The ethics of ... death

[GSHamster]

Is this objectively poor game design in every case, or just your preference (perhaps commonly shared with others or even the majority)? And, if the former, can you please explain to me why you think it's objective, when design goals are chosen based on preference? I think that'd help me in this conversation. As always, play what you like

I think it is objectively poor game design. I would argue that failure in games should always come from the player's choices, and not be imposed by the game writer/designer/DM. Every problem should contain a solution (even if the solution is to avoid the fight), and players fail by choosing actions that lead away from the solution.

To put it another way, Kobayashi Maru situations are bad and unfair game designs, which is why we all applaud Kirk for cheating.

Designing a monster to kill at least one PC in each encounter smacks of taking away the choice from the player. The game designer is imposing failure upon the player, and that is unfair and objectively poor game design.

 

[billd91]

I think it is objectively poor game design. I would argue that failure in games should always come from the player's choices, and not be imposed by the game writer/designer/DM. Every problem should contain a solution (even if the solution is to avoid the fight), and players fail by choosing actions that lead away from the solution.

To put it another way, Kobayashi Maru situations are bad and unfair game designs, which is why we all applaud Kirk for cheating.

Designing a monster to kill at least one PC in each encounter smacks of taking away the choice from the player. The game designer is imposing failure upon the player, and that is unfair and objectively poor game design.

Doesn't that depend on at what level you're looking for a solution? If the end goal is having explored and looted an old tomb complex, then getting killed by an encounter is failure imposed by player choice. They engaged in a dangerous encounter. They paid the price for their choice. It's really only if you focus on getting through each encounter that I think your argument even makes sense, but I think that's a trend in D&D gaming - focusing on the encounter - that could really stand to be reversed in favor of broader contexts.

 

[Guest 85555]

I think it is objectively poor game design. I would argue that failure in games should always come from the player's choices, and not be imposed by the game writer/designer/DM. Every problem should contain a solution (even if the solution is to avoid the fight), and players fail by choosing actions that lead away from the solution.

To put it another way, Kobayashi Maru situations are bad and unfair game designs, which is why we all applaud Kirk for cheating.

Designing a monster to kill at least one PC in each encounter smacks of taking away the choice from the player. The game designer is imposing failure upon the player, and that is unfair and objectively poor game design.

But why is this bad design and not simply preference?

but by this logic randomness is bad game design. Rolling dice in combat is bad game design because it PCs might die from a bad series of rolls instead of their decisions.

Failure in the case of SoD is not imposed by the designer, it is determined randomly. Just as critical hits are a product of randomness. Yet crits are exciting, even if they are not a product of player choice. In the same way, some find SoD exciting.

There are differing preferences on how lethal games should be and how much choice versus randomness should be a factor. But there are lots of people who like the thrill of random elements in combat and are entirely fine with deaths resulting from a single roll. To me this all looks very much like preference, and people are, in a way, saying our preferences are invalid because they fall under the blanket of bad design.

 

[Greenfield]

Let's be fair.

Sometimes failure in games come from just plain bad luck.

As a DM, you can't lay out all the information on every scene in advance. On the strategic level, you should lay clues, and have information available for the players who know how to look (Gather Information, Knowledge checks, interrogating prisoners, Divination spells, etc.) You should also hold out a few surprises.

On the tactical level, though, bad dice can kill you, literally. I've seen players dice run cold, to the extreme of not being able to roll over an 8 on a D20 check for 32 rolls in a row.

As a DM, or as a player, we have to plan for this. We don't count on good luck, and we try to allow for bad, but in the end extreme runs of the dice can do in any character.

The question on SOD type situations is, are they appropriate at all? If so, how extreme (or non-extreme) does the luck have to go to tip it from acceptable to non-acceptable?

A 50/50 chance might be okay, if you only have to make it one time and the situation allows for good play to tip the odds in your favor. That same chance, every six rounds might not be acceptable.

Then again, it might. Adding time pressure to deal with an enemy before the SOD goes off again can add dramatic pressure, and a real sense of accomplishment when they make it. And the old, "Oh, I was soooo close..." line isn't exactly a problem.

