game's purposefully designed so that other players are obstacles you need to strategize around. You aren't arguing for or against a handicap mechanic, you are arguing against an entire layer of gameplay because you were bad at it.

I just don't agree with any of this.

You are basically saying that there is no such thing as a bad game, and that anyone who doesn't like any game is sore loser if they say or do anything about it.

It is not about winning or losing.

Making players suffer for playing your game is bad design.

People absolutely have the right to express their discomfort and stop playing if they are not having fun. This does not make them a "sore loser".

Pitching your game as being a game about movie trivia, but actually making it a game about manipulating your opponents and playing politics where the right move is to pretend you are bad at movie trivia and stay quiet when you know the answer is bad game design.

Handicap mechanics can exist without booting someone from the game entirely.

Heck, even your proposed "You lost because you were bad at the social aspect" wasn't even true, because nobody else was playing politics or intentionally missing answers. Honestly, its more or less down to dumb luck. Once you get within one move of the exit, you just sit there out of the game. I got there an hour before anyone else, so I had to sit there for a very long time, but ultimately the person who won was just the person whose turn it happened to be when everyone else ran out of "lose your turn" cards after everyone


Also, at this point you aren't even playing devil's advocate. She didn't call me a sore loser because I was complaining about the "legal blow", she called me a sore loser because she felt I was faking being bored out of my mind and only complaining about the boredom because I was mad that I didn't win.

Also, am I still a sore loser if I complain on someone else's behalf? Like if it was my little brother who was forced to sit out the entire game and was clearly bored out of his mind, but was too shy / polite to say anything, but I can tell he is not having fun and I said something?


Out of curiosity, I have a similar story.

I went to play munchkin at a friend's house.
They had a house rule in play that there were no take backs.
It was very late, and my buddy who had rode with me needed to work the next morning.
Of the six players, three of us will help anyone without asking anything in return, and the other three players label as cheaters as a result as we are way ahead.
After a very long intense game, I am in a position to kill the last monster needed to hit max level and win the game, and nobody has any cards left to stop me.
One of the players then played an instant wall card on me, telling me it forced me to run away, then started taking his turn.
I picked up and read the instant wall card and said "No, this doesn't force you to run, it just makes running automatically successful after you have already decided to run.
He said "Oh, my mistake. But no take backs!"
I said "Look, its 3 AM, I won the game. You can't just make up rules to like that. If you really play that way, I am just going to declare that the potted plant in my hand reads that players named Talakeal instantly win the game. You guys are free to play for second place, but Brian has to work in four hours and we are going home," and left.
I actually enjoy munchkin, but to this day Brian refuses to play it even with totally different groups.

Am I sore loser in this case?


I also have a Talisman story, but that one is even more extreme, to the point where I imagine people would say I made it up. I can tell that one if people like.


EDIT: You know, debating specifics aside, the entire argument is nonsense. The key word in "just being a sore loser" is "just". That implies that I don't actually find the mechanic flawed, I am merely mad because I lost and am looking for something to blame it on. This is an attempt to dismiss someone's legitimate opinion. All your attempts at redefining "sore loser" basically make the term worthless, and imply that it is actually impossible to have a flawed game mechanic as any possible critiques can easily dismissed as "just being a sore loser".

[NichG]

Speaking for myself, what I want as both player and DM isn't 'Difficulty', but rather I want (as a player) that it matters that I engage with the situation rather than playing on autopilot, and (as a DM) I want the players to have to do the same. So basically I think the game shouldn't support someone building a character in isolation such that there's a single schtick that the character just should always use, always using that schtick every time they have a chance to act, and thereby always succeeding. But the game should support the possibility that someone, by understanding and engaging with the situation, reliably and consistently is able to guarantee their own success.

I think this resolves the paradox of 'you want it to feel dangerous, but not be in danger'. It feels dangerous in that if you didn't react appropriately, you would die. But actually reacting appropriately can be a guarantee of safety, and that doesn't change that the situation was in fact dangerous. Really lethal things that also telegraph themselves very clearly for example can be like this - you're told up front that anything in these 20 squares at the start of the enemy's next turn will effectively die - no save, no hitpoint buffer, no layering of buffs and spells and gimmicks to avoid it. But all you have to do to not die is not be standing in one of those 20 squares. And yes there might be stuff that tries to hinder movement or paralyze you or push you into the death zone, but as long as you account for those things, 100% survival rate should be achievable from moderately smart decisions and paying a bit of attention.

Also, the flip side of this is that I want the game to give the right kind of responsiveness (one might call this 'resistance' in an exercise context specifically, not meaning that word in the wider interpretations...) that makes me feel like pushing harder is actually going somewhere I couldn't otherwise go. E.g. 'even smarter play, even higher heights of achievement' instead of 'if you play this smart or better, you live; otherwise you risk dying'. So e.g. get an average group of players who generally avoid standing in the death zone or doing the obvious misplays but otherwise aren't incredibly engaged, and they should still get through with a 100% survival rate. But get a group or even a single player in that group who is extremely engaged, attentive, pokes at all of the cracks in the game, etc, and they should not only get through but also discover the hidden stuff going on behind the scenes, gain opportunities to determine or change outcomes that would otherwise look like they were set in stone, etc. And the cleverer that player is, the more they should be able to uncover. Even better, when those things you can push into aren't all just on a single axis of 'power' or 'smart play', but have a lot to do with the specific way that a specific player chooses to get invested in the game - if you really get into magical engineering, you find engineering stuff you can engage with and escalate into; if you really get into fantasy economics, you find business stuff you can engage with and escalate into; if you grasp sophisticated politics, you can try to create world peace in the setting; if you like to delve into the metaphysics, you can find reality-warping insights; etc.

So the ideal game for me has lots of those places you can only get to if you do really well, but isn't trying to constantly say 'you should be failing X percent of the time' or 'you are going to be constantly tested near the limit of your ability, and if you slip up, you fail'. It should be easy, to the extent that if you barely wish to engage you can still make it through without suffering, but also have things that you can voluntarily engage with that make any level or gradation of player competency the DM is capable of supporting matter.

[Telok]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

You were focusing on it too much in your analysis of AD&D. "Being able to be overcome" being part of basic principle of traps in AD&D is dubious, focusing on it makes traps seem more different than they are between AD&D and your game. I'm not proposing you are following that principle in your games.

Dude! Cool it with the insults. All I was generally talking about was that we apparently don't agree on what traps, the purpose of traps, and the fundamental principles of them are. I'm not talking about this at a game theory or set theory level, which I think you may be, and that could be part of the issue. I'm not in the mood to take the time and typing to go thar far with a minor tangent, I have other stuff to do.

