Game Fundamentals - The Illusion of Accomplishment

[Garthanos]

The sales people at WotC have to try and identify trends and play by them, even if they are seemingly weak, because a weak trend still gives better direction than no trend analysis at all.

Then lets look at a trend test ... There were roleplaying games and many of them even fairly early on that featured hardier more competent begining characters with abilities like magic controlled by mana points or similar allowing frequent use. hmmmmm? I don't even think Celebrim is some insulated youth who thinks there weren't do you?

It tells me we need to look to more normal motivations for game features that broadly implemented. Real life people are complicated when analyzing people in GURPS for instance if you included every single skill a real person has it gets to be astounding.

Desire for detailed characters seems to also drive wanting them to be hardier, if you spend more time and effort making them then you expect them to be useful and interesting for a longer game time...

 

[Garthanos]

A good read on this topic: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted | Cracked.com

I didnt follow the link... but have you heard the reason why Freud is rejected by modern psychology almost every where ... I hear it was two reasons the first isnt important ( because he just referbished a really old pop model... of mind body and soul with different names) ... the second reason is because he based everything on self avowed crazy french men generalizing and convincing himself it applied to normal folk pretty much without corroboration.

 

[Garthanos]

Press the button, get a food pellet.

Comparing people who like things different than you do.. to rats pushing buttons for feed is so gracious I cant believe it and yes that is exactly the right analogy for this thread.

 

[SKyOdin]

A good read on this topic: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted | Cracked.com

I wouldn't call that a good read. Most of it is no different than the arm-chair psychology going on in this thread. The people at that site aren't professional psychologists, they are sensationalistic journalists. Most of that article has logical holes you can drive a truck through. It is also primarily talking about MMO design, which is a fair bit different beast than most other games or tabletop RPGs. Furthermore, the phenomena that article describes, and the limited psychological evidence it draws upon, have nothing to do with Celebrim's "ego-gamers are averse to failure" theory.

 

[Hussar]

I've been mulling this one over for a bit.

I think there's an element missing from Celebrim's analysis and that's the presumed campaign length that has become fairly codified into D&D design. The market research leading up to 3e showed that (of those that were queried) a campaign lasts about a year, year and a half on average. Now, remember, this was of 2e players, primarily. There's a quote floating around here somewhere from Gygax that stated something to the fact that 10 levels should take about a year of sessions (or so, give or take), which would put a "campaign" length at around the same ball park for earlier editions.

3e let that length strongly influence their design. When you presume that a campaign will be about a year and a half, that's about 80 sessions (to pick and easy number, pick another, probably between 60 and 100 if it makes you feel better). Once you make that decision AND you decide that within an average campaign, an average group should be able to hit the entire game, that gives you your advancement rate.

In 3e, that means you should bump about every four sessions. Probably a bit quicker. In 4e, that means you should bump better than every three sessions.

Is this catering to a certain kind of gamer, or is it recognizing the realities of the player base and designing to that reality? 1e didn't really have a presumed campaign length and, I think, for most gamers, a large chunk of the rules when unused. How many eighth level spells did you actually cast in 1e after all?

Once you make those two decisions - that a campaign will last about X number of sessions, and within those sessions, the players should have the opportunity to experience the entire game - you get your rate of reward.

 

[Celebrim]

I think there's an element missing from Celebrim's analysis and that's the presumed campaign length that has become fairly codified into D&D design...

...Is this catering to a certain kind of gamer, or is it recognizing the realities of the player base and designing to that reality? 1e didn't really have a presumed campaign length and, I think, for most gamers, a large chunk of the rules when unused. How many eighth level spells did you actually cast in 1e after all?

Once you make those two decisions - that a campaign will last about X number of sessions, and within those sessions, the players should have the opportunity to experience the entire game - you get your rate of reward.

