D&D 5E Challenge in 5E

[FrogReaver]

Challenge = Decision Making about 'important' things.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There’s so much to unpack here.

1. Yes challenge is important but so is reward. And any challenges must be adequately rewarded. Many times challenges have only one fail state-total failure. Which means that it’s not really a challenge that anyone would actually engage in if they had any choice.

2. Challenges also do not necessarily mean right now. Things can be challenging over time. That’s the whole point of an adventuring day and game pacing. No single challenge taken in isolation is particularly challenging. It’s the aggregate over time that is challenging.

3. Any challenge with a significant failure chance - say about 25% is pretty much an automatic failure. There’s no point in gaming this because you will lose. The reward for something that challenging will never be enough.

I disagree with 3. How is 25% an automatic failure, especially if failure doesn't mean TPK?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I disagree with 3. How is 25% an automatic failure, especially if failure doesn't mean TPK?

Because that means you fail once or twice per adventuring day, as it currently is. Which seems a bit much. Short life for adventurers.

 

[Quickleaf]

In a recent poll about the top three things people enjoy in playing D&D, challenge received quite a few votes. Challenge was only behind narrative at the top of the list. And since it keeps coming up in various threads, let’s talk about how we define challenge in 5E.

Now, it would be great if people would answer from their own perspective and leave others to answer from theirs and not have a general repeat of how these kinds of threads typically go. If something here makes you mad, just remember it’s an elfgame. If you’re not having fun, stop and go do something else.

For me, the key to challenge is having a risk of failure. The greater the risk of failure, the greater the challenge, and the greater the satisfaction if you succeed.

Now, that risk of failure has to be real. No illusionism, no railroading. And the consequences for failure must follow. No protecting the players from their choices or the consequences thereof. No padding the loss, no repeats, and no take backs. You can try again later when the circumstances change, but you can’t just pound your head against the wall infinitely until you succeed.

If you roll the dice, they have to matter. If the system or the referee make it so you can’t really lose, there’s no challenge.

So how do you define challenge in 5E?

ETA: I should have made it a bit clearer. To me, challenge ≠ combat. Challenges are any obstacles, complications, or barriers to the players’ or PCs’ goals.

The big umbrella definition, for me, of challenge in RPGs is challenging the players.

While "risk of failure" is a necessary part of the equation, IME more is required for a meaningful challenge, and by "meaningful" I mean that it presents more than one obvious quickest path to resolution.

You can have an unlocked door with a discovered poison needle trap, and the rogue player can say "I disarm the trap", throw their dice, if they succeed they disarm, if fail it triggers (or maybe you differentiate normal failure from fails by 5+, but same idea).

But that hardly registers as a challenge. In abstraction, the player saw a triangle shaped hole, saw they had a triangle shaped solution on their sheet, applied it, rolled a die and added a number. No additional thought needed. If this can be considered a challenge, it is the weakest form because it lacks layers of information – and it's that layering which leads to multiple solutions and encourages player creativity.

What I've noticed is that the harder the GM leans into multi-variable / info-layered scenarios, that's when you can have combined/blurred fail+success happening in the same outcome.

For ex, I recently ran an abandoned feast hall (10th level PCs, One D&D Playtest) which had three levels of challenge... (1) First, telepathic whispering seemed to come from 7 mounted monster heads. Brief interaction had an ominous tone. Tremorsense revealed small creatures intermittently in contact with the stone walls (which heads were mounted on). So the first challenge was figuring out "what do we think is happening here?" A PC resolved this by taking the risk to experimentally shoot an arrow into a mounted head, and a dead intellect devourer slumped out of its mouth, leading to intellect devourers squirming out of the other mounted heads.

They succeeded at identifying the challenge (and got a jump on the enemy), but triggered a dangerous combat that was avoidable. Mixed success+failure.

To finish my vignette...

(2) Second, what made this combat scary is that the dungeon already had an intelligence-draining effect (which PCs had become aware of through interaction with dumb-ified dwarven NPCs), and so even failing one save vs the intellect devourers could be devastating. The challenge was not "can we kill them?" (the answer was clearly yes) it was "can we keep them at bay so as to avoid catastrophic consequences for ourselves?" The players accomplished this with a combo of Bardic Inspiration used reactively to turn a failed save into a success, then compulsion (to cluster the intellect devourers) followed by conjure barrage to finish them off. The players had to think up a strategy minimizing their exposure, and combined elements on different character sheets to achieve it. Total success.

(3) Third, this led to the challenge of interpreting what they'd just learned about the intellect devourers wanting bodies as "clothes", the "dwarves killing mother and father", and several dwarven NPCs under charm effects. They've looped back to that original question "what do we think is happening here?" but with more info and on a bigger scale that will influence the approach they choose to finish the dungeon. What they conclude and what they do based on that will determine whether this leads to success, failure, or a mixture.

edit: not putting forward my example as some extraordinarily sophisticated bit of GMing, but it's the most recent example I can recall that speaks to "challenge" as being a close cousin to "info-layered with multiple avenues."

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because that means you fail once or twice per adventuring day, as it currently is. Which seems a bit much. Short life for adventurers.

I honestly have no problem with that, on either side.

 

[Lanefan]

There's a secondary question underlying all this around types and degrees of fail-state consequences.

This is important because, unless the challenges are illusory and the PCs are in fact always going to win no matter what, sooner or later they're gonna fail. That failure can be individual, or as a group, whatever, but it will happen.

So, fail-state consequences it is.

There's two broad types, I think, which I'll label as "mechanical" and "narrative" for lack of better terms. I'm only looking at major consequences here; minor ones such as failing to climb a wall and falling to the bottom are, well, minor.

Mechanical consequences are those that directly and (almost always) immediately impact a character's (or, much less often, a party's) mechanics and abilities. Death, level drain, sensory loss (blindness, deafness, etc.), mobility loss (paralysis, slow, etc.), stat loss, item or magic loss - all of these are mechanical consequences; all featured in older editions, but 5e has either dropped or moved well away from nearly all of them except death.

Narrative consequences are those that affect the ongoing story, either now or later. Their effect isn't always immediate and-or obvious, and if not immediate it's on the DM to ensure they rear their heads at the appropriate moment(s) down the road. Sometimes both the failure and (some of) the consequences are clear - we fail to rescue the kidnapped prince thus no reward for us and the royal family's gonna be mad - while other times it's not - the guard gate is a spy for the local Thieves' guild and unknown to us he's just put us on their 'marks' list.

The beauties of mechanical consequences for me are their a) immediacy, b) clarity, and c) non-negotiability; by the last I mean what happens happens and neither the player nor the DM can legitimately change the result. Further, mechanical consequences can also lead to narrative consequences, where the reverse is rarely the case (e.g. having a vital-to-story item get destroyed or lost both deprives the PCs of the item's usefulness now and means there's gonna be a narrative consequence later when they realize they need it)

Narrative consequences - particularly delayed ones - can IME put much more load on the DM, both to remember to introduce them when appropriate and to somehow ensure their effect doesn't get watered down or overly mitigated in the meantime, even if unintentionally. For example, the gate guard's consequence will be much less if the PCs don't stay in town or (and I've done this in the past!) the DM forgets to have the local Thieves try to rob the PCs that night!

 

[Micah Sweet]

There's a secondary question underlying all this around types and degrees of fail-state consequences.

This is important because, unless the challenges are illusory and the PCs are in fact always going to win no matter what, sooner or later they're gonna fail. That failure can be individual, or as a group, whatever, but it will happen.

So, fail-state consequences it is.

There's two broad types, I think, which I'll label as "mechanical" and "narrative" for lack of better terms. I'm only looking at major consequences here; minor ones such as failing to climb a wall and falling to the bottom are, well, minor.

Mechanical consequences are those that directly and (almost always) immediately impact a character's (or, much less often, a party's) mechanics and abilities. Death, level drain, sensory loss (blindness, deafness, etc.), mobility loss (paralysis, slow, etc.), stat loss, item or magic loss - all of these are mechanical consequences; all featured in older editions, but 5e has either dropped or moved well away from nearly all of them except death.

Narrative consequences are those that affect the ongoing story, either now or later. Their effect isn't always immediate and-or obvious, and if not immediate it's on the DM to ensure they rear their heads at the appropriate moment(s) down the road. Sometimes both the failure and (some of) the consequences are clear - we fail to rescue the kidnapped prince thus no reward for us and the royal family's gonna be mad - while other times it's not - the guard gate is a spy for the local Thieves' guild and unknown to us he's just put us on their 'marks' list.

The beauties of mechanical consequences for me are their a) immediacy, b) clarity, and c) non-negotiability; by the last I mean what happens happens and neither the player nor the DM can legitimately change the result. Further, mechanical consequences can also lead to narrative consequences, where the reverse is rarely the case (e.g. having a vital-to-story item get destroyed or lost both deprives the PCs of the item's usefulness now and means there's gonna be a narrative consequence later when they realize they need it)

Narrative consequences - particularly delayed ones - can IME put much more load on the DM, both to remember to introduce them when appropriate and to somehow ensure their effect doesn't get watered down or overly mitigated in the meantime, even if unintentionally. For example, the gate guard's consequence will be much less if the PCs don't stay in town or (and I've done this in the past!) the DM forgets to have the local Thieves try to rob the PCs that night!

Narrative consequences are also much easier to ignore, weasel your way out of, and forget about in the hurley-burley of an inconsistent gaming schedule.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Narrative consequences are also much easier to ignore, weasel your way out of, and forget about in the hurley-burley of an inconsistent gaming schedule.

I mean, maybe, but it's kind of the DMs job not to drop the ball like that, right? If the DM does, the world is no longer a vibrant living place. It's a bunch of cardboard veneers that are a barely there facimile of a living world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, maybe, but it's kind of the DMs job not to drop the ball like that, right? If the DM does, the world is no longer a vibrant living place. It's a bunch of cardboard veneers that are a barely there facimile of a living world.

Which a lot of games are. You need GM AND player buy-in to do otherwise.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Which a lot of games are. You need GM AND player buy-in to do otherwise.

TBH, I feel like that's mostly on the DM. The players might treat the world like a cardboard veneer, despite the DM presenting a dynamic living world. But it can still be a living world without the players. In that case, it only lives in one mind (the DMs), but it's still alive.