My "analysis of AD&D" was a... What? Two or three sentence?... off the cuff guesstimate. Please don't tyr to ascribe some deep level of importance to it.

[Mechalich]

Also, the flip side of this is that I want the game to give the right kind of responsiveness (one might call this 'resistance' in an exercise context specifically, not meaning that word in the wider interpretations...) that makes me feel like pushing harder is actually going somewhere I couldn't otherwise go. E.g. 'even smarter play, even higher heights of achievement' instead of 'if you play this smart or better, you live; otherwise you risk dying'. So e.g. get an average group of players who generally avoid standing in the death zone or doing the obvious misplays but otherwise aren't incredibly engaged, and they should still get through with a 100% survival rate. But get a group or even a single player in that group who is extremely engaged, attentive, pokes at all of the cracks in the game, etc, and they should not only get through but also discover the hidden stuff going on behind the scenes, gain opportunities to determine or change outcomes that would otherwise look like they were set in stone, etc. And the cleverer that player is, the more they should be able to uncover. Even better, when those things you can push into aren't all just on a single axis of 'power' or 'smart play', but have a lot to do with the specific way that a specific player chooses to get invested in the game - if you really get into magical engineering, you find engineering stuff you can engage with and escalate into; if you really get into fantasy economics, you find business stuff you can engage with and escalate into; if you grasp sophisticated politics, you can try to create world peace in the setting; if you like to delve into the metaphysics, you can find reality-warping insights; etc.


This kind of positive feedback can be a bit tricky, since it can lead to escalation that invalidates later challenges by making the characters too powerful. Admittedly there's a sort of inherent tension to any encounter series with a reward treadmill in that there's a fairly narrow zone on the graph of character power versus challenge that needs to be maintained. Too many setbacks and too few rewards and the characters fall behind and are unable to meet the ongoing challenge benchmarks. Too many rewards, and subsequent challenges become trivial (this is common in certain classes of JRPGs, where a few hours spent grinding to overlevel early on may leave the player OP for the rest of the game even if they subsequently play normally).

Now, in video games the general consequence of being OP is that you beat the game faster, while the story elements, which are usually broadly protected from character power due to compartmentalization, remain broadly unchanged. This is often even desirable, since there are only so many hours in the day and rendering a game trivial while not technically cheating in order to breeze through the story is a satisfying experience for many, many players. In tabletop this desire isn't exactly uncommon either, but the contrasting point is that it tends to suck for the GM and for any player who cares deeply about immersion and doesn't want to feel like they've found a hack in reality and operate like an isekai protagonist.

However, in many ways this is an issue of balancing the expectations of players and GMs, and there's little a system can do about it.

[NichG]

This kind of positive feedback can be a bit tricky, since it can lead to escalation that invalidates later challenges by making the characters too powerful. Admittedly there's a sort of inherent tension to any encounter series with a reward treadmill in that there's a fairly narrow zone on the graph of character power versus challenge that needs to be maintained. Too many setbacks and too few rewards and the characters fall behind and are unable to meet the ongoing challenge benchmarks. Too many rewards, and subsequent challenges become trivial (this is common in certain classes of JRPGs, where a few hours spent grinding to overlevel early on may leave the player OP for the rest of the game even if they subsequently play normally).

But if you take the philosophy that I just stated as a whole, preserving challenge is not actually important. Having a 'graph of character power versus challenge' and having benchmarks is exactly what I was saying not to do.

Instead, the idea is to have something which is capable of providing resistance when a player pushes into it, but if the player stops pushing then so does the resistance. So its not that 'on session 37, the party will face this CR 17 creature with X, Y, Z things and either succeed or perish'. Rather, on session 1 the players can learn that there is a cave with this CR 17 creature guarding a ley line. If you decide to go when its difficult, you're pushing and the setting is providing matching resistance to your push. If you decide to go when it's trivial because you've built up power elsewhere, then its trivial and the GM can just skip the fight and say 'you can easily drive away or kill the creature, what do you want to do with the leyline' - no 'push', so no need for resistance. But you have to abandon the idea that the players should always be in a state of pushing and being resisted at all times. It's okay if they're not, as long as there is a way that they could be which they can voluntarily choose to engage with.

Now that's a simple 'power' kind of push, but the sort I'd use more often is things like dropping a hint somewhere that suggests that something powerful but dangerous was sealed away, and a hint elsewhere that maybe the 'dangerous' aspect was because people didn't understand it correctly at the time, and then if the player puts those things together and figures out some way to bypass the seal and figures out how to offset the original danger, then they might unseal it and discover that the thing itself is only the tip of an iceberg involving the civilization that originally created it and... So if the player decides 'nah, I don't care' then game proceeds, no real failure there, just a missed opportunity perhaps. If the player figures out how to get to the thing, they can stop there having seized something that allows them to make some decisions about the world by fiat - maybe they can use it to fundamentally alter the structure of magic so that undead don't work anymore or whatever, but some big payoff that was nonetheless technically not necessary. If they go and dig into the old civilization, maybe figure out what destroyed them or reinvent their technology, then the game shifts to become about that kind of thing - they're actively pushing, so there is 'resistance' that makes their act of pushing meaningful in that direction.

But its not like there has to be some session by which 'you'd better have the rule-editing tech of the ancient ruined civilization, or you won't be able to defeat the challenges you're expected to deal with by that session'. Forget the idea of a curve to maintain.

It's more like a Minecraft Creative Mode model of 'difficulty' than a JRPG model of 'difficulty'.

[Mechalich]

But if you take the philosophy that I just stated as a whole, preserving challenge is not actually important. Having a 'graph of character power versus challenge' and having benchmarks is exactly what I was saying not to do.

That only works if everyone involved accepts that preserving challenge isn't important. As I mentioned, it is very common for all or at least a majority of the players to be down with this, it is much less common for a GM to accept this. This has been well-established for decades. As far back as the 1e AD&D DMG there was advice about 'monty haul campaigns' and how they are often great fun for the players but may be miserable for the GM. In a video game there is no GM and it doesn't matter when encounters are trivialized, but when there is a GM it does, and even if you skip encounters that means now new ones have to be made, and they have to incorporate new PC abilities, and this involves more work.

And, this circles back to time management, since the amount of time a GM may have to invest in a game is usually limited, anything that imposes an additional burden on the GMs time may be a problem. Ultimately, this applies to a lot of things regarding tabletop gaming. Time is the most important resource. The tricky part is that the amount of it any given person involved may vary wildly.

