D&D General Should D&D Be "Hard"

[EzekielRaiden]

The exact opposite is true in every milieu I've evern seen it done: it is much easier (in terms of getting along with people) to remove difficulty than it is to add it. It's also generally easier at the design level to remove difficulty than to add it.

How so? If you have a system that is already quite functional and works exactly as intended, adding uncertainty is extremely easy. If you have a system where the numbers already work to favor one side, all you need to do is add bigger numbers to the other side and you've already increased the difficulty.

Having a system that is brutally hard is very, very difficult to turn into something that can be easy if you want it to be. Having a system that is easy is MUCH easier to turn hard, because you just add hard things to it.

You must remove hard things from a hard structure in order to get an easy structure. Removing, in almost all cases, is much harder than adding. It's like salt.

There's about 49 years worth of old-school players who might take issue with this statement.

I did not say it would drive everyone away. But it sure as hell would drive most players away. Hardcore gaming is simply not as popular as casual gaming, and never will be.

Yes, and rightly so; and the idea that not everything is going to go well on your first try is also perfectly valid. I mean, absent beginner's luck, is there any endeavour at which people can expect to even be competent at the first asking?

Why should everyone be absolutely bound to only having stories that start with incompetent rubes? Why should everyone be absolutely bound to only having challenges where they have almost no tools to deal with them? Why should everyone be absolutely bound to only having possible worlds where genuinely no people start a career that they already have some experience doing?

Whatever your preferred game style, there are perfectly valid reasons for starting at a level other than 1st. But many, many, many, MANY DMs out there think that you absolutely, positively HAVE to start at 1st level. Even if it would be detrimental to the game to do so. Because it's first, and first is where you start. As I said, I would know--I've experienced it firsthand. Three times now.

 

[LordEntrails]

There's about 49 years worth of old-school players who might take issue with this statement.

Umm, not a very good argument or support for it. Given how 5E seems to have been more popular than all previous editions, and how it has grown the player base and been so widely successful, argueing that the way we used to do it doesn't work is kind of missing the whole point that the success of 5E strongly indicates that their is a better way to do it rather than the way its been done for 49 years.
Sure, there are too many variables that impact success to that just 1st level wet tissue paper characters is the cause. But it's certainly doesn't seem to support your arguement.

The problem is, I'm not sure that that is meaningfully achievable. Keeping even a roughly fixed chance (e.g. maybe only 5% for a short campaign and 15% for a spend-many-sessions-at-cap campaign) is going to be an extraordinarily difficult design problem. Perhaps even mathematically impossible. Because if it's even 0.5% chance of TPK per encounter, all you need are 140 encounters to have a 90% TPK rate. If a short campaign has only, say, 100 encounters, and a long campaign has 300, how can you possibly design both to end up in the same place? Unless, of course, what you actually do is make the risk of TPK go down as the game gets "harder"...which I suspect is not what you intend for this!

Also--you really want 80% of encounters to fail? Like...run away or surrender because you just cannot succeed? That's...extremely high. That means nearly all encounters end in failure. I dunno about you, but failing at 80% of the things I attempt sounds unbelievably demoralizing, and at that rate, almost a third of five-encounter runs would be literally all failures (.8^5= .32768). Even a 50% "sorry, this is just failure, you get nothing, good DAY sir" rate would probably drive me away from the game after only a few sessions.

LOL
You are extrapolating a great deal from my very simplified statement. And making all sorts of assumption to try to mathematically prove my desire is not feasible. First, not all encounters are equal, so it's very easy to have a campaign that has a certain lethality to it, without making that "percentage" equally spread out over all encounters.

Second, you are looking at this some sort of white room theory. I'm talking about practical game play. With a DM who adapts encounters as needed to get the desired feel.

It's achievable, because we've doing something like this for a decade.

 

[Vaalingrade]

A company should make a hard game by default, but sure also have a EZ version for the players that want it.

This works for video games where the enemies are computers that can hit perfectly every time and have to be tempered to even pretend to be fail, much less.... ugh... 'EZ' (never without something patronizing), but for games as random and swingy as D&D, it's a lot easier to set the math at fair and then dial in the harder version.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

The game needs to support both.

