The paradox of challenge in RPGs

[HouseRules]

I might be missing something, but I don't really see the relation with the question here.
You seems to try to solve difference between players, and how to reward specific players more than others.

OP is asking about how to deal when the whole group of players is taking an early lead or and early set back compared to what was expected, and that encounters after encounters this early lead of set back is amplified to the point of the PCs being significantly stronger or weaker than expected, meaning that the whole group is either rolling over encounters that were supposed to be difficult, or being forced to retreat in encounters that were supposed to be easy. Both of them leading to potentially boring gameplay.

Encounters could change.

If they are stronger

• Spread the monsters so they are less susceptible to aoe spells.
• Focus fire on certain characters in the party: arcane -> divine -> skills -> combat.
• Use more lower CR monsters to decrease wealth by level, spell accumulation, &c. if that is a source of problem.
• example: 16 CR 1 monsters give no xp to ECL 9 characters

If they are weaker

• Group the monsters so they are more susceptible to aoe spells.
• Spread fire, try not to attack the same character in the same round.
• Use less higher CR monsters in bad terrain to increase wealth by level, spell accumulation, &c. if that is the source of problem.

[HumanFighter]

My philosophy when it comes to running game difficulty is being brutal, yet fair. I don't pull punches, and I don't fudge dice rolls. A dead character is a dead character, so what? You can roll up a new one, I don't care how attached you got. Resurrection is sometimes possible, but it is expensive.
I care more about the integrity of the game and the world than an individual's feelings, even my own. If I start twisting things and showing too much favor to a character or group, even if it is someone I like, then the world falls apart, the game falls apart. Consistency and long-term integrity is more important than emotions, which are fickle anyways.
Some of my favorite characters have died by bullsh*t before, and I may have felt disappointed, frustrated, etc. at first, but in time I come to accept it. The world stays believable as a result.

[Man_Over_Game]

I have had some people tell me that it is a good idea to play the monsters smarter when the PCs are having an easy time and to play them dumber when the PCs struggle, but I have also had people tell me never to do this as it is tantamount to metagaming and punishes the players for their success.

Thoughts?

You're talking about a negative feedback loop. The best example of a negative feedback loop that everyone is experienced with is Mario Kart. The more you lose, the better powerups you get, and vice-versa.

There is game development talk about the frustrations of NFLs, with the reduction of a player's "Value of Effort" (how much winning actually feels rewarding). But there's a threshold. If Mario Kart made it too hard for good players to consistently win, then they'd no longer want to play, yet players still want to play Mario Kart, so it's not actually a problem.

Saying that it's an extreme is wrong. Extremes are made, not inherent things. What you're describing, and similar solutions (adding buffs or extra exp for added difficulty), are valid. It's no different than having to fight an entire army...while you have one of your own. As long as everything is a roughly equal threat relative to the circumstance, you're doing great.

What those nay-sayers are talking about is sacrificing realism, yet you don't hear game developers say realism made a better game.

[Tanarii]

In what weitd bizarro-universe is GMs reacting to the players a bad thing?

Some players want to handle the world on their own skills, not have it handed to them by a DM.

[Salmon343]

I'm not sure I agree with player power needing to be a reward for success. But first I'm gonna assume that it is. I see two main ways of approaching it, guided by two example styles of DMing.

Style 1: Dramatic. This is my preferred style, where drama is favoured over simulation. Player backstories will always find a way of being worked into the plot, player death is infrequent unless its at a dramatic moment (a key villain fight, or a sacrifice) (note, this isn't forcing death at those moments, but guiding away from it at non dramatic moments) or the players were being silly, etc. In this style, the players are always suitably challenged, even when they gain power. This breaks verisimilitude, like in RPGs where random encounters are always tough, even when you dethroned god 5 levels ago. But the drama is always kept hot, due to that constant challenge. When players buy in to this style of DMing, adjusting enemy strength to account for their increase in power works quite well, as they agree on being entertained by the drama of the moment, and pushing any realism issues aside.

Style 2: Simulationist. Realism is favoured over drama. Its not my preferred focus, but it is just as legitimate as Dramatic. Adjusting enemy strength under the hood is rightly seen as problematic, as its unrealistic - the world is reacting to the meta knowledge of the party power, when it shouldn't - the game is about the players reacting and adapting to the world, not the other way around. Here, the power issue can be turned on its head - its not that gaining power makes the fights easier, its that not doing so makes them harder. The DM should aim to make the boss' approximate power and themes known, so that the players can prepare and strategise. Power rewards make the fight easier but that's not a bug, its a feature. If the players know as such, then it still feels like a reward - it got them through that fight without critical injury.

Now, power isn't the only reward that can be given. Progress of the state of affairs in the world works too. Perhaps a reward for success is not having the nearby town razed to the ground. Maybe by going against all odds, you can save the captive from the bandits. Variable success allows for a better result to be its own reward, essentially. Likewise, failure isn't just death. Failing your goal can lead to negative consequences in the world. With strong player engagement with the world and story - this can be its own reward and punishment.

[Man_Over_Game]

Some players want to handle the world on their own skills, not have it handed to them by a DM.

The classic battle: The Roleplaying vs. The Game.

[Tanarii]

The classic battle: The Roleplaying vs. The Game.

What I said was about players who want both.

Roleplaying is making (meaningful) decisions for your character in the fictional environment. IMO that works better if the DM doesn't shut down a bunch of meaningful choices for you in advance.

And of course, for many people, 'challenging how good I am' makes for a fun game.

[Man_Over_Game]

What I said was about players who want both.

Roleplaying is making (meaningful) decisions for your character in the fictional environment. IMO that works better if the DM doesn't shut down a bunch of meaningful choices for you in advance.

And of course, for many people, 'challenging how good I am' makes for a fun game.

Sure, but I know my wife wouldn't find that fun. Your suggestion would make my game worse. It, objectively, is a bad suggestion, since the only thing that matters is how the player's react.

(It's not a bad suggestion, just trying to give perspective.)

The point I was trying to make is that you need both, yet they're sometimes they're mutually exclusive. So it just boils down to priorities, aka opinions.

We've nitpicked the current topic to the point where there's not much room for improvement, since any addition just removes something else.

