D&D 5E Challenge in 5E

[overgeeked]

5e is general too low agency for my tastes in this arena. People have generally put it well, players have goal, world has obstacles, players overcome/circumvent obstacles to get goal. I get iffy when that starts coming down to die rolls. Talking about "difficulty" in a skill check is silly, there's no effort expended in rolling a 20 instead of a 4.

The challenging bit, ideally, should be in choosing the most likely to succeed course of action with the least cost, and then engaging in risk analysis when you do need to roll dice. 5e is particularly bad at this, because it doesn't have codified actions for skills, and generally limited non-combat abilities outside of a few spells.

Yeah, I definitely agree there. Chance of success doesn't correlate to how difficult it is. It generally costs the player and character nothing but an action to perform a skill check. This is one area where I think older editions of D&D does a lot better, or at least players with experience with older editions. Skilled play and all that. You solving a riddle or puzzle is challenging and difficult, you making a skill check for your character is not.

 

[tetrasodium]

5e is general too low agency for my tastes in this arena. People have generally put it well, players have goal, world has obstacles, players overcome/circumvent obstacles to get goal. I get iffy when that starts coming down to die rolls. Talking about "difficulty" in a skill check is silly, there's no effort expended in rolling a 20 instead of a 4.

The challenging bit, ideally, should be in choosing the most likely to succeed course of action with the least cost, and then engaging in risk analysis when you do need to roll dice. 5e is particularly bad at this, because it doesn't have codified actions for skills, and generally limited non-combat abilities outside of a few spells.

5e falls down on the bolded but too. With unlimited highly effective* cantrips & trivial rest recovery it avoids creating a need for both cost/benefit analysis of spending spell slots that might be needed later vrs risking hp attrition & death. Fixing those would be hard for a gm to push through on a table without a sidebar or optional rule from wotc, but I think it would go a long way to breathing (some) challenge into 5e.

 

[Pedantic]

5e falls down on the bolded but too. With unlimited highly effective* cantrips & trivial rest recovery it avoids creating a need for both cost/benefit analysis of spending spell slots that might be needed later vrs risking hp attrition & death. Fixing those would be hard for a gm to push through on a table without a sidebar or optional rule from wotc, but I think it would go a long way to breathing (some) challenge into 5e.

That's an interesting point. I don't disagree per se, but I would contend that's actually the less important part of the problem, or maybe just the thing that you need to solve second before you succeeding at creating a challenge rich environment. The important thing for an engaging "challenge" heavy scenario, is first and foremost ensuring that your player's decisions matter. I think that requires three things: choice must be real (i.e. different mechanics must be invoked when a diplomatic or a violent approach is tried), decision quality must be evaluated (diplomacy is more likely to work than violence), and decisions must be informed (players know how the diplomacy and violence mechanics function and are different, so they are aware they are making a choice). You have to have all three before you can have agency and the enjoyment a challenge offers at all. I think 5e is generally falling down on this step, because it rarely provides enough information (often because the mechanic doesn't exist and the DM is making it up on the fly) and/or because it doesn't provide decision quality (you were always going to roll a similar skill check, no course of action was more effective).

The resource management game you're talking about is a next level concern, about how complicated and interesting the optimization case in any given challenge is. I think we've got more fundamental design problems in creating challenging gameplay, but it's definitely something that could be be improved. Assigning limited resources to solve an unknown number of problems is roughly the gameplay loop spells create, and if you aren't careful with limitations, the optimization case becomes trivial (use them all, rest, repeat). There's technically more than one way to resolve that, either by limiting the resource system, or by changing the nature of the problem (time limits, imminent threats etc.). I'm partial to week-long long rests that require a safe haven to stay in to enforce the passage of time as a threat, but if I'm spending design time trying to improve the challenge appeal of the game, I'd start with more clearly spelled out skill DCs.

 

[Hussar]

There’s so much to unpack here.

1. Yes challenge is important but so is reward. And any challenges must be adequately rewarded. Many times challenges have only one fail state-total failure. Which means that it’s not really a challenge that anyone would actually engage in if they had any choice.

2. Challenges also do not necessarily mean right now. Things can be challenging over time. That’s the whole point of an adventuring day and game pacing. No single challenge taken in isolation is particularly challenging. It’s the aggregate over time that is challenging.

3. Any challenge with a significant failure chance - say about 25% is pretty much an automatic failure. There’s no point in gaming this because you will lose. The reward for something that challenging will never be enough.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

To me a challenge needs both a reward and a consequence, and a chance to win the reward and a chance of suffering the consequence

easy challenges may be 75-80% chance of reward and only 5-10% chance of consequence.
hard challenges may be as low as 25% chance of reward and as high as 60% chance of consequence.

anything too much more or less will make it not really a challenge.

the consequence doesn't have to be death though

 

[Blue]

Let's take the dice out of this. If the party avoids a lot of pitfalls through thinking and intelligent, knowledgeable action, that's overcoming challenge as much as rolling dice. There's risk of failure, uncertainty that their choices are correct, and meaning if what they do.