If the threat isn't real, neither is the victory.

So, on one extreme you have games like Chess, where all factors are known by both players, the only surprises come from an opponent's plans, and chance has no real part.

Then there are games like Stratego (or maybe I'm thinking Risk?), where each side starts out equal, but neither knows all the factors of the game (where the Mines are placed, where the Spy is hiding, or which tile conceals the flag.) Chance enters this game only through planned strategy and choices.

D&D and other RPGs depend on chance as a necessary mechanic in play. Dice rolls are a major part of play, and in the earliest versions there was no premise that everyone started out equal.

To remove character death due to chance isn't a flaw in the design, it's inherent in it. The only question is, how strong a factor should chance have in deciding that death?

 

[Umbran]

Doesn't that depend on at what level you're looking for a solution? If the end goal is having explored and looted an old tomb complex, then getting killed by an encounter is failure imposed by player choice. They engaged in a dangerous encounter. They paid the price for their choice.

Right. So by that measure, they'd be better served by going for "success" by choosing to sit back at the inn, where nothing riskier than a bad pot of stew awaits them? Does that give a good game experience? As a GM or a game designer, how much do you want the players to avoid risk? You want to put the old tomb and stories of its loot on stage in Act 1, and *not* have them go for it?

I don't think that makes sense. As a GM or a designer of an RPG, you want the players to have a good time, probably with something adventurous. The players should avoid being stupid, but only insofar as it is consistent with the conceit that they are characters who make bloody combat part of their life's work. We are all accepting a basic level of stupidity (or life-threatening need) as part of the game assumptions. It is our jobs as GMs to offer reasonable risk, consistent with the players having a good time. Now, what counts as "reasonable" is subjective, but be very careful how much you shift the blame for deaths down to the player, when it is already agreed between you that this is supposed to be a fun, escapist, adventure game.

A GM should own their part in it. We either designed or accepted the design of the adventure and the encounters within. We put it there for them to choose. We don't get to wash our hands of that and lay it all on them.

 

[Nagol]

Right. So by that measure, they'd be better served by going for "success" by choosing to sit back at the inn, where nothing riskier than a bad pot of stew awaits them?

You know, that is pretty much exactly how I decided Call of Cthulhu wasn't the game for me. I rolled up a character I thought I'd really like to play... and said "Gee, I don't want to destroy him... He retires now."

 

[Aenghus]

Another issue is that the more swingy the game is, the harder it is to learn before a new group gives up D&D and moves to another game where their PCs don't have the life expectancy of a mayfiy.

I learned to play D&D from the books themselves as informed by magazines, and pretty much accepted that D&D was supposed to be heroic asskicking fantasy, not robbery by any means necessary, which is something I didn't encounter until I heard of the OD&D rule. So did practically everyone I played with in Ireland, which never got the personal knowledge transfer that US games got.

So "Screw the player" monsters never fit into the D&D game as illustrated on the covers and as I saw it played most of the time. The dirty secret was that DMs around here secretly fudged all the time to avoid killing PCs, (expecially the poor player of his third M-U in a row who couldn't roll hit points to save his life - 1 hp characters don't live long, and the idea of minimum hp values as a house rule hadn't developed.)


And before you ask, hordes of PCs were killed in these games, particularly at low level which was a meatgrinder.

IMO making encounters wildly unpredictable significantly increases the difficulty of new DMs learning how to run the game, and new players learning how to survive in the game. A steep learning curve and harsh penalties do not make it easy on players new to D&D. Secondly, it encourages a paranoid style of play of never having a fair fight if you can avoid it, exhaustive planning and in my experience can overly punish the straighforward tactics of new players.

I'm not saying that a swingy game isn't a valid playstyle, just that there are severe downsides to making it a default.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I think it is objectively poor game design. I would argue that failure in games should always come from the player's choices, and not be imposed by the game writer/designer/DM. Every problem should contain a solution (even if the solution is to avoid the fight), and players fail by choosing actions that lead away from the solution.