Not trying to stifle conversation, but I think a good discussion point is that almost any RPG should do is figuring out how to bridge those two sides of the same coin.

I'd say 5e doesn't know how to do it, while something like FATE does. What other RPGs pull it off well?

[Tanarii]

Sure, but I know my wife wouldn't find that fun. Your suggestion would make my game worse. It, objectively, is a bad suggestion, since the only thing that matters is how the player's react.

(It's not a bad suggestion, just trying to give perspective.)

I understand the perspective. But the comment I was responding too was they couldn't understand why a GM tailoring to their players & PCs might be a bad thing for anyone.

[icefractal]

I'd say 5e doesn't know how to do it, while something like FATE does. What other RPGs pull it off well?

Does Fate do it? The system supports either (although dramatic to a greater extent than simulation, IMO), but in a given campaign it's going to be run a particular way.

I don't think I'd call this "Roleplaying vs Game" though - it's more like "World vs Game"; you can roleplay either way.

[Quertus]

What those nay-sayers are talking about is sacrificing realism, yet you don't hear game developers say realism made a better game.

Because absolutely no effort was made to make the acceleration, turning, braking, or other performance characteristics of the carts intuitive to the players' expectations, or to have different vehicles or add-ons affect those performance characteristics, and do so in an intuitive way.

Clearly, you've never heard of a flight simulator. Or heard developers (or marketing thereof) brag about their game's physics. Or heard players complain about how unrealistic certain parts of a game were. Or heard players complain about how the AI "cheats". Or…

Nope, game developers never care about realism.

[Man_Over_Game]

I understand the perspective. But the comment I was responding too was they couldn't understand why a GM tailoring to their players & PCs might be a bad thing for anyone.

On the contrary, giving your players realism when they want it IS tailoring to the players.

Because absolutely no effort was made to make the acceleration, turning, braking, or other performance characteristics of the carts intuitive to the players' expectations, or to have different vehicles or add-ons affect those performance characteristics, and do so in an intuitive way.

Clearly, you've never heard of a flight simulator. Or heard developers (or marketing thereof) brag about their game's physics. Or heard players complain about how unrealistic certain parts of a game were. Or heard players complain about how the AI "cheats". Or…

Nope, game developers never care about realism.

Same thing. Realism is a lever, like difficulty. If the player feels its a priority, it's a priority. It's not an inherently useful thing to prioritize.

But the reason we keep running into Guy At The Gym problems is because some guy made it a priority when his players didn't.

And considering you're already working in fantasy, it's important to remember that fewer people complain about a DM being too unrealistic.

[Tanarii]

On the contrary, giving your players realism when they want it IS tailoring to the players.

Who said anything about giving players realism?

Changing or designing a campaign, module, adventure, or encounter, including "playing monsters smarter or dumber", to accommodate or oppose your players is tailoring. Letting it stand or doing it agnostically is not.

The latter isn't automatically a bad thing. Some players don't want hand-holding, in either direction. They want to trust that the GM is a neutral referee.

[Morgaln]

Who said anything about giving players realism?

Changing or designing a campaign, module, adventure, or encounter, including "playing monsters smarter or dumber", to accommodate or oppose your players is tailoring. Letting it stand or doing it agnostically is not.

The latter isn't automatically a bad thing. Some players don't want hand-holding, in either direction. They want to trust that the GM is a neutral referee.

But the GM isn't purely a neutral referee. If the challenges in a certain adventure are too tough for a group, the GM can't just say "tough luck, this is how this was designed," mainly because the GM is the person who designed the challenges in the first place. If the players can't handle a challenge, the GM is partly responsible. The players not only have to trust that the GM is a neutral referee during the game, they also have to trust that the GM is a fair judge of what is doable during design. But the GM is human and can make mistakes. Is it fair to have a TPK because the GM completely misjudged the danger of a challenge? Will that help or destroy trust? On the reverse, if all challenges are too easy and the players just breeze through them, how much fun is that? Will the kind of player who doesn't want any hand-holding enjoy ripping through everything with no challenge at all for multiple sessions? Or would they prefer to feel like they actually accomplished something? So the players also have to trust that the GM is trying to create a fun experience (the whole point of the game, after all).

Also, who's to say that all monsters always take the most effective action? Sometimes humans make dumb decisions. Why shouldn't monsters do the same thing? It actually adds to the realism of the scene if the monster sometimes acts irrationally or emotionally (where appropriate, of course) and thus makes suboptimal choices.

[Man_Over_Game]

The latter isn't automatically a bad thing. Some players don't want hand-holding, in either direction. They want to trust that the GM is a neutral referee.

And sometimes they don't. As long as you give your players what they want and don't assume for them, there isn't a wrong answer.

To me, being a "fair and impartial judge" is a definition of realism. That's how real life works, Randomness is the fairest judge.

But not everyone wants to play a game that's challenging all the time. Sometimes, randomness is cruel, and cruelty isn't always fun. Having a human in control of the universe means that you are in a unique position to trade fairness for fun.

[Telok]

I try to deal with about factors when DMing.

1. I like to run an open world sandbox. I think it gives verisimilitude to the setting and lets players pick their game difficulty level. Of course the area threat rating has to be communicated effectively.

2. I try to lean into the major tropes of the genera. In supers games saving bystanders is more important than capping the villian, high body counts and collateral damage are bad things. In D&Ds zero to superhero, trapped evil wizard lairs, and genocide of unpopular sapients are goals.

3. Not boring. The party [opinion] shouldn't just roflstomp stuff or be a no-choice-tpk, and nobody should be completely useless except by choice*. [/opinion] This is both combat & noncombat situations, not individual actions or turns but a whole situation. Some systems/adventures encourage it or make it easy to do by accident but I don't like running those. Even "easy" needs enough complication/threat to be able to turn into disaster and "tpk" needs at least two obvious exits (players may not take them, but at least two need to be honestly presented).