And sometimes the goal isn't always apparent and needs quick thinking - sometimes the goal isn't to defeat a foe you just engaged, but to recognize that you never should have engaged it and withdraw with your party in one piece. Or at least pieces big enough for your healers to put back together.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Gonna buck the trend and say I don't care too much about challenge, especially not in the 'gambler's fallacy but complicated' way it applies to D&D.

I don't really find it a challenge to have to roll higher next time and hope the DM didn't make the mistake of believing in CR. That or just metagaming my way through everything when I came to play my character who might not be the tactical genius I'm supposed to be as a gamer apparently.

It all just feels like theater getting in the way of the theater I'm actually here for.

 

[Art Waring]

If you roll the dice, they have to matter. If the system or the referee make it so you can’t really lose, there’s no challenge.

Very much agreed.

I personally don't ever call for rolls unless there is actually something at stake in the game, and there will actually be an interesting result from the suspense of the roll. Otherwise, the players can go about things using the narrative.

I have seen DM's call for too many rolls lately on streaming ("like, gimme a WIS check, cause I say so"), which can really bog down the table, and it can interrupt a scene where the DM & the players are having a good time... then roll a die and the momentum is lost.

 

[tetrasodium]

That's an interesting point. I don't disagree per se, but I would contend that's actually the less important part of the problem, or maybe just the thing that you need to solve second before you succeeding at creating a challenge rich environment. The important thing for an engaging "challenge" heavy scenario, is first and foremost ensuring that your player's decisions matter. I think that requires three things: choice must be real (i.e. different mechanics must be invoked when a diplomatic or a violent approach is tried), decision quality must be evaluated (diplomacy is more likely to work than violence), and decisions must be informed (players know how the diplomacy and violence mechanics function and are different, so they are aware they are making a choice). You have to have all three before you can have agency and the enjoyment a challenge offers at all. I think 5e is generally falling down on this step, because it rarely provides enough information (often because the mechanic doesn't exist and the DM is making it up on the fly) and/or because it doesn't provide decision quality (you were always going to roll a similar skill check, no course of action was more effective).

The resource management game you're talking about is a next level concern, about how complicated and interesting the optimization case in any given challenge is. I think we've got more fundamental design problems in creating challenging gameplay, but it's definitely something that could be be improved. Assigning limited resources to solve an unknown number of problems is roughly the gameplay loop spells create, and if you aren't careful with limitations, the optimization case becomes trivial (use them all, rest, repeat). There's technically more than one way to resolve that, either by limiting the resource system, or by changing the nature of the problem (time limits, imminent threats etc.). I'm partial to week-long long rests that require a safe haven to stay in to enforce the passage of time as a threat, but if I'm spending design time trying to improve the challenge appeal of the game, I'd start with more clearly spelled out skill DCs.

I agree with almost all of this but think the first/second bit falls a bit short. The two are so tightly linked that they may as well be two side of the same unchallenging coin. On the one side 5e works so hard to avoid any hint of ivory tower design in service of rewarding any merely functional choices that it actually makes any challenge hinging from in combat choices more of a challenge to get wrong to any meaningful degree than to make one seemingly functional choice over another have meaningful impact on the average combat. If by some chance a gm makes it matter that gm just turns over the coin by doing the lifting for 5e as a system to provide a challenge that makes it matter. attrition has been so downplayed & recovery so trivialized that the challenge is immediately wiped clear as nothing but a forgotten illusion that only momentarily appeared tangible.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I also enjoy challenges in D&D, but for me-- as I'm sure it's unsurprisingly to you all-- it's the narrative choices meant to be overcome, and the ideas we as a group at the table try and come up with to overcome them.

The story needs to progress. We have to Yes, And our way forward in the narrative. So for me the challenge is what makes narrative sense for moving forward. What ideas and choices can I come up with to drive us ahead? That makes sense for us to do? That is interesting but also logical? And which will move us up the slope of Rising Action heading towards the inevitable Climax?

And for this type of challenge, what do we need? Dice? Absolute not a requirement. Dice are a way for the DM to determine how the ideas of ours play out, but the DM could also just respond with a logical narrative choice in response as well, and that's just as good to me. A "chance for failure"? No, not a requirement. It'll usually more often that not HAVE a chance for failure... but I don't consider that a necessity for me to feel like I am overcoming a narrative challenge if there's a chance it could go wrong. It could merely be a spread of equal but different options for moving forward that could make us as a party sit down and try to suss out what our options might result in if we take them, and whether those results are things we want to deal with. And that discussion to me is us trying to overcome the challenge before us.

For example... we've witnessed a crime. How we respond to this to me is a Challenge. Do we go to the Town Guard and report it? Do we go chasing after the perpetrators ourselves? Do we just pretend like we didn't see it? None of these options have an obvious "chance for failure"... but all of them have directions where our party is going to go and who we will with interact with later as a result. And there might be places later on where we might look back and say "All right, we made a bad choice"... but none of that is known to us beforehand when the choice itself is made. But we all know what our possible futures could be with taking any of those avenues, so deciding what is best is to me overcoming that challenge.

We players are the Authors of our own Stories. And my Challenge is always to make my Story as fun and interesting and compelling as it can be for who my Character is. That's why I play D&D.