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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8679879" data-attributes="member: 4937">As a guy that written an RPG but is not an RPG designer, I'll try to give you my take.Games are most fun when you feel like you are making meaningful choices that will effect the outcome.  This is true in tabletop RPGs pretty much irrespective of your aesthetics of play.  If you are engaging with the fiction you are hoping to change it.  But this goes double for people with challenge based aesthetics of play, who want to not only make meaningful choices but feel that their choices were clever, not obvious, and required study and analysis and skill to come up with.  One of the many reasons combat is an enduring focus of table top RPGs is precisely that it allows for complex challenges to overcome.But your two examples don't actually fulfill any of those needs in a strong manner.  In the case of encountering something well above your ability to overcome either this negates your choices since it doesn't matter what you do you will lose, or else it turns into a color/stage setting/cut scene type encounter where the narrator describes what you see but you can't really interact with it in a meaningful way.   Because there aren't meaningful choices here, a very little of that goes a very long way.  Think about that famous scene in the original Jurassic Park movie, where the music swells and the protagonists look up and they see the immense herds of dinosaurs.  It's not that there is no point in having that sort of stage setting scene in a tabletop RPG, it's that movies are much better suited to delivering sensation based aesthetic with music and visuals than a narrator in a table top game is.  It's often a bad idea to encourage a GM to be overly wordy and prosaic in narrating because it's so hard to deliver a beautiful enough word picture to make that time well spent, and that's especially true for something where the PC has no agency over what he sees.And the same sort of thing is true of pushover encounters.  There just aren't any meaningful choices when you are so much more powerful than the threat that there is no threat.  It's not that it's entirely wrong to occasionally have an establishing scene where you let the players show and feel just how dangerous and powerful they've become, but a little of that goes a long ways.  After a while, killing kobolds is just rote rolling with no payoffs and no meaningful choices.  By comparison balanced challenge make for meaningful choices where the players have more emotional investment because they have to 'sweat it out' and work for their victory, and where the players have more satisfaction because they realize that they needed to make those smart plays in order to win whether against a particularly tough foe or a run of bad luck.  There is just more "fun" to be had because you are embracing more aesthetics of play simultaneously in more compelling ways.  And again, it can't be overemphasized how poorly tabletop RPGs do sensation.  They are hard to wring enjoyment out of compared to video games or movies played passively and casually.  So whatever game experience you create needs to have as it's core experience balanced challenge, with only "outliers" rarely happening and those "outliers" carefully managed in order to be fun.Lastly, this is a well covered ground in the game design community.  You should be able to find a lot of discussion around why balanced game play is core to your experience and when and how you can break those guidelines profitably to achieve particular effects.  You aren't covering ground no one has thought through before.</blockquote>

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