So SOD fails what you want out of mechanics, making them poor design. But, isn't this just your preference? What if people want all the implications of SOD?

Designing a monster to kill at least one PC in each encounter smacks of taking away the choice from the player. The game designer is imposing failure upon the player, and that is unfair and objectively poor game design.

Based on your preference, right? How is this objective? As always, play what you like

 

[Ahnehnois]

I do think that you are forcing your opinion on the text. I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't confirm exactly what you said

I'm going to stop you right there. Let's look at the book:

"If you decide to use only status quo encounters, you should probably let your players know about this. Some of the encounters you place in your setting will be an appropriate challenge for the PCs, but others might not be" (p. 48)
"In general...[stuff about ELs]" (p. 48)
"In general...[another paragraph about ELs" (p. 49)
"Remember that when the EL is higher than the party level, the chance for PC fatality rises dramatically" (p. 49)

You'll note that this last one does not say all the PCs will die, it makes a much more qualified statement. If you do actually read the section, it's clear that it is general advice, not rules.

The reason they AREN'T part of the SRD is the exact opposite reason. The XP chart for calculating XP was considered so intrinsic to playing and running D&D that WOTC felt if they left it out of the SRD, people would still buy the book and wouldn't be able to copy it precisely.

I doubt that WotC thought this, but if they did, they were wildly misguided. As has been covered several times, only a minority of players on ENW use that system. It certainly is not intrinsic. You can throw out the whole thing quite easily.

For example, CoC d20 uses the same basic mechanics, and even gives its monsters CRs. However, the CR is basically described once as "this is a rough guess of how powerful a monster is" and there is no information about standard encounter difficulty, encounter building using CRs, modifying CRs, or XP. Because that is the point of a CR; it's someone's guess of how powerful a monster is, not a mechanical representation of anything.

There's definitely some debate about this. It's commonly accepted that house ruling is fine in D&D, I agree. But it's also common to house rule some of the rules of Football when it's played out on the playground outside of schools as well. It's not real Football, but it's close enough and the rules are often changed to allow for things like the wrong number of players, a smaller field size, and difficulty to handle with no dedicated referee.

Okay, sure, there are different contexts. An "official" game has strict rules, those rules may be modified for certain situations (but remain rules) and people may play loose with the rules in an "unofficial" game.

It's simply the culture that has risen around D&D that is perfectly accepting of changes to the rules. I'd argue, however, that by pure definition any game that changes the rules isn't "D&D" in it's purest form.

Have you read Unearthed Arcana? Besides the variant rules, there's also a boatload of sidebars that say, in effect "this is how I do things in my game, signed [D&D writer]". Their games often run very differently than the published rules. And they wrote the rules. So no, there is no "pure D&D" in the rulebooks that we then alter; if anything, the "purest" form of D&D comes straight from the DM of your home game.

You may not understand the reason for the rule and your particular group might be able to run without it just fine. However, I don't doubt for a second that a LOT of thought was put into everything written in the book. Nothing would have been written and put in the book unless something thought it was important to be there and had a good reason for it.

There may have been thought put into it (and I do think that a lot more thought was put into the 3.0 core rulebooks than anything that came before or after them), but just because they thought about it doesn't mean they were right.

I hate using them. The difference between the two is that in a story you are reading it can often feel like "Oh, those guys were lucky and something odd happened to save them". In an RPG, where all the players know the rules, contrivances often come across as "Oh, good, the DM had to step in and save us because we were all going to die."

Unless they are well executed. Which is, to be fair, really a matter of taste.

As a player it feels....unfulfilling. I'm this cool hero with all these cool powers and I should be able to defeat my enemies and triumph...or I should die if I fight monsters too powerful for me. If Elminster shows up and kills the monsters for me, I feel quite a bit less heroic. I also feel less needed. After all, if Elminster showed up to save us, why isn't he just finishing the rest of the adventure for us as well? He can do it better than we can.

True, that's a dramatic conceit. A better way might be to have the opponent call of the fight if there is no reason to continue, or to introduce a third legitimate combatant that heard the first two fighting.

