Failure is boring!
ShadowDark
“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”
Perrin, I was inspired by the comment you left last week. I was talking about death in games but I think you got to the deeper issue, which is about failure. My experience in published 4e D&D adventures (and I’m including the free to download Living Forgotten Realms adventures) is that there really is no interesting options for failure.
Now, part of this can be accounted for in the format of a published adventure. Unlike a DM who is crafting their own home-brew campaign, the authors of published adventures are writing for a wide, general audience and can’t really take into account individual groups.
I once had a campaign I was running where the characters took on the ruler of an underground community of much higher level than they were and he responded to their attacks, after he grew bored, of teleporting them thousands of miles away. Okay, he was trying to teleport them to hell, but his spell was disrupted but that’s another story entirely. My point is that no published adventure can account for the characters so violently altering the plot through their actions.
Given all of this, though, I still think there exists more options than have been explored for meaningful and interesting failure in published adventures. To narrow the topic to discuss in this blog posting I will address skill challenges in Living Forgotten Realms adventures. I’ve have read Wizards of the Coast (Wotc) employees advise that failing skill challenges should not lead to dead ends and thus successful completion of a skill challenge should not hinge on the story of an adventure moving forward. In fact, some of their writings talk about how failure at skill challenges should be interesting.
However, most of the skill challenges I see in LFR games impose only receiving ½ xp for failure, the loss of healing surges and a tougher fight for the heroes, or some combination of these. None of that appeals to me as interesting. In fact, it often, in my experience, drives the players to their skill lists and begins a mechanical discussion of who should make what skill check in order to achieve success.
I have also heard that the DCs of skill challenges are set that only about 5-10% of skill challenges are actually failed in LFR adventures. So, the point being made is why change skill challenges to offer meaningful failure for such a small percentage of the audience.
If this is the case, why even call them challenges? In fact, why not just make these interludes role-playing encounters. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the introduction of the skill challenge mechanic into 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, but I don’t think it’s being given enough attention or focus on backing up the intention of making failure interesting.
I have posted comments elsewhere with the idea that failure of a skill challenge could lead to a different encounter in the adventure, change the plot, even if temporarily before coming back to the finale conclusion. It has been pointed out that devising a new encounter in an adventure for the 5-10% who failure isn’t feasible. If that is the case, then perhaps skill challenges could be made more challenging so there is a higher failure rate. If interesting things happened perhaps more players wouldn’t mind failing, or might even want to play the same adventure again with a different character to see what a different outcome might look like.
What about you? Any ideas on what could constitute interesting failure? Do you have any examples to share from a game where failure changed the course of things, turning out to be at least as interesting as success?
The Care Bear of DMs
ShadowDark
“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”
Okay, this week I've decided to turn the flashlight on myself and explore a little of my own Shadow. I don't subscribe that one's Shadow has to be completely unknown to one. While it usually may reside in our unconscious or at least large parts of it, sometimes we are all too painfully aware of our Shadow.
In my particular case I have a definite philosophy that D&D is squarely about the player characters and they should be the heroes, or in same cases anti-heroes of the game and not only win the day but also rarely, if ever, die. Yet, taken to an extreme, if there is no danger of the character's dying or significantly failing, then where is the drama, the tension in the game?
You see, I also want to have pulse-pounding, exciting adventures where not only the characters but the players themselves are wondering if they will be able to succeed. I have had some of these adventures on both sides of the screen and they remain some of my most memorable sessions.
However, the avoidance of character failure or death, taken too far by the DungeonMaster can quickly leech all excitement from the game. I had an incident when I had first started DM'ing (this was shortly after the release of 3.5) and the characters had come across a roper; a hideous creature far too powerful for their level. This was a professional adventure and the purpose of the creature was to create an obstacle the characters had to negotiate their way past instead of addressing with combat. The players chose the combat route and soon all but one of their party members had been reduced to a helpless state as the monsters used its long tentacles to suck the very strength out of them.