Sometimes you want to have an ultracompetitive battle on the field. Sometimes you just want to chuck around a ball with friends. Rugby (or football or league or whatever) can support both styles of play.

 

[Remathilis]

If your tabletop D&D campaign had a video game style difficulty slider, what would you set it at? Why?

That's not really how most modern video games act anymore. Most video games that have a story are built for the player to SEE the story. The idea of a video game so hard few players ever sees the ending is antiquated. Instead, difficulty is measured in side-activities: completing collections, finding rare items, fighting hidden bosses, challenge modes, etc. A video game that is hard is a video game that isn't played except by a small group of dedicated players, and when your goal is to appeal to a wide swath of players (and get their microtransaction money) you build to keep the player interested. The players find their own level of challenge. Of course, some exceptions exist (the Souls series is famed for its brutal difficulty) but they are exceptions.

Now, D&D is unique because there are two basic styles of play (with ten thousand variations): open-ended and story driven. Open ended is the classic Gygax "endless dungeon" where you play with your PCs for as long as you can against all challenges that arise. It also includes the hexcrawls or other styles where there is no ending to the campaign until all players are dead (And sometimes not even then). Story driven is the Dragonlance/AP style of a campaign having a story the plays out over the course of several levels and culminates in a finale. You're there for an interactive story and it's akin to most modern "story modes" or "campaign modes" in video games.

Basically, open ended is arcade style "play for as long as you can" while story is akin to the console style "interactive storytelling experience". Diablo vs Final Fantasy.

Obviously, both playstyles want different challenge levels. Open ended want a steady progression of escalating challenge with a higher chance of failure. Notions like "challenges beyond your capacities" and "smart, tactical play" are key elements to this style. As is harsh penalties for failure, including loss of gear and permanent PC death. Whereas story driven wants some challenge, but they seek a fair challenge because they want to see the end of the story. The journey is just as important as the destination. They may opt for harder challenges, but generally speaking, the goal is to defeat the BBEG and win the adventure. Those types of players favor things like action points to mitigate bad dice rolls or straightforward ways to return dead PCs to life (it's not always as much fun to finish an AP with a different PC than when you started).

All that said, I think the game has moved heavily towards the story-driven style of play. Old School Endless play can be fun, but the modern audience wants plots and villains and set pieces. Critical Role didn't get popular being a competitive survival game to see who lasts longest, it got popular due to the stories and characters. And that requires a more nuanced and balanced style of play that provides a challenge, but not ramping difficulty and high lethality. That said, the beauty of D&D is it can still accommodate the latter, with a few tweaks. But as a default style, I think the game has abandoned endless dungeon for story mode.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's not really how most modern video games act anymore. Most video games that have a story are built for the player to SEE the story. The idea of a video game so hard few players ever sees the ending is antiquated. Instead, difficulty is measured in side-activities: completing collections, finding rare items, fighting hidden bosses, challenge modes, etc. A video game that is hard is a video game that isn't played except by a small group of dedicated players, and when your goal is to appeal to a wide swath of players (and get their microtransaction money) you build to keep the player interested. The players find their own level of challenge. Of course, some exceptions exist (the Souls series is famed for its brutal difficulty) but they are exceptions.

Now, D&D is unique because there are two basic styles of play (with ten thousand variations): open-ended and story driven. Open ended is the classic Gygax "endless dungeon" where you play with your PCs for as long as you can against all challenges that arise. It also includes the hexcrawls or other styles where there is no ending to the campaign until all players are dead (And sometimes not even then). Story driven is the Dragonlance/AP style of a campaign having a story the plays out over the course of several levels and culminates in a finale. You're there for an interactive story and it's akin to most modern "story modes" or "campaign modes" in video games.

Basically, open ended is arcade style "play for as long as you can" while story is akin to the console style "interactive storytelling experience". Diablo vs Final Fantasy.