That's an interesting set of thoughts. The longest campaign I was in went 4 or 5 years, and probably 120 sessions over that period (total play around 600 hours). It went on for a bit after I left it, but when I left the players were 12th-13th level (or equivalent multiclassing). Now that you mention it, I've never cast an 8th level spell in 1e, and maybe not even as the DM running an NPC. I do remember casting 'Reverse Gravity' as a player, and few other similar spells, but those are I think 7th level.

When I started gaming, the default assumption was that all play was inherently open ended. You might arbitrarily pick a place to stop, but there was no end. The 1e AD&D character progression tables implied they didn't stop anywhere, and that the same rules set would extend out infinitely. The 1e AD&D M-U table ended at something like 26th level or some such, but like every other table it carried instructions for going on. There was no assumption you'd reach 'the end'. In a way, D&D seems to me almost to have been the 'new games' version of the war game - open ended, cooperative, inclusive, and governed by a certain spirit of play (most manifestedly by the inclusion of 'rule zero', giving the referee the right to change the rules in the middle of play).

As a player, it never occured to me that I was missing out on something by not having a 18th level M-U who could cast 'wish' and 'meteor swarm'. Name level PC's were fantastically powerful people capable of overcoming many challenges on there own, and in cooperation could dominate just about anything in the game.

I'd be interested in knowing where the shift in expectations came from, or whether I was just unusual in not feeling cheated by not getting to be umpteenth level. If there was a shift in expectations, the immediate - but perhaps incorrect - assumption I want to leap to is that this comes back into D&D from computer games, which, by necessity must be closed ended and which get nothing from offering content which is not directly experienced.

 

[Doug McCrae]

If there was a shift in expectations, the immediate - but perhaps incorrect - assumption I want to leap to is that this comes back into D&D from computer games, which, by necessity must be closed ended and which get nothing from offering content which is not directly experienced.

Most computer games do have a definite ending but MMOs, such as World of Warcraft, don't. Blizzard will keep producing new content for WoW, and increasing the maximum level, for as long as people keep paying.

Regarding early D&D, you're right to say that there's a lot of evidence that it's intended to be open-ended - very high level modules such as Isle of the Ape, open-ended charts (+3hp/lvl etc), the fact that Gary himself had PCs in the teens and so forth. But there are a few indicators that one is supposed to stop at name level. The OD&D tables only go up to 10th level for fighting men and clerics (16 for wizards, weirdly) and there's no indication that a PC can keep going beyond that. (Hit dice relative to level are much wonkier in OD&D than in AD&D so there's no easy way to extrapolate levelling.) These limits were increased in Supplement I, Greyhawk. Also, name level is when a PC 'settles down' in his stronghold. Another factor are the level limits for demi-humans, which were increased in Unearthed Arcana.

In fact the idea of where the limit is probably changed quite a bit in D&D's first ten years, as it became apparent that the hobby was going to stick around. People just wouldn't have looked that far ahead in 1974.

 

[Steel_Wind]

There's a quote floating around here somewhere from Gygax that stated something to the fact that 10 levels should take about a year of sessions (or so, give or take), which would put a "campaign" length at around the same ball park for earlier editions.

Correct, but misleading.

What changed from between 1st ed ca. 1978-79 and 3.x ca. 2001 was not the "length" of the intended campaign in terms of the overall time of 12-18 months, but the frequency of sessions within that time span.

What changed in that 20+ years? Simple: the core audience of the players got older - a lot older - and we no longer had time to play 2, 3, or four times a week. Responsibilities: jobs, wives and families interceded. Many people were now getting in one game a week - and still many others a game every other weekend, or less than that.

So that was the main change in 3.xx and the experience point rules. The number of campaign sessions that would be required to level a character was deliberately and significantly reduced in the XP design of 3.xx. 1st ed experience point system was aimed at slowing down level advancement - whereas 3.xx was aimed at speeding it up. Monte Cook wrote about this change and why it was done after the release of 3.xx.

