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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7597087" data-attributes="member: 4937">Now, I think we are only arguing over which term of art that we have just made up is most appropriate."Challenge the Character" => "Indirect Challenge to the Player" => "Resolution Through Capabilities of the Character"We're talking about the same thing.  Oh, that's a good one.  Yes, you can introduce or resolve a conflict without challenging either the player or the character.   You don't see it much any more, but in some old 1e AD&D encounter designs there were some encounters that seemed more or less to introduce and resolve the challenge randomly, through a pure random check, without any recourse to either the player's skill and choice or the character's abilities.   You'd find some encounter where, "There is a 20% chance X will happen to a random member of the party.", and it didn't matter what that character was capable of.These seem to a be a pure case of what [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] calls "random number generation", where we just seem to be introducing randomness into the fiction for no reason other than the feeling that the fiction out to be random.  But I think cases of "pure challenge to player" (as I've called them) are simply this in disguise, differing only in that we're inspecting the player before setting what we think the proper odds of random forks in the road ought to be.   Further, I think these "challenge to player" cases were we introduce something purely to create a small possibility of a random fork in the fiction are more common than you might think.   In MMORPGs it is typical for a player in combat to have few real choices regarding their action or their fictional positioning.  Typically they'll engage in the entire combat without moving because movement is meaningless within the fiction, and typically they will cycle through a list of abilities with particular refresh timers according to some optimal sequence and timing without needing to make any choices along the way.   In MMORPGs, its not unusual for some encounters to be relatively straight forward and tacticless, where no choices matter beyond performing these mindless tasks as efficiently as possible and success is determined solely by the level, character build, and equipment of the characters involved in the encounter.   In MMORPGs these are referred to as "pure damage races", but for our purposes we could equally refer to them as pure character challenges.It strikes me that in many adventures there are encounters that are designed to be these sort of pure damage races, where the players best strategy is just to use their best damage attack each round and hope to overwhelm the foe before the foe overwhelms them.   Each round each player declares something like, "I attack", and then uses the fortune mechanics to determine how much damage they inflict and receive.  Success depends less on player choice than strong builds and good luck of the dice.Those are cases of random number generation.  They are complex random number generators, but that's all they are.   You might as well turn a crank and have it tell you what the new fictional positioning is.   They are combats that largely resemble late game Risk combats, where you grind through large stacks of armies with repeated attacks.And this reminds me of another thread, where we argued over the utility of ending a combat early, where I suggested the utility of that depended on whether or not the fiction was still evolving.   If it was, then there was no point in truncating the combat.   Well, in the context of this thread, I might have just as well phrased my point as there is no point in truncating the combat as long as it is the player's skill that continues to be tested, and it's not just the character's skill we are challenging, because as long as the player's skill is being tested the player will be engaged and tend to enjoy the combat.  Whereas, if it is just a damage race, we might as well figure out a simpler random number generator to use to arbitrate the outcome.</blockquote>

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