Obviously, both playstyles want different challenge levels. Open ended want a steady progression of escalating challenge with a higher chance of failure. Notions like "challenges beyond your capacities" and "smart, tactical play" are key elements to this style. As is harsh penalties for failure, including loss of gear and permanent PC death. Whereas story driven wants some challenge, but they seek a fair challenge because they want to see the end of the story. The journey is just as important as the destination. They may opt for harder challenges, but generally speaking, the goal is to defeat the BBEG and win the adventure. Those types of players favor things like action points to mitigate bad dice rolls or straightforward ways to return dead PCs to life (it's not always as much fun to finish an AP with a different PC than when you started).

All that said, I think the game has moved heavily towards the story-driven style of play. Old School Endless play can be fun, but the modern audience wants plots and villains and set pieces. Critical Role didn't get popular being a competitive survival game to see who lasts longest, it got popular due to the stories and characters. And that requires a more nuanced and balanced style of play that provides a challenge, but not ramping difficulty and high lethality. That said, the beauty of D&D is it can still accommodate the latter, with a few tweaks. But as a default style, I think the game has abandoned endless dungeon for story mode.

This is why I play versions of D&D that haven't abandoned it.

 

[Lanefan]

How so? If you have a system that is already quite functional and works exactly as intended, adding uncertainty is extremely easy. If you have a system where the numbers already work to favor one side, all you need to do is add bigger numbers to the other side and you've already increased the difficulty.

And you then have to deal with the players' complaints that you've made the game harder.

Having a system that is brutally hard is very, very difficult to turn into something that can be easy if you want it to be. Having a system that is easy is MUCH easier to turn hard, because you just add hard things to it.

You must remove hard things from a hard structure in order to get an easy structure. Removing, in almost all cases, is much harder than adding. It's like salt.

Completely disagree. Removing things is usually dirt simple, even more so in a system built of modular subsystems.

Don't want the complexity of weapon-vs-armour-type in 1e? Drop it. Poof, it's gone. Took me less than five seconds.

Don't want Inspiration in 5e? Drop it. Poof, it's gone. That was another less-than-five seconds.

Adding things means you have to think them up and design them first, which from experience I can attest takes immensely more effort and time.

Making a game generally easier often just means removing challenge types or fail states. 1e D&D can be made much easier in a heartbeat by removing level drain, removing the rule that items have to save if you fail vs AoE damage, and excising some player-side annoyances e.g. Rust Monsters. That'd take me maybe fifteen seconds, were I of a mind to do it.

But if those things aren't there to begin with, I'm not likely to think them up for myself in order to add them in.

Why should everyone be absolutely bound to only having stories that start with incompetent rubes?

Because it's a zero-to-hero game.

Why should everyone be absolutely bound to only having challenges where they have almost no tools to deal with them? Why should everyone be absolutely bound to only having possible worlds where genuinely no people start a career that they already have some experience doing?

Whatever your preferred game style, there are perfectly valid reasons for starting at a level other than 1st. But many, many, many, MANY DMs out there think that you absolutely, positively HAVE to start at 1st level. Even if it would be detrimental to the game to do so. Because it's first, and first is where you start. As I said, I would know--I've experienced it firsthand. Three times now.

A 1st-level character in 5e is pretty powerful compared to a commoner, though (thankfully!) nowhere near as bad as was a 1st-level character in 4e. In that way, you're already starting as something considerably better than an "incompetent rube".

 

[Reynard]

Completely disagree. Removing things is usually dirt simple, even more so in a system built of modular subsystems.

Don't want the complexity of weapon-vs-armour-type in 1e? Drop it. Poof, it's gone. Took me less than fifiveeconds

While I am generally in agreement with you, I think it is important to note that there are consequences for making these kinds of adjustments. For example, eliminating weapon vs armor type as a subsystem may streamline combat, but it nerfs the fighter a bit. Just like ignoring components might simplify record keeping, but buffs the magic user. Most people did both, and then bemoaned the power imbalance between the two.

 

[Remathilis]

This is why I play versions of D&D that haven't abandoned it.

No version of D&D abandoned it, but it's been deemphasized for decades. Adventure design embraced it with Dragonlance so it's as least as old as 1e, and it's developed into the AP style of today.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And you then have to deal with the players' complaints that you've made the game harder.

Okay. Maybe that means your players don't actually want to play the kind of game you are trying to run?

I legit do not get this response. If the players are complaining, maybe it is because you're doing something that doesn't fit the group!

