Interesting Decisions vs Wish Fulfillment (from Pulsipher)

[Libramarian]

As far as I'm concerned having relatively balanced encounters isn't about if you want meaningful decisions - it's a question of where you want the meaningful decisions. It's about tightening the feedback loop, providing more visceral and immediate consequences for decisions.

Good post! I think that's right.

The tradeoff for tightening the feedback loop is that the drama of the game is spread out more evenly among all the decisions, rather than being all bunched up at the end of a series of decisions with a looser feedback loop.

It's kind of like basketball vs. association football, to describe CaS and CaW as two sports (and hopefully make Tony Vargas feel better).

CaS = basketball. Each team takes ~80 shots a game, hitting around half of them. The winner is the team that is slightly stingier on defense and/or slightly more efficient on offense. Consequently each make/miss is not in itself very dramatic (at least until the game comes down to the wire). Feedback loops are short; most of the good plays directly lead to a bucket or missed chance for the other team. It's easy to spot the good plays but harder to spot the good players because there are so many good plays in each game by various players (as in baseball, you need to use statistical analysis to accurately rank the non-star players...but I digress).

CaW = association football. Each team only gets a handful of scoring chances per game, so they're full of drama. When a player misses a good chance it's like that Simpsons' episode where Lisa rejects Ralph Wiggum: if you play it in slow motion you can pinpoint the second his heart rips in half. Scoring chances are created like a glass of water tipping over: at first somebody on defense makes a slight, seemingly innocuous mistake, but then you realize that an offensive player happened to be in just the right place to take advantage, and he makes a good pass...and you sit up straighter and straighter as it dawns on you that this is snowballing to a scoring chance. Feedback loops are sloppy: many, many passes are made between scoring chances that don't seem to have any obvious purpose. It's hard to see the value of most individual plays but at the end of a match one or two players get most of the glory.

Basketball is more of a designer sport. The rules committee debates things like whether or not the 3 point line should be moved back another two feet to incentivize more mid-range shots, or whether the shot clock should be reduced or extended another few seconds. Association football is more organic: very simple rules-wise with very interesting emergent properties. The play is sloppier but the rules are more elegant.

Can't say that I love every edition of D&D but I do love watching both basketball and association football.

In the football leagues in Europe the team at the bottom of the standings moves down a division next season, which I also love. Level drain

 

[Campbell]

[MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION], excellent post. Wish I could XP. You pretty much cut to the core of the play styles. For what it's worth these days I'm finding 4e to be a very immature incarnation of its design ethos as far as relaying the immediate resolution of stakes. Dungeon World and other Powered by Apocalypse games really do what I think 4e was trying to do much better. In the Dungeon World play by post Manbearcat is running every decision feels critical because there are far more consequences attached to each decision. I find it helps that complete success or failure is pretty rare - it's far more common to get what you're after, but have to sacrifice something else in the fiction.

 

[Bluenose]

@Libramarian, excellent post. Wish I could XP. You pretty much cut to the core of the play styles. For what it's worth these days I'm finding 4e to be a very immature incarnation of its design ethos as far as relaying the immediate resolution of stakes. Dungeon World and other Powered by Apocalypse games really do what I think 4e was trying to do much better. In the Dungeon World play by post Manbearcat is running every decision feels critical because there are far more consequences attached to each decision. I find it helps that complete success or failure is pretty rare - it's far more common to get what you're after, but have to sacrifice something else in the fiction.

Can you imagine how well that approach would have gone down in a game with Dungeons & Dragons on the cover? Even the very tentative steps in that direction 4e took were too much for some players, so I can't imagine the reception would have been better if it had gone further. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Oh, and covered for xp on Libramarian.

 

[Campbell]

Can you imagine how well that approach would have gone down in a game with Dungeons & Dragons on the cover? Even the very tentative steps in that direction 4e took were too much for some players, so I can't imagine the reception would have been better if it had gone further. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Oh, and covered for xp on Libramarian.

I get that completely. The forum battles over Through Death's Eyes would make Come and Get It seem tame in comparison. There is a very vocal and visceral resistance to the mainstreaming of indie RPG design conceits going on right now just like the early aughts brought a visceral reaction towards the mainstreaming of heavy GM force, high setting fidelity play popularized by Vampire. I don't find it surprising that Zak S and the RPG Pundit were paid consultants on 5e whereas Vincent Baker was not. I'm slightly disappointed, but not surprised.

That being said games like Dungeon World and Demon - The Descent reach into meta game mechanics in areas that are more traditionally meta (GMing principles, XP awards, outcomes, etc.) rather than in areas where players directly interface with the fiction (like action declaration).