[NichG]

That only works if everyone involved accepts that preserving challenge isn't important. As I mentioned, it is very common for all or at least a majority of the players to be down with this, it is much less common for a GM to accept this. This has been well-established for decades. As far back as the 1e AD&D DMG there was advice about 'monty haul campaigns' and how they are often great fun for the players but may be miserable for the GM. In a video game there is no GM and it doesn't matter when encounters are trivialized, but when there is a GM it does, and even if you skip encounters that means now new ones have to be made, and they have to incorporate new PC abilities, and this involves more work.

And, this circles back to time management, since the amount of time a GM may have to invest in a game is usually limited, anything that imposes an additional burden on the GMs time may be a problem. Ultimately, this applies to a lot of things regarding tabletop gaming. Time is the most important resource. The tricky part is that the amount of it any given person involved may vary wildly.

I mean, I mostly GM these days, so that's not exactly a problem for me. And it doesn't really take more time - if anything, it takes less, because I don't have to try to engineer encounters for being challenging, analyze the players' builds carefully, bring out just the right degree of optimization for NPCs, control loot, all of that stuff.

[icefractal]

Also, the flip side of this is that I want the game to give the right kind of responsiveness (one might call this 'resistance' in an exercise context specifically, not meaning that word in the wider interpretations...) that makes me feel like pushing harder is actually going somewhere I couldn't otherwise go. E.g. 'even smarter play, even higher heights of achievement' instead of 'if you play this smart or better, you live; otherwise you risk dying'. So e.g. get an average group of players who generally avoid standing in the death zone or doing the obvious misplays but otherwise aren't incredibly engaged, and they should still get through with a 100% survival rate. But get a group or even a single player in that group who is extremely engaged, attentive, pokes at all of the cracks in the game, etc, and they should not only get through but also discover the hidden stuff going on behind the scenes, gain opportunities to determine or change outcomes that would otherwise look like they were set in stone, etc. And the cleverer that player is, the more they should be able to uncover. Even better, when those things you can push into aren't all just on a single axis of 'power' or 'smart play', but have a lot to do with the specific way that a specific player chooses to get invested in the game - if you really get into magical engineering, you find engineering stuff you can engage with and escalate into; if you really get into fantasy economics, you find business stuff you can engage with and escalate into; if you grasp sophisticated politics, you can try to create world peace in the setting; if you like to delve into the metaphysics, you can find reality-warping insights; etc.

So the ideal game for me has lots of those places you can only get to if you do really well, but isn't trying to constantly say 'you should be failing X percent of the time' or 'you are going to be constantly tested near the limit of your ability, and if you slip up, you fail'. It should be easy, to the extent that if you barely wish to engage you can still make it through without suffering, but also have things that you can voluntarily engage with that make any level or gradation of player competency the DM is capable of supporting matter.Very well said, that really sums up how I feel about difficulty. I want "resistance" primarily - the feeling that my path of action matters, than some things are harder than others, that my choices can determine how well I do. And enough difficulty (in absolute rather than relative terms) to certain actions that it explains why not everybody is doing them / can do them. Challenge is secondary, and IME optional challenges are usually more truly challenging than mandatory ones are. And fractal exploration is definitely a plus!

You mentioned it as being like creative mode Minecraft, but really I think survival mode qualifies too. If you just want to survive, slowly build up a base, cautiously explore when you're fully geared, then it's pretty easy. It's optional challenges like speed exploration, nomadic lifestyle, mega-projects, automation, and so forth where the (several kinds of) difficulty comes from.



As far back as the 1e AD&D DMG there was advice about 'monty haul campaigns' and how they are often great fun for the players but may be miserable for the GM. In a video game there is no GM and it doesn't matter when encounters are trivialized, but when there is a GM it does, and even if you skip encounters that means now new ones have to be made, and they have to incorporate new PC abilities, and this involves more work.Mark me as another GM who doesn't feel that way. Honestly I find it very freeing to not focus on challenge first. Instead of "what stats does this foe need and how to justify that" and arms-races, I can just think in terms of "what makes sense for someone with this position in the world". I mean yes, you do still need some awareness of what the PCs can do, for knowing what your pacing will be like if nothing else, but it's a lot less pressure, and (IMO) gives the world a more authentic feeling.

[Vahnavoi]

@NichG: I have a nagging feeling this has come up before: your need to split "resistance" from "challenge" is because you (and other people in this thread, most likely) conflate challenge with subjective feeling of being challenged (whatever you imagine that feeling to be).

In truth, resistance is just straightforwardly part of challenge and the subjective feeling is, again, byproduct of challenge and player skill. You can substitute "challenge" with "difficulty" in the prior sentences and the same point holds.

This becomes obvious if we do go back to simple physical systems that have the trait you desire. A rubber resistance band would be the most common example, from which game design gets the terms "rubber band difficulty" and "rubber band artificial intelligence" (for opponents designed to maintain rubber band difficulty). To tie this point to the overall discussion about game mastering, however, I'll instead take as an example an arm-wrestling contest, where one person, instead of trying to win, is trying to match how much force the other person is exerting almost exactly, yielding only enough to make the other person feel like they're winning.

So obviously, if the other person pushes not at all, nothing happens. If they do push, the force they're exerting will gravitate towards whatever they feel comfortable with, provided the first person does their job right.

Does the first person need a planned curve for how much force the other person exerts? Most likely, they do not, because they are getting constant feedback from the other person; they can adjust based on that. Trying to plan the curve ahead of time poses a different and harder problem, because it means having to gather information and trying to predict another person's actions before they happen.

So, what are the limits of this kind of setup? Notably, the first person has to be at least equal to the second in strength, processing tactile feedback etc., otherwise their ability to scale the challenge and maintain a comfortable feeling will drop off if the second person chooses to go for upper limits of their strength. Plus, they need a theory of mind and sense of empathy - if they cannot reason about how the other person feels, they cannot tell where the resistance they're offering crosses a threshold from causing a triumphant feeling to causing anxiety, etc. Here's the diagram, again, if someone still can't visualize this. (https://images.app.goo.gl/azBhbkVfYoRQT3H87)

All of the principles for this armwrestling contest apply to being a game master in a roleplaying game. The specific skills used may change - verbal ability instead of physical strength, logical reasoning instead of tactile response, etc. - but the theory doesn't. What's important to notice is that there are at least two difficulty curves, because a game master and a player are doing different things. In order for a game master to enjoy what they're doing, the difficulty of maintaining the right sort difficulty for the players has to match the game master's skill level to a similar degree.

Now, for almost any game there is some set of players that satisfies these conditions. How easy it is to find such players depends on the game, but it's worth noting that it's way easy to overestimate the difficulty if one tries to solve the wrong problem, such as, in the example, trying to make a predictive difficulty curve instead of adjusting it based on moment-to-moment experience during play.

