How do you generate difficulty?

[Shinizak]

How do you generate difficulty?

In so many games there are DMs who say that they're going to run "hard" games, and usually (in my experience) that translates into 3 possible game experiences:

Dark souls: where every monster is out for blood and can/ will kill you in 2 hits or less.
Hard limits: where every check is arbitrarily harder than it needs to be, and there the world is FULL of these monstrous checks.
Douchebaggery: the world just hates you. You could play a philanthropic Disney princess who poops rainbows and kindness, but every NPC is low key hostile towards you, even if you JUST saved them and and their goat.

Usually it's some combination of the 3.

I know that we can do better than this. Is there a way to emphasize difficulty without being and ass about it? Could an ultra hard game ever be played in a Bright or Noble Bright setting?

[King of Nowhere]

Of course it can. You only need the first two factors to have a hard game.
My campaign was full of helpful people and reasonable autority figures - including most of the villains.
Allies were showering the party with items, information, resurrections, support spells.
The campaign also featured a party of 20th level liches as main antagonists, with phylacteries well unavailable. A buffed elder dragon. And a couple of betraials among people close to the party. It was expected that some party members would die in any major fight (i used easy resurrection as part of the worldbuilding, for the villains too), and from some they had to escape to avoid a tpk.
So yes, it was bright but hard

[Pleh]

Most of my experience is D&D post 2007, but in D&D like games, the intended difficulty is attrition. It's not supposed to be hard to survive a mob of goblins. The mob of goblins is supposed to make the party choose between dropping a casting of fireball or trusting the fighter's AC for a few rounds.

Attrition is commonly thought of as dour, but it doesn't have to be. All it means is that difficulty can be set by limiting the party's ability to rest between fights. That can maintain a bright and noble theme throughout an adventure.

[Quertus]

What factors can contribute to difficulty? The OP lists

• NPC hostility
• monster hostility
• monster lethality
• ****ing up DCs

To that, I'll add

• oversized encounters - number of monsters per encounter
• plentiful encounters - number of encounters per… rest
• adjacent encounters - need for stealth/speed, as encounters trigger encounters
• intelligent monsters
• puzzle monsters
• time limits
• decreased information
• misinformation
• multiple goals
• conflicting goals
• rule of unintended consequences
• don't be a fan of the PCs
• constantly change the rules
• violate expectations - especially by removing expected resources ("low magic D&D", for example)

EDIT:

• tailored foes
• adaptive foes
• let the dice fall where they may
• cheat at dice for the monsters
• cheat at other layers

That should get us started.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I know that we can do better than this. Is there a way to emphasize difficulty without being and ass about it? Could an ultra hard game ever be played in a Bright or Noble Bright setting?

Sure. To make a game difficult, you just set the goal-posts higher than what basic "roll a check, kick down the door" gameplay can achieve. A "hard" game shouldn't be one that becomes easy with more optimization; it should be one that makes you think.

[Guizonde]

i play high lethality-high rewards game. whenever my players encounter a fight, they know there's a very real chance of getting maimed or killed. based on the characters they rolled up, they'll either fight defensively, fight with pure trickery, or just go gung-ho on the theory that chutzpah trumps danger (it's surprisingly effective).

as a dm, my quests are simple: tall-order objective, and you have to convince the world you are the hero. i'm interested in seeing the characters develop, and it seems to please my players that the emphasis is their characters evolving. it doesn't make my games hard, per se, but the bigger the challenges or the more prestigious the reward, the more they're willing to move earth and sky to succeed. as an example in my current campaign:

-the pc's are the elite of a mercenary guild: their life expectancy is measured in in-game weeks, if not days. that is hard to accept for players.
-they're facing horrors that never challenged the guild, and everyone is counting on them. it's rough on their psyche thanks to insanity checks and the weight of the responsibility.
-they're going in blind. they don't know what they're going up against, or where they're going, or how they're going to succeed.
-they've skipped the "kill five goblins", they're already punching out ogres as "beginner characters" and surviving thanks to trickery and a hold the line mentality, as they know the guild encourages.
-the quest is to save the village, with the prestigious npc's begging them to do it, knowing the prestigious npc's are scared silly.
-the combat is brutal, with very little chance of healing grievious wounds, like broken bones or amputation.
-ammo is scarce. food is scarce. information is scarce.
-language barriers, and the future npc's they'll meet don't know them, meaning they have to prove themselves. it's gonna be a grind.
-they're under the impression that they are on a time limit. granted, the time limit is advancing at the speed of plot most of the time, but that's another mental stressor.