 

[Savage Wombat]

CaW = association football. Each team only gets a handful of scoring chances per game, so they're full of drama. When a player misses a good chance it's like that Simpsons' episode where Lisa rejects Ralph Wiggum: if you play it in slow motion you can pinpoint the second his heart rips in half. Scoring chances are created like a glass of water tipping over: at first somebody on defense makes a slight, seemingly innocuous mistake, but then you realize that an offensive player happened to be in just the right place to take advantage, and he makes a good pass...and you sit up straighter and straighter as it dawns on you that this is snowballing to a scoring chance. Feedback loops are sloppy: many, many passes are made between scoring chances that don't seem to have any obvious purpose. It's hard to see the value of most individual plays but at the end of a match one or two players get most of the glory.

I don't see how soccer could be described as CaW - since your team doesn't have the option of, say, ambushing the opposing team at Hooters the night before and beating the stuffing out of them. Or hiring fans in the stadium to take potshots at the goalie.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't see how soccer could be described as CaW - since your team doesn't have the option of, say, ambushing the opposing team at Hooters the night before and beating the stuffing out of them. Or hiring fans in the stadium to take potshots at the goalie.

Indeed. CaW would be long-pre-association football. The game played between two entire towns/villages, where they had to roll a barrel (or what have you) to the other town, and which did indeed involve such shenanigans.

Football is total CaS, it's just a slower-paced sport than basketball.

 

[Umbran]

Sounds like a re-hash of CaW vs CaS. Which is to say, nothing more than broadly implying that anyone who doesn't play in the OneTrueWay is a spoiled child.

Except, of course, until you go look at the link in the OP, and you see....

Wish-fulfillment can still have choice
But in many cases, to implement wish-fulfillment the designer/writer eliminates the larger choices in order to guide a story to a conclusion
As in, say, Mass Effect 3?
Role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons provide the bridge between the two
You can play it either way
Some RP game systems encourage one or the other

Is one way “better?”
No

So, Tony, you should probably revise your opinion on the matter.

 

[Emerikol]

Keep in mind folks that this discussion is about how you play any edition of D&D and not a topic for an edition war. The person who I believe was primarily focused on wish fulfillment was no fan of 4e. I personally am in the opposite camp and I'm no fan of 4e either. So in my mind there is no edition connection. It's how you play in general.

Another question you could ask that relates to the above question is how great a challenge do you want in the pursuit of your goals. A person who puts wish far ahead of choices might want only a modest challenge. The act of living out the adventure and appearing heroic is satisfying without the need to wrack your brain for the perfect move.

Now I think I lean toward choices so I'm just trying hard here to be fair to both sides. If you imagine the sort of stress you incur when you are really invested in a movie character who is running for his life, a good stress so stress may not be the right word, then that is part of what I call challenge or interesting choices. You feel imperiled and you have to make decisions that often have lots of consequences. How hard do you want those decisions to be?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If you imagine the sort of stress you incur when you are really invested in a movie character who is running for his life, a good stress so stress may not be the right word, then that is part of what I call challenge or interesting choices. You feel imperiled and you have to make decisions that often have lots of consequences. How hard do you want those decisions to be?

Most action movies are pretty much pure wish-fulfillment, including, nay, especially ones where the bolded bit happens much. So... may want to rethink this example. It seems to show you wish-fulfillment can be tense or something!

 

[Emerikol]

Most action movies are pretty much pure wish-fulfillment, including, nay, especially ones where the bolded bit happens much. So... may want to rethink this example. It seems to show you wish-fulfillment can be tense or something!

It can be. It's kind of silly to define wish fulfillment as getting what you want. That means all playstyles are wish fulfillment because it's all about getting what we want out of a game right?

It's just like GNS. Every single roleplaying game in the universe has elements of all three. The design of the game though respects one more than another. Or it provides a way if it's trying to target all audiences for the game to respect one more than the other. So saying you are a simulationist is akin to saying S > N > G or S > G > N. People should rank their preferences instead of saying they are just an S. There are people who claim S who then fight over whether G or N should come next.

Same thing for wish fulfillment versus difficult choices. I might say "challenges" instead of choices to better illustrate my point. In a wish fulfillment game you are going to get what you want no matter what. In a difficult choices game, there are going to be roadblocks to getting what you want and it is possible you won't actually your goal UNLESS your goal is purely difficult choices.

My players want to start out as nobodies and scratch and claw their way up through the world and society until they become premier movers and shakers in the world. Their real goal though is the scratching and clawing and not the final destination. The process of achieving the goal is really what they find fun.

Other people want to realize a concept. They do not really want there to be a chance of failure when it comes to achieving that goal. Their fun is actually being their goal. That does not mean that there aren't all kinds of choices along the way. Nothing gets in the way ultimately though of the wish fulfillment.


I hope maybe that clarifies the discussion a little.

One tool valuable for the wish fulfillment camp is the fail forward concept. Even with setbacks you keep moving towards the goal. Not saying it can't be used by anyway see my earlier discussion but I do think it fits wish fulfillment like a glove.