Interesting Decisions vs Wish Fulfillment (from Pulsipher)

[Henry]

This conversation does bring out one memory for me - one thing I found that 4e did better than 3e or Pathfinder, and that was a Monk I played. There is quite a lot of buzz among D&D gamers about the uselessness of the Monk in 3.x; in 4e, my monk was an unholy chainsaw of fury. Did I get hurt? Plenty. Did I go down to superior opponents? Absolutely. But at no time did I feel like I wasn't contributing to the party, or that I had to weigh every combat carefully and count my escape exits with each one just in case - and there's nothing wrong with that.

In the greater context, there are some days I want to hard-scrabble and get challenged, and others I want to revel in being a badass at the game table (especially if my real life work is particularly challenging in the recent past!) and the game that supports both I haven't found yet. Maybe 5e will be versatile enough in its options that I'll have found it. Guess i'll know by October.

 

[Emerikol]

I don't necessarily think that chance of death is an indicator in general of overall difficulty.

If I had to dig a grave in the hot sun it would be hard but I'm certain of success. Now that is a physical challenge I realize but there are mental challenges that are similar.

In my games failure to play well results in death. Over the years, my players have learned to play well. When they go to other campaigns they often think they are easy. When I say hard I mean how much mental effort you exert to succeed.

I'm a programmer by trade and I occasionally encounter a hard problem that taxes my knowledge and creativity. I never in the end fail to solve the problem though. That doesn't mean it wasn't hard.

In my games, characters die on occasion but not frequently. I attribute that more to my players skill than to the easiness of my game.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The elephant in the room is that there's almost never such a thing as Combat as War. A dungeon is approximately as artificial an environment as the assault course on Sasuke/American Ninja Warrior. The PCs are well enough armed, and this is a feature, that they resemble big game hunters on a safari - yes you can mess up. But the odds are stacked in your favour. And minimising risk while bringing back the head of a lion is a good thing.

This is by no means universal. I see dungeons like that as something that would happen when a party goes into a dungeon level that is several levels below their own.

A group going into territory that is considered challenging for their level might actually be part of a safari but they may sometimes be playing the role of the trophy rather than the hunter. Having that as a posiibility and not knowing when that may be the case, is where the excitement comes from.

 

[Emerikol]

That doesn't sound like a hard game to me. It sounds like a game of "Know the DM". And that has a difficulty threshold but no serious ramp.

Tomb of Horrors was in response to Rob Kunz and Ernie Gygax complaining that Greyhawk was too easy. And guess what? They were right. The first encounter with Tomb of Horrors resulted in all treasure found and no PC deaths. This is because knowing your DM is a skill - and if they throw the same type of opposition you can master it. And when you've mastered it you might need to keep your wits about you, but it's no longer hard.

I don't want to disagree with you 100% because I realize the DM is representing the laws of the universe so knowing those laws of course improves your chances of success. I get the feeling from you though that you mean it in a far more pejorative way. Kind of like the DM has these oddball idiosyncrasies or is predictable or something like that. If I'm reading you wrong please explain.

I vary things a lot in my dungeons so they are definitely not predictable. Still I think we all have to agree that combat tactics are combat tactics and good ways to move through a dungeon could be established. It gets challenging when the unexpected happens and you have to think on your feet. The whole point is that hard does not equate to death. Hard is not 3 in 10 chance of death instead of 1 in 10 chance of death. I might agree if you said "for a selection of average gamers" perhaps. A game where you entered a room and rolled a die ten and on a 2 or better you clear the room is no easier than a game where you have to get a 5 or better. Perhaps it's harder to not die but it's not hard as in requiring skill. That is the kind of hard I'm talking about. Not improbability of success.

I want skill to matter in my games. So if you are more skillful, you lessen your chances of death. Being more skillful is sometimes adopting best practices but it's also being creative and cunning in unexpected circumstances. I try to create a "realistic" world which means my monsters given the setting try to act in a way that makes sense given their environment and experiences. I play them to survive and win.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't necessarily think that chance of death is an indicator in general of overall difficulty.

Indeed, it's a terrible indicator, but I think that discussion has been had.

In my games, characters die on occasion but not frequently. I attribute that more to my players skill than to the easiness of my game.