not really difficult on their own, but taken all at the same time, it's a crushingly hard thing for a pc to take in: they're in the dark, the only thing they can hold on is the confidence in their character's ability and their ability to think quickly on their feet.

since my players are experienced in the system, and are starting to know the in's and out's of how to survive, i'm adding mental difficulty and throwing curve balls we didn't explore previously. in my long list of things to be explored are hit and run enemies, traps, poison attacks, and assassination attempts. they will be harried constantly, until one of two things happen: physical attrition happens (low ammo, low provisions, low health), or mental attrition (insanity points, fear of failure, paranoia...). my game reads like a tour guide of the world combined with how the big bad created monsters that have been a fixture in the game for the past 5 years. it's easy, it's no big challenge. but the characters don't know that, and the players don't know it. the difficulty comes from the psychological aspects and their fears of the unknown. oh, and dismemberment. nobody wants to get dismembered.

[Koo Rehtorb]

There's nothing wrong with a game being mechanically difficult. The world being unrealistically hostile is irritating, though. But another option is to heavily punish player mistakes. You can do that in a "fair" way, if a player decides to sass the king, have the king try to have him executed on the spot instead of some lesser response. Or you can do it in an "unfair" way, Tomb of Horrors style.

[kyoryu]

Sure. To make a game difficult, you just set the goal-posts higher than what basic "roll a check, kick down the door" gameplay can achieve. A "hard" game shouldn't be one that becomes easy with more optimization; it should be one that makes you think.

This.

Even kicking in a door is a decision - am I willing to make the noise it takes? Is that worth doing it quickly? What if it fails? What attention am I going to attract? Am i ready for that? Is getting through the door worth it? What's the danger of picking the lock instead, or trying to find another way?

Even in a scenario as simple as "kick down the door", there can be a lot of decision-making. The actual door-kicking check is the leasti interesting bit, if you're "doing it right".

There's a few quotes about games, I think both from Sid Meier:
"A game is a series of interesting decisions."
"Gameplay happens at the nexus of suboptimal choices"

IOW, it's your decisions that make the game, not the mechanics that come into play - the mechanics are there to create the decisions. And by suboptimal, it means that you cannot deduce a "correct" choice in most situations. In the case of the door, you're weighing speed vs noise vs the value of what's behind the door vs. probably a number of other things as well. None of the options (kick down the door, pick the lock, ignore the door) are obviously and inherently better, they all have advantages and disadvantages.

[noob]

Most of my experience is D&D post 2007, but in D&D like games, the intended difficulty is attrition. It's not supposed to be hard to survive a mob of goblins. The mob of goblins is supposed to make the party choose between dropping a casting of fireball or trusting the fighter's AC for a few rounds.

Attrition is commonly thought of as dour, but it doesn't have to be. All it means is that difficulty can be set by limiting the party's ability to rest between fights. That can maintain a bright and noble theme throughout an adventure.

The problem is setting inconsistency.
"I am going to be 100% sure to die if I fight but like all those 200 other goblins that died while barely inflicting a scratch on those people I am going to fight to the death"
Afterwards somehow goblins are not considered as the ultimate honour bound martyrs of their causes while they are ready to fight to the death in masses in the hope of one day killing an adventurer that went too fast through the dungeons instead of regrouping all their forces or surrendering as if the two latter were forbidden things.

Attrition dungeon delving is among the least realistic dungeon delving systems possible unless you work for making a setting that explains it. (Maybe dying from a cause other than being killed in a fight by an adventurer is the ultimate dishonour any living creature can go through)

[King of Nowhere]

The problem is setting inconsistency.
"I am going to be 100% sure to die if I fight but like all those 200 other goblins that died while barely inflicting a scratch on those people I am going to fight to the death"
Afterwards somehow goblins are not considered as the ultimate honour bound martyrs of their causes while they are ready to fight to the death in masses in the hope of one day killing an adventurer that went too fast through the dungeons instead of regrouping all their forces or surrendering as if the two latter were forbidden things.