Now, they had clearly made the choice and were knowledgeable enough to know this monster was above their capabilities but tried anyway. In hindsight I wish I would have left them to their fate but I allowed the remaining PC to negotiate with the monster for the release of his comrades.
In a current game I am running this same pattern has reared its head when I gave the party extra action points for an upcoming encounter where there existed the possibility of character death, at least in my mind, in a fight near the edge of a tall cliff that could easily kill a character if one of the monsters threw them off. In the end someone did fall but I nerfed the damage and the party clearly didn't need the extra action points to successfully defeat their enemies.
I think this comes down to me viewing D&D through the lens of a cinematic movie. When was the last time you saw the hero fall? However, what makes movies interesting is the suspension of disbelief and the drama revolving around the potential failure. I do believe that as a DM I need to allow for the possibility of character failure and even death to maintain the excitement even for myself as the person running it.
Part of what makes D&D fun for me as the DM is being surprised at what might happen next. Often this is through the choices my players make as well as the random chance factor the dice bring into the game. I do believe that not allowing the characters to fail, whether through their own choices or random luck deflates some of the energy of the game and yet I find myself struggling to allow it to occur.
I suppose another view to take of D&D is that it is a game and as such there is nothing sacrosanct around the characters always succeeding. After all, the game allows for the possibility of death and has rules built into the game, such as the Raise Dead ritual, to allow characters to come back from the grave and continue to still adventure.
I'm curious about the opinions of others. As a DM, do you fondly remember the glory days of 1st edition where it was almost a rite of passage for the DM to kill as many PCs as possible? As a player do you ever intentionally put yourself in harms way as an excuse to get killed off and roll up someone new? Do you prefer your DM to call the dice as they roll or would you appreciate a little leniency when you're about to fail your third death save?
Competition in a cooperative game
ShadowDark
“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”
Welcome back! This week I’m going to talk about another experience I had when gaming that I think has occurred in many people’s games, albeit this was taken to an extreme. In D&D and role-playing games in general the vast majority of people would prefer to be players than the DM. Whether it’s the increased responsibility or fear of failing to run the game successfully or inexperience, there is a great deal of anxiety surrounding the Dungeon Master’s or Game Master’s role. I’ll admit than when I first started DM’ing in 3.5 edition D&D I was nervous myself, but after a few times of doing it I soon grew to love it. However, I find it invaluable to continue to inhabit both sides of the screen. Being a player helps keep me in touch with what’s important and that my goal is to deliver a great experience for the players when I’m DM’ing.
I’ll admit I have run combats where it seems the players are having little challenge and my monsters are dropping in droves. It’s helpful to have the player experience fresh in my mind to remind me that this is okay. Sometimes the players do have any easy combat and sometimes from my omniscient view of how many hit points, special powers and action points the monsters have left I may know the combat is close to being over but the players, without that same knowledge, may be feeling stressed or anxious.
While I tend to run my encounters without any modification, I do know DMs out there who like to silently bump a monsters hit points or add a bonus to their attack rolls to give the players more of a challenge. I can see that done in moderation and with the goal of providing the players an exciting and fulfilling experience, this could be okay.
Unfortunately I think some DMs get carried away and lose perspective on what’s truly important. This happened to me one time when group I was in had a new member join. I’ll call him Phil, though that is not his real name. He was definitely a power gamer, knew the character optimization possibilities inside and out. As a player he was great to have on your team because his PCs could really lay down serious pain on the monsters.
After a few months of playing our current DM was growing tired and wanted a break and Phil volunteered to run. This was during 3.5 and he chose to DM us through the super adventure City of the Spider Queen. Things went well for the first few sessions. He added a lot of flavor as a DM and great descriptions during combat. Since he knew the rules well he was able to use the monsters to best advantage. However, this being an adventure featuring drow in 3.5, their challenge ratings were much higher than the actual threat they represented.
After a couple of months of the campaign I can only surmise that Phil was getting tired of having his monsters handily defeated. Afterall