Consequence and Reward in RPGs

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I like to compare trends in the game industry as a whole with individual segments, such as RPGs. Often what’s happening “out there” will turn up in the individual segments, if it hasn’t already.



The most striking trends in hobby games is the movement from games of consequence to games of reward. Players in hobby games in the past have been expected to earn what they received, but more and more in hobby games we’re seeing games that reward players for participation. This is a general trend in our society, where schoolkids expect rewards for participation rather than for achieving excellence, and in fact excellence is sometimes not allowed!

Reward-based games have always been with us via party games, and to a lesser extent family games. Virtually no one cares who wins a party game, and all of these games tend to be very simple and fully accessible to non-gamers. Mass-market games are much more reward-based then consequence-based. Hobby gamers might call them “not serious”.

A reward-based game is more like a playground than an organized competition, and the opposition in reward-based games tends to be weak/inconsequential/nonexistent.

Home video “save games” have always tended to make video games a “you can’t lose” proposition. We’re moving beyond that.

With free-to-play video games dominating the mobile market and a strong influence in other markets, designers reward players so that they’ll play the game long enough to decide to spend money in it. We see players who blame the game if they fail, who expect to be led around by the hand, even in games that people purchase.

Tabletop RPGs generally involve an unspoken pact between the players and the GM, so that the players can have fun and not have to worry too much about losing. But the game tends to be more enjoyable when there’s a possibility of failure - the triumphs are sweeter. The co-creator of D&D (Gary Gygax) put it this way in one of his last publications (Hall of Many Panes) "...a good campaign must have an element of danger and real risk or else it is meaningless - death walks at the shoulder of all adventurers, and that is the true appeal of the game."

Classic games involve conflict. Many so-called games nowadays do not involve conflict, and there are role-playing "games" that are storytelling exercises without much opposition.

Reflections of this trend in RPGs often involve abundant healing and ways to save characters from death, such as the ridiculous Revivify spell, usable by a mere fifth level cleric in D&D Fifth Edition, that brings back the dead on the field of battle.

35 years ago, a young player GMed his first game for our shared-characters campaign. He really wanted to ensure the players had a good time - so he gave out lots of magic items. We wanted players to earn what they received, so myself and the other lead GM waved our hands after the adventure and most of those items disappeared.

I’m a senior citizen, in my roots a wargamer, and I prefer games of consequence. But that's not where the world is headed.

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher

 

[Sunseeker]

The contention is that classic D&D play of the Pulsipherian/Gygaxian sort involved avoiding dice rolls by, instead, making your own luck - mostly through clever exploitation of fictional positioning.

That sounds like roleplaying with extra steps, which I think people still do today.

 

[S'mon]

As [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] mentions, XP isn't exactly the issue, it's the level. But, yeah, totally agree, 1e and 2e level drain were brutal. OTOH, System Survival rolls weren't exactly hard to make. Even a 9 Con gave you a 70% survival chance, so, it wasn't exactly a hard check.

But, that is precisely my point. That's just random chance, not difficulty. The player has no control here. No decisions to make. Why did you get to bring your character back? You got a lucky die roll. That's not "earning" anything. It's simply arbitrary roadblocks that have no actual impact on how you play your character. Since there's nothing I can do to change my chances of coming back, if my character dies and is raised, that's entirely random chance. Where's the "earning" that is being characterized of earlier game play?

Weird. The way I play my pc is certainly greatly affected by whether I am likely to die to random chance, whether I may be Raised, etc.

The stuff I have no control over greatly affects how I treat stuff I do have control over. And a game with easy random death, no raise etc is indeed experienced as harder than a game where I am unlikely to die/fail to unfortunate random roll.

When the PCs in my Mystara game charged the Heldannic warbird in the face of its Blight Belcher, they knew or should have known that permanent death was likely. My son lost his first dnd PC, the guy he played from 4th to 17th level over the past 4 years. The decision to risk that took a form of in character and out of character bravery (esp for a 9 year old!). And the fact his death came down to rolling a 2 on a d20 did not negate that.

 

[S'mon]

No one is denying that it existed though. We know that it existed. What's being denied is that this was the only way that games were played back in the day and that now we only game to participate, rather than be challenged.

That's the rather point I've been arguing against.