Attrition dungeon delving is among the least realistic dungeon delving systems possible unless you work for making a setting that explains it. (Maybe dying from cause other than being killed in a fight by an adventurer is the ultimate dishonour any living creature can go through)

+1.
while the game would be designed for attrition, i very rarely use it, because it's hard to justify it plausibly from the other side

[Pleh]

The problem is setting inconsistency.
"I am going to be 100% sure to die if I fight but like all those 200 other goblins that died while barely inflicting a scratch on those people I am going to fight to the death"
Afterwards somehow goblins are not considered as the ultimate honour bound martyrs of their causes while they are ready to fight to the death in masses in the hope of one day killing an adventurer that went too fast through the dungeons instead of regrouping all their forces or surrendering as if the two latter were forbidden things.

Attrition dungeon delving is among the least realistic dungeon delving systems possible unless you work for making a setting that explains it. (Maybe dying from a cause other than being killed in a fight by an adventurer is the ultimate dishonour any living creature can go through)

I've never had a problem with inconsistency.

For one thing, you probably aren't fighting 200 goblins in an open field where they all see how hard it is to win. You are crawling through a dungeon, where you fight goblins in gradually increasing increments.

"You may have killed the watchmen, but the security forces will not be so easy!"

"You may have killed our security, but our elite guard can't be beaten!"

"They may have killed the elite guard, but they can't kill me if I drop boiling oil on them from cover!"

"They may have breached our defenses, but no one can defeat our Champion(TM)!"

You kill 200 goblins gradually over several encounters.

And recall that sometimes, enemies WILL see the battle is hopeless and run away. You still get XP as if you killed them (though not the loot unless they drop it).

Now all you have to do to add attrition is make it so you can't rest between taking out the watch, the security, the elite guard, the defenses, then the boss. Some enemies may retreat, but each has a reason to think THIS encounter will go differently than the last.

[kyoryu]

So have outclassed forces flee.

Don't you do that? I do that all the time.

[Telok]

So have outclassed forces flee.

Don't you do that? I do that all the time.

Morale hasn't been a thing in D&D for going on 20 years now. All the fresh/new D&D DMs I've played with in the last decade+ have had everything fight to the death.

[GrayDeath]

Take 50ccm hard Math problems, add 25cl hard Liquor, add ground Granite, stir, bake for 123 minutes, done.


Fewer jokes: A lot of good hints have already been given, but let me concentrate on the 3 most important for actual TTRPG use I use when Iw ant to make it "hard" (mind, thats not what you seem to understand nder the same idiom^^).


1.: They know exactly as much about the world as their characters. THis they get either in text form (if they are relatively new) or I tell them and they have to take notes.
If they want more info, they have to work for every scrap of it.
And if they find out they dont know enough? Well, their fault.

2.: The world is very much NOT "level graded and color coded for your convenience". Consequences and power structures are very much real and DO WORK against anyone not respecting them.
if they do not try tog et info about an area before going in, the Dragon there WILL hunt (and likely kill) their Level 3 Party.

If they think they can just walk to the High priest of the continent spanning LN church and be a disrespectful douchebag, well, ahve fun sitting in prsion for the next 10 years.

3.: There will be both a hard time limit and clear set, "big" goals for them to reach within it.
If they are too slow, or too afraid, dont think enough, or simply not good enough, then the WILL LOSE.




What I will however NEVER do is pulling arbitrarily high DC`s out of my ass (just because they are now level 12 does not mean climbing the hill is suddenly DC 20 instead of DC 10) or use lots of Gotcha encounters or let the world react "stupid mean" "just because".

[JoeJ]

Morale hasn't been a thing in D&D for going on 20 years now. All the fresh/new D&D DMs I've played with in the last decade+ have had everything fight to the death.

This thread is in the general roleplay forum, so I wouldn't assume it's referring specifically to D&D.

