WHAT IS EASY, MEDIUM AND HARD

[Bedrockgames]

I am a putting together a target number suggestion list today (going with Easy, Challenging and Hard). As this came up in another thread, I am curious what do tiers like this mean to you. For example if something is labeled easy, how often do you expect a skilled, versus an unskilled, versus a highly skilled person to succeed? What sort of tasks do you associate with easy, with challenging and hard (and what is you preferred terminology)?

 

[Celebrim]

This really depends on the genre expectations.

In SIPS, the genre expectations are that you are the Peanut's Gang or similar young people operating in a world where adults are remote and largely uninvolved. Something that is Easy in SIPS is something like eating a meal without spilling your water glass, doing a basic arithmetic problem, running across a flat field of wet grass without falling down, or if falling down realizing you are uninjured and getting up without breaking into tears. These are the sort of things that are rarely even tested in an RPG of casually realistic heroics. And of course, what is Easy difficulty if your game is simulating members of the Justice League, is another matter.

Of course, it's possible to have a comprehensive system that tries to simulate the whole range of zero to super-hero, but quite often such systems get unwieldy and break down at the edges despite the designer's best intentions. For example, D&D does zero the super-hero but has all sorts of problems at very low levels or very high levels, resulting in the notion of a 'sweet spot' - the power levels where the games rules and assumptions actually work as intended.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Without more to go on, I think I’d default to thinking about success rates. Something like Easy: 75% success rate, Medium/Challenging: 50%, and Hard: 25%.

Not knowing the genre or setting or general expectations makes it tough to go much beyond that basic take.

 

[aramis erak]

I'd set the metric based upon a Guy Competent in field

Easy: Guy only fails if distracted, injured, hurried, under fire or otherwise has issues.
Medium: Guy fails less than half the time
Hard: Guy fails less than 3/4 of the time

I'll note that these are a step off from Twilight 2000 v2.0...
Average guy was skill three in his competence, so T2K Easy is my Medium; T2K Average is my hard, and T2K hard I'd call formidable or very hard.

 

[niklinna]

I am a putting together a target number suggestion list today (going with Easy, Challenging and Hard). As this came up in another thread, I am curious what do tiers like this mean to you. For example if something is labeled easy, how often do you expect a skilled, versus an unskilled, versus a highly skilled person to succeed? What sort of tasks do you associate with easy, with challenging and hard (and what is you preferred terminology)?

Depends on the system. Harder things are ideally both more taxing to perform, and more likely to fail (possibly but not necessarily more likely to have heavier consequences on failure), and there should be some amount of player ability to make the tradeoffs. Some systems explicitly handle both: Blades in the Dark excels here, Torg Eternity has a variety of limited resources players can spend to improve their odds.

Many systems don't provide for players to make tradeoffs. Pure odds-of-success is pretty standard in such popular systems as Basic Role Playing and D&D. At least 5e has Inspiration dice, and some class features & spells, but nothing's really tied directly to difficulty and a sense of effort. As for specific target numbers or percentages, that's heavily genre-dependent so I won't try to be that specific.

 

[Fenris-77]

I am a putting together a target number suggestion list today (going with Easy, Challenging and Hard). As this came up in another thread, I am curious what do tiers like this mean to you. For example if something is labeled easy, how often do you expect a skilled, versus an unskilled, versus a highly skilled person to succeed? What sort of tasks do you associate with easy, with challenging and hard (and what is you preferred terminology)?

If it's easy I start with 'don't roll' and then think about situational stuff like time pressure, poor tools, or man eating pachyderms. From a rolling perspective I'd say that a 'skilled' PC (by which I mean one who has invested some points/ranks/stripes/snot stacks into the skill) might succeed somewhere around 75% of the time with minor situational difficulties and scale from there. The notion of 'challenging', for me, is usually whatever the target 'average' skill roll gets you in a given system, so around 50% success with minor situational difficulties factored in. 'Hard' is probably set closer to 25% success rate.

Those are just very rough numbers of course. If a game has useful 'help' rules I'll factor that in. I'll also adjust based the level to which PCs in a given game are supposed to experts in their chosen skills right off the hop. So playing zero-hero D&D style stuff I might set the bar higher than I would playing, say, Night's Black Agents. Things also change if the game in question (like PbtA for example) aims it's mechanics for what I'm calling challenging at a success with complications type of result.

Really, the system in questions and genre expectations probably affect these numbers for me more than any generic notion of difficulty in RPGs.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Without more to go on, I think I’d default to thinking about success rates. Something like Easy: 75% success rate, Medium/Challenging: 50%, and Hard: 25%.

Not knowing the genre or setting or general expectations makes it tough to go much beyond that basic take.

I am more interested in what the terms mean to people in general across systems (as most games seem to use language like this). But in my case it is horror (lethal horror) and a dice pool skill system against a target number, with character ranks generally ranging from 2d10 take the single lowest result, 1d10, 2d10, and 3d10 (all the latter of which are take the single highest result). TNs range from 2-10. Situational Bonuses can move those ranks up to 6d10 max but the system is pretty stingy with the bonuses, so 6d10 would be rare.

 

[Fenris-77]

I am more interested in what the terms mean to people in general across systems (as most games seem to use language like this). But in my case it is horror (lethal horror) and a dice pool skill system against a target number, with character ranks generally ranging from 2d10 take the single lowest result, 1d10, 2d10, and 3d10 (all the latter of which are take the single highest result). TNs range from 2-10. Situational Bonuses can move those ranks up to 6d10 max but the system is pretty stingy with the bonuses, so 6d10 would be rare.

What kind of genre expectations are you working with? Are the PCs playing average joe types or something more like experts in their fields?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I am more interested in what the terms mean to people in general across systems (as most games seem to use language like this). But in my case it is horror (lethal horror) and a dice pool skill system against a target number, with character ranks generally ranging from 2d10 take the single lowest result, 1d10, 2d10, and 3d10 (all the latter of which are take the single highest result). TNs range from 2-10. Situational Bonuses can move those ranks up to 6d10 max but the system is pretty stingy with the bonuses, so 6d10 would be rare.

Good start, but what do you want the feel to be? Competence, like the players are Constantine fighting devils, or more poor shmucks that are in way over their head? There really shouldn't be a universal idea of what's easy. It's gonna change with your tone.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I dig the DCC RPG system's definitions, which go something like this:

Very easy: a child could do it.
Easy: a regular adult could do it
Medium: only someone with training could do it
Hard: it would take a hero to do it, someone with exceptional ability