I think your discussion of how "hard" your game, is and how "skilled" your players are is distracting you from the actual topics you set out to discuss. The thing is, it's subjective/relative how skilled your players are, and how hard your games are. Very subjective. Whether there even is such a thing as player "skill", rather than merely knowing DMs or genre conventions or the like in RPGs is a matter of debate - and probably should be in another thread.

So perhaps we could move away from that?

What we can say is, if your players are having a good time, and enjoy the tension that feel, feel like they are working hard, and enjoy that, and so on, then you're DMing them well.

Equally, if you took another group, and just TPK'd them repeatedly, and they had no fun, we could say you were DMing those guys really badly.

It's all relative. Difficulty is certainly relative, and it doesn't matter if "most" groups would steamroller what you're putting out or get steamrollered by it, it matters how the group you're actually DM'ing for reacts.

But you asked about the tension between "interesting decisions" - perhaps better phrased as "meaningful decisions" or "decisions with consequences" and "Wish Fulfillment", which is perhaps better phrased as "emotionally meaningful success". I think one issue that the more you lean towards aspects like puzzle-solving, resource management, strategy and tactics and so on, which are inevitably going to get pretty metagame-y, the harder it becomes to stay in a strong role-playing, in-character mode. I've particularly seen some of the sort of "fiddly word puzzle"-type stuff push players completely away from their PCs and into an entirely different mode. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's definitely a thing. Whereas the stuff attributed towards the latter state, whatever we're calling it, all tends to support staying in-character.

There's also the simple matter of whether you want the game to be dramatic or you want it to be quiet. I mean, you associate "enemies destroyed spectacularly" with the "emotionally meaningful success" mode, but I'd associate it more with the "dramatic" mode. For example, 4E tends to offer strong "meaningful decisions" play in combat, but when a major badguy dies, I'm probably going to make his death spectacular, rather than having him merely slump to the floor or whatever - but that it no way detracts from any "meaningful decisions" made that lead to his death, nor does it counter-indicate them.

Equally, I could have an entirely DM-driven game, where I basically give the victory to the PCs, but where their victory, in the end, is entirely pyhrric, and their enemies don't die spectacularly. Yet that would seem to align away from the "meaningful decisions" mode, despite also aligning away from "emotionally meaningful success".

I think the challenge for a DM is recognising what players want, how they want to play and so on, and sometimes categorization can help, but I'm not sure this categorization is necessarily helpful in that task. I feel more like Pulpisher was intent on catergorizing for the purpose of excoriation than to be helpful.

Perhaps a better breakdown would be to consider how much players like certain elements, like resource management, puzzles, and so on, and how they like to succeed (because I feel like a game where the players rarely succeed at all is probably not a very fun or sustainable game - note: having a bunch of PCs die in a "PC funnel" or the like isn't the same as not succeeding, imo). I know that in my group, we don't have many lovers of static puzzles, but equally not all the players enjoy NPCs saying that they're cool, and are far more interested in whether they've actually changed the gameworld for the better. There are so many different things to measure. Hmmmm.

One thing my group can't live without, though, is NPCs with personality who oppose them. Put them up against a faceless force and they'll be slumped with boredom before the end of the session. Throw a couple of named NPCs who are kind of dicks at them, and they'll be like a dog with a bone. No idea how to categorize that.

EDIT - You say it's important to you that your players cause their PCs to adapt and survive and so on - I think that's true for most good DMs. On the flip side, a good DM must adapt to the players he's playing with to give them a challenge that entertains and engages the group he is with, rather than merely defeating them and then being smug about it (not that you are, but I've seen it happen). If he can't, he's a failure, at least temporarily (I've failed before - but you learn and adapt).

 

[Neonchameleon]

This conversation does bring out one memory for me - one thing I found that 4e did better than 3e or Pathfinder, and that was a Monk I played. There is quite a lot of buzz among D&D gamers about the uselessness of the Monk in 3.x; in 4e, my monk was an unholy chainsaw of fury. Did I get hurt? Plenty. Did I go down to superior opponents? Absolutely. But at no time did I feel like I wasn't contributing to the party, or that I had to weigh every combat carefully and count my escape exits with each one just in case - and there's nothing wrong with that.

