In light of my gloom ridden post above – believe it or not, I do have an idea or 2, with varying levels of feasibility.
1) Design the entire game around failure. Unlock content rather than prohibit it should you fail a skill check or lose a fight. Make success satisfying (“I overcame this challenged, YAY!” + Loot), and failure exciting (“You lost 2 party members and ran away, now a whole story chain has opened up to save them from something. You have 12 hours.”). This would probably mean 2 things: Combat would have to be rarer and more deadly, and the story/plot would have to be incredibly complex to chain, narratively, lots of success and failure possibilities together and make both equally fun to play.
2) Make the players control the bad guys AND the good guys. How you’d do it well, I have no idea, but you’d have to do it in such a way that the player can’t cheat, and there is some sort of satisfaction in playing the bad guy well. What this ‘might’ do (I’m not a psychologist) is make the feeling of rolling badly a lot both a good and bad thing in equal measure. It’s much harder to get frustrated with the feedback loop of roughly even probability when you feel both happy and sad with any outcome, depending on the context (Rolling for a hero/monster). This would, I suspect, take a lot of testing and innovation to get right.
3) Increase the pace drastically. There is a 4th way other than Real Time, Active Pause, and Turn Based – FFVIII’s Active Time Bar. In D&D parlance, this is akin to saying “You have 30 seconds to take your turn, after than you start slipping down the initiative order”. This is a sort of mash-up of the two solutions by giving a player time to plan, but moving them quickly onto the next action if they fail. Deadlines force people to reassess the measure of success and failure, this might just work….again though, you’d need a lot of testing to get the balance.
4) Trick the player into thinking what they are experiencing (the high-ish probability of failure) isn’t anything to do with probability and is, in itself, a measure of skill. Dark Souls is Effing Hard, but hardly anyone says it’s unfair. Give me a probability engine and a quiet room, I’ll have the most rational mathematician screaming foul play in under an hour trying to play a game of chance. If you can convince the player somehow that rolling a d20 is exactly like a high precision fighting game, you might make the hit and miss mechanic something satisfying, rather than a probability trip-hazard.
So just some ideas here – and if you’re wondering what the bejesus I’m going on about in point 4, I have an example of how that would work from when I was thinking about creating a dungeon crawling video game in Unity, and how I’d port my own homebrew combat system into it.
1) Design the entire game around failure. Unlock content rather than prohibit it should you fail a skill check or lose a fight. Make success satisfying (“I overcame this challenged, YAY!” + Loot), and failure exciting (“You lost 2 party members and ran away, now a whole story chain has opened up to save them from something. You have 12 hours.”). This would probably mean 2 things: Combat would have to be rarer and more deadly, and the story/plot would have to be incredibly complex to chain, narratively, lots of success and failure possibilities together and make both equally fun to play.
2) Make the players control the bad guys AND the good guys. How you’d do it well, I have no idea, but you’d have to do it in such a way that the player can’t cheat, and there is some sort of satisfaction in playing the bad guy well. What this ‘might’ do (I’m not a psychologist) is make the feeling of rolling badly a lot both a good and bad thing in equal measure. It’s much harder to get frustrated with the feedback loop of roughly even probability when you feel both happy and sad with any outcome, depending on the context (Rolling for a hero/monster). This would, I suspect, take a lot of testing and innovation to get right.
3) Increase the pace drastically. There is a 4th way other than Real Time, Active Pause, and Turn Based – FFVIII’s Active Time Bar. In D&D parlance, this is akin to saying “You have 30 seconds to take your turn, after than you start slipping down the initiative order”. This is a sort of mash-up of the two solutions by giving a player time to plan, but moving them quickly onto the next action if they fail. Deadlines force people to reassess the measure of success and failure, this might just work….again though, you’d need a lot of testing to get the balance.
4) Trick the player into thinking what they are experiencing (the high-ish probability of failure) isn’t anything to do with probability and is, in itself, a measure of skill. Dark Souls is Effing Hard, but hardly anyone says it’s unfair. Give me a probability engine and a quiet room, I’ll have the most rational mathematician screaming foul play in under an hour trying to play a game of chance. If you can convince the player somehow that rolling a d20 is exactly like a high precision fighting game, you might make the hit and miss mechanic something satisfying, rather than a probability trip-hazard.
So just some ideas here – and if you’re wondering what the bejesus I’m going on about in point 4, I have an example of how that would work from when I was thinking about creating a dungeon crawling video game in Unity, and how I’d port my own homebrew combat system into it.