They can all conflict in a game, the goal is fun. Too easy/hard fights are fine as long everyone has fun. But yeah, most people get annoyed with them. Also that easy/hard can be choices to be made, not a hp/resource thing. A well planned ambush that goes perfectly is a "easy" fight but not easy prep work, the fight is the reward for the prep challenge. For me D&D 4e was boring because each combat turn was seconds to run a simple 6 step decision tree, seconds to roll dice, wait 3 to 5 minutes for next turn maybe mark off some hp. The fights were mechanically balanced and not too easy/hard from the hp/resource angle, but game play was basically mental repetitive motion injury & boredom for me.

I think maybe I got past the too easy/hard thing by sorting fights into two categories and sticking to games with higher options & dangers. Fights are either something that's in the way of the party blocking them from a goal, or they're there to give the players information (meta and/or in-game). So evading a fight, having a plan that makes it trivial, or running away is ok because the fight isn't the point of it. Also I try to avoid running systems that feel like "padded boffer" combat. If a fight gets to people standing in the open trading hits to run down hp I feel like I've failed**.

* I've seen "useless by choice" characters. Usually from players who tend to tune out everything noncombat or play by character "roles" in games that don't force character roles on you.

** I've face-palmed when players went to stupid melee fight an immobile golem in a room where they could have walked past before it finished animating.

[Tanarii]

But the GM isn't purely a neutral referee. If the challenges in a certain adventure are too tough for a group, the GM can't just say "tough luck, this is how this was designed," mainly because the GM is the person who designed the challenges in the first place. If the players can't handle a challenge, the GM is partly responsible. The players not only have to trust that the GM is a neutral referee during the game, they also have to trust that the GM is a fair judge of what is doable during design. But the GM is human and can make mistakes. Is it fair to have a TPK because the GM completely misjudged the danger of a challenge? Will that help or destroy trust? On the reverse, if all challenges are too easy and the players just breeze through them, how much fun is that? Will the kind of player who doesn't want any hand-holding enjoy ripping through everything with no challenge at all for multiple sessions? Or would they prefer to feel like they actually accomplished something? So the players also have to trust that the GM is trying to create a fun experience (the whole point of the game, after all).

You seem to assuming the GM only has one group of players for the content, that they are creating it themselves, and the players don't get to choose what content they will face or not face.

Also, who's to say that all monsters always take the most effective action? Sometimes humans make dumb decisions. Why shouldn't monsters do the same thing? It actually adds to the realism of the scene if the monster sometimes acts irrationally or emotionally (where appropriate, of course) and thus makes suboptimal choices.

Whats that got to do with the price of milk?

We're talking about the DM changing the way monsters act based on the players skill level or build level. Not on having the monsters always behaving optimally.

And sometimes they don't. As long as you give your players what they want and don't assume for them, there isn't a wrong answer.

Yup. Which is why I was providing an alternate perspective.

[King of Nowhere]

Let me also tell you the story of the "cycle of stupidity". Long ago, I would adjust the difficulty of the campaign world to match the power level of the players. The result was the players would optimize (or as we called it back then, min-maxxing) even harder. So I would up the difficulty, and the players would min-max even harder, and I would up the difficulty. Eventually it got to the point where the player characters were completely one dimensional builds and the campaign setting was optimized like a proto tippyverse.

Nobody was happy here.

The problem is that players want fair challenges and also a world that doesn't appear tailored for them, which is really contradictory.

there is no contradiction, unless your world consists of nothing but a hex crawl of predetermined content.
A world has diffrent challenges of different level. while they are weak, they take low level challenges, like clearing out basements from dire rats. As they grow in power, they move to influence the world. They do completely different things.
And that's fundamental. They are more powerful, so they do something different. They do not do "the same things, with higher number". And the way I see it, you can only have your apparent contradiction if in your campaign leveling up entails doing the same things, with higher numbers. And that's horrible.
... ok. I am aware there are many people who like that. there are many successful games based on that paradigm, you have a bunch of abilities and you keep those abilities all game, just with higher numbers. Personally, I never saw one that could hook me up more than a few hours. I don't see the point in the whole leveling system if you keep doing the same things.

And so, as the party grows in power, the problem of them being ahead or behind the curve never applies; they simply undertake different quests. They can spend longer clearing basements or they can rise quickly to be champions of their nations, in all cases they will find appropriate challenges.

Right, so pretty much this. A good portion of the reward should be knowledge, renown, contacts, mundane resources (if you have magic item shops, or the equivalent, this can be hard to separate), and similar items. Getting more of these early is still an advantage, but it is harder to turn them into a wildly increasing upward spiral of advancement or the like (having three noble houses who like the party and are willing to hire them frequently is nice, but it is hard to leverage all three at once).

How do you keep that from snow-balling into tangible power though?

Why don't allies help you out? Why don't rich patrons buy your way out of trouble?

Some of that is supposed to snowball into tangible power. I consider connections an important part of a party's power; in fact, my campaign world is ruled by people with connection, not necessarily people with many pc class levels.
As for the rest, your allies are a very good way to make the party invested in the campaign world, and they can be used sparingly. The party has some problem they cannot solve? they are about to be defeated? you can send an ally to help them. As long as it doesn't happen often - and especially that their loss was not prearranged by you just to save them - they will be happy to have invested time to get allies.
But you can't get helped every time. Those people who see you as an asset, if you call on them too often, will see you as a liability. be a drain on their resources, and your allies will turn away from you. ask a favor once, all is good, but ask a favor every session, it won't end well.

Furthermore, many of those allies will not provide much combat power, but they will provide other kinds of power that the party may lack.
In my campaign, the party accepted to work for a powerful nation. Now they have a powerful sponsor. And they get benefits. They can stay at the safehouse, without worrying about the assassin killing them in their sleep. They can access the nation's spy network, finding information that they'd have no way of uncovering otherwise. If they need a specific service, they ask and they are sent to the right person - they don't need to climb the mountain to find the old wise man to who will answer their questions, they will be given the address of a specialist of the specific field in which they need questions. They get legal protection from minor crimes committed during adventuring - they were likely going to infiltrate the home of the bad guy in search for evidence anyway, but now they won't get in trouble with the authorities, they are the authorities.
Those are all things that cost little to a nation, whose apparatus will have many people whose job is to know other people and make things happen, but they are very convenient to adventurers, that would have to go through a lot of trouble, expences, and sidequests to achieve the same results.
And the nation also offered to help with the aforementioned assassin, though if they ask help too often without providing things of value, they will fall out of favor eventually.
In exchange, the nation asks them for their combat prowess. Clearing out the wandering monsters around the road is, for them, a job of a normal afternoon. The nation, if it couldn't ask them, would have to hire adventurers and pay them dearly, or to send a regular army detachment and lose many men.
So it's a good exchange; the nation provides something they would have a hard time getting otherwise, and they provide something the nation would have a hard time getting otherwise. Being sponsored by the nation increases their power, but in ways that advances the story, not in ways that help them in a dungeon crawl.

