Gamble based RPG's and the urge to 'put the players to the test'.

Originally posted by me over here. In regard to putting the players to the test, an urge perhaps felt by people even as they use a largely gamble based RPG:

I'll give the background to this 'challenge the player' impulse.

1. D&D and many others have no option for not to the death of gaining XP, or little in the way of that.
2. So players are forced into potentially lethal combat in order to play at all.
3. Which is based around random rolls, which they can't affect.
4. Then the players get hissy when they lose (especially a beloved character perma dead) or threaten to get hissy or the DM just second guesses they will or might.
5. The DM then starts looking for ways to invent challenge for the player, so it's the player who screwed up if they die.
6. The dice are still there and get in the way of #5.
7. It all hinges on the fact that to play at all involves going into potentially lethal combat, whereas if there was a non lethal option then players could choose (that actually gained XP and gold) whether they go into non lethal activities or potentially lethal combats is their choice. Thus forfilling #5 by dint that they could have chosen non lethal/stayed in the shire, but didn't.

From someone who wrestled with this, each of those steps, for years.

The negative reviews that actual challenge in games earns

Ran into this twice, recently. The first is here. It's a review of the latest adventure time mechanic and it mentions that you can only get back to town after every five levels.

To make matters worse, you can only return to the surface after every five floors, so if you happen to lose all of your health before you reach the next checkpoint, tough luck--you’ll be dumped back above ground without any of the loot you’d accumulated. Worse still, there’s no way to quick-save in the middle of a floor, forcing you to continue playing until you reach the next checkpoint (or die trying).

Tre sigh!

And the next is of a review of might and magic in PC powerplay, where they say that whenever you rest, you use up supplies and can only carry six at a time. This is then described negatively as having to cut short the adventure instead of continue exploring.

It's so incredibly wearying to hear things that provide difficulty as being things which actually reduce the score a game is given. Perhaps unless they dark souls-like cram the 'this is tough!' meme down their throat, it's all exploro land to them?

Okay, caveat - Lord of the Rings, war in the north had checkpoints where if you died you'd lose your previously found gear. Which annoyed me greatly.

The thing is, it didn't announce when the next checkpoint was, unlike the adventure time game, where you can see how many levels you are away from the checkpoint.

Without stating where the checkpoint is, it's not a challenge that you're facing, I'd say. It's just struggling to 'not lose'.

AD&D idea: Long term damage.

I look at combat in AD&D now, at the level ~5 range and...I run into the problem I've talked about before. You cannot include a statistical chance of death, without instigating a certain death sentence. But without a chance of death, the thrill that you get at level one ("OMG am I gunna die!!?!?!") is absent.

I'm considering this idea now were at higher levels: Saying that various monsters attacks are so vicious that for some of them, if they drop you to the negatives you suffer a long term loss in the maximum number of hit points you have. When you go down, you make a system shock save. If you pass, you lose 5 hitpoints off your max, for this session and one future game session. If you fail, it's for this session and two future game sessions. You can gain this penalty twice and the HP penalty stacks, but no more than that.

The reason I say game sessions instead of just weeks is because if at the start of the session the players just go 'oh, we sit around in the tavern for two weeks - there, effects gone! Then we adventure!' it sucks. It's the most weak ass way of avoiding consequences - it's just a free get out of jail card. That sort of stuff is for pure simulationists who don't care if the game is challenging for players (they only care about playing out a world, no matter how easy or hard that makes gameplay).

So the idea is that it will definately affect future sessions. It may even bring about your demise! But since it doesn't kill you in itself, it gives some wiggle room for the players to avoid death (so it's not just a statistical implementation of a death chance).

Possibly at levels 10 to 15 it might become a 10 hit point penalty. 16 to 20, a 20 hitpoint penalty.

The honest 'No Challenge' gamer

Wow. I just found a post by someone who openly says they want something that I suspect alot of other gamers do, but just can't openly admit it. Link.

And to quote it

I'll continue to freely admit that I don't want challenge in my games. I want a story about how my character starts awesome (born the chosen one) and then goes about being awesome (fated to save the world). It's already known and decided that the world will be saved, the story is just how that comes about. The drama comes from the NPCs who can't or won't hop on the train of inevitability to awesometown.

I want the game to be a sycophant for me. In the movie Minority Report where there is that virtual "arcade" (or whatever you want to call it) where people are in pods where their fantasies are being enacted, crowds shouting adorations, etc. That's what I want out of an RPG.

 See, I hate the game style, but because this guy is honest and open I think that's valid. It's where someone wants this, but they pretend they are gaming in some other way, that strikes me as denial. A kind of gamer closet, if you will.

I'm actually thankful of coming across this. So many times I suspect someone just wants the above but wont admit it - I try and describe it but they will tip toe around it, even as they use a bunch of techniques to make the above happen. Now I don't have to describe it in abstract - I have a living, breathing example of a real person embracing this gaming. One of the things that kept it all in the closet is only being able to refer to it in abstract before. Hell, even the word sycophancy - I've wanted to use that exact word! Perfect example!

Pride and Punishment

If you can't beat me...I wont punish you. Just kill you.

Picking up an article link from Tesh's blog...

I think there's a double speak in terms of the use of the word 'penalty' going on. That article makes the first mistake, saying a level with checkpoints and a level with no checkpoints requires the same amount of skill. This is simply not true - try throwing a single coin in a cup. Not so hard. Now do ten in a row, with your count reseting if you miss one. With check points, your only throwing one coin into one cup - fail and you just try the one cup again. Ugh - I hope no ones going to make a two girls, one cup joke after than analogy...