---

As for what Mechalich said, the actual difference between most video games and tabletop games is that video game designers aren't present at site of actual play; they face all the same challenges as a game masters in tabletop games, with the same potential for anguish, most players just aren't there to see it because process happens over longer distance and time. The idea that it doesn't matter when a player trivializes a challenge is incredibly naive; some people have the literal job of taking feedback on these cases, judging whether it is within acceptable parameters, and then fixing them if they are found to not be. The corollary is that if a video game designer has to solve a harder problem of making a predictive curve using statistical reasoning or whatever, it's because they won't be there during play and are thus never in the position to solve the easier problem.

As for a system "balancing expectations" between game masters and players, of course they can do that. The most obvious thing they can do is have instruction manuals explaining what parameters the system is meant to be used within, starting with obvious stuff on the box of every tabletop game such as "this game is made for two to six players who are aged four years and up". Untangling decades of tortured expectations may be hard, but explaining the basic stuff for a new game with new rules isn't. A lot of games already do this; where they fail, it's often because even the makers have adopted some bizarre anti-intellectual attitude about whether a game system can teach anyone anything (nevermind how). But most commonly, it's due to players themselves adopting an attitude of "who even reads instruction manuals?". People reap what they sow.

[NichG]

@NichG: I have a nagging feeling this has come up before: your need to split "resistance" from "challenge" is because you (and other people in this thread, most likely) conflate challenge with subjective feeling of being challenged (whatever you imagine that feeling to be).

In truth, resistance is just straightforwardly part of challenge and the subjective feeling is, again, byproduct of challenge and player skill. You can substitute "challenge" with "difficulty" in the prior sentences and the same point holds.

This becomes obvious if we do go back to simple physical systems that have the trait you desire. A rubber resistance band would be the most common example, from which game design gets the terms "rubber band difficulty" and "rubber band artificial intelligence" (for opponents designed to maintain rubber band difficulty). To tie this point to the overall discussion about game mastering, however, I'll instead take as an example an arm-wrestling contest, where one person, instead of trying to win, is trying to match how much force the other person is exerting almost exactly, yielding only enough to make the other person feel like they're winning.


It would instead be something like pushing your way through a spongy, plastic medium, or shoving wet sand around a room. If you don't move, nothing happens to you. If you do move, the distance you manage to go is proportional to the force you exert as the medium collapses in that direction and piles up. But if you then stop, again there is no force pushing you back any more from your new location.

Physically thats more like friction than elasticity. There's hysteresis - the force you experience is not just a function of displacement, but also of your direction of movement relative to past movements.

As far as subjective game experience, the important distinction is who is controlling the pushback. In most of the discussion on this thread, the GM is determining a force and the player must meet it. Here I'm saying that instead, the player can be the one to determine the force and the GM just translates that into movement.

And no mandatory minimal movement to stay in place.

[Vahnavoi]

@NichG: yes, which is why in the arm-wrestling contest I cast the first player as the game master equivalent. If we analyze the idea further, we'll once again end up talking about internal versus external motivation (player starting to move out of their volition with game master reacting, versus game master starting events of out of their own volition and players reacting).

[NichG]

@NichG: yes, which is why in the arm-wrestling contest I cast the first player as the game master equivalent. If we analyze the idea further, we'll once again end up talking about internal versus external motivation (player starting to move out of their volition with game master reacting, versus game master starting events of out of their own volition and players reacting).

The arm wrestling example isn't too far from what I mean, but I do think there's a subtle difference between a case where the other person tries to meet the first with as much force as they apply as an intentional act (they have a goal to make motion just barely possible), versus something where e.g. there are things which can be pushed by different levels of strength all lying around, and someone goes and pushes the ones they're interested in pushing - in which case its possible to have the states 'I can never push this', 'I can't push this yet, but I can become able to push this', 'I can trivially push this', etc.

Its sort of like if I ask you to, using whatever formal definition of difficulty you like, give me a single quantitative answer to the question: How difficult is Minecraft Creative Mode?

I won't say that an answer to that question will be impossible in the language of difficulty, but I expect it will be awkward because it requires a lot of context like 'what is the player trying to do?'.

[icefractal]

To tie this point to the overall discussion about game mastering, however, I'll instead take as an example an arm-wrestling contest, where one person, instead of trying to win, is trying to match how much force the other person is exerting almost exactly, yielding only enough to make the other person feel like they're winning.

So obviously, if the other person pushes not at all, nothing happens. If they do push, the force they're exerting will gravitate towards whatever they feel comfortable with, provided the first person does their job right.IMO, that's a somewhat different situation - you're still focused on achieving a specific level of resistance and tailoring the opposition to achieve it.

Instead of arm wrestling, consider an obstacle course. There are various obstacles, like tires you need to step through, walls to climb, ropes to swing on, hurdles to duck under or vault over, etc. Not all of them are the same difficulty, and they're not re-calibrated whenever a new challenger arrives. For someone athletic enough, the whole course might be pretty easy, where-as someone just starting out might only get halfway through.

Now imagine that this is a huge obstacle course with branching paths. So pretty much everyone can get past the first section, some very easily, but then they could go onto various branches of varying difficulties, and they can (to an extent) see those difficulties in advance and decide based on that - "Expert rope-climbing section? I'm not ready for that yet, I'll go for the balance-beam path instead."

Now imagine that this is a game-show with different prizes at the end of different paths, so that the consideration is not just "I'll pick the toughest part of the course that I can currently handle" but rather "which of these goals is more important to me, considering the odds of reaching them?"

[Vahnavoi]

The arm wrestling example isn't too far from what I mean, but I do think there's a subtle difference between a case where the other person tries to meet the first with as much force as they apply as an intentional act (they have a goal to make motion just barely possible), versus something where e.g. there are things which can be pushed by different levels of strength all lying around, and someone goes and pushes the ones they're interested in pushing - in which case its possible to have the states 'I can never push this', 'I can't push this yet, but I can become able to push this', 'I can trivially push this', etc.

I don't disagree. An armwrestling contest is a simple game, picked as an example to illustrate a principle; a more complex game such as a roleplaying game can have more vectors of challenge to apply it over, such more entities to push against. I chose an example with an intentional actors because a human game master is an intentional actor.


Its sort of like if I ask you to, using whatever formal definition of difficulty you like, give me a single quantitative answer to the question: How difficult is Minecraft Creative Mode?

The question is loaded because it presumes Minecraft Creative Mode is a single challenge. It isn't; it's an open-ended collection of largely self-selected challenges that vary in difficulty, with parameters of difficulty being things like amount of time it takes to assemble a construct and the algorithmic complexity of a construct, and necessary players skills being things like spatial reasoning, logical reasoning and mechanical reasoning. You might as well be asking "how difficult are Lego blocks?" Well what are you trying to build? A few hundred block house or a million piece programmable redstone computer?