And sometimes the plot will expect them to use their connections for power. In the previous campaign, the big bad showed up with a massive army, including a few hundred liches and a handful of 20th level npcs that were capable of going toe to toe with the party - and of mopping the floor with pretty much anyone else that would oppose them.
and the party was never expected to face this on their own; although they did repeatedly face the enemy elite on the battlefield, a lot of their effort was spent with their allies, bringing as many as possible to fight against the big bad. And it was awesome. Every good choice they took in the two-years campaign came back to help them. Much better than solving everything with a few rolls of dice.

[Morgaln]

You seem to assuming the GM only has one group of players for the content, that they are creating it themselves, and the players don't get to choose what content they will face or not face.

I'm certainly assuming we're talking about content the GM created themselves, since the OP heavily implies that. Whether there are other groups using the content only matters if those groups interact somehow, otherwise they are completely independent instances. Players can only choose content they view through the lens of the GM's description. It's the job of the GM to convey somehow whether specific content is doable for the party or not. If the GM mistakenly portrays a challenge as appropriate, it's on the GM's head if the players engage that challenge in good faith.

Whats that got to do with the price of milk?

We're talking about the DM changing the way monsters act based on the players skill level or build level. Not on having the monsters always behaving optimally.

What else is "playing a monster dumber" supposed to mean? Having it talk like Ralph Wiggum? Playing it dumber means not always choosing the optimal tactic or ability for a given situation, i. e. having it play suboptimally, in order to account for the players also having suboptimal skills and/or builds. I can't think of any other interpretation of that. Maybe you'd like to explain the difference?

[Talakeal]

Sorry I haven't been around to reply much, busy week.

As I detailed above MMOs generally do not experience the problem of characters being set against a standard difficulty curve while their power grows based on performance (recent XCOM). You’re free to loiter on a lower difficulty boss until you have the gear. You’re also free to skip intermediate gearing pursuits if you can handle the challenges a few tiers up.

PvP free for alls have always been first come first served and their meta revolves around this or they’ve explicitly chosen to not care about that balance as a central part of the experience.

Depends on the MMO I guess. It has been a constant complain about PvP in World of Warcraft, for example, that gear is designed to amplify skill gaps rather than minimize it.

Good Stuff

I just wanted to say, excellent post.

Paraphrased from JayR's rules: What players want today is an easy encounter where everything goes their way, and they breeze through it. What they will want tomorrow is to have had an extremely difficult encounter they only survived by the skin of their teeth, and the trick their thief pulled by dropping the chandelier onto the edge of the bench that flipped up, banging the bottom of the table, which tipped the lit candle over into the thingamabob that burned the McGuffin.

I kind of live by that, but I don't think my players do. They constantly bitch and whine, and even bring up decades old "DM screwjobs." Heck, one of my players always make extreme "glass-cannon" builds and shields his character with out of character bitching.

I don't consider myself very hard (80% daily resource expenditure, 7% of sessions have some sort of set back like the players being forced to retreat, failing a time sensitive goal, or a player character death), certainly not compared to an old school gamer, but my players sure do.

I don't want everything to be a cake walk, but I do want the abilities of the PCs to matter. And if everything is auto-scaled to the PCs, their abilities don't really matter.

Personally speaking, I think people take "challenge" as too much of a hard rule. Not every fight needs to be equally challenging! If some of them are easy and others are various degrees of challenging/deadly, that's fine. So the PCs found out they were facing magma trolls, prepared accordingly, and now they're facerolling them? Yes, that is ok, that's not a problem you need to solve - or should solve - by a retroactive "and the trolls had an ice drake in reserve!" Let them take the easy win, aim a bit tougher for the next arc, done.

The one case that becomes a problem is when a foe is supposed to have particular significance in the world and they blatantly don't live up to it. Like, "Grath the Executioner is the lone guardian of the gate to the netherworld - the last time someone got past him was a century ago" - and then it turns out that Grath goes down like a chump and everyone's wondering "how the hell did this guy survive a century of battles?" For that I'd recommend not introducing such setting-critical characters immediately, wait until you have a better idea what the right optimization level is.

Agreed.

I might be missing something, but I don't really see the relation with the question here.
You seems to try to solve difference between players, and how to reward specific players more than others.

OP is asking about how to deal when the whole group of players is taking an early lead or and early set back compared to what was expected, and that encounters after encounters this early lead of set back is amplified to the point of the PCs being significantly stronger or weaker than expected, meaning that the whole group is either rolling over encounters that were supposed to be difficult, or being forced to retreat in encounters that were supposed to be easy. Both of them leading to potentially boring gameplay.

Excellent summation of my point, you said it better than I did.

I don't think you have to be playing a narrative system to give (/ask player to give their) characters goals beyond kill things and getting stronger. Making progress in those goals could be rewards that don't create a positive feedback loop.

Neither do I.

I usually run "Dragonlance" style games where killing and getting stronger are just stepping stones to goals both epic and personal, like saving the world and finding true love. I normally play World of Darkness, where combat is only an every few sessions thing and killing someone is treated with the gravity of comiting murder.

But, most games, even narrative games, are definitely part of the action / adventure genre and involve overcoming challenges, where "power" helps you overcome conflict and where "combat" is a viable solution to many problems.

Do note that when I talk about narrative I am talking about the rules, but the game style. I am talking about something where the game is trying to tell a good story and replicate narrative tropes rather than logic or simulation; where an (american) character can't just stroll into Walmart and buy a gun because he didn't spend points on having one.

What I said was about players who want both.

