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.
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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.
Here are some phrases which, for message board purposes, can be treated as synonymous: "is hard"; "is a challenge"; "is difficult".
Relying on that synonymy, I now restate the quote:
If you have a truly hard game, then there has to be a significant chance of failure. If it's possible to change the ods, then it's not really that hard. It might be hard to find how to change the odds, but the fact that the odds can be changed belies the hardness.
I hope that this restatement reveals what has gone wrong: if it is
hard to change the odds, then in fact the game was
hard, even if the upshot is that the odds were changed and hence the final, modified, risk of failure was low.
[MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION] gave work examples; I can give some too. When I have to get something written by a deadline, I rarely fail - writing to a deadline is part of my job. But that doesn't mean it can't be hard - it's just that I put in the effort, an am quite good at it. You might retort, "OK, then, it's not hard for you" - but now we're just playing with ambiguities in the meaning of "hard. Eg it's not hard in the sense that I'm likely to fail, but it certainly is hard in the sense that I might be exhausted by the end of it.
If lethality can be mitigated by the players of the game to the point where it becomes extremely rare, then the game is not terribly lethal in the first place.
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.
I think this is obviously untrue. I mean, every sudoku or crossword has a solution, but that doesn't mean that no puzzle of that sort is ever a real challenge. It's a long time since I took a maths or logic exam, but every question on those exams had a solution too, a solution that I was in principle capable of identifying and applying. It doesn't mean that none of them was hard.
Or to give a real-world example: the threat to mercant shipping of submarine warfare was able to be mitigated via the convoy system, plus other innovations in naval practices and technology. That doesn't mean that the threat posed by submarines was an illusion!
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.
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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 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.
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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.
This makes sense to me.
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.
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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.
So does this.
I submit that difficulty is orthogonal to the concept of the two outlined styles of play. Difficulty isn't the issue. The issue is sandbox vs linear.
Pulsiver's point has nothing to do with difficulty at all. It's about sandbox vs linear.
I don't quite see it that way. "Linear vs open world" is actually mentioned as a separate way to look at design. He refers to "wish fulfillment" as "having an experience". The experience doesn't have to be linear, it merely has to be foregrounded to a greater degree than choices.
As I posted a way upthread, I agree that it's not about difficulty. Nor is it about linear/sandbox. It's about "choice" vs "experience". In RPGing, the examplar of "wish fulfillent" is not really what Emerikol pulled out in the OP. It's first person immersive RPing. I think of CoC as the poster-child for this, but I think a lot of the more "avant garde" 2nd ed stuff (Ravenloft, Planescape) was intended to be played this way too.
What I'm getting at is that the difference between these two types of games is not really about the associated fiction of the game moves. That's a red herring I think. It's about how transparent the consequences are for the decisions players make.
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A game with less predictable consequences tends to snowball into dramatic showdowns, like scoring chances in soccer, showdowns in poker, or save-or-dies in D&D. Some people really like this, and some people deride this as 20 minutes of fun in 4 hours, which I can understand.
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In CaS game you can play in more of a Wish Fulfillment mindset because you're not risking as much at each decision. You can take plays off to goof around, as it were. In a CaW there's a lot more pressure to be in win-at-all-costs mode all the time, because you don't want to be the person who drops the ball when it turns out that that decision was actually extremely important.
I like your analysis. I don't know that I agree with the connection to WF, though - goofing off isn't necessarily about "having an experience". I think it can often be about "authorship", about achieving some communicative effect in the real world. (Eg making a point about your PC, or about someone else's, or making a point about what is at stake.)