D&D 5E Defining fun

[delericho]

Getting a bit deeper into root causes, would you say that it was the failure itself that made things not fun, the relative time it took to resolve a combat that you substantially failed in, or both that was the main cause of a fun deficit?

I think it was a combination of three things:

- The consecutive failures. Missing one roll was a non-issue, missing two was amusing. But after that it became increasingly annoying, as round after round I simply could not hit a damn thing.

- The nature of the failures. Again, had it been a bunch of at-will powers that had failed, that would have been less of an issue. But because it was all my best abilities that missed, it meant that when I finally managed to score a hit, that sucked too.

- And, yes, the duration of the combat. IIRC, that encounter took about an hour, out of a five-hour session. So it was a pretty hefty investment of time for a total lack of fun.

But, oh well. It was only one encounter out of several, and one session out of many, so I'm not too upset.

 

[jodyjohnson]

Asked and answered.

http://angrydm.com/2014/01/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/

This or a variation of this should be something each player evaluates at the beginning of a campaign. The likelihood of 'fun' occurring is so much higher if the DM and player know what they actually find fun.

Kind of like the 'Gamer personality type' survey.

They could almost have you do the survey and then tell you what options or modules you should use based on the results.

 

[Mistwell]

For me, fun is just hanging out with my friends playing an RPG. That's enough of a threshold. It can even be my least favorite RPG.

Of the six people I routinely play with, one of them gets discouraged when he feels like his character is not making much of a difference in an encounter.

Part of that problem is right now the game is a form of escapism from a difficult time for this player. He works all day on a hard newer job, he has few friends near where he lives (which he moved to relatively recently, away from his lifelong friends), and then in the evenings he is taking care of a newborn who is fussy lately. Taking care of a newborn in the best of times is difficult, and it's even more so when they're teething or sick. Bottom line, his life is a bit rough and he uses D&D online with his friends as a form of brief escapism, playing the role of this hero doing good and making things happen in a fantasy world.

So in those brief breaks when he gets to play and engage in that escapism, he wants to feel like he's making a meaningful impact on what's going on. If he's going to escape into the role of a hero doing good - he wants his hero to be heroic and actually doing the good.

So if he just wiffs multiple times in a row, or if his character is paralyzed for an entire battle, I can hear him getting discouraged. To him, the little time he had to try and escape into the fantasy of the game left him as frustrated as real life.

That issue wasn't as prominent for that player when we were playing live, and he didn't have a newborn. But right now, it's having an impact. So it might be in his best interest to play a character that is more likely to have an impact on the encounter throughout the encounter. Even if that means his average damage goes down, or his defense goes down, I think he'd be happier if he felt like his character was "doing something" every round.

 

[Jacob Marley]

Alexis over at The Tao of D&D had a couple of interesting posts about 'fun' last December. (I won't link to those posts as his choice of language often runs afoul of this board's rules. Anyone who is interested can seek the posts out - December 6, 2013 and December 9, 2013.)

I have been a D&D player for over twenty-three years, a M:tG player for over twenty years, and a board game player for over fifteen years. I would hesitate before referring to much of that time as being 'fun.' A better description would be: periods of frustration punctuated by points of satisfaction.

On Sunday I will be getting together with some friends for board games. Undoubtedly, J will suggest we play Through the Desert. An observer will see five guys sitting around a table, sighing heavily as we take turns placing camels on the board. It will be a frustrating experience! At the end of the game we will all sit back, satisfied with our decision-making. We will all enjoy the mental challenge. None of us will have fun. We will play again.

 

[Derren]

You can't simply ask "What is fun". The answers to this question are limitless and knowing them all serves no purpose.

The question you need to ask when designing a game is "What kind of fun should the game support".

 

[Lanefan]

Hmmm...where to start?

For my part, I take it as a simple fact of life that there's going to be times where my character is pretty much useless be it due to death, bad rolls, not being in the right place, whatever; as a counter I also assume there's going to be times when that same character is the only reason we succeed.

In other words, everyone gets a chance to be special now and then; and if everyone's special all the time then nobody's special at all.

The bad-rolls-in-combat one is also really easy to overcome in that OK, you're not doing actual damage to the enemy but you can still be taunting them, blocking them, deflecting swings that would slay others, etc. There's more to combat than simple damage output - or there should be.

