Once More, With Feeling

Why do you play RPGs?

Okay, okay, to have fun, yes, of course.

But Call of Cthulu plays differently than 1e AD&D, which plays differently than Feng Shui, and someone might love all those games on different nights. Someone might also really not like ANY of those games and might prefer Dogs in the Vineyard or Primetime Adventures or 4e D&D. Whether we each individually like or dislike a particular game or system, we generally allow for the possibility that all are, if not fun for us, then somehow, at least for other people, "fun".

But what does that mean to you? What kind of fun do you want out of playing an RPG? Why does one game give you that fun and another stop your fun dead in its tracks or not give you as much fun? And why is that different for you than it is for someone else? How can one mechanic create fun in one person and obliterate it in another?

Big questions, right?

Well, let’s break it down, then.

I WANT TO KNOW WHAT FUN MEANS

We're gonna start broand and narrow our field. A broad way to think about "fun" is as a pleasurable experience. This encompasses an immeasurably vast diversity of activities, but is also excludes a similar vastness: fun is not an unpleasant experience. When we enjoy ourselves, we are having fun, when we don’t, we’re not. Being force-fed habaneros by your middle-school crush while fire ants nibble your soft parts? NOT FUN. Playing an RPG? For most people reading this article: absolutely fun.

But there we get into some of the subjectivity of fun. Playing an RPG isn’t fun for many people – it’s just not something that is a pleasurable experience for them. Additionally, some things that you’d think are unpleasant are VERY fun, at least for someone. Habaneros are delightful to the right person in the right dish. The exact same situation might be both a lot of fun, and no fun at all, depending on the person: a roller coaster ride that is exhilarating for Sandy might make Billy miserable. A horror movie where Billy is screeching and flinching might make just make Sandy uncomfortable. And the comedian that Amos thinks is hilarious is something that neither of them quite get.

We also can see that fun varies between people, but it also varies within the person. If you’re a person who enjoys roller coasters and also enjoys BBQ’s with your friends, it’s easy to see that the kind of fun is different between the two activities. In the one case, you flirt with death and scare yourself silly. In the other, you’re chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool. If you’re not that person, I imagine it’s not hard to relate: the things you enjoy doing you often enjoy in different ways. When you’re playing an RPG, it’s not the same kind of fun you get from roughhousing with your kids or watching the big game.

All design is local, right?

This is more than just blindingly obvious, though. If we could find out what the differences are between Sandy and Billy and Amos, and the actual differences between BBQ's and roller coasters, we could start getting at a useful way to look at the kinds of fun -- and the kinds of games -- we engage in. If we could find out why and in what ways these people have different preferences, we can make games and play games that target those preferences much more efficiently.

Fortunately, we do have a useful way to talk about these differences.

YOU’RE LESS COMPLEX THAN YOU THINK

We can talk about these activities as all "fun," but there is a more precise way to talk about them, too. We know roller coasters make us feel exhilaration, fear, dread, uncertainty. We know hanging out with our friends at a BBQ makes us feel warm, loved, at ease. We can talk about fun more directly by talking about how these experiences make us feel. For that, we're bringing in a psychologist.

Paul Ekman has done perhaps the most systematic and convincing survey of human emotions on earth, and his research is a good place to start on it. We usually think about emotions as complicated, vague things, but Ekman has applied a scientist’s rigor to this vague area and has codified 17 “basic emotions,” and that gives us a way to discuss the kinds of fun we are having in more concrete terms. We can say that roller coasters give us fear, surprise, and excitement. We can say that a fun BBQ gives us happiness, contentment, and amusement.

These are not just words for feelings. They are words for reactions. So we probably wouldn't say that we like roller coasters because they give us satisfaction or disgust or contentment, or say that we like BBQs because they give us fear or excitement or surprise. Yeah, you can derive satisfaction from a roller coaster (having successfully confronted your fears!) or surprise from a BBQ (Wow, this is better than usual!), but that’s not the reason we seek those activities out – that’s part of the fun we have, but it’s not the main kind of fun we’re seeking.

