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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emerikol" data-source="post: 6342618" data-attributes="member: 6698278">Yes.  I agree that hard is relative.  When I say hard, I mean two things.  I believe hard for the average group of D&D players.  So it's objectively hard on some scale like that.   I also believe that it is hard for my players.   The latter is though all that really matters.   The point is that some groups desire to be challenged in ways that other groups do not.  You could substitute player for group in that previous sentence and be right but typically they group up.  That is my point.   Not everyone wants to be highly challenged.  That does not mean they don't have combats where on occasion they might die.  Like I've said before, and you agreed, probability of death is not necessarily an indicator of difficulty.  I feel the wish fulfillment crowd want to be heroes.  They have a conception of what that is and they want to be that.  That is their goal.  Their goal is not necessarily to be challenged or hindered from attaining that goal.  Whereas other people specifically want the challenge and are giving lip service to the fact they want to be heroes.   I hope you can see this distinction.   Of course there are degrees of interest in both.  Even the player who I identified as a wish fulfiller kind of player would not say he wants everything to be totally easy where you don't even need to roll the dice.  He wants to feel of challenge absolutely.  He doesn't want real challenge though.  Again I hope you see this distinction.There is not doubt that if I had a totally new group I would go easy on them.  I would though over time likely lead them into a challenge style game.  They'd learn from their mistakes and adjust and eventually be very skilled players.  Or they'd dislike the tenor of the game and move on to greener pastures.  But sure at first level with totally new players, challenge is very easy to achieve and it doesn't have to be hard at all by the standards of an experienced group.  So when it comes to challenge I am agreeing that it is group specific.  I agree with this totally.  I also believe that you could if you cared and I think we don't establish some objective criteria.  Take a thousand groups measure their success levels and time to completion and then determine this adventure was harder or easier.   Again I don't think either of us care.  I probably shared too much about my own campaign.  I'm not advocating for DMs to steam roller their groups.  I am advocating that we realize that some groups want to feel like they really spent every ounce of their mental energy figuring out a way to survive the dungeon and others do not.   That is the overall point.While I am a strong believer in actor stance roleplaying when it comes to my own enjoyment and immersion, I don't really think that bears on this discussion all that much.  This debate is orthogonal to that debate.  There is no correlation.I think you are getting off the beaten path here.  I'm sure it's that my examples are not great.  I think this whole debate could be about degree of challenge.  How hard as in mentally taxing do you want play to be?  There are some players that want to be taxed to the utmost because that is what the game is about.  Others want a lesser degree of challenge because they primarily derive pleasure from the being their characters rather than facing hard challenges.  Does that mean they want no challenge?  No.  Nobody wants zero challenge or at least almost nobody.  Here are two gaming experiences.  They are both hyper extreme to make a point.  Please do not take from these examples that I'm saying either approach in D&D would go this far.  It's just to help understand the general concept.The Hard GameI once played a Ghost Recon game where I literally real time had to crawl across a field pausing as guards passed in the distance until I reached a point where I could use a sniper rifle to take out the enemy.  That crawl perhaps took 15 minutes of real time.  After I took out that guard I had to crawl some more to get another shot.  I had to systematically eliminate guards in a couple different guard towers.   It required great care and one wrong mistake meant the enemy was alerted and the game was over.  In this version of Ghost Recon, one shot often took you out.  It was far closer to real life than most games.  It was hard and at times someone watching me might have said it looked tedious.  I did enjoy it.  The Easier GameCall of Duty.  I'm a soldier I have a really cool gun and I can run through an enemy position taking out bad guys left and right.  Sure I can die if I totally ignore trouble but most of the fun is being this awesome killing machine.  Watching those nazi's go down left at right as I blaze my machine gun.  I get a thrill from what I am doing even though the challenge is not really there.  Even if someone shoots me, I just duck around a corner for a second and I recover.  The game is absolutely focused on wish fulfillment.  I enjoyed this game too.Now I like both games.  If the easier game is a 1 and the hard game is a 10 on the challenge scale then I prefer a D&D game in the 7 range.  I see some people liking D&D in the 3 or 4 range.   No way is wrong.  What is fun for you is all that really matters.  Most game systems can support both styles of play well enough.  It's all a DM thing.  I think as a DM though it is good advice to identify how much challenge your players want to deal with.  I'd never tell them I'm dialing the challenge up or down (challenge for them mind you) because part of the wish fulfillment is the illusion of challenge.  Personally I don't want to run a long running campaign in the low challenge way so I seek players of like mind.</blockquote>

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