Completely disagree. Removing things is usually dirt simple, even more so in a system built of modular subsystems.

Don't want the complexity of weapon-vs-armour-type in 1e? Drop it. Poof, it's gone. Took me less than five seconds.

Don't want Inspiration in 5e? Drop it. Poof, it's gone. That was another less-than-five seconds.

Adding things means you have to think them up and design them first, which from experience I can attest takes immensely more effort and time.

If we were talking about subsystems, maybe. But even then, removing is often just as hard, you've just ignored the why of it.

Cut out short rests. Suddenly most of the game breaks. Cut out hit dice. Suddenly there's a third less healing. Cut out bonus actions. Etc., etc. Removing subsystems is quite risky, Jenga-style.

But the actual thing that makes encounters difficult is monster design, not subsystems. Adding new features to monsters to make them hard is often a trivial task. Double their damage. Done! But taking brutally hard monsters and generating a set that are reasonable but NOT trivial? Extremy difficult.

Adding well-balanced is very difficult. Adding "piss easy," sure, but that is boring and no one really wants that. Adding brutally hard monsters isn't difficult at all. Adding brutally hard monsters with a puzzle solution, likewise easy (trolls are not some monumentally impressive feat of game design.)

Making a game generally easier often just means removing challenge types or fail states.

IME, this is far from true. Because players want the challenge types present: combat (with both brute damage and more complex traps/magic/terrain to deal with), exploration (ditto, but also fatigue and resources), socialization, puzzles, moral/ethical quandaries, etc.

But they want these things in such a way that it is reasonably likely they will succeed if they (a) make smart decisions, (b) pay attention to their surroundings, and (c) exploit their resources (abilities, equipment, teamwork, environs) effectively. Every group I've played in has recognized that sometimes all of that just won't be enough, and beating a retreat is necessary, even in games people accuse of being too easy.

And I absolutely stand by the claim that getting that delicate bal—er, equilibrium JUST right is a very hard design problem.
You have to tweak and adjust and test, test, test until things work out just right so the challenge is true but not overwhelming, such that variance allows the real possibility of failure but in the long run a relatively low actual failure rate.

Adding stuff which breaks this delicate bal—equilibrium is easy. Building this delicate equilibrium yourself is stupidly hard. Believe me, I would know; I tried to do so with 3.5e. It was beyond me...and beyond every 3.5e/PF1e DM I ever played with.

1e D&D can be made much easier in a heartbeat by removing level drain, removing the rule that items have to save if you fail vs AoE damage, and excising some player-side annoyances e.g. Rust Monsters. That'd take me maybe fifteen seconds, were I of a mind to do it.

And yet nearly all of the brutally hard monsters remain. All of the "welp, looks like that's a crit. Hope you don't instantly die" is still there. All the many, MANY save-or-die spells are still there. The ear seekers. Etc., etc.

But if those things aren't there to begin with, I'm not likely to think them up for myself in order to add them in.

Good thing you don't need to, because you already know they could exist!

Because it's a zero-to-hero game.

Oh, awesome, you found the inarguable objective definition of D&D that everyone should be beholden to! Can I see it? Where did you find it?

Seriously Lanefan, I respect you too much tk believe you meant this. You literally just said the One True Way of D&D is zero-to-hero. You definitely know better than that.

A 1st-level character in 5e is pretty powerful compared to a commoner, though (thankfully!) nowhere near as bad as was a 1st-level character in 4e. In that way, you're already starting as something considerably better than an "incompetent rube".

A first level 5e character can (with the "right" choice of class) die outright in a single hit from a single low-level (IIRC CR1?) enemy. Even if they don't die outright, a single hit can bring even a Fighter to Dying, without being a crit. That, as far as I'm concerned, is being an incompetent rube at adventuring.

Going off to do something so unbelievably deadly when you literally don't even have the ability to survive two attacks, attacks that are quite likely to hit you, is eithet the height of stupidity, or reflects starting on something long before you have achieved even the most limited form of competence.

So yeah. I stand by that too. First-level 5e characters are incompetent rubes. Some folks want to play that. That's fine. That's what "zero" means to them, and more power to them.

I should not be shackled to that.