However, morale is certainly a thing in modern D&D; it's on p. 273 of the DMG. And leafing through Tales from the Yawning Portal, I see a number of places where it says that monsters will try to escape if they're losing. I'm pretty sure I recall seeing similar description in other published adventures as well.

[Guizonde]

Take 50ccm hard Math problems, add 25cl hard Liquor, add ground Granite, stir, bake for 123 minutes, done.


Fewer jokes: A lot of good hints have already been given, but let me concentrate on the 3 most important for actual TTRPG use I use when Iw ant to make it "hard" (mind, thats not what you seem to understand nder the same idiom^^).


1.: They know exactly as much about the world as their characters. THis they get either in text form (if they are relatively new) or I tell them and they have to take notes.
If they want more info, they have to work for every scrap of it.
And if they find out they dont know enough? Well, their fault.

2.: The world is very much NOT "level graded and color coded for your convenience". Consequences and power structures are very much real and DO WORK against anyone not respecting them.
if they do not try tog et info about an area before going in, the Dragon there WILL hunt (and likely kill) their Level 3 Party.

If they think they can just walk to the High priest of the continent spanning LN church and be a disrespectful douchebag, well, ahve fun sitting in prsion for the next 10 years.

3.: There will be both a hard time limit and clear set, "big" goals for them to reach within it.
If they are too slow, or too afraid, dont think enough, or simply not good enough, then the WILL LOSE.




What I will however NEVER do is pulling arbitrarily high DC`s out of my ass (just because they are now level 12 does not mean climbing the hill is suddenly DC 20 instead of DC 10) or use lots of Gotcha encounters or let the world react "stupid mean" "just because".

this is my outlook as well, but for the first point, let's just say that my players are more than familiar with the setting, only the flavor changes, so they already have the basics, not the nuances.

for the second, that's a given. a jailbreak is always a possibility, but then enjoy being hunted down ruthlessly. we've done it in the past when i was a player. let me tell you, having your character tortured for a week before the party breaks you out is no fun. it also created a major difficulty spike, since now everyone wanted to kill us, not just the evil factions we were going up against. the third point was done by one of the players dm'ing, and he told us afterwards it was nerve-wracking to track time, do you have any tips? i'm trying to implement it more precisely beyond counting weeks. oh, and for dc's and gotcha moments, oddly enough, either the system doesn't care for them, or my players always luck out at just the right time.

[Droid Tony]

Sure. To make a game difficult, you just set the goal-posts higher than what basic "roll a check, kick down the door" gameplay can achieve. A "hard" game shouldn't be one that becomes easy with more optimization; it should be one that makes you think.

Agreed.

A basic role playing game is HARD. And as a role playing game simulates real life, it's as hard as real life. Simply put, most players don't stand a chance as they don't have the real life skills to role play an ''adventurer". So most game play makes it easy or super easy, for the players.

The two big ways to make a RPG Easy are for the DM to lead the players: Railroading or for the DM to change the world to the players whims: Sandbox.

Want a game that is difficult, hard or even impossible: Run one that is NOT a Railroad or a Sandbox.

[Jay R]

A “difficult” game is one in which the powers and abilities of the PCs are not sufficient to defeat many of the encounters in a straight-up fight.

Players should have to come up with something clever to win.

That’s what makes good stories.
Frodo is not a strong as Sauron or his minions.
The rebellion are not as strong as the empire.
Harry has less magic than Voldemort.
Zorro could never defeat all the Alcalde’s soldiers.

PCs should start avalanches, sneak past the guards, outwit minions, etc. — because they cannot simply out- fight them.

What the players want today is is a CR-appropriate encounter that they easily defeat with the abilities on their character sheet. But what they will want tomorrow is to have survived overwhelming odds with a brilliant move that they believe other players would never have come up with.

“Only those who attempt the absurd will ever achieve the impossible.”

[Pugwampy]

I know that we can do better than this. Is there a way to emphasize difficulty without being and ass about it? Could an ultra hard game ever be played in a Bright or Noble Bright setting?

I am not sure what you want ?


