The Dumbing Down of RPGs

[tomBitonti]

Something I've noticed in the space of iOS (on the iPad Air) is a dearth of interesting strategy games.

There are lots of very pretty games, and board game emulators, and games which handle a single focus very well, but exploration / strategy games are quite limited.

I'm sure there are lots of good puzzle games out there, but that's not been the space I'm looking for, so I can't speak much to it.

One example where the underlying engine has a huge potential which has been vastly underused is Warhammer Quest: The game engine is very nice, and the graphics are excellent, but the game never tries to go beyond the basic structure of the board game (which it implements very well). There is a huge space for an open ended campaign world to be build, which is almost entirely untapped (the game provides very limited campaign packs, each with a handful of increasingly difficult encounters, but not very playable once the party power has increased to meet the final encounter difficulty).

In the space of online MMO's (especially World of Warcraft) is the shift from an open world immersive environment, with a player gradually gathering meaningful state, and with lots of interesting and detailed locations which are truly explorable, to more of a world with strictly defined entertainment value: Instead of having a dungeon with a dozen paths and a lot of replay value, a dungeon is reduced to an unbranched string of boss encounters with a very limited replay value, and as a result, a quite fixed entertainment value. There is a parallel reduction of the space of player options, with much less of the combinatorial space exposed to players as a character options sandbox.

In both cases, what seems to be in play is a bounding of the value of an offering: A product of a fixed dollar cost is set very deliberately to provided a fixed entertainment value. An open sandbox with very high potential entertainment value is specifically avoided. The goal is to maximize revenue by limiting replay value. A consequence of the goal is the placement of bounds on the complexity of the game.

That outlook highlight another key detail: The focus on entertainment value as opposed to the goal of creating a very wide potential play value.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Janx]

there's at least 2 ports of NetHack to iOS.

Hard games exist. They don't appeal to as many people.

 

[tomBitonti]

Oh wow ... NetHack ... I remember that ... played a variation in school almost 28 years ago.

Not sure if that would be playable without a keyboard, which is very limited on an iPad.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Neonchameleon]

The only consequence fail forward has is additional trouble later on or a little bit less of an reward for succeeding. And in the case that there will be some trouble later on, the group can simply fail forward through this, too and so on, until they succeed in something flawlessly instead of succeeding with a little black mark.

What is impossible with fail forward is to fail.

Keep telling yourself that. Failure has consequences inherently. That's why it is failure. If that was what it meant, we wouldn't need a special term for it.

What 'fail forward' means is that failure always has some mitigating consequences. And in particular, it means that for the majority of players with the typical set of aesthetic motivations, what you call 'failure' never really impacts their goals of play in a negative way.

From memory both of you play Gygaxian D&D (i.e. OSR or heavily influenced by oD&D, bD&D, or 1E). Gygaxian D&D does not need a fail forward mechanic because it has an inherent consequence to failure. Gygaxian D&D is a timed game - every ten minutes you take you make a wandering monster check. So if failure costs time then it is always something bad, as opposed to something simply not happening. Gygaxian D&D is hardly the only game with no need for a fail forward mechanic - the Cortex Plus System, any Powered by the Apocalypse game, Dread, and the Dying Earth all spring to mind.

For a game that should have Fail Forward guidance, let's take a hypothetical game called GURPS: the Fudge d20. (Not being terribly subtle pointing out systems to start looking at - there are plenty of others, including most process-sim systems). In GURPS: the Fudge d20, you have a skill for lockpicking. If you fail a lockpicking check, you fail to open the lock. Which means if you are not under immediate time pressure and do not critically fail (if indeed there are crit mechanics) you've failed to open the lock - but you can take a few seconds to steady your nerves and try again. Failure has no consequences other than taking more time - and if time isn't critical, who cares? In GURPS: the Fudge d20 there is even a Take 20 rule which says that with enough time you need never fail a repeatable skill check. Failure of a repeatable skill check has literally no consequence unless you are specifically under time pressure.

Fail Forward explicitly denies this. There is always a negative consequence for failure under Fail Forward. You can never just repeat the roll until you get it right.

And the thing to remember is that forward isn't necessarily the direction you want to go - merely the direction you are going. Forward towards a cliff is often a bad idea - and if you fail to jump a pit, falling into the pit is failing forward because the situation has changed due to your failure. Your options at the bottom of the pit are different from your options at the top of the pit. The situation has moved forward.

 

[Celebrim]

I agree with Siberys here. Derren, you've seem to have taken a literal interpretation of the jargon, and missed the nuances.

"Fail forward" doesn't mean there is no failure. It is about having a path out of the state of failure.

"Yes, I failed my find traps check, and I fell down into this pit and took damage. And now.... Well, I'm kinda stuck. I have no way out of this pit. Um...."