Is it actually punishment to be sent right back to the start? In the linked article, he talks about great tests of skill. But the very thing about a great test of skill is that unless your sent back to the start, it's not a great test of skill. If you 'have' to hit the bullseye to move on...but then when you shoot your own foot your still allowed to move on, then you didn't HAVE to hit the bullseye. Indeed the great test of skill involved at most required you to hit your own foot.

But not being allowed to move on is just a punishment, right? Totally not needed for challenge!

No, actually it is needed for real challenge. For a simulation of challenge, where we pretend we need to hit the bullseye but when we hit the nearby tree we move on anyway, you don't need punishment. So if you want a simulation of challenge rather than actual challenge, I'll pay the point.

Also I will pay that having a large punishment for death generally works out in most mmorpgs as your risking $100 to earn $2. The monster that could make you pay through the teeth is only going to give up a tiny scrap of treasure. It's not the traditional way gambling goes - on the other hand, in traditional gambling the house always wins.

There are no 'great tests of skill' without a 'punishment' of being sent back in some way if you fail the test.

Challenge: Can you NOT win?

Tesh put forth the hypothesis that you can have challenge without risk - risk is like a seperate thing, like oxygen is seperate from hydrogen (...though you can't have water without it...).

So, talk or perhaps make a game and let that do the walking for me!? Introducing proof of (bad) concept!

The bullets, they head toward a ship you can move around. What will you do? If you don't happen to do anything, does it matter at all?
Can you win? Can you not win?

Failure is not enough

Failure itself is punishment enough

I read this phrase recently. Try out this thought experiment - your walking a character through a forrest when a goblin runs out starts hitting you, your HP score rapidly going down! It gets to the bottom and...resets to full! The goblin keeps hitting and it keeps going down and...reseting. Up, down, up, down.

Is failure to avoid this is punishment enough?

No, not really. It's a complete non moment - the health just slides down, then leaps up, slides down, leaps up. It's just a red bar bouncing. A non moment. Nothing.

It's not even failure, let alone a failure that's a punishment in itself. It's a non moment. Nothing.

Okay, lets take a common model - your HP go down to zero, then they are put up to full, but your 50 feet back from where you were, at a prior checkpoint (From what I've heard Bioshock did this - indeed on RPG.net I heard people talk about the 'strategy' of whittling down enemies by hitting them once before dying, then coming back again and again...masterstroke 'strategy' that). And let me stress, all enemies are dead between you and the point you died, they don't come back when you die.

Still pretty much a non moment AND it's essentially the world of warcraft ghost walk.

Failure to notice the goblin or the fireball coming at you is not anything, in itself. Let alone enough of something.

The only model that really works with challenge first, and has been used in a billion shoot 'em ups, is that when you die, all enemies return - you can only get as far as you can survive.

Now maybe we could dumb down the enemies till they move like molasses. That just lowers the skill. But mmorpgs, like wow don't do that, except perhaps in the peripheral - ie, if you take long enough to get back to where you died, the monsters have respawned. Though if you can beat the ones around your body, then you haven't lost progress - and thus entering back into 'non moment' territory again.

Actually that's an interesting point - once you start fighting those monsters, your putting effort into playing a non challenge game. If there's ever a way of turning someone from X and having them start doing Y, it's to make it look like they are doing X, but really they are putting effort into Y. Once someone puts enough effort in, they are lothe to stop doing it - indeed, they are conditioned to do that thing, even if it's Y and they actually intended X to begin with. It's how you train dogs - you give them a little treat for doing something, they do it for the treat, but latter on they just do it, sans treat - doesn't make sense, really.

So no only is failure not enough in itself, it can actually twist the player from what they intended, to something else (and hey, if you say 'no, I'd resist that', well you can only resist what your aware of)

Do you really want challenge?

I'm still wondering about that since a discussion at MMO crunch.

For example, say there's a zone rich in nodes and treasure chests - and the company has an employee called Gus who patrols around a monster NPC to attack players. Let's say he has around 20% chance of finding you, usually.

BUT the company tells the employee hey, if you wanna take bio breaks or just watch some TV or talk on the phone with your girlfriend, that's fine.

Man shouts at evony advert

At those times he's not going to catch you at all, of course.

Now, is that satisfying? Is that really facing any sort of risk? Because that's what the majority of PVP is in most mmorpgs. The enemy might just be entirely absent.

There was no risk. Are you into facing risk, or do you just like to give the impression you are but your really happy to actually be in any situation where Gus is absent, so your just collecting treasure in the face of no real risk - but because you don't know that's how it is, you can say to everyone you did face risk?

Are you actually happy for Gus to be on the can?

If not, to me, your not into risk. Your just into the impression or illusion of risk.

Do you think if you dislike something in a game, it's a mistake?

Once again my 'What the firetruck?' responce to someone elses blog becomes a post here...I'll paraphrase my responce here

If something is an unintended side effect and the developers did not intend it to happen, fair enough to argue against it.

But if they did intend it to be part of the difficulty of the game, even if only tanks have to face it...well, what? Do you think difficulty in any particular game has to revolve around what you personally dislike?

Just because you don't like something, doesn't mean it's a bug.

I mean, where does it end? If you think your in a position to argue away intended challenges, where do you stop? Which ones are acceptable to your sensitive palette?

And what of the thousands of others - what if they think they can argue this way, and what challenge you think is okay, they think is a big bad spoils their fun bug? Someone, somewhere might have their fun spoiled by what you think is okay - and as much as you think you get to determine what is a bug rather than an intended challenge, so do they. So it must be removed!

Eventually all challenge gets removed as there's always someone who's fun is spoilt by practically any challenge and you end up with...a themepark.

Oh yeah. Right.