Roleplaying is making (meaningful) decisions for your character in the fictional environment. IMO that works better if the DM doesn't shut down a bunch of meaningful choices for you in advance.

And of course, for many people, 'challenging how good I am' makes for a fun game.

Agreed.

But the GM isn't purely a neutral referee. If the challenges in a certain adventure are too tough for a group, the GM can't just say "tough luck, this is how this was designed," mainly because the GM is the person who designed the challenges in the first place. If the players can't handle a challenge, the GM is partly responsible. The players not only have to trust that the GM is a neutral referee during the game, they also have to trust that the GM is a fair judge of what is doable during design. But the GM is human and can make mistakes. Is it fair to have a TPK because the GM completely misjudged the danger of a challenge? Will that help or destroy trust? On the reverse, if all challenges are too easy and the players just breeze through them, how much fun is that? Will the kind of player who doesn't want any hand-holding enjoy ripping through everything with no challenge at all for multiple sessions? Or would they prefer to feel like they actually accomplished something? So the players also have to trust that the GM is trying to create a fun experience (the whole point of the game, after all).

Also, who's to say that all monsters always take the most effective action? Sometimes humans make dumb decisions. Why shouldn't monsters do the same thing? It actually adds to the realism of the scene if the monster sometimes acts irrationally or emotionally (where appropriate, of course) and thus makes suboptimal choices.

Question, what about an encounter where the players own choices lead to their own demise?

Should the GM save them from the consequences of their decisions?

Like, for example, if the wizard chooses nothing but fire spells, and then the party gets wrecked by a fire immune monster, who is to blame here?

there is no contradiction, unless your world consists of nothing but a hex crawl of predetermined content.
A world has diffrent challenges of different level. while they are weak, they take low level challenges, like clearing out basements from dire rats. As they grow in power, they move to influence the world. They do completely different things.
And that's fundamental. They are more powerful, so they do something different. They do not do "the same things, with higher number". And the way I see it, you can only have your apparent contradiction if in your campaign leveling up entails doing the same things, with higher numbers. And that's horrible.
... ok. I am aware there are many people who like that. there are many successful games based on that paradigm, you have a bunch of abilities and you keep those abilities all game, just with higher numbers. Personally, I never saw one that could hook me up more than a few hours. I don't see the point in the whole leveling system if you keep doing the same things.

I am the complete opposite.

If I like the game, I want to keep playing it, I don't want it to fundamentally change on me.

I hate D&Ds game where you have to wait for months to get the abilities that define your character (assuming the game lasts that long), which is only balanced at a few levels at mid game, and where the campaign ends shortly after you get your awesome capstone ability. Or where if you decide to go to Epic, you find yourself in another world where which completely and utterly trivializes everything you did before.

And sometimes the plot will expect them to use their connections for power. In the previous campaign, the big bad showed up with a massive army, including a few hundred liches and a handful of 20th level npcs that were capable of going toe to toe with the party - and of mopping the floor with pretty much anyone else that would oppose them.
and the party was never expected to face this on their own; although they did repeatedly face the enemy elite on the battlefield, a lot of their effort was spent with their allies, bringing as many as possible to fight against the big bad. And it was awesome. Every good choice they took in the two-years campaign came back to help them. Much better than solving everything with a few rolls of dice.

Ok, and what you have done if the players hadn't made those good choices? Just keep playing for two years and then shrug and tell them, sorry, tough luck?

Personally, I never saw one that could hook me up more than a few hours.

Every good choice they took in the two-years campaign came back to help them. Much better than solving everything with a few rolls of dice.

I assume I am reading too much into this, but how do you play a two year campaign where you need fundamental change every few hours?

[Quertus]

Spoiler: "stuff by @Morgaln, spoiled for length

Show

But the GM isn't purely a neutral referee. If the challenges in a certain adventure are too tough for a group, the GM can't just say "tough luck, this is how this was designed," mainly because the GM is the person who designed the challenges in the first place. If the players can't handle a challenge, the GM is partly responsible. The players not only have to trust that the GM is a neutral referee during the game, they also have to trust that the GM is a fair judge of what is doable during design. But the GM is human and can make mistakes. Is it fair to have a TPK because the GM completely misjudged the danger of a challenge? Will that help or destroy trust? On the reverse, if all challenges are too easy and the players just breeze through them, how much fun is that? Will the kind of player who doesn't want any hand-holding enjoy ripping through everything with no challenge at all for multiple sessions? Or would they prefer to feel like they actually accomplished something? So the players also have to trust that the GM is trying to create a fun experience (the whole point of the game, after all).

Also, who's to say that all monsters always take the most effective action? Sometimes humans make dumb decisions. Why shouldn't monsters do the same thing? It actually adds to the realism of the scene if the monster sometimes acts irrationally or emotionally (where appropriate, of course) and thus makes suboptimal choices.

I'm certainly assuming we're talking about content the GM created themselves, since the OP heavily implies that. Whether there are other groups using the content only matters if those groups interact somehow, otherwise they are completely independent instances. Players can only choose content they view through the lens of the GM's description. It's the job of the GM to convey somehow whether specific content is doable for the party or not. If the GM mistakenly portrays a challenge as appropriate, it's on the GM's head if the players engage that challenge in good faith.



What else is "playing a monster dumber" supposed to mean? Having it talk like Ralph Wiggum? Playing it dumber means not always choosing the optimal tactic or ability for a given situation, i. e. having it play suboptimally, in order to account for the players also having suboptimal skills and/or builds. I can't think of any other interpretation of that. Maybe you'd like to explain the difference?

I may be able to help clear this up.

So, the theory is, you've got monsters, that you are intending to play a certain way. Probably not as a perfect Determinator would, because, as you say, "It actually adds to the realism of the scene if the monster sometimes acts irrationally or emotionally (where appropriate, of course) and thus makes suboptimal choices."

The theory is, a GM can attempt to rectify balance errors (or changes to redirected balance to do player tactics, or (un)lucky dice by sliding that slider of "monster competence" in reaction.

So, the GM can *choose* that the monster gets irrationally angry, and does something dumb, *because* the party needs a break.