If players can escape from the fight anytime they like , you can go as nutz as you want . DND is about unpredictability and randomness , you should mix around super hard and stupid easy and somewhat balance all the time . Dont stick to one difficulty .

Why do you want an ultra hard game only ? What if you have a mix of players from noob to veteren ?

[Guizonde]

A “difficult” game is one in which the powers and abilities of the PCs are not sufficient to defeat many of the encounters in a straight-up fight.

Players should have to come up with something clever to win.

That’s what makes good stories.
Frodo is not a strong as Sauron or his minions.
The rebellion are not as strong as the empire.
Harry has less magic than Voldemort.
Zorro could never defeat all the Alcalde’s soldiers.

PCs should start avalanches, sneak past the guards, outwit minions, etc. — because they cannot simply out- fight them.

What the players want today is is a CR-appropriate encounter that they easily defeat with the abilities on their character sheet. But what they will want tomorrow is to have survived overwhelming odds with a brilliant move that they believe other players would never have come up with.

“Only those who attempt the absurd will ever achieve the impossible.”

i've got a great story about that. we were meant to sneak into a town where the guards were out for blood. they outnumbered us about 20 to 1 and had gear on par with us. so we threw the dm a curve ball. we sneaked in as planned, but not using the sewer systems. we dressed up as courtesans, got painted up really heavily, stored most our loot underground before the city checkpoint, and waltzed up to the guard house. my friend's impression of an over the top madam was so good and cringy that we were escorted to the red light district. all of that in under 5 skill checks.

for honesty's sake, my plan was to vaporize lsd into the guardhouse and let them slaughter each other. the way my friend roleplayed, though, i'm glad we went for his plan. we call it "outsmarting the dm", but it's really thinking up left field solutions. as dm's and players, we love it when we pull it off. sure, fighting a big boss and barely surviving is awesome, and we've all got tales about that. but actually doing something off the beaten path makes for funnier and/ or better stories.

another one, and the most memorable to me, was the fourth session i dm'd in my post-apocalyptic rpg. there are these big tanks that are used to move junk into neat and ordered piles in the world's junkyard. all automated. they look just like the tinier versions used to clean the corridors, except they're about 3 meters tall and 4 wide. big roomba, i know. i spooked the players with the giant rumbling, the junk piles collapsing, and my players were on edge. they meet the darn thing, and instead of generating a chase sequence like i'd hoped, they jumped on the thing! they managed to pry it open, and stop it cold, just like they did on many roombas before. ok, i can roll with that. the team engineer outfitting it with human controls? yeah, not planned, but i rolled with it. little did i know how i'd just broken my own game. i loved it, but that's the day i lost control of that very memorable campaign.

[Pleh]

Agreed.

A basic role playing game is HARD. And as a role playing game simulates real life, it's as hard as real life. Simply put, most players don't stand a chance as they don't have the real life skills to role play an ''adventurer". So most game play makes it easy or super easy, for the players.

The two big ways to make a RPG Easy are for the DM to lead the players: Railroading or for the DM to change the world to the players whims: Sandbox.

Want a game that is difficult, hard or even impossible: Run one that is NOT a Railroad or a Sandbox.

A railroad and a sandbox can still be very difficult. A difficult Railroad tends to be frustrating as you basically become the DM's punching bag, but some people like CoC.

A difficult Sandbox may just mean danger everywhere and you stay underleveled. You have to stay smart to stay alive.

[Quertus]

change the world to the players whims: Sandbox.

Citation needed on that definition of "sandbox".

IMO, a sandbox is exactly the opposite: where the world (starting condition) is set in stone, but the players are allowed to interact with the world however they want. See the classic "hex crawl" as a simple example of a sandbox.

[King of Nowhere]

Morale hasn't been a thing in D&D for going on 20 years now. All the fresh/new D&D DMs I've played with in the last decade+ have had everything fight to the death.

do we actually need a game mechanic to decide that the npc are having enough and run? the players certainly can escape whenever they choose

[kyoryu]

do we actually need a game mechanic to decide that the npc are having enough and run? the players certainly can escape whenever they choose

Exactly this. The GM should do "what the NPCs would do". People do not just throw their lives away for no reason.