The same thing works as a player. If I've never played D&D before or I've played only a little bit, how am I to know how difficult a Beholder is(or even WHAT a beholder is)?

Skills. In 3e, there is a use for Sense Motive to do this, and it is largely the point of Knowledge skills as well. If your characters are clueless about the monsters you're fighting (never mind the players' metagame knowledge), then they should be in trouble. If they, conversely, are smart, they should be able to make better decisions and be more likely to survive.

Maybe the DM should provide input at this point...but what tells the DM who has never used a beholder before that it can't be taken out by 3rd level characters?

Its HD and special abilities. Assuming you have even a basic understanding of what all the numbers on its stat block mean, it should be pretty clear.

I'm not sure about that. Was it the DMs intention to put the players in a situation where they had to run away or use defensive tactics?

In some cases yes, in others not. The point is that the players have a lot of knowledge; they hear the attack rolls of the monter/NPC, they know what their save results are and whether they succeeded, they know how many hp they have left. If they ask, they likely have some ides of how many hp their opponents have. And that's on top of whatever foreknowledge they acquired in the game, and whatever knowledge their skills give them. It is largely the players' responsibility to decide what level of challenge they can handle and what tactics are most likely to ensure their survival.

Well, most Epic fantasy books and movies have...either no or VERY few losers. Only Boromir dies amongst the entirety of the Fellowship(unless we count Gandalf, which I don't).

They didn't fight 13.3 encounters per level either. If you're trying to model an epic fantasy book, the assumptions of the CR/EL system will fail you pretty badly.

The hobbits weren't attacked by all 9 nazgul in a cave that made it impossible to retreat at the beginning of the story. Because that would have ended the story in failure and wouldn't have been interesting to read/watch.

D&D characters are not usually commoners! And those hobbits were repeatedly faced with challenges that the CR/EL system would frown on, and survived anyway.

The DMs job is very similar to that of an author. Make the story interesting and don't kill off all the PCs. However, it's made even harder because you don't have absolute authority like an author. You have to rely on the dice, stats, and rules to decide part of the game. When those dice, stats, and rules say "Everyone dies", it can ruin a game.

Except, the stats never say that. You can always call of the fight. You can always overrule the results of the dice. Or you can play with them and see what happens. In any case, it is the DM's choice.

And yes, the DM does have authorial responsibility. To say that CRs are pointless is not to say that the DM shouldn't pick a level of challenge that is appropriate for his style of play. I'm merely saying that CRs are not helpful in doing that.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I think it is objectively poor game design. I would argue that failure in games should always come from the player's choices, and not be imposed by the game writer/designer/DM. Every problem should contain a solution (even if the solution is to avoid the fight), and players fail by choosing actions that lead away from the solution.

That might be one way to run a game, but that is not the definition of good game design. There are many games where it is entirely possible to play optimally well and lose anyway (many card games, such as poker, blackjack, and solitaire are this way; casinos are founded on games that are easy to lose) (not to mention large segments of the video game world, including D&D-based CRPGs, where it is assumed that the player will lose repeatedly and reload saved games and try again). Likewise, there are many stories where major characters fail for reasons outside of their control. It's quite a large contrivance to say that the players are completely in control of their own fate. Where is it written that failure should only come from player choice? I don't understand the origin of this idea.

Personally, I think that giving the players the sense that nothing bad can happen to them if they don't let it is a recipe for disaster. It tends to make them overconfident and insulated, and then when something bad does happen, that means that they are effectively being blamed and they tend to take that personally. Again, I think the whole reason for making random chance a core element of rpgs (by using dice) is not poor game design.

Player choice is part of the equation, but not the only part.

To put it another way, Kobayashi Maru situations are bad and unfair game designs, which is why we all applaud Kirk for cheating.

We do? Personally, I applaud whoever came up with the test in the first place (which by the way, was really a plot device to save money by reusing Klingon footage from the first movie). Yes, it is a defining part of Kirk's character, but do we think that every other cadet who went through it and lost like they were supposed to is a chump?

The D&D relevance, in my mind, is that situations in which characters must die are often the climax of a great campaign, IME.