Interesting Decisions vs Wish Fulfillment (from Pulsipher)

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Having played both, I can say that you're confusing two issues, badly.

Ghost Recon is NOT a hard game (assuming the 2001 original). I have played it. It is a METHODICAL game. Follow the method and it is easy.

CoD is NOT a hard game (assuming one of '00s sequels). I have played it. It is a twitch/aim game. If you are good at that, it is easy.

Now, the BASELINE difficulty on CoD in particular IS much lower. But the same isn't true of otherwise-identical games - there are other action-shooters which are super-hard. It's not the gameplay that makes it easy, it's that the basic difficulty is intentionally low for a broad audience. Likewise there are games as methodical as GR but which are pretty easy.

So I think this example serves to illustrate that playstyle isn't difficulty.

 

[Emerikol]

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.

Yes but I didn't fail. I can complete that mission every time now. Why? because I'm skilled. Skill determines death not pure chance. If a new player showed up and tried it then sure he'd die a lot until he learned how to play the game.

I didn't kill my players a lot but I gradually rewarded smart play and as they got better I gradually increased the challenge.

 

[Neonchameleon]

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.

OK.

You are playing D&D.

1: You have Hit Points, meaning you can survive getting hit without even being slowed down.
2: Resurrection magic is a thing in all editions of D&D. Even death doesn't stop you.
3: You have magic at your fingertips for many classes. Reliable and powerful magic with no drawbacks.
4: Unless you're an AD&D Thief, your character is intended to be pretty awesome.

The choice isn't between Ghost Recon and Call of Duty. It's between Call of Duty and Mass Effect. And even on "Nightmare" Mass Effect 3 only pushes over difficulty 2 in a very few scenes. (And Ghost Recon is known to not be that hard - especially because Elite is very little more of a challenge - it's simply that the lowest difficulty setting isn't that easy).

 

[Hussar]

Yes but I didn't fail. I can complete that mission every time now. Why? because I'm skilled. Skill determines death not pure chance. If a new player showed up and tried it then sure he'd die a lot until he learned how to play the game.

I didn't kill my players a lot but I gradually rewarded smart play and as they got better I gradually increased the challenge.

But that only applies if the challenge is the same every time. yes, you can complete that mission every time now. Cool. How many times did you fail before that became true? And, can you complete every single mission every single time? If I gave you a completely new mission, using the same game (I assume it has a level editor, most FpS game do), would you compete it the first time? Unlikely, I think.

Which means that basically, you are playing wish fulfilment games. You are gearing the difficulty to the players, with an eye on the idea that they will always succeed, just like you always succeed in your Ghost Recon mission. There are no actual decision points to be made. Do the same thing every time, and you succeed. Once your players learn your "rules" they succeed every time. They don't have any real decision points - just learn which levers you want pulled and they succeed.

Decision point gaming means that decisions actually matter. It's not about reading the DM or always being able to make the "right" choice. It's about every single choice actually having consequences beyond a binary succeed/fail. In Interesting Decisions play, a decision may advance you towards a goal, or may impede you from achieving that goal but it is up to the players, ultimately, as to whether or not they will achieve success. Success in Interesting Decisions play cannot ever be guaranteed. As soon as success is guaranteed, then it's Wish Fulfilment play because success is a foregone conclusion. You WILL succeed in Wish Fulfilment play.

The thing is, you are conflating play difficulty with the idea of Interesting Decisions. In your view, they are synonymous. A difficult game will always be one with Interesting Decisions. But, your examples disprove your point. In your examples, difficult play actually has no Interesting Decisions since there are only single paths to the goal and all other paths lead to complete failure. Since your games don't end in complete failure they can't actually have any Interesting Decisions. If your games always end in success, then they are Wish Fulfilment by definition. That it takes a while to get there means that you hide the illusion well, but the fact that you ALWAYS get there means that you don't actually have an Interesting Decisions game because it is virtually impossible that a group could always make the right decision every single time. It would be like someone picking up Ghost Recon and succeeding in every single mission on the first try. It's possible, but not very likely.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

(And Ghost Recon is known to not be that hard - especially because Elite is very little more of a challenge - it's simply that the lowest difficulty setting isn't that easy).

Yep and re: GR difficulty, pretty much all "methodical" games are like this. Fr'ex Deus Ex (old or HR) or Dishonored on max difficulty is barely harder than Normal, if you're playing to win/get a good score. It's the nature of methodical games - if one hit or alarm is a lose/serious score drop, there's not much difficulty curve.