-----

Also, even with the GM creating the content, I have advised¹ this particular OP to create their content as a written module *before* they know what the PCs are, and save this module in a way that the players can know that the GM is playing fair, rather than making things up specifically to **** their characters. (Encrypted files, one for each encounter, where I tell the players the password to decrypt *that specific file* when this comes up is how I might implement this; sealed envelopes held by a neutral third party is another valid implementation of "GM's content as static module".

¹ in response to "how do I get my players to stop complaining that I'm being unfair".

[King of Nowhere]

I am the complete opposite.

If I like the game, I want to keep playing it, I don't want it to fundamentally change on me.

I hate D&Ds game where you have to wait for months to get the abilities that define your character (assuming the game lasts that long), which is only balanced at a few levels at mid game, and where the campaign ends shortly after you get your awesome capstone ability. Or where if you decide to go to Epic, you find yourself in another world where which completely and utterly trivializes everything you did before.
...

I assume I am reading too much into this, but how do you play a two year campaign where you need fundamental change every few hours?

well, i wouldn't say that the game fundamentally changes. Like, I hate when they make a rebalance and change gameplay, it's part of the reason i stopped playing magic the gathering (have to chnge deck every time a new set of cards come out) or leage of legends (have to change strategy at every season). But this is not that kind of change. D&D is still D&D, it still has the same mechanics and the same setting. but there is a definite sense of progression and story advancing when your party goes from clearing pests to squabbling with a local crime lord to being involved in international spy business to eventually be the strongest people on the side of good and the only ones that can stand in front of the bbeg.
The point is that playing at high levels must feel different than playing at low levels. if at level 1 you clear rats out of the basement and at level 5 you clear dire infernal half-dragon rats out of basements and at level 20 you clear tarrasque out of basements, then i feel there's no point to leveling up in the first place. just give me static numbers, don't have to worry about balance either.

and yes, you raise good points for the problems there. i prefer to start the campaign with a few levels so that people already start with the abilities that define them (well, mostly). as for capstones, they are boosts but rarely game-changing. As for epics, half of my dislike for that is the "same thing, only with higher numbers" factor, the other half is the "now you go in another place where everything is epic too" and yes, this also sucks.
In my campaign world, at levels 5-10 you are a big guy in your city/region, at level 11-15 you are a big guy in your nation, at level 16-20 you are important worldwide; the most powerful people in the world are level 20 with some extra cheese. at no point you ever "utterly trivialize what you did before". if you optimize well or get much wealth or get too powerful for any other reason, you simply can join the bigger league sooner than you would have otherwise.

Ok, and what you have done if the players hadn't made those good choices? Just keep playing for two years and then shrug and tell them, sorry, tough luck?

No, that's the part I like more about the thing. Of course the players succeed in the end. the game is set to make them win. but they can get various degrees of success.

In my case they got the golden ending. They defeated the big bad and his army at every encounter. They built up a coalition as big as they could. And when a faction of dragons tried to use the humanoid war as an opening to exterminate humans and resume being the dominant species on the planet, the players defeated the dragon leader and impressed enough the other dragons that they joined them against the big bad.
This ended the campaign with the big bad army annihilated by a huge coalition made of all the free nations of the world, a lot of nations that were not free but that the players could persuade anyway, and dragons. the big bad was defeated with little (for the scale of a world war) collateral damage, the dragons and humans made peaceful treaties, orcs got rights as regular people (important because one of the players was an orc) and a new era of peace and prosperity started.

If the players had been less skilled, i still would have given them ways to win in the form of more quests to weaken the big bad power base, but it would have been worse. Maybe the dragon leader would have been successful in leading dragons against humanoids, turning the war into a prolonged three-faction standoff. In fact, the dragon leader had agents on both sides of the conflict, and he was using those to ensure the conflict would be balanced; obviously he wanted as many humanoids to kill each other as possible. And this gave me a perfect excuse to "adjust" the difficulty according to the player's success: it's not metagaming, it's the agents from the dragon leader. Of course the players didn't knew at first, but the moment of the big reveal was worth it.
Maybe the big bad would have been successful in getting the orcs to join him; this would have likely resulted in orcish extermination.
Maybe the factions would have been more evenly balanced, so that the war would not be won quickly but would be protracted and destructive.
Maybe they could not persuade the dragons (which, by the way, was done by forgiving the party dragon cohort for having been a mole and having sabotaged them; this persuaded the more uncertain dragons that peaceful coexhistance was possible; I wasn't expecting it, it impressed me, and i figured it would impress the dragons too), and relationships between dragons and humanoids would have remained strained.
If the party had been mostly unsuccessful in those objectives, instead of ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity, they'd have defeated the big bad(s) and ushered in a new era where the immediate threats were dealt with, but none of the underlying problems was fixed. or, they could have inherited a broken world, recovering with difficulty from a devastating war. All those scenarios would have been pc victories, just not as complete.
only by being utter morons they could have actually lost the war.

And i'm proud of having come up with that story because it gave the party something to strive for. Everyone knows the party is going to win unless they do something real stupid. there is no suspence in that. knowing that there was a golden ending to strive for means they knew their actions would have consequences, that failure was a possibility. They got some real sense of accomplishment. Their actions made a difference. At the same time, i could give them many chances to lose without being a harsh dm; i was going to give them many chances to win in any case, it's just that victory would have been less complete.

Of course, it helps if you can get your players to trust you that the stuff you do makes sense and is not done to spite them.
When i announced my players that their most safe unbreachable stronghold was breached by the big bad, it could have seemed like i was randomly throwing obstacles at them because they were being successful. But i got them to trust me that i wouldn't just do that for no reason. in fact, when they investigated they eventually discovered that someone sabotaged the defences from the inside, and that their dragon cohort was responsible. which led them to discover all the plot with dragons, and eventually ushered in the end of the campaign. In fact, they started to investigate (instead of buying the apparent explanation that the big bad just researched a new ritual to break the defences) exactly because they trusted me to not resort to ass pulls just to screw them up because they were winning.
And it helps that the world was well characterized and established, too.