I'm also a really big advocate of playing more than one character at a time - that way if one of them gets one shotted in the first round you're not completely done for the combat. It can also happen on an adventure-level scale: sometimes a particular adventure or mission just doesn't suit a character's abilities - Globbo the PlateMail Tank in a stealth-based infiltration mission, for example; or an Illusionist in the field against waves of brainless undead - and again it's useful to have a second character along (preferably with different abilities).

Fun, though, most often comes from things in the game that do not involve dice. As others upthread have already mentioned, much of the fun comes from the sheer entertainment brought by the DM and the other players, and in trying to give the same right back to them; from putting ridiculous characters in impossible situations and seeing what happens next; and from getting out of reality for a while.

Lan-"without surrounding darkness, there'd be no bright stars - Ric Ocasek"-efan

 

[ExploderWizard]

You can't simply ask "What is fun". The answers to this question are limitless and knowing them all serves no purpose.

The question you need to ask when designing a game is "What kind of fun should the game support".

Things get a bit more basic than that. The first question is actually: "Do you find actually playing a game fun?" Once you have a concensus on that issue then you know whether to bother designing a game at all. If the overwhelming response seems to be " I like games and playing them except when I lose then they suck" then you have an answer, which is to produce something that provides a game-like experience without actually being a game.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Things get a bit more basic than that. The first question is actually: "Do you find actually playing a game fun?" Once you have a concensus on that issue then you know whether to bother designing a game at all. If the overwhelming response seems to be " I like games and playing them except when I lose then they suck" then you have an answer, which is to produce something that provides a game-like experience without actually being a game.

This made me think of another aspect of fun vs. unfun: the concept of Misery Loves Company.

Back to boardgames for a second, co-operative boardgames have been a big success lately. People enjoy winning and losing together. In co-op games, everyone wins or everyone loses together, and losing can actually be a lot of fun because you all go down together. In team based games, like group sports, you have the commiseration of your teammates to join you in any losses you might have.

RPGs can share much the same qualities. They're naturally co-operative, but many people draw fun from participating on a more or less equal level with everyone else. Back to team sports, nobody wants to be the guy batting .100 while everybody else is batting .500. Not only do you feel that you're dragging the team down, but you feel worse about your own ability than if everyone were at your own level. This gets into optimization, random ability score generation, and a slew of other factors that people think of as "fun" or "not fun" based on their own experiences roleplaying.

 

[Derren]

Things get a bit more basic than that. The first question is actually: "Do you find actually playing a game fun?" Once you have a concensus on that issue then you know whether to bother designing a game at all. If the overwhelming response seems to be " I like games and playing them except when I lose then they suck" then you have an answer, which is to produce something that provides a game-like experience without actually being a game.

But for every "losing sucks" answer you will get a "losing is fun" answer (see Dwarf Fortress players). So in the end it still comes down to "do you want to make a game for the people who like losing or dislike losing"? Of course in reality there will not be a 50/50 split so economic reasons do influence you in a certain direction.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=72717]Exploder Wizard[/MENTION]

So we have a two-weapon fighter in our game who rolls lots of d20's each session. One session, I kid you not, he had five natural 1's.

I started adlibbing these increasingly hilarious mishaps that hat plagued him with swords getting stuck in doors, jammed in his dwarven ally's shield, flying free of his grasp, etc. Obviously he'd much rather be hitting but the dynamic critical misses at least made it fun on some level. But it got me thinking about those combats where a player misses five times in a row even without a critical miss.

What I came to is that the "you miss, next..." style of play, whether it's due to old habits or always exceedingly long combats, is less fun for me and my group than:

(a) never missing (or at least nearly always hitting)
(b) having interesting complications happen on a miss

I think this has a lot to do with play style. In my group about half the players will describe what they're doing in detail while the other half will say "I'm using ability X." For those who do invest in describing their PC's actions, having the whims of a d20 determine whether or not something happens from that description can feel less fun than it would have for a player who just said "I'm using ability X."

So here's my radical opinion...Every PC ability in the game should have one of the following:

• it automatically hits, but is mitigated by a saving throw.
• whenever you miss you gain an attack bonus and the potential damage increases.
• whenever you miss with the ability it has a specific effect that occurs and the ability explains what that looks like in the narrative.
• or go the Dungeon World route and give the DM "moves" to make on a miss