I don't think you two are actually saying anything different. If there is always a path out of failure, then its not much like the experience of actual failure. And it's even less like failure if the player knows that whenever he fails, a path out of the state of failure is supposed to appear shortly. In practice, if you turn it into a rule, fail forward becomes, "All failures actually have silver linings and mitigating consequences, so in that way they are a lot like winning." Fail forward grants every protagonist the superpower of every protagonist of pulp novels and action movies, and while that isn't 'bad', the problem with that is that the protagonist generally isn't genera aware in the story by the player certainly is. So instead of simulating the experience of being the protagonist, you are simulating the experience of being the protagonist's author.

If I wanted to simulate being a protagonist's author, I'd just write the dang story.

Now, as a general practice, it's a good idea for the DM to plan for failure - that's the idea behind things like the three clue rule. If your game can't sustain a player or party failure, then failure is the expected result and you are running a tournament game in a setting were typically most of the players have less competitive goals. If you are trying to tell a narrative and it depends on one particular NPC not dying, or dying, or anything else - then your narrative technique is too inflexible.

But when you turn DM's pathing out of failure states into a rule of play, it gets silly. Players that fall into pits don't need deus ex machina to come along and save them - even if you dress it up as slavers that come along and capture them. That's just putting a coat of black paint on salvation and pretending its a bad thing. Players need to learn not to go into places where you can fall down and get stuck by themselves and to have their own back up plans for failure instead of relying on the DM to have one for them (Tie a rope to the thief! Hopefully, we can at least retrieve his body when he fails his find traps roll!). And once you reach the point that players who fall into pits expect deus ex machina to come along and save 'the story' (and with it, them), then you are running a game that is appealing to about as broad of spectrum of aesthetic goals as that PC grinder style tournament play. Plus, you've hedged off into 'one wayism', where the game is meant for one type of play, and one type of player, and you just aren't doing it right if you don't 'follow the rules'.

 

[Celebrim]

For a game that should have Fail Forward guidance, let's take a hypothetical game called GURPS: the Fudge d20. (Not being terribly subtle pointing out systems to start looking at - there are plenty of others, including most process-sim systems).

Oh dear, now we are going to play the game of forge jargon. If you are going to play this game, at least do me the favor of playing it well. You are throwing out terms but I'm not sure they line up.

First, I've got thousands of hours play GURPS: the Fudge D20 (well, not so much the fudge part), and I think you are totally blowing the analysis. Indeed, I'm not sure that you don't have it backwards. 'Take 20' is not the anti-fail forward mechanic. 'Take 20' is basically, "Say yes or throw the dice." I can't recall anyone ever rolling the dice 20-30 times to find out if they pick the lock. If there is no consequence to failure, then the guy with the lockpicking skill just goes, "Take 20", and the DM just goes, "Yes." No need to roll the dice unless there is a consequence, in which case... get this... you can't take 20. Take 20 is 'fail forward' guidance.

Fail Forward explicitly denies this. There is always a negative consequence for failure under Fail Forward. You can never just repeat the roll until you get it right.

Err.... no, that's not what fail forward means. Fail forward means that the stakes of a negative roll can never be nothing. This means that you don't roll a dice when there is no consequence of failure, but it doesn't mean that you can't keep trying or that the consequence is somehow more negative than consequences in systems without explicit fail forward. Allowing someone to try again is perfectly valid fail forward. In fact, it's the state of not allowing someone to try again that fail forward is trying to avoid. Fail forward means that the stakes on a loss are always something, and it doesn't have to be 'bad', but also always never 'on failure stop'. For example, it means that you as the GM should never say, "Step on up. Find the clue. Success means continuing and failure means you've nothing to do." It means that regardless of the outcome, the story goes forward (although possibly in different directions).

There is a certain amount of sense to that. Too often you see a story structure where A->B->C->D. But if the chance of failure in each transition is 20%, then failure quite soon becomes the expected result. And even if the chance of failure is small, what then? Just stop the story at C or A and shrug?

The problem becomes when it is endorsed as a solution to more generic problems. As guidance against avoiding pitfalls, it's decent enough advice. As an actual mechanic of play meant to happen at all times, it's just ridiculous. Transforming each failure into success with consequences means transforming your game into slapstick comedy. It's an attempt to impose something that is really best as GM discretion.

 

[Halivar]

Fail forward gives me an excuse to not cancel a campaign halfway through just because my players have one bad fit of rolling. Yes, it's contrived; everything about D&D is contrived so I don't feel there's any sancrosanctity there. Once I ran a pretty gritty GURPS game that ended with a TPK, and I played it straight. Game over, campaign's finished. My group has declined my repeated offers to run such a game again.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Oh dear, now we are going to play the game of forge jargon. If you are going to play this game, at least do me the favor of playing it well. You are throwing out terms but I'm not sure they line up.

I am very sure that yours don't line up even with themselves.

Err.... no, that's not what fail forward means. Fail forward means that the stakes of a negative roll can never be nothing.
...
Allowing someone to try again is perfectly valid fail forward.