I won't say that an answer to that question will be impossible in the language of difficulty, but I expect it will be awkward because it requires a lot of context like 'what is the player trying to do?'.

This is why I made the distinction between predictive difficulty curves versus on-the-spot adjusted curves. Missing context means unknown information means a harder problem to solve. Even in the much simpler armwrestling scenario, correctly predicting how much force to use might be impossible for the first player, but they don't have to do that: once the players lock hands, the first player has immediate feedback to react to and does't have to predict very far anymore.

---


IMO, that's a somewhat different situation - you're still focused on achieving a specific level of resistance and tailoring the opposition to achieve it.

That's precisely the kind of bad use of words I'm trying to disabuse people of. It's measurable in units of physical force that the level of resistance is dynamic and can vary from zero to a person's maximum capability. Achieving a specific level of resistance only satisfies what the first person's trying to do if the second person shoots for a specific level from the start and doesn't let go before the contest ends.


Instead of arm wrestling, consider an obstacle course....

Stop. You are only cheating yourself out of noticing principle by using a purposelessly complex alternate example. Again, I chose an example with an intentional actor because a human game master is an intentional actor; it's about how to design a game with the trait NichG desires.

In none of your examples did you stop ask how the obstacle course or game show got there or why it is the way it is.

When making an obstacle course with a variety of problems, you are trying to provide a range of resistance, just like the human arm provides a range of resistance in the armwrestling contest. The principle works over more vectors and more different entities, but it's still the same principle.

It's possible to accidentally create sufficient conditions for the trait to emerge by, say, spreading a load of crap across a wide area and then letting people roam in it. There are real examples of that happening with, say, junkyard playgrounds. But if you want to talk about why it happens, you pretty much have to understand how to make it happen.

[NichG]

I don't disagree. An armwrestling contest is a simple game, picked as an example to illustrate a principle; a more complex game such as a roleplaying game can have more vectors of challenge to apply it over, such more entities to push against. I chose an example with an intentional actors because a human game master is an intentional actor.


The reason I was talking about the metaphor of resistance in contrast to challenge though was because I'm arguing that a GM (and players) don't need to be intentional about the level of difficulty in the game, and that framing the task of figuring out how to tune the game to preferences in terms of an intentional and particular level of difficulty tends to create issues that may not be essential to the part of the subjective experience of 'challenge' that is actually most satisfying.

To someone trying to 'fix' the level of challenge (even relative to player skills), something like a surprisingly powerful mechanical combo or a positive feedback loop in loot ends up being a problem - this is something acting in the opposite direction of their intent, its a disturbance which has to be adjusted to.

From the point of view of making the scope of the game such that there are things where any difference in skill or power can matter, those things would just mean that the player is currently effectively at a different position in the state space of the game than you thought. Not a problem to be solved, but just, that's where the gameplay is now.



The question is loaded because it presumes Minecraft Creative Mode is a single challenge. It isn't; it's an open-ended collection of largely self-selected challenges that vary in difficulty, with parameters of difficulty being things like amount of time it takes to assemble a construct and the algorithmic complexity of a construct, and necessary players skills being things like spatial reasoning, logical reasoning and mechanical reasoning. You might as well be asking "how difficult are Lego blocks?" Well what are you trying to build? A few hundred block house or a million piece programmable redstone computer?


In the context of the thread, the way that this question is loaded when you talk about challenge or difficulty is the point. If I were trying to design Minecraft Creative Mode to have a certain level of difficulty, even for a certain player, it'd be hopeless because as you say, its fundamental nature is to be open-ended and self-selected. On the other hand, I could approach the design with the idea that 'I always want the player to be able to do more, the better they get at it'. From that framing, the open-endedness of Minecraft becomes the key point. As long as I have that, as well as the subjective feedback which inspires the player to get ideas for bigger and more complex builds the more experienced they become, I'm done.

So when the thread asks in the OP how to address the question of "How hard do you want Combat to be?" with players, and posters go back and forth about the paradox of how players often want to win but feel they could have failed, and really don't want to fail, this alternate framing resolves the apparent paradox by saying 'well yeah, success rate isn't necessarily the thing you should be concerned with, you can have something where it feels meaningful to become more powerful without ever having something like being directly defeated be a possible outcome'.

[icefractal]

That's precisely the kind of bad use of words I'm trying to disabuse people of. It's measurable in units of physical force that the level of resistance is dynamic and can vary from zero to a person's maximum capability. Achieving a specific level of resistance only satisfies what the first person's trying to do if the second person shoots for a specific level from the start and doesn't let go before the contest ends.You are trying to achieve a specific level of relative resistance. What I'm saying is, there's a playstyle where you don't do that. You create a world with challenges in it that aren't based on what level the PCs are.

Since you only want to talk in arm-wrestling terms, here's the closest match: There are multiple people you can arm wrestle against. They each arm-wrestle to the best of their ability, which varies because they're of different strengths. None of them base their amount of force on what the challenger is doing.

If you're saying "no, there is only one arm wrestler, because that is the GM and the GM is always choosing how much challenge to provide" then you're fundamentally coming at this from the wrong angle (for the playstyle I'm describing). As a GM, I don't decide how much challenge I'm providing at a given moment. That's a result of what they're up against, which has been determined some amount in advance, and which the players usually have choice in.

It's true that in situations where the PCs don't get any choice (someone hires an assassin to go after them, say), then the GM is choosing the level of challenge. It can be affected by in-fiction factors (how much resources the person who wants them dead has, say), but there's definitely enough wiggle room that the GM is making a choice. But that's an edge case, not the majority of the game.

[Easy e]

@Vahnavoi - Thanks for the chart. That was helpful to me for something unrelated to this thread.

[Vahnavoi]

You are trying to achieve a specific level of relative resistance. What I'm saying is, there's a playstyle where you don't do that. You create a world with challenges in it that aren't based on what level the PCs are.

And what I'm trying to explain is that you really should drop talking about relatives and start talking about absolutes. "Relative resistance", like the subjective feeling of being challenged or resisted, is a byproduct of actual resistance/challenge/difficulty versus player skill. By insisting on talking about relative resistance in response to me, you neatly miss the point and return right back to the start.

Also, for clarity, I'm not, and have not at any point, been talking about character level, because character level is not player skill. There is no clear analogue to character levels in the armwrestling example, and that was on purpose; resistance, challenge, difficulty, is always aimed at a player.