To suggest the average length of a campaign was about the same in 3.xx as it was in 1st or 2d ed is only superficially accurate. Under the hood - the XP reward crunch underwent a HUGE and deliberate change in the XP reward system, brought about largely by the aging of the core audience of the game. The change was not a consequence of providing more and more doggie treats to the players - but in providing them often enough, given the decreasing # of game sessions most players were spending playing their characters during the course of a campaign and the reduction in frequency of actual game sessions.

 

[pemerton]

I'm merely saying that depending on the desired type and speed of reward feedback, a computer game is a far more easily accessible, instantaneous, and compelling way to get that type of reward feedback than a pen-and-paper RPG is.

And Celebrim's point is that pen-and-paper RPGs often run into trouble when they try to duplicate that type of reward feedback in the same manner, frequency, and consistency as a computer RPG does. It's a hell of a lot harder for a pen-and-paper RPG to produce those levels of short-cycle reward feedback than it is for a computer game to do so.

Awesomeapocalypse has shown that this just isn't true - enjoyable face-to-face RPGs give immediate social and story rewards on a more-or-less continuous basis.

Mmm. I actually wonder about that. In a face-to-face game, a reward can be instant, and can actually precede the success(!!) (or lack of success).

In specific, I'm thinking about "get-more-dice" systems like Exalted's stunts, or "get-more-resource" systems like WFRP 3e's group token pool. Using these systems, the DM can reward you for a creative solution many times over the course of a session.

Good point about options for mechanical rewards. But I think awesomeapocalypse's point about social rewards is a deeper one. In a face-to-face RPG, I think the social rewards are probably the deeper source of player gratification.

Once you make those two decisions - that a campaign will last about X number of sessions, and within those sessions, the players should have the opportunity to experience the entire game - you get your rate of reward.

Lke Nifft, you're talking about the mechanical reward of XP/character development. This is one interesting aspect of the game, but not the crucial one (and in any event hard to compare between more modern games, where it tends to be built into the character development rules, and a game like AD&D where character development depends less on levelling and more on gaining access to magic items, castles etc - it seems plausible to me that players in traditional AD&D games get funky new magic items at something like the same rate that players in a 4e game get access to new powers).

I think awesomeapocalypse has identified the social rewards as the most fundamental, and the rate of delivery of these has not changed.

Note its possible to have your character be in a disabled state without being as a player disabled(lacking choices) for instance via meta tools the player may have a choice to play an Action Point or Karma/Fate point to influence the action. They might be able to spend it to improve there characters recovery or influence the action via luck so that an ally can safely reach them or similar things.

Agreed. It is a mistake to assume that adversity for the PC has to be correlated with adversity - as opposed to demanding gameplay - for the player. And once there is the demanding gameplay, there is the opportunity for social rewards . . .

 

[Hussar]

/snip

As a player, it never occured to me that I was missing out on something by not having a 18th level M-U who could cast 'wish' and 'meteor swarm'. Name level PC's were fantastically powerful people capable of overcoming many challenges on there own, and in cooperation could dominate just about anything in the game.

I'd be interested in knowing where the shift in expectations came from, or whether I was just unusual in not feeling cheated by not getting to be umpteenth level. If there was a shift in expectations, the immediate - but perhaps incorrect - assumption I want to leap to is that this comes back into D&D from computer games, which, by necessity must be closed ended and which get nothing from offering content which is not directly experienced.

Well, I know that I always WANTED to play those high level things, but, it just never happened. I'll agree that I probably didn't feel cheated, but, when it was pointed out to me that I probably only used about 2/3 of the rule set, it did kinda "click" with me when 3e was released.

3e made it pretty explicit that the entire rule set was meant to be used.

Steel Wind - your assumption that the player base has aged considerably isn't really supportable. For one, the readership of Dragon, for example, remained about 20ish for more than a few reader polls, including two done by Paizo. The average age of a gamer isn't likely all that much different than it was twenty years ago.

Although, you'd think, if hte player base was much older than before, that more open ended campaigns would be the norm since isn't it generally thought that younger people lack the stability and attention span?