I hope my explanation was clear enough. And most of it was specific to my campaign; but the point is, the paradox of challenge doesn't have to be a dicotomy. You can reward your players for good ideas while at the same time ramping up the difficulty in ways that the players will perceive as justified and not punitive. And you can punish them for failure without it derailing the whole campaing, and give them some easier path afterwards.

[quinron]

well, i wouldn't say that the game fundamentally changes. Like, I hate when they make a rebalance and change gameplay, it's part of the reason i stopped playing magic the gathering (have to chnge deck every time a new set of cards come out) or leage of legends (have to change strategy at every season). But this is not that kind of change. D&D is still D&D, it still has the same mechanics and the same setting. but there is a definite sense of progression and story advancing when your party goes from clearing pests to squabbling with a local crime lord to being involved in international spy business to eventually be the strongest people on the side of good and the only ones that can stand in front of the bbeg.
The point is that playing at high levels must feel different than playing at low levels. if at level 1 you clear rats out of the basement and at level 5 you clear dire infernal half-dragon rats out of basements and at level 20 you clear tarrasque out of basements, then i feel there's no point to leveling up in the first place. just give me static numbers, don't have to worry about balance either.

This is becoming a complaint for me in TTRPGs: enemies' defense/offense scale pretty much 1:1 with your offense/defense, respectively, so it's hard to see the point at which the game really changes unless the GM decides to throw in some weaklings for you to stomp - in which case that fight probably nets you next to nothing in terms of experience, so you'd have been better off saving your resources for a real challenge.

My immediate solution is to raise the floor and lower the ceiling. 1st-level challenges should be a bit tougher and should also be worth confronting throughout the low levels, so that you can feel that sense of accomplishment that comes from easily overcoming something that used to be a challenge while still getting something for your effort. Past a certain point, high-level challenges should increase in variety without necessarily increasing in difficulty outside a few major threats - that way, once you've reached top level, you're walking around feeling like a god among men most of the time until you encounter one of the few creatures that still pose a threat. The easiest way to accommodate this, or at least the first that comes to mind, is to have a more robust and well-defined system for awarding experience outside combat - that way, once you've reached level 20, you aren't having to plow through hundreds of level-16 monsters to level up; you just plow through dozens of them and get a big (maybe level-scaled?) reward for clearing out the dungeon.

To borrow your framework: at level 1 you're clearing rats out of one basement, at level 5 you're clearing rats out of every basement in town in the same timeframe, at level 10 you're clearing demons out of the dungeon, at level 15 you're clearing all the demons out of every dungeon in the kingdom in the same timeframe, and at level 20 you're clearing out all of Hell until Satan shows up to fight you.

[MoiMagnus]

This is becoming a complaint for me in TTRPGs: enemies' defense/offense scale pretty much 1:1 with your offense/defense, respectively, so it's hard to see the point at which the game really changes unless the GM decides to throw in some weaklings for you to stomp - in which case that fight probably nets you next to nothing in terms of experience, so you'd have been better off saving your resources for a real challenge

Statistics scale in 1:1 because you only have a small margin in which the math actually works well enough for the game to be pleasant. Having played a long campaign in a homebrew where we experimented a lot with scaling, the main thing that cause problems are hitting rate:
+Since failing at your attack (or the enemy saving against your single target spell) means your turn was useless, you have a floor of how often failing is acceptable before the game becomes frustrating to play.
+On the other side, if attack bonuses are so high that success is the norm, occasional failure becomes even more frustrating.

However, what you have much more freedom is:
(1) Hit points and lethality of combat.
(2) Action economy, and reaction economy (how many effects can be inserted as an interruption of a turn). In general, technical complexity of a fight and the involved rules can scale.
(3) Diversity and "weird effects" that fundamentally shape the combat (like flight allowing aerial battles).

My immediate solution is to raise the floor and lower the ceiling. 1st-level challenges should be a bit tougher and should also be worth confronting throughout the low levels, so that you can feel that sense of accomplishment that comes from easily overcoming something that used to be a challenge while still getting something for your effort.

From my understanding, the way modern TTRPGs are designed, this is handled at meta level. 1st-level challenges are tougher because it is assumed the players are new to the system, so if you keep the same mathematical balance, the game will become easier as the players are becoming better at playing.

[Mrark]

I agree with King of Nowhere: being one of his players I found more enjoyable changing the "playstyle" during the campaign, and I think that's what would likely happen in a "real world". I mean, you don't always wanna stick rats, bigger rats, or demons or tarrasques: when you become powerful you might be tempted to change the whole world dinamics, and if your DM isn't a railroad berserker, you should be able to try doing that at least. You might get involved into politics, you won't fight just monsters but fight against other NPC parties might become daily routine: and sometimes the fights might be just diplomatic conversation or resource management in order to get the job done. The point is that the more you advance into the game, the more complex it should get. Of course at level one you won't be considered by anyone, nor have any resources, so you go and take whatever quest you get clearing rat in the basement. But raising up with power the situation changes: you create connections, changes in the world are determined not just with sticks and rocks but with words and alliances, and consequently the gameplay has to evolve.

[Talakeal]

I agree with King of Nowhere: being one of his players I found more enjoyable changing the "playstyle" during the campaign, and I think that's what would likely happen in a "real world". I mean, you don't always wanna stick rats, bigger rats, or demons or tarrasques: when you become powerful you might be tempted to change the whole world dinamics, and if your DM isn't a railroad berserker, you should be able to try doing that at least. You might get involved into politics, you won't fight just monsters but fight against other NPC parties might become daily routine: and sometimes the fights might be just diplomatic conversation or resource management in order to get the job done. The point is that the more you advance into the game, the more complex it should get. Of course at level one you won't be considered by anyone, nor have any resources, so you go and take whatever quest you get clearing rat in the basement. But raising up with power the situation changes: you create connections, changes in the world are determined not just with sticks and rocks but with words and alliances, and consequently the gameplay has to evolve.

Ok, maybe I am actually not reading enough into it.

When you say "bigger numbers" do you literally mean bigger numbers?

Because it seems to me that I could tell that same story at low levels.

Say, replace world with town, replace nations with business owners, replace dragons with ogre tribes living in the nearby wilderness, replace villain with crime boss, replace liches with goons, replace orcs with poor youth gangs, and replace 20th level NPCs with hired guns from out of town.