Since you only want to talk in arm-wrestling terms, here's the closest match: There are multiple people you can arm wrestle against. They each arm-wrestle to the best of their ability, which varies because they're of different strengths. None of them base their amount of force on what the challenger is doing.

You don't seem to grasp that increasing the number of entities for a principle to work over does not mean a principle is not in play. To make this easier, let's introduce a bit of roleplaying back to the example: instead of there being multiple opponents, there is in fact just one, who goes to change their mask on the backstage and then changes how seriously they're going to play based on the player's pick.

Given the one player's range of strength is enough to cover the hypothetical range of the, supposedly, multiple opponents, we find the one player is capable of offering all the same challenges, and the example with multiple opponents reduces to the example with just one.

Which is equivalent to what a tabletop game master does. That's why I picked an example with an intentional actor. No matter how many opponents the game master plays the role of, there's one person changing their behaviour in reaction to a player's.


If you're saying "no, there is only one arm wrestler, because that is the GM and the GM is always choosing how much challenge to provide" then you're fundamentally coming at this from the wrong angle (for the playstyle I'm describing). As a GM, I don't decide how much challenge I'm providing at a given moment. That's a result of what they're up against, which has been determined some amount in advance, and which the players usually have choice in.

My armwrestling contest was a sample of a simple system having traits desired by NichG, and the entire point is that the first player's choice is a reaction to the second's, who chooses the actual level of resistance. By going back to talking about relative challenge, you neatly missed that part.

For a similar reason, when talking absolute terms, statements like "as a game master I don't decide how much challenge I'm providing at a given moment" are misleading or outright false. Who is speaking to your players? Whose words do they have to listen to and interpret to know what's going on in the game? Who is actually playing the opponents and obstacles they choose to tackle? These are the basics of gameplay that create resistance, challenge, difficulty, and if its you providing them, how can you claim it was not you who decided to provide them?

At the end of the day, we're talking of intentional actors because a human game master is not a rubber band or a robot. In order for players to be able to have their choice of challenge, a human game master has to make a complementary choice to give it to them. This holds true regardless of what playstyle you're aiming for,

---


The reason I was talking about the metaphor of resistance in contrast to challenge though was because I'm arguing that a GM (and players) don't need to be intentional about the level of difficulty in the game, and that framing the task of figuring out how to tune the game to preferences in terms of an intentional and particular level of difficulty tends to create issues that may not be essential to the part of the subjective experience of 'challenge' that is actually most satisfying.

To someone trying to 'fix' the level of challenge (even relative to player skills), something like a surprisingly powerful mechanical combo or a positive feedback loop in loot ends up being a problem - this is something acting in the opposite direction of their intent, its a disturbance which has to be adjusted to.

From the point of view of making the scope of the game such that there are things where any difference in skill or power can matter, those things would just mean that the player is currently effectively at a different position in the state space of the game than you thought. Not a problem to be solved, but just, that's where the gameplay is now.

The problem was that you're using names of the actual parameters that can be measured as metaphors for byproduct of those measures. As for intention, that goes back to what I said to Telok and Icefractal earlier: it's possible to have a system that unintentionally, by accident, has the quality you want, but understanding why a system has that quality pretty much involves knowing how to intentionally make that kind of system. This very much applies to a game master being stoically cool with unexpected game events. Being able to accept a weird thing as just "where the gameplay is now" involves various cognitive skills and even personality factors (notably, neuroticism) on the part of a game master. With no effort spent on figuring out what parameters of difficulty are on that task, any person's ability to do it is unknown beforehand.

I'd also like to draw attention to the point I made of empathy in my armwrestling contest: the goal for the first player is a particular feeling for the second. This matters for analysis of why sudden spikes or drops in the second player's performance would be a problem. The first player doesn't have to adjust if the second player is still satisfied with the outcome. A complementary statement is that there may be unexpected positive feedback loops that run counter to the second player's intent, and since the first player's intent is linked, they ought to do something about it. For contrast, the first player's stoicism about the outcome only removes anxiety of it on their part, it does not in itself do a thing to improve the experience for the second.


In the context of the thread, the way that this question is loaded when you talk about challenge or difficulty is the point. If I were trying to design Minecraft Creative Mode to have a certain level of difficulty, even for a certain player, it'd be hopeless because as you say, its fundamental nature is to be open-ended and self-selected. On the other hand, I could approach the design with the idea that 'I always want the player to be able to do more, the better they get at it'. From that framing, the open-endedness of Minecraft becomes the key point. As long as I have that, as well as the subjective feedback which inspires the player to get ideas for bigger and more complex builds the more experienced they become, I'm done.

I hoped we'd reached an agreement by now that looking for certain level of difficulty is the wrong thing to do; what is necessary to get a game where a player is always able to do more, the better they get, is to find a problem class that scales in difficulty open-endedly. Which also means that to intentionally get from zero to where you want to be, there is still one point where explicitly thinking of a certain levels of difficulty matters: the start of that scale.

And I'd bet you money whoever put Creative Mode in Minecraft thought of this. The changes from Survival Mode exist to strip away all difficulty that doesn't come from the root block puzzle and basic user interface. A designer who didn't think of that might've ended up with a creative mode too hard for most players to use.


So when the thread asks in the OP how to address the question of "How hard do you want Combat to be?" with players, and posters go back and forth about the paradox of how players often want to win but feel they could have failed, and really don't want to fail, this alternate framing resolves the apparent paradox by saying 'well yeah, success rate isn't necessarily the thing you should be concerned with, you can have something where it feels meaningful to become more powerful without ever having something like being directly defeated be a possible outcome'.

We aren't in disagreement over this, I started my contribution to this thread by noting how win rates are a poor proxy value for difficulty. The difference is that I approach solving the paradox by looking for real parameters, or at least better proxy values, for difficulty. The reason why we end up talking to each other is because the same parameters serve a role in getting what you want.

[NichG]

The problem was that you're using names of the actual parameters that can be measured as metaphors for byproduct of those measures. As for intention, that goes back to what I said to Telok and Icefractal earlier: it's possible to have a system that unintentionally, by accident, has the quality you want, but understanding why a system has that quality pretty much involves knowing how to intentionally make that kind of system. This very much applies to a game master being stoically cool with unexpected game events. Being able to accept a weird thing as just "where the gameplay is now" involves various cognitive skills and even personality factors (notably, neuroticism) on the part of a game master. With no effort spent on figuring out what parameters of difficulty are on that task, any person's ability to do it is unknown beforehand.


This comes down to framing, which is something I think you're having trouble recognizing as meaningful - ironic because you're being very particular about language.