For Ekman, emotions are discrete, measurable, and psychologically distinct. That means that we can’t be both contented and excited at the same time: the mind and body are processing one emotion, or the other, and won’t do both at once. Emotions can blend and flow and switch, but they aren’t simultaneous. You might feel contentment as your roller coaster is coming to a stop, for instance, but you aren’t feeling that when your roller coaster is plummeting 80 feet and your stomach is in your throat. You might feel excitement when play against your friends in a game of basketball, but you aren’t feeling that when you’re not taking the rock to the rim in a furious charge.

There’s a biological basis for this according to Ekman – emotions serve an evolutionary purpose at their core, giving the creature experiencing them a sort of kit of immediate, unconscious responses that it can instantly and rapidly act on, given certain circumstances. You can think of excitement and contentment as filling different biological purposes: excitement leads to the biologically advantageous position of seeking out novelty and of challenging barriers. Contentment, on the other hand, can help form social bonds and reduce stress levels. If one could feel excitement and contentment simultaneously, that would be one hell of a confusing dinner party moment.

IN WHICH AMOS IS A JERK

So we can talk about personal preferences and differences in our fun activities by referring to the emotional reactions we seek to generate with them. Billy doesn’t like coasters and Sandy doesn’t like horror movies. Clearly they both have fun engaging fear, but they do it in completely different ways. Why?

Simply put, emotions are personal. Maybe Billy has an acute fear of heights so that a roller coaster never feels safe to him. Maybe Sandy has an acute sense of the gross and so can’t really tolerate the blood and guts for very long.
They’re also highly variable, which is why Sandy might come to appreciate Amos’s favorite comedian over time, or Billy might find himself feeling particularly daring and wanting to take on a roller coaster. Think of the mediocre quality of some of the cartoons you loved as a kid, or how after you’re 5 movies deep into your zombie movie marathon the skull-gnawing just doesn’t feel as freaky, or how sometimes you’re just not in the mood for a BBQ. Our reactions to things change and grow and alter with our experiences and what might have been terrifying for our 13-year-old selves might now be downright hilarious in our 40’s. What might be a reaction of disgust for blood and guts one minute may change in seconds to amusement at how hilariously bad the prosthesis are.

Of course, when Amos’s reaction to Billy and Sandy not liking his comedian is “What’s wrong, don’t you like laughing?” we can see he’s being the King of Jerk Town: Billy and Sandy aren’t humorless people, they’re just different people than Amos, which means they find different things amusing. Amos isn't the sole rational judge of what is funny to all people. The humor that’s obviously hilarious to Amos doesn't have to translate to Billy or Sandy or anyone else. Emotions are personal reactions, and individuals are going to react differently to the same scenario.

A BUFFET OF FUN

And thus we come to the Generic Food Metaphor portion of our article.

Just as different fun activities engage different emotions, different games engage different emotions, as well. Even if you personally hate it, 4e D&D is a lot of fun -- for the right person. For the person who sees the emotional reactions that 4e is good at delivering, and wants to have fun like that, 4e might be the perfect game.

And what 4e is good at delivering is different than what Call of Cthulu or Feng Shui or even different than what 1e AD&D is good at delivering. Even within one game system, what Dark Sun delivers is different than what Birthright delivers which is different than what Planescape delivers. And once we understand Ekman's concept of emotions and his list of basic emotions, we can have a useful way of talking about these very real differences that isn't just throwing up our hands and saying that people are different.

We also find a good explanation of why we have had such vitriolic Edition Wars in the last few years: differing emotional goals.

Usually, when we engage in a fun activity, the kind of fun we're going to have is pretty well telegraphed. When we’re going to a horror movie, we expect to be surprised and disgusted and afraid at various points in it. Though emotions like contentment and satisfaction may occur, they’re not really what the movie is trying to accomplish.

With D&D, the promise has always been much more vague. This has something to do with the youth and size of the medium, but it also has to do with the history of it -- the game has changed from its origins, in some dramatic ways. It has gone from supporting "game-like" play with its emphasis on fiero (what Ekman called "pride in accomplishment") to supporting a more "story-like" style with an emphasis on purpose (what Ekman called "satisfaction"). While the two goals had been clashing and combining and changing for most of D&D history, in 4e, the emotion of purpose finally officially trumped fiero, and the game was designed to deliver that emotion as well as possible, rather explicitly at the expense of the other. Think of how hard it is to fly in 4e in comparison to earlier editions, and what that says about the emotional goals of the game.