If they can try again with the situation unchanged then there is no consequence to failure. As I mentioned Gygaxian D&D always has the situation changing due to Wandering Monster Rolls making it a timed game. I explicitly mentioned a number of other games where every roll has a consequence and where the stakes can never be nothing.

I can't recall anyone ever rolling the dice 20-30 times to find out if they pick the lock.

I've seen it happen four or five times in a row - and frequently all the PCs rolling until someone passes.

The problem becomes when it is endorsed as a solution to more generic problems. As guidance against avoiding pitfalls, it's decent enough advice. As an actual mechanic of play meant to happen at all times, it's just ridiculous. Transforming each failure into success with consequences means transforming your game into slapstick comedy. It's an attempt to impose something that is really best as GM discretion.

That's because nowhere does fail forward say that you must transform each failure into a success with consequences. It says that each failure must make the situation worse - and one of the ways to do this is a success with consequences. If someone fails a jump check to longjump over a pit, having them land unpleasantly in the bottom of the pit is failing forward. Because it's a failure that moves things forward by changing the in game situation. But it's certainly a fail. If someone tries to bluff that they are the prince and fails their bluff check so someone calls "Arrest this impostor" to the guards (who start to do so), that's failing forward. It's also failing. Fail Forward therefore demonstrably does not transform "each failure into a success with consequences". It does transform a small subset of failures into technical successes that make the situation worse. Like the lockpicking example. But if it's only a small subset that get transformed (as it is) your entire argument about slapstick comedy vanishes in a puff of smoke.

 

[WayneLigon]

Fail forward gives me an excuse to not cancel a campaign halfway through just because my players have one bad fit of rolling. Yes, it's contrived; everything about D&D is contrived so I don't feel there's any sancrosanctity there. Once I ran a pretty gritty GURPS game that ended with a TPK, and I played it straight. Game over, campaign's finished. My group has declined my repeated offers to run such a game again.

As would almost anyone.

I think the 'softening' of both tabletop RPGs and computer RPGs have done a huge service to both hobbies by vastly increasing the number of people that stick with them. Certainly there is some degree of pride in beating a 'Nintendo-hard' game, but you can bet such things drove many more people away from video games altogether. They never had a chance to develop any interest in them because the failure consequences were too steep. Similarly, the 'well, you didn't poke a stick ahead of you so now you've fallen in a pit trap and died, roll up another character' idea has probably turned a great many people away from the entire tabletop experience.

A lot of the people I play with these days are lapsed players giving it another chance, or people that have always wanted to try RPGs but for various reasons never had the time or ability to do so. The lapsed players have some interesting stories, indeed. Many of them came from campaigns that were basically one long march of death, or where the GM routinely screwed the party out of any real reward for their efforts. With some, it's like dealing with a rescue dog: they get put into certain situations (and these can be some perfectly innocuous situations) and they freak out because they've been 'trained' that they're going to get screwed over regardless of the decision they make. After putting up with such games for a short time, they just turned to other things and dropped out of the hobby altogether.

 

[Dausuul]

I just watched a FoolTube video, pretty well done, about how the Elder Scrolls games are being "dumbed down" to meet the lowest common denominator. To make more money. And I had to ask myself:

Are TRPGs doing this too?

Now, obviously, the video's arguments don't apply directly to TRPGs. But for your reading pleasure, here they are (with my additions in parenthesis):

1) You can't fail (except to die and reload in the same place).
2) No consequences for faction membership (or, the Imperials don't care if you're a Rebel).
3) You make little impact in the world.
4) The quest and journal system (does little more than make you walk toward arrows).
5) NPC conversations are heavily reduced (and bear little significance).
6) Massively oversimplified puzzles (usually, with the solutions in plain sight).
7) The value of (special) items has been reduced (and supply has been greatly increased).

This would probably be easiest to view through the lens of multiple D&D editions, on which I'm no expert. But most big companies are out for your dirty dollar - are they making compromises as well?

What would be a possible compromise that a TRPG company could make along these lines? All the stuff you listed above is in the GM's hands, not the company's, unless you're running a prefab adventure. (And even then it's in the GM's hands, it's just a question of whether the adventure supports the GM or not.)

I suppose "fail forward" could be considered an example of this, but I don't really see that as dumbing down--rather, I see it as attempting to remove the scenario where bad luck on the dice, or player inability to solve a given puzzle, stops a campaign in its tracks.

I learned the importance of "fail forward" a decade before I ever heard the phrase. Ironically, I learned it from a scenario where the players didn't fail--but they almost failed, and left me wondering what the heck I would have done if they had. It was the grand climax of a huge campaign, the PCs were in the heart of Hell with the Lords of Hell descending on them in full fury, there was a puzzle they had to solve in order to break Hell's power, and they weren't solving it. I was faced with a choice between wrapping up my campaign with a TPK, or wussing out completely on my uber-villains. Fortunately, one of my players figured it out at the last second and the night ended on a high note, but from then on, I determined that in any such scenario I would arm myself with a backup plan. (I won't tell the players about it, though, unless I have to use it. No sense defusing the tension.)