Pulsipher would surely agree. He has been preaching anathema against your kind since the 1970s!

 

[S'mon]

Did you have to fight a 15th level character at first level, like the the Zeitgeist AP for Pathfinder has you do?

Frankly, that doesn't strike me as real difficulty. If you're playing a fighter in D&D, you're going to be standing in front of the mage; and if you have one hitpoint (through no fault of your own), and get hit (because it's not like you can get your AC low enough that's not going to happen), then you died of bad luck. It wasn't a challenge; you just simply rolled...

IME skilled play in these games includes being immune to the social expectation that your 2 hp Fighter stand in front of the Wizard.

I am generally skilled at old school play, but weak in this regard. I played a 3 hp Cleric a while back. I was perfectly aware that if the zombies got a swing at me I was dead meat. I was perfectly able to avoid that circumstance - UNTIL those pesky other players looked at me expecting me to Step On Up. So I did, and died of course.

 

[Lanefan]

In first edition your typical fighter probably didn't have a 15+ in Con, so didn't even get a bonus to hit points. A 14 Con gave no bonus and the average roll of 5 at first level gave you 5 hit points. Orcs did 1-8 damage, giving it a decent chance to put the fighter down in 1 hit. That same fighter in 3e had 12 hit points(10 + a 2 bonus for 14 Con) and had to max out damage to even get that fighter to 0, barring a crit. On the other side of things the 1e orc had 1-8 hit points, averaging 4. The 1e fighter probably didn't do extra damage(a 15 being +0), but at 1d8 had a greater than 50% chance to kill any orc hit. The 3e fighter probably had +2 damage due to strength of 15, +1 for using a great sword two handed for +2d6+3 damage. The 3e orc had 5 hit points giving a 100% chance to kill any orc hit.

Pretty easy to see which one was more difficult.

What does the same comparison look like in 4e (to a "real" orc, not a minion) and-or 5e?

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Pulsipher ...

While Pulsipher is I assume this guy's real name, every time I see it I think to myself what a great character name it would make for a Cleric - a Human, probably, LN alignment, something of a zealot, and more than capable of handling himself in a fight. Stats something like S-15 I-10 W-16 D-10 Co-15 Ch-12 (and yes that's the order they should be in, dammit!).

Lan-"my problem is I never remember these names when I actually roll up a character"-efan

 

[Hussar]

We are discussing D&D here, not a completely different games. You're bringing in oranges to a discussion about apples. The stat differences I mentioned affect game difficulty in D&D. It's entirely irrelevant if a completely different game is more or less difficult.



In first edition your typical fighter probably didn't have a 15+ in Con, so didn't even get a bonus to hit points. A 14 Con gave no bonus and the average roll of 5 at first level gave you 5 hit points. Orcs did 1-8 damage, giving it a decent chance to put the fighter down in 1 hit. That same fighter in 3e had 12 hit points(10 + a 2 bonus for 14 Con) and had to max out damage to even get that fighter to 0, barring a crit. On the other side of things the 1e orc had 1-8 hit points, averaging 4. The 1e fighter probably didn't do extra damage(a 15 being +0), but at 1d8 had a greater than 50% chance to kill any orc hit. The 3e fighter probably had +2 damage due to strength of 15, +1 for using a great sword two handed for +2d6+3 damage. The 3e orc had 5 hit points giving a 100% chance to kill any orc hit.

Pretty easy to see which one was more difficult.

Couple of things to note.

Straight out of the Monster Manual, a 3.5e orc deals 2d4+4 and crits on an 18-20. While true, he has to roll max damage to drop our fighter, that's presuming one hit. And, as soon as we get away from 1st level, the 3.5 monsters get a WHOLE lot more dangerous [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]. Because 3e monsters are meant to challenge 4 PC's, not one. Which means that a 3.5e monster, by and large, is capable of dealing 10xCR in damage in a single round. Not too many PC's average 10 hp/level.

Which is why I point to later era D&D being very deadly.

OTOH, we've got 5e, which leans heavily on 1e for design, where a single monster isn't meant to be a challenge to a group of PC's, by and large. Which is generally why you hear all these complaints about 5e not being difficult enough. It's not difficult enough because it's based on 1e, where difficulty comes from adding a LOT more monsters.