[Droid Tony]

Citation needed on that definition of "sandbox".

IMO, a sandbox is exactly the opposite: where the world (starting condition) is set in stone, but the players are allowed to interact with the world however they want. See the classic "hex crawl" as a simple example of a sandbox.

Wait, do I have the wrong word? What is the game called where the DM makes up very little game world facts, and lets the players fill in the blanks by altering the game reality to whatever the players wish.

I'm talking about difficulty as in the role playing side of the game. My thinking was:

Railroad: The DM makes hard unchangable facts, Item Y is located in place X. But the players can just sit back and relax as the DM will lead them right there.

Sandbox: The DM makes few facts, and they can be changed on a whim. Specificaly, whatever the players pick to do is the 'right' one to continue the adventure.

So if you have a game where the DM does not lead the players and the players can't just 'pick' the right path, you will have a very difficult game.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Railroad: The DM makes hard unchangable facts, Item Y is located in place X. But the players can just sit back and relax as the DM will lead them right there.

Sandbox: The DM makes few facts, and they can be changed on a whim. Specificaly, whatever the players pick to do is the 'right' one to continue the adventure.

No. A railroad is a game in which the GM has a predefined plot and will aggressively force the players back onto the plot against their will.

A sandbox is a game where you establish the setting beforehand and the players can do whatever they want within that setting.

[malloc]

Lots of talk about crunch with respect to encounter design for difficulty. I think there's a better way--multi-objective encounters.

Basically, you want to divide the party's attention between two sub-goals and force them to split their actions between the two, or sacrifice one objective to ensure the other. This builds naturally from yes-and/yes-but systems of check resolution, where partial success or partial failure exist to drive dramatic tension.

Consider this simple example: you have gone into the cult's base to stop them. Some of the cultists attack you. Some of them keep doing the ritual. This creates agency, which is the best way to drive difficulty without getting into punitive math and a crunch arms-race. Do the players ignore the attacks and focus on the ritual? Do they ignore the ritual and focus on the attacks? Do they split attention?

Difficulty can be healthily driven by increasing the number of objectives the party wants to accomplish while maintaining a fixed resource limit (namely, actions, but gold, spells, or any other limited resource works just as well). All of these tasks are very doable on their own, but when stacked together, they become difficult (or impossible) to all complete.

The downside is that building encounters like this is more taxing on the DM. Use it when it needs to count!

[Jay R]

do we actually need a game mechanic to decide that the npc are having enough and run? the players certainly can escape whenever they choose

My mechanic for that is included in my "Rules for DMs":

26. When the party’s victory is assured, the encounter is over. End it.

a. Most NPCs won’t fight to the death; they would usually rather flee, negotiate, or surrender.
b. This is your opportunity to force-feed them that obvious fact they’ve been missing, and let them believe they earned it.
c. One round earlier, when you know the PCs have won and they don’t yet, is a great time for the NPCs to offer to negotiate.

[King of Nowhere]

No. A railroad is a game in which the GM has a predefined plot and will aggressively force the players back onto the plot against their will.

A sandbox is a game where you establish the setting beforehand and the players can do whatever they want within that setting.

on the other hand, in most sandboxes the party will still find level-appropriate encounters. Some DM will probably have the sandbox say "and there is a dungeon here", but only fill it with appropriateely leveled denizens when needed. or they will find a way to telegraph which adventures are appropriate and which are not.

It is also worth noting that a sandbox is generally filled with a few plot hooks, and the players are expected to latch onto one of them. if they don't, and just keep doing random stuff, the dm is likely to get bored and quit, or to start railroading them.

and that, unless the dm is highly disfunctional, even a railroad will give plenty of freedom to the players; not much in what is their goal, but in how to accomplish it.

so, the distinction between a sandbox and a railroad is often more blurred that what is often assumed. And a sandbox is often not as well established as it's supposed to be.

[Pelle]

What is the game called where the DM makes up very little game world facts, and lets the players fill in the blanks by altering the game reality to whatever the players wish.

An improvised game. Could be either GM- or player-led, and I guess the former can feel more railroady and the latter can feel more sandboxy.