Lets say - for example only - I'm doing something and for some weird reason my only tool for doing it is to frame it as an optimization problem. The space might have, say, 10 actual underlying control dimensions x, but 100 observable dimensions y. There are various methods I can use to specify my optimization, for example any mix and match of the following:

- I could try to specify what I want by asking the value of each control dimension to take the value I want, e.g. minimize the function: sum_i (x_i - x_i*)^2 where x_i* is my preferred value. This is the same as saying 'I know what the answer I'm looking for is, but I'm being forced to use optimization'

- I could try to specify what I want by asking the value of each observable dimension to take the value I want, e.g. minimize: sum_i (y_i - y_i*)^2 where y_i* is my preferred value for each. This is probably overdetermined, and requires me to know and specify the details of each aspect of the thing.

- I could also transform the control dimensions and observables into some new abstract space of z's where z_i=f_i(x,y), and minimize sum_i (z_i - z_i*)^2. So that may leave some or even most of the y's underdetermined, but if I choose my functions f_i well based on what it is I actually want, then that's okay.

For the last one, one example of the effect of framing becomes visible. If I choose a good framing for what I want, I can perhaps specify only a single (abstract) dimension that I'm trying to determine and leave the rest to adapt to make that happen. Challenge is one such function of the y's (f_1). What I've been calling 'resistance' would be a different, function (f_2). And while f_1 and f_2 are often going to be correlated, neither is invertible - they're discarding different information about the full space of observations. So you can't even really do something like 'first transform into the language of challenge, then use that language to construct resistance' and capture 100% of what I'm talking about.

For me, the concepts of 'difficulty' or 'challenge' are less effective guides for this optimization process (or the more realistic intentional approach to game design and running that isn't just gradient descent...) than a different set of measures that are certainly related but are subtly different in ways that are the essence of what I was trying to communicate.

By choosing a different framework than the usually used one, the (meta) difficulty of designing a game to suit my preferences is vastly reduced. Similarly, my observation is that DMs using the challenge framework are less likely to actually understand my when I express the kind of game I would like to play, because the expression of that thing in the language of challenge is very complex, whereas if one rotates their basis vectors a little bit, it becomes much easier to understand how the kind of game I would want to ask for would be possible or even nearly automatic. And since I've seen many GMs have difficulty communicating about this or understanding this perspective on these forums (look at Mechalich's assertion that its basically impossible to find a DM who doesn't care about challenge, or any of Talakeal's threads...), there is evidence that the coordinate system given by 'difficulty' and 'challenge' observables can be hard to escape once you've started to think and design in terms of those things rather than along other axes.

So even if you want to defend the existence of a formal definition of 'difficulty' that e.g. the 'resistance' concept I talked about doesn't fully escape, being ontologically perfectly orthogonal isn't the purpose here, its creating a distinct rubric or design space where the easy directions of thinking for design align with the principle of caring about the subjective experience of feedback over the objective measures of success and failure. That design space might not be so useful for e.g. nations figuring out the game theory of de-escalating from a nuclear war, or a competitive board game sport trying to come up with a way to rank their players. But it is useful to focus on those subjective aspects as things you can directly optimize as opposed to having to go through the intervening language of difficulty in order to design and run the sort of TTRPG that I want to be running.



I hoped we'd reached an agreement by now that looking for certain level of difficulty is the wrong thing to do; what is necessary to get a game where a player is always able to do more, the better they get, is to find a problem class that scales in difficulty open-endedly. Which also means that to intentionally get from zero to where you want to be, there is still one point where explicitly thinking of a certain levels of difficulty matters: the start of that scale.


Yes, though I'd say there are starting points you can take for a non-difficulty-centric design as well. For example, consider 'moving from one place on Earth to another place on Earth'. That's a task that inherently scales at least up to the circumference of the Earth because of the geometry of space - some points are further away from each-other than others, and distance is related to time, so there's a natural hierarchy of cost. Then furthermore, anything which modifies the rate at which you can move also modifies that cost hierarchy so e.g. inventing the car has an equivalency with time saved in moving, and so on.

For something perhaps less physical, I've found that hierarchies of partial information are also a very easy way to get a 'resistive' style of system. If increasingly usable (e.g. closer in form to the final inference) information flows in over time (or over 'the course of play'), then a player who dives more deeply might make an inference that lets them do something or go somewhere or figure something out more quickly (using less of the information flow) than a player who waits for the clear answer to become evident on its own. And the design recipe here is easy - scatter interrelated information throughout the world, and have it so that correct inferences result in the availability of increased leverage over the world (anything from locating an ancient ruin to figuring out a deeper truth about how magic works that allows you to ignore its apparent rules to figuring out the hidden scheme of one deity against another that would let you blackmail or undermine the gods of your choice to ...). As part of what Icefractal alluded to, you don't have to calibrate any of these things as long as they vary enough. You can just scattershot them throughout the setting, and when players notice they have enough understanding to figure something out, it organically becomes something they can now do something with.

Most of my games are built using this kind of structure as a major component. Sometimes people figure stuff out, sometimes they don't. I had one game where there was a 4d nonlinear quantum mechanics sort of 'puzzle'. Or rather, the metaphor I had used to construct how this kind of creature worked was based on it having its anatomy spread out through a multiple-worlds framing of QM, with the 'nonlinear' bit allowing those parts of its anatomy to actually communicate with each-other across eigenstates, and 'belief' had an observer effect consequence to those creatures which pinned them down into a single eigenstate; the creature in question, incidentally, the Lady of Pain in a Planescape campaign. I did not expect the players to figure that out or even necessarily do anything with it, but they independently put together the pieces and figured out a way to free the Lady from Sigil. If I ran that with a different group? Well, they would maybe have instead gotten involved in fiendish politics or just completed their tour of the plans as a traveling circus and ignored all of that other stuff about the metaphysics of belief.

Another kind of pattern to use is a criticality in complex systems type of design, in which logistical and organizational considerations change with scale. That kind of setup spontaneously creates new things to do or new considerations to solve as you scale it up. For example I had a game where the players each played a patron deity of a civilization, and the sort of natural consequences of low-level discretenesses of the system meant that there was a space for e.g. negotiating that residual fractions of a resource would be transported to the civilization that could use them best before they decayed (since for short-lifetime resources you might produce 4 but need only 3 for a project you can complete this year, but someone else has 1 and needs 2). So one of the players figured out how to have their civilization be the bottleneck through which those trade agreements flowed, and as a result was able to actually play nearly civ-less but use their influence to pressure the other civilizations (including NPC civs) to take actions on their behalf. If that player hadn't figured that out? Well, the other three players were doing other things, so not a problem. But the scope of the scenario was such that even without me planning it intentionally I could be sure there'd be stuff like that to push on.