Heck, you want to see the easiest way to show all this? Take any 1e module. Straight up convert it to 3e - same monsters and same number of monsters, and then run a 3e group through it at the suggested levels for the 1e module. It's a death trap. You will TPK the party every single time. 20 kobolds in a single encounter in a 1e module for 1st level becomes an instant death encounter for any 1st level 3e party.

 

[pemerton]

The contention is that classic D&D play of the Pulsipherian/Gygaxian sort involved avoiding dice rolls by, instead, making your own luck - mostly through clever exploitation of fictional positioning.

That sounds like roleplaying with extra steps

I'm not sure what you mean.

I think of clever exploitation of fictional positioning as one (important) aspect of RPGing, but that view is contentious (see, eg, this thread).

And I'm not sure what you have in mind by "extra steps"? Which steps? And additional to what?

 

[Maxperson]

What does the same comparison look like in 4e (to a "real" orc, not a minion) and-or 5e?

Lanefan

Orcs are not level 1 in 4e. As a level 3 monster they do 1d12+3 damage. A 3rd level fighter will have much more than that, so orcs become even less of a threat one on one. They have 46 hit points and since I never really played 4e, I have no idea what a 3rd level fighter can dish out.

In 5e an orc has 15 hit points and does a d12+3. Not sure what a first level fighter can dish out in 5e, but hit points wise the fighter can be taken down with one hit at level 1, even if the fighter has a 20 con.

As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] pointed out, the stat block of 3e shows 2d4+4, but doesn't take into account the combat section which says that they are proficient with greataxes and shows them using a greataxe. The falchion is not all they use. My error was that I thought it was greatsword, not greataxe, so the damage wasn't 2d6+3, it was 1d12+4(I also was in a hurry and got the two handed damage wrong).

 

[pemerton]

No one is denying that it existed though. We know that it existed. What's being denied is that this was the only way that games were played back in the day . . .

Agree with that.

. . . and that now we only game to participate, rather than be challenged.

Kind-of agree with that. The "only" makes the claim too strong. But I think a fair bit of contemporary RPGing does focus more on what I have called "setting/story tourism", which is a type of participation.

I think a lot of discussion - and it comes out on these boards as well as in blogs, DM's guides, etc - gets confused because it wants participation/tourism and it wants challenge (these days probably more of a tactical combat challenge by default, rather than square-by-square exploratory challenge), and doesn't begin to tackle the tension involved in having both these things in the same episode of play.

a game with easy random death, no raise etc is indeed experienced as harder than a game where I am unlikely to die/fail to unfortunate random roll.

Generally I'm following along with your posts, and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s - but just like there are bits of his where I differ, likewise here I only kind-of agree. It depends on "fail", at least in part - overall I think it is more common in contemporary RPGing to have non-death failure conditions, and these don't necessarily make the game easier.

And then there are also non-die-roll-based failures. A game where success in action declarations is pretty likely, and in which the (mechanical and immediate story) consequences of failure are fairly mild, but where the social/"at the table" consequences of failure can be more serious (eg The Dying Earth that Hussar mentioned upthread) might be hard, in a completely different sort of way.

Different games can require a player to "put him-/herself out there", on-the-line as it were, in different ways.

When I think back over my own RPGing experiences, one of the most demanding was a freeform CoC scenario, where each of the PCs was related to a particular NPC who had been taken by dark forces to a bad place. We were going into that place to rescue the NPC. I was playing the mother of the NPC; the kidnapper (another NPC) was my ex-husband. It wasn't the sort of game where there was any risk of PC death - the actual events we went through had been prepared in advance by the scenario authors. But it was demanding, very demanding: in part because at a few key points choices had to be made (about which of the five of us woud bear a cost or get a benefit) and those were hard to make while remaining true to our characters, and our GM did a masterful job of pushing every player to stray true in reaching the final consensus (in effect by playing the angel/devil on one's shoulder); and in part because giving a sincere portrayal of a person wronged by her ex-husband and potentially losing her son is, itself, demanding (especially for someone, like me, not trained as an actor). (In my mind I used the mother of some old school-friends as my starting point for portraying the character.)

I guess my bottom line is that there is more than one way to make a RPG require more than just participation, and the likelihood of irreversible PC death is only one of those ways.