Nothing about these scenarios really screams fundamentally different to me, its just a matter of scale.

But admittedly I don't know all the details.

What else is "playing a monster dumber" supposed to mean? Having it talk like Ralph Wiggum? Playing it dumber means not always choosing the optimal tactic or ability for a given situation, i. e. having it play suboptimally, in order to account for the players also having suboptimal skills and/or builds. I can't think of any other interpretation of that. Maybe you'd like to explain the difference?

Generally its about trying harder. Much like any game, when I am losing I focus more and think through my actions, while when I am winning I just charge in and have fun.

In the specific example that was brought up previously, the party put a wall of fire down on top of a blind monster (who could still smell them). On its turn, the monster moved out of the wall of fire toward the party. The party complained, saying that since it was blind, I should have rolled randomly for which direction it moved, possibly trapping it in a corner and allowing them a free round of missile fire and another move through the wall of fire, and I told them that I probably would have had it make the poor decision if they were losing, but as it was they were wiping the floor with the monster so I didn't think it necessary.

Another time I had a hydra split its attacks evenly between all melee characters rather than focus fire on one at a time because they were having a tough go of it and I didn't want to TPK the party.

That sort of thing.

[King of Nowhere]

Ok, maybe I am actually not reading enough into it.

When you say "bigger numbers" do you literally mean bigger numbers?

Because it seems to me that I could tell that same story at low levels.

Say, replace world with town, replace nations with business owners, replace dragons with ogre tribes living in the nearby wilderness, replace villain with crime boss, replace liches with goons, replace orcs with poor youth gangs, and replace 20th level NPCs with hired guns from out of town.

Nothing about these scenarios really screams fundamentally different to me, its just a matter of scale.

But admittedly I don't know all the details.

You know, i never considered it this way, but you have a point...
then again, while engaging with the chieftains to shape the fate of conflicting tribes and engaging with kings and high priests to shape the fate of conflicting nations has some similarities - if nothing else, shows that i like some political dealings in my games - the things are different enough to not qualify as "same, but with bigger numbers". You get very different problems, and very different resources - both magic and people.
or perhaps we are really just fooling ourselves and we do the same things with different fluff.

but i think we had a misunderstanding when i say i want things to be different. it's not like i want a first person shooter gradually become a game of chess. but leveling must give a sense of growth beyond higher numbers. in most cases, just having new magic toys does the trick. i did play a few games where you start with a bunch of skills and fight some monsters, and then you level up and those skills deal more damage and you have more hit points but the monsters also have more hit points and deal more damage so that leveling up felt pointless. and the situation you were initially describing gave me the idea of just that, a game that was a mere exercice in rolling dice and calculating probability, without any of the trappings that make the thing actually engaging.

[Telok]

This is becoming a complaint for me in TTRPGs: enemies' defense/offense scale pretty much 1:1 with your offense/defense, respectively, so it's hard to see the point at which the game really changes unless the GM decides to throw in some weaklings for you to stomp - in which case that fight probably nets you next to nothing in terms of experience, so you'd have been better off saving your resources for a real challenge.

My immediate solution is

My solution has been to move to systems that don't scale offense/defense in that manner. And by that I mostly mean the current D&D style games that scale attack from +x to +x+20, and scale ac from 10+x to 10+x+20, and scale damage from 1d+y to 20d+y or 1d+(20*y), and scale hit points from 10+1d to 10+20d. I feel that those systems have started to spend so much design space on the offense/defense progression, and on making cosmetic differences between character types, that they use up almost all the word count and game space just on that progression. Which I think is why they don't seem to do much else and so often start breaking at the introduction of abilities that aren't hit point based.

It depends on the genera of the game, but I don't believe that combat ability advancement, or the lack there of, needs to be a given. Call of Cthulhu isn't reliant on combat at all, most supers systems don't care if heroes can beat infinite mooks from day one (assuming you aren't doing the gritty streel level stuff), Shadowrun dosen't require any combat advancement since characters can start high on that ladder if they want to, Paranoia is happy to keep everyone subject to the whims of the dice.

Another time I had a hydra split its attacks evenly between all melee characters rather than focus fire on one at a time because they were having a tough go of it and I didn't want to TPK the party.

Once in d&d I had a custom dragon power attack a 10th level pc for 22 points. That was fine as it was going to need a 18+ to hit (pc didn't know that) and the pc had a reroll ability. It was a way to telegraph the danger level of the encounter. After some cat-and-mouse stuff through a cave maze the party lured it into a small tunnel, blocked it in, and kept it busy with summoned creatures while they got free access to it's flanks. In fact several times in that campaign there were very large monsters in areas with tight spaces for the pcs to use.

Still didn't stop them from trying to fight the giant gelatenous cube out in the open though. I was amazed that a non-intelligent, 10'/round speed, 3 ac monster, stuck in one room could kill 3 pcs over a 12 round fight during which it moved less than 30 feet. And they'd spotted it before starting the combat too. Sometimes it isn't the dice and no amount of believable fudging will help the pcs.

[icefractal]

While there's nothing wrong with systems that have flat power curves, I'm sort of confused why multiple people are posting them as the answer to progression feeling fake and high-level quests being too much a reskin of low-level ones.

"Clear out quasi-Tarrasque clones from the archmage's subterranean storage area? Isn't this just killing rats in the basement with bigger numbers?"
"I hear you, that sounds dumb. Let's ditch the bigger numbers so you can just stick to killing rats in basements."

Like - changing the scope of gameplay, having a wider variety of challenge types, giving connections and social matters a larger role - all good things. None of which are dependent on whether the power curve is flat or steep.

Personally, I actually feel like the "GM bar" is a little higher with systems that don't have mechanical progression, because it means having any sense of achievement is dependent on the GM creating the opportunity and presenting it in a way that feels meaningful. With D&D, you can at least have some feeling of change when the GM isn't doing that.

[kyoryu]

It shouldn't just be bigger numbers - it should be more and more complex options.

At level 1 (metaphorically) you're hitting things with a sword.

At level 20 you're looking at positioning, and selecting between a number of maneuvers based on the situation, applying effects and utilizing others, etc.