This change was the BEST thing if that's the emotion you were looking for in D&D, anyway. And if you weren't? It sucked, pretty hard, because now the reason you played D&D wasn't the thing that D&D was really designed to give you anymore.

It’s key to call back to something I said earlier here: emotions might be exclusive, but they are very dynamic. The division between 4e and the rest of D&D isn't about a monolithic focus. Just because a game focuses on purpose doesn't mean that it doesn't engage fiero, and vice-versa. However, it's something like the difference between Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead: the former has some laughs, but focuses on the fear. The latter focuses on amusement, but has some moments of genuine scary in it, too. Their design intent is clearly different, but they overlap significantly. The same is true of 4e: it has different emotional goals, but that doesn't mean it doesn't overlap in many ways with the old ones, just that the focus is different.

Which brings us back to you, and your table. What are your goals when you play an RPG? What emotional responses are you trying to cultivate in yourself, and your players? And in what ways does your game favor one emotion, at the expense of another? Let us know in the comments! I'm quite interested.

 

[Shayuri]

I just want to throw in that with RPGs, the question of what 'kind' of fun/emotion the game evokes is further complicated by the intervention of a particular game master and group. Two games taking place in the same setting, using the same rules, will often cater to different styles of play and evoke different reactions. This is even true of different groups running identical adventure paths...as close to regimentation as the hobby permits.

So in a lot of ways, an RPG is a lot like a live theater performance. There is a script, which gives you the 'rules' of the piece. It defines the genre, and tells you how to progress mechanically through the performance. What it does not give you is the performance itself. The director, and the actors, give it that emotional resonance...and while productions of the same play tend to fall into definable categories of interpretation, each performance is equally defined by its unique flourishes.

And you can be sure that when some upstart comes up with a weird new take on Hamlet, it is definitely looked askance at by the veterans who ran/played in more traditional versions of it before.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Finding the Fun

Eleka Nahmen Nahmen. Eleka Nahmen Nahmen.

Sorry, wrong Fiero...

Different people have fun in different ways - and this is obvious. I've currently got a group with this tension - and right now I'm running the Leverage RPG for them. This works well - it's very much story and humour centric, but at the core of the game are puzzles. Notably the one for the mastermind: "My opponent has two traits at d12 and two at d4. How can I make him roll the 2d4 against my 2d10 in the final showdown, not the 2d12?" The mastermind is, of course, the most fiero-centric of my players. The more satisfaction-centred players have the thief and the grifter which provide far less required strategy, and far more looking cool and telling the story plotted by a mixture of the mastermind and myself.

As for 4e, one of the reasons I favour it is that, to me, it's amongst other things more laden with fiero than just about any edition outside White Plume Mountain or Tomb of Horrors. This is because tactical combat is all about fiero. (4e combat is also about satisfaction, see the links being discussed between powers and encouraging in character behaviours). In 4e, with a competent DM, almost every combat is a puzzle to be solved as well as a story.

To expand on this, there are six monster roles in 4e (although not quite the normally given six). Four of the six are inherently puzzle roles that if allowed to do their thing get really nasty.

Brute: Melee damage: high, ranged damage: None-low. Strong defences vs NADs, weak vs weapons.
Soldier: Melee damage: Medium, ranged damage: Low. Strong defences vs weapons. Function: anti-defenders, prevent the PCs doing their thing.
Skirmisher (vanilla): Melee and ranged damage: Medium.
Skirmisher (tactical): Melee and ranged damage low unless a condition is triggered when it becomes high. Defences: Medium
Artillery (including controllers): Melee damage: Low, ranged damage: High (or medium with added obnoxiousness). Defences: Weak vs weapons.
Lurkers: Melee damage: Extreme. Only attacking or vulnerable one round in two but a soft target when you can reach them.

Every single monster role except the vanilla skirmisher is an inherent puzzle piece - they are only about half as threatening when you do not allow them to play their game as when they get a chance to do so, and monsters should be used as "combined arms" most of the time to enable them to try to play their game. And add some interesting terrain and you have a nice fiero set-up in the same way as a chess problem right in front of you. This happens in such a way that fiero and satisfaction do not cut across each other (think back to DL1 - that was aimed at pure satisfaction at the expense of fiero when Gygaxian D&D is about almost pure fiero).