I've played in a campaign with a 4e monk where I did have to count my escape exits most of the time. We were getting seriously challenged - and due to being a speed demon my monk was the only survivor of the final battle. (After the other PCs went down I said that I was out of there, took a flying leap over the curtain wall, ran, and put on an additional burst of speed).

A group going into territory that is considered challenging for their level might actually be part of a safari but they may sometimes be playing the role of the trophy rather than the hunter. Having that as a posiibility and not knowing when that may be the case, is where the excitement comes from.

This isn't them playing the role of trophy. It's that sometimes the hunted hunt back. Occasionally the hunters get killed.

I don't want to disagree with you 100% because I realize the DM is representing the laws of the universe so knowing those laws of course improves your chances of success. I get the feeling from you though that you mean it in a far more pejorative way. Kind of like the DM has these oddball idiosyncrasies or is predictable or something like that. If I'm reading you wrong please explain.

Saying that all DMs are at least partially predictable and have their own idiosyncracies is not intended to be perjorative. All DMs are people. Tomb of Horrors is a particularly good example - there's a procedural method to get you through the tomb safely, but if you don't know it then the Tomb isboth lethal and paranoia inducing.

I vary things a lot in my dungeons so they are definitely not predictable.

And Agatha Christie varied things a lot in her books. Which didn't prevent them all being Agatha Christie Mysteries with a fairly distinctive style.

Hard is not 3 in 10 chance of death instead of 1 in 10 chance of death.

No. But when your chance of death doesn't go back up it's become easy by those standards - assuming death is how you measure failure.

To use an example, I've already mentioned American Ninja Warrior. The first round qualifier is hard. Hard enough that there is no way I could do it in this lifetime. Hard enough that if an expert slips they tumble out (I believe Brent Steffenson did this year). But it's also of fixed difficulty and there are a lot of difficulty steps between the qualifier and the final rounds. I know my 4e games are harder than average - but I've also quite deliberately had to teach the players in one of my groups to do such things as focus fire. (Burning monsters that take half damage until you douse their flames for a round, and a couple of elemental icicles as weapons are really good for this).

 

[Hussar]

I don't necessarily think that chance of death is an indicator in general of overall difficulty.

If I had to dig a grave in the hot sun it would be hard but I'm certain of success. Now that is a physical challenge I realize but there are mental challenges that are similar.

In my games failure to play well results in death. Over the years, my players have learned to play well. When they go to other campaigns they often think they are easy. When I say hard I mean how much mental effort you exert to succeed.

I'm a programmer by trade and I occasionally encounter a hard problem that taxes my knowledge and creativity. I never in the end fail to solve the problem though. That doesn't mean it wasn't hard.

In my games, characters die on occasion but not frequently. I attribute that more to my players skill than to the easiness of my game.

But, in your own words, there is no chance of failure here. You cannot fail to dig a grave. You apparently have never had a professional challenge that you couldn't overcome. Sure, it might have taken you some time to come to a solution, but, in every case you succeeded.

In a D&D game, I'd pretty much say that this is illusionism. If every problem has a solution, so long as I spend enough time on it, then there is no real challenge. It doesn't matter what decisions you make, because, so long as you keep at it, you'll succeed. This is the definition, to me at least, of wish fulfilment gaming. I cannot fail. There is no failure, according to what you've just said here. Sure, it might take a while to get there, but, the point is, you will "never in the end fail to solve the problem".

I was using lethality as a yardstick because its an easy one. But, since you yourself freely admit that you can never fail, then this is pretty much textbook wish fulfilment play.

I think you've actually proven the opposite of what you set out to show. Your game, by your own description, are wish fulfilment games. Without the possibility of ultimately failing, it's pure wish fulfilment. Decision points mean that you can actually make the wrong decision and ultimately fail to achieve goals. That's the point of that style of play.

 

[Emerikol]

What we can say is, if your players are having a good time, and enjoy the tension that feel, feel like they are working hard, and enjoy that, and so on, then you're DMing them well.

Yes. I agree that hard is relative. When I say hard, I mean two things. I believe hard for the average group of D&D players. So it's objectively hard on some scale like that. I also believe that it is hard for my players. The latter is though all that really matters.

The point is that some groups desire to be challenged in ways that other groups do not. You could substitute player for group in that previous sentence and be right but typically they group up. That is my point. Not everyone wants to be highly challenged. That does not mean they don't have combats where on occasion they might die. Like I've said before, and you agreed, probability of death is not necessarily an indicator of difficulty.

I feel the wish fulfillment crowd want to be heroes. They have a conception of what that is and they want to be that. That is their goal. Their goal is not necessarily to be challenged or hindered from attaining that goal. Whereas other people specifically want the challenge and are giving lip service to the fact they want to be heroes. I hope you can see this distinction. Of course there are degrees of interest in both. Even the player who I identified as a wish fulfiller kind of player would not say he wants everything to be totally easy where you don't even need to roll the dice. He wants to feel of challenge absolutely. He doesn't want real challenge though. Again I hope you see this distinction.

Equally, if you took another group, and just TPK'd them repeatedly, and they had no fun, we could say you were DMing those guys really badly.

There is not doubt that if I had a totally new group I would go easy on them. I would though over time likely lead them into a challenge style game. They'd learn from their mistakes and adjust and eventually be very skilled players. Or they'd dislike the tenor of the game and move on to greener pastures. But sure at first level with totally new players, challenge is very easy to achieve and it doesn't have to be hard at all by the standards of an experienced group. So when it comes to challenge I am agreeing that it is group specific.

It's all relative. Difficulty is certainly relative, and it doesn't matter if "most" groups would steamroller what you're putting out or get steamrollered by it, it matters how the group you're actually DM'ing for reacts.

I agree with this totally. I also believe that you could if you cared and I think we don't establish some objective criteria. Take a thousand groups measure their success levels and time to completion and then determine this adventure was harder or easier. Again I don't think either of us care. I probably shared too much about my own campaign. I'm not advocating for DMs to steam roller their groups. I am advocating that we realize that some groups want to feel like they really spent every ounce of their mental energy figuring out a way to survive the dungeon and others do not. That is the overall point.

But you asked about the tension between "interesting decisions" - perhaps better phrased as "meaningful decisions" or "decisions with consequences" and "Wish Fulfillment", which is perhaps better phrased as "emotionally meaningful success". I think one issue that the more you lean towards aspects like puzzle-solving, resource management, strategy and tactics and so on, which are inevitably going to get pretty metagame-y, the harder it becomes to stay in a strong role-playing, in-character mode. I've particularly seen some of the sort of "fiddly word puzzle"-type stuff push players completely away from their PCs and into an entirely different mode. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's definitely a thing. Whereas the stuff attributed towards the latter state, whatever we're calling it, all tends to support staying in-character.

While I am a strong believer in actor stance roleplaying when it comes to my own enjoyment and immersion, I don't really think that bears on this discussion all that much. This debate is orthogonal to that debate. There is no correlation.

There's also the simple matter of whether you want the game to be dramatic or you want it to be quiet. I mean, you associate "enemies destroyed spectacularly" with the "emotionally meaningful success" mode, but I'd associate it more with the "dramatic" mode. For example, 4E tends to offer strong "meaningful decisions" play in combat, but when a major badguy dies, I'm probably going to make his death spectacular, rather than having him merely slump to the floor or whatever - but that it no way detracts from any "meaningful decisions" made that lead to his death, nor does it counter-indicate them.

I think you are getting off the beaten path here. I'm sure it's that my examples are not great.

I think the challenge for a DM is recognising what players want, how they want to play and so on, and sometimes categorization can help, but I'm not sure this categorization is necessarily helpful in that task. I feel more like Pulpisher was intent on catergorizing for the purpose of excoriation than to be helpful.

I think this whole debate could be about degree of challenge. How hard as in mentally taxing do you want play to be? There are some players that want to be taxed to the utmost because that is what the game is about. Others want a lesser degree of challenge because they primarily derive pleasure from the being their characters rather than facing hard challenges. Does that mean they want no challenge? No. Nobody wants zero challenge or at least almost nobody.

Here are two gaming experiences. They are both hyper extreme to make a point. Please do not take from these examples that I'm saying either approach in D&D would go this far. It's just to help understand the general concept.

The Hard Game
I once played a Ghost Recon game where I literally real time had to crawl across a field pausing as guards passed in the distance until I reached a point where I could use a sniper rifle to take out the enemy. That crawl perhaps took 15 minutes of real time. After I took out that guard I had to crawl some more to get another shot. I had to systematically eliminate guards in a couple different guard towers. It required great care and one wrong mistake meant the enemy was alerted and the game was over. In this version of Ghost Recon, one shot often took you out. It was far closer to real life than most games. It was hard and at times someone watching me might have said it looked tedious. I did enjoy it.

The Easier Game
Call of Duty. I'm a soldier I have a really cool gun and I can run through an enemy position taking out bad guys left and right. Sure I can die if I totally ignore trouble but most of the fun is being this awesome killing machine. Watching those nazi's go down left at right as I blaze my machine gun. I get a thrill from what I am doing even though the challenge is not really there. Even if someone shoots me, I just duck around a corner for a second and I recover. The game is absolutely focused on wish fulfillment. I enjoyed this game too.

Now I like both games. If the easier game is a 1 and the hard game is a 10 on the challenge scale then I prefer a D&D game in the 7 range. I see some people liking D&D in the 3 or 4 range. No way is wrong. What is fun for you is all that really matters. Most game systems can support both styles of play well enough. It's all a DM thing. I think as a DM though it is good advice to identify how much challenge your players want to deal with. I'd never tell them I'm dialing the challenge up or down (challenge for them mind you) because part of the wish fulfillment is the illusion of challenge. Personally I don't want to run a long running campaign in the low challenge way so I seek players of like mind.

 

[Emerikol]

But, in your own words, there is no chance of failure here. You cannot fail to dig a grave. You apparently have never had a professional challenge that you couldn't overcome. Sure, it might have taken you some time to come to a solution, but, in every case you succeeded.

In a D&D game, I'd pretty much say that this is illusionism. If every problem has a solution, so long as I spend enough time on it, then there is no real challenge. It doesn't matter what decisions you make, because, so long as you keep at it, you'll succeed. This is the definition, to me at least, of wish fulfilment gaming. I cannot fail. There is no failure, according to what you've just said here. Sure, it might take a while to get there, but, the point is, you will "never in the end fail to solve the problem".

I was using lethality as a yardstick because its an easy one. But, since you yourself freely admit that you can never fail, then this is pretty much textbook wish fulfilment play.

I think you've actually proven the opposite of what you set out to show. Your game, by your own description, are wish fulfilment games. Without the possibility of ultimately failing, it's pure wish fulfilment. Decision points mean that you can actually make the wrong decision and ultimately fail to achieve goals. That's the point of that style of play.

The assertion was made that you can't have something be hard without a chance of death so I did a reducto ab absurdum argument to show otherwise. I am not saying that my games have 0% chance of death. They definitely have a chance for sure. I'm just saying that the occurrence of death is no indicator of how hard a game is or isn't. I suppose with a large enough control group you might be able to say that as it applies to that entire group.

Think about this... (Now realize when I say hard I mean challenging the players)

Two games.
1. Expert Group (say a 8 out of 10 in skill) is playing a hard dungeon (say a 7 out of 10 in skill)
2. Average group (say a 5 out of 10 in skill) is playing a average dungeon (say a 5 out of 10 in skill)

Now given that state of affairs the dungeon in #1 is still harder even though it is likely more deaths would occur in group #2.

RuinExplorer rightly pointed out that this is irrelevant for this debate so I want belabor it any further because he is right. I just wanted you to realize how I viewed the concept of hard. See my response to him for further discussion about the actual subject.

 

[Hussar]

But, Emerikol - your Ghost Recon example tallies perfectly with what I was talking about for lethality. Why is Ghost Recon hard? Because a single mistake results in total failure. You cannot make any mistakes. Call of Duty is softer and allows for mistakes.

But, that doesn't jive with your point though - that the PC's cannot actually fail. After all, if you are playing a 20 level campaign, where mistakes result in total failure, then the law of averages says that your group has to have total failures often. Even if the chance of total failure is only 10%, because of the amount of play you are talking about, then total failure is still pretty much guaranteed.

My point is, you aren't actually running a Ghost Recon game. You cannot be because you don't fail often enough. In your Ghost Recon play, do you ever fail? Or do you do each mission perfectly the first time, every time? In a video game, you can fail, because all that means is you try again. In an RPG, total failure means that you have totally failed, there are no retries.

If there are retries, then your game isn't actually Ghost Recon but is far closer to Call of Duty.