 

[Bluenose]

Yep and re: GR difficulty, pretty much all "methodical" games are like this. Fr'ex Deus Ex (old or HR) or Dishonored on max difficulty is barely harder than Normal, if you're playing to win/get a good score. It's the nature of methodical games - if one hit or alarm is a lose/serious score drop, there's not much difficulty curve.

It's also rather rare that you roll a 1 when making your stealth check. There are computer games with that sort of randomness; some of them are great fun. But they're not "skill based" and a lot of players hate them because of that randomness, which is a key part of task resolution in D&D and in nearly all tabletop RPGs.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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.

I think it's fairly obvious that a large part of 'player skill' is how closely the players' ideas of what would be 'clever' matches the DM's ideas in areas where the game doesn't provide clear resolution mechanics. If the players come up with a 'creative use of a spell' or a 'good strategy' and whether it works is a question the rules can't answer, it comes down to whether the players have come up with something the DM will approve of. Predicting or manipulating your DM to get there is certainly a skill.

Another large part of 'player skill' is, obviously, system mastery, for when the game system /does/ apply.

 

[Hussar]

It's also rather rare that you roll a 1 when making your stealth check. There are computer games with that sort of randomness; some of them are great fun. But they're not "skill based" and a lot of players hate them because of that randomness, which is a key part of task resolution in D&D and in nearly all tabletop RPGs.

I think this is a very important point. If success is based heavily on random chance, which DnD is, then skill becomes more about manipulating odds. Sure you can increase your odds but you can rarely guarantee success in a "difficult" game. That's the point of it being difficult.

Which means the pcs should fail more often in a difficult game, regardless of skill. Since you cannot reduce failure chances to zero, you simply will fail due to the law of averages.

Imagine a DnD version of Ghost Recon where your odds of success are random. Maybe guards will spot you ten per cent of the time, randomly. Now it is impossible to beat the level every time.

That's what interesting choice play emphasizes. The fact that you can't really control the variables.

 

[Hussar]

Yknow, reading through Pulsiver's blog I'm struck by the idea of DnD as a Sid Meier game vs DnD as Mass Effect.

Pulsiver's point has nothing to do with difficulty at all. It's about sandbox vs linear.

If you reframe Emerikol's argument that way, it makes a lot more sense. At least to me. He expects pro active players who are going to drive their own destiny whereas his player is looking for a more linear game with clear signposts.

I really think there is a miscommunication between Emerikol and his player.

 

[Iosue]

The original post was trying to figure something out out loud. It was interesting, worth reading, and reaching to something useful. The way CaW/CaS has been used since (right down to I think someone having a sig reading "I like Combat as War") has been not particularly well disguised edition warring.

Then the thing to do is address those edition warring posts when they happen, not denigrate Daztur's original post, as Tony did.

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.

I'm not quite following how the rest of this paragraph follows from the first sentence.

But the math doesn't add up. If you have a truly hard game, then there has to be a significant chance of failure. Combat or non-combat, it doesn't matter. If you have a 50:50 chance of success, then you will fail half the time. If the players are succeeding virtually all the time, then your game isn't actually that hard. It can't be. If it was truly hard, then people would fail. If it's possible to change the odds such that the party constantly (or nearly constantly) succeeds, then it's not really that hard. It might be a challenge to find how to change the odds, but, the fact that the odds can be changed belies the difficulty.

I believe this is a fallacy. Let us look at maternal mortality in childbirth. Here in Japan, the maternal mortality rate is 6 per 100,000 live births. One might look at this number and say, "Childbirth isn't very hard or dangerous." But in actuality, within the lifetime of some elderly people, and indeed in other parts of the world, childbirth is the number one cause of death for women. It is extremely dangerous. This inherent danger is not absent in Japan, it is only mitigated through a very large number of interventions that must be followed for each pregnancy. Emerikol's players mitigate the lethality of his campaign through constant interventions, but that doesn't remove the danger itself. Mitigating that danger is in fact the very game itself.

Or to put it another way, someone who has played Contra enough to beat it without the Konami code can make the game look very easy. To them, in fact, it may be easy. That doesn't change its inherent difficulty.

Now, mitigating the difficulty of Emerikol's game may rely on DM-negotiation and/or in-game actions that follow conventions particular to his table, but I submit that's somewhat orthogonal to the issue of difficulty.