Of course once again 4e's labelling doesn't point this out...

So the feelings are where you find them and where you see them.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This is because tactical combat is all about fiero.

It can be, but 4e combat isn't quite deadly enough to present much of a real chance of failure most of the time. This directly corresponds to its satisfaction goals trumping its fiero goals: it makes a bad story for the hero to die at the hands of some goblins, but it makes a good challenge.

4e has fiero, but I find that it's mostly in the character building: can you make a better striker/defender/controller/leader than anyone else? How high can you pump your damage/marking capacity/saving throw penalties/buffs? That's where there's an objective measure of something you can beat. Most combats are going to be won even if you're asleep at your character sheet.

On the other hand, if one made 4e combat deadlier, the combat would be an awesome engine of fiero. The exploration or interaction maybe not depending on the DM, but the combat, oh yeah! Make winning something that rarely happens rather than something nearly assured of happening, and you can change that preference nicely. Admittedly, it might weaken the story a bit (y'know, if your characters are dying in droves, it's difficult to center a plot on them).

 

[Neonchameleon]

It can be, but 4e combat isn't quite deadly enough to present much of a real chance of failure most of the time. This directly corresponds to its satisfaction goals trumping its fiero goals: it makes a bad story for the hero to die at the hands of some goblins, but it makes a good challenge.

4e has fiero, but I find that it's mostly in the character building: can you make a better striker/defender/controller/leader than anyone else? How high can you pump your damage/marking capacity/saving throw penalties/buffs? That's where there's an objective measure of something you can beat. Most combats are going to be won even if you're asleep at your character sheet.

On the other hand, if one made 4e combat deadlier, the combat would be an awesome engine of fiero. The exploration or interaction maybe not depending on the DM, but the combat, oh yeah! Make winning something that rarely happens rather than something nearly assured of happening, and you can change that preference nicely. Admittedly, it might weaken the story a bit (y'know, if your characters are dying in droves, it's difficult to center a plot on them).

You need DMs who play rougher - and some sort of house rule restricting extended rests. To put this into perspective, I've killed more PCs in a year and a half 4e campaign than died in more or less the same group between 2000 and 2009 when they were playing 3.X. It's not so much that winning is somethign that happens rarely. It's that I'm confident enough that they are tough, and so death isn't random. Each PC death has had a tactical or strategic mistake at the heart of it (although on one occasion this mistake was not noticing that the barbarian wasn't retreating with the rest of them, but instead putting a head on a pike while the werewolves were closing in).

 

[I'm A Banana]

Sounds like you've modded 4e into a decent engine of fiero in combat. Cool.

And I think you're right that randomness can kick fiero right in the nads. If you win through chance or die through chance, there's no real accomplishment, either.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Hmm... Having been reading Reality is Broken and thinking about RP a bit more, I've realised that there are generally two high-Fiero roles and two high-Satisfaction roles in 4e combat.

Most controllers are about fiero. They are all about changing the situation to the advantage of the PCs, and leaving the monsters fuming impotently. I gave up one of my favourite characters when things got too easy and I more or less negated a string of encounters (seriously, you never want to see an orb wizard with Storm Pillar and Freezing Burst defending a narrow mountain pass or let loose in city streets). If there's any interesting terrain around there's fiero to be had.

Defenders are also about fiero; tactical positioning is almost critical for a defender, and they are about locking the enemy down. Or knocking them down, stepping one step away, and laughing. (The fighter much more so than the knight)

Strikers as a rule are about satisfaction. MASIVE DAMAGE!!! (This isn't universal; the Warlock and the Rogue are both high-fiero, outmaneuvering the enemy, shutting them down, and generally making sure the enemy can't do anything effective while in the rogue's case needing combat advantage). The slayer is almost as pure a satisfaction class as there is.

Leaders are about satisfaction as well - the great heroic save. And the making everyone a bit better. A lot less tactical positioning than most, and a lot more reactive.

It is perhaps not surprising that the running joke about my characters is that it doesn't matter what class they are, they are probably a better controller than the party controller.