[Quertus]

The problem was that you're using names of the actual parameters that can be measured as metaphors for byproduct of those measures. As for intention, that goes back to what I said to Telok and Icefractal earlier: it's possible to have a system that unintentionally, by accident, has the quality you want, but understanding why a system has that quality pretty much involves knowing how to intentionally make that kind of system. This very much applies to a game master being stoically cool with unexpected game events. Being able to accept a weird thing as just "where the gameplay is now" involves various cognitive skills and even personality factors (notably, neuroticism) on the part of a game master. With no effort spent on figuring out what parameters of difficulty are on that task, any person's ability to do it is unknown beforehand.

So… I can only assume that you just left out the concept of “a GM who actively desires unexpected events”, because your description of one who is merely stoically cool with them shares approximately zero similarities with my personal experience.

GMs who actively desires unexpected events (according to my comprehensive poll of all 1 of them who have been in my kitchen) have skill at creating variable content without skill at intentionally creating content to certain “these are the PCs”-specific checklists. While those skills theoretically could be related / complimentary, they are nonetheless separate skills (whoever created this RPG we call “reality” really did create a truly complex skill system).

To poke at that further, a GM could learn to vary their content purely through a naïve approach of applying content to characters, and measuring the results, like a modern AI creation tool (shudder). However, there are more intelligent approaches to both types of problems, that recognize patterns and use actual intelligence to predict what the final outcome of “varied content” might actually look like.

Further, these GMs have very low Neuroticism scores. The trick isn’t to get unduly attached to the now, but, rather, to simply not get unduly attached to one particular plan. In fact, this sample informs me, the real trick is to play through the module yourself, and have a negative attachment to things turning out exactly that way. If playing with others produces the same results as single author fiction, what’s the value in playing with others?

[gbaji]

disagreement here too. at any board game, there is one winner and many losers. for the experience to be pleasant, it must be pleasant even if one loses - else it's going to be miserable for the majority of the table. So, if losing makes the experience unpleasant, one is a sore loser. whether he actively complains or not is only a test of emotional maturity.

Unfortunately, this can sometimes be very player dependent. A friend of mine has on several occasions suggested that "since I can't win the game at this point, there's no point in continuing". This is usually in card games with some sort of scoring mechanism, where it's quite possible for one player to be so far behind that it's effectively impossible for them to catch up in the last hand. I've always found that mindset to be very "odd". I enjoy playing games for the sake of playing them. In card games, I enjoy looking at my hand, seeing what's there, coming up with a strategy for playing the hand, seeing what I draw each round, hoping that it helps my hand, being annoyined (of course!) when many draws don't help me, but otherwise see it as a "puzzle to be solved" to try to reach the end of that hand.

Would I prefer to win the entire game? Absolutely. Stopping at the last hand because one player is too far behind to be able to win? That's just alien to me. But I've met enough people who do seem to think this way that I recognize that this kind of thinking does, in fact, exist. I just happen to think that adopting a mindset where "the game isn't fun unless I win" seems counterproductive, for the exact reason you mentioned earlier. Everyone except the winner will lose such games. If you actually tie your enjoyment to winning, then you'll find yourself not enjoying the majority of all games you play.


And yeah. Many game designers are also aware that some people have this mindset. And it's why many games have mechanisms in them to slow down players who get too far into the lead. Things like skips exist for this reason. It's not necessarily that they must win, but as a game designer you want the most players to feel they have a chance to win for the longest period of game time possible for the game to be enjoyable. On the flipside though, if the game doesn't present some sort of cumulative advantage over time, then many players (perhaps rightly) will be unhappy that the first 90% of their game time is meaningless. If every game is won or lost on the last hand/round/whatever, then why bother playing the earlier parts of the game?

Which gets us back to the idea that each hand/round/whatever should itself be enjoyable in some way. And that's what we should be focusing on. And when it comes to RPGs, the enjoyment should be in playing out each and every section of a given encounter/scenario. The playing of the game should be where most of the enjoyment comes from, not just the "winning". Otherwise, we could just skip all that unnecessary stuff about playing our characters, and exloring the dungeon, and defeating monsters, and just skip right to the killing blow on the big bad, and count up all our treasure and experience and clap ourselves on the backs for "winning".

Pretty sure no one would enjoy that either.

[kyoryu]

"the game isn't fun unless I win"

I think that's a bit of a misconception. I mean, that can be fun for some people, and I agree that's problematic.

My personal opinion is that, for competitive games (which D&D ain't), the fun is in trying to win. It's the competition. The knowledge that it will be my skills and my abilities which determine winning or losing. Sure, losing doesn't feel good, but it's like a good kind of not feeling good.

Both a game where I'm guaranteed to win, and one where I'm guaranteed to lose aren't fun to me. I will deliberately handicap myself if I know I'm too likely to win a game, or treat it as an educational opportunity for my opponent and show them how to play better.

So, if I've been effectively eliminated halfway through a game? Yeah, that's gonna be a lot less fun for me, unless it's basically a party game or something where just doing the thing is inherently fun (like Cards Against Humanity). That doesn't mean it needs to be 50/50 until the last moment, but ideally there's at least some small sliver of a hope that I can turn things around.

[Easy e]

There is a reason many games are so popular and have lasted so long. Games like Uno, Sorry, and even Candy Land all have amazing Catch-up mechanics. At no time does a player feel completely out of the game. These catch-up mechanics are integral to the success of the games themselves.

Now, RPGs are packed full of catch-up mechanics. Having a GM is ht eultimate "catch-up" mechanic.

[kyoryu]

There is a reason many games are so popular and have lasted so long. Games like Uno, Sorry, and even Candy Land all have amazing Catch-up mechanics. At no time does a player feel completely out of the game. These catch-up mechanics are integral to the success of the games themselves.

Now, RPGs are packed full of catch-up mechanics. Having a GM is ht eultimate "catch-up" mechanic.

Negative feedback is a really awesome thing to include in games, if done right.

A lot of social "screw the other person" mechanics act as negative feedback.... in Catan (for instance), if you are clearly ahead, others are less likely to trade with you and more likely to hit you with the Bandit. These things are all in the players' hands, but serve as very effective negative feedback mechanisms.

[gatorized]

On the more general question of combat difficulty, my personal feeling would be -
If the average fight is deadly enough that making non-optimal moves* spells defeat, then the difficulty is too high.
Some fights can be that challenging. But to me, if I just wanted pure sweaty** combat I'd play a competitive video game - TTRPG fights should (usually) have room for the RP.


Why should thinking tactically prevent you from roleplaying?



disagreement here too. at any board game, there is one winner and many losers.

This is false.

[truemane]

Metamagic Mod: Thread Necromancy