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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 8836281" data-attributes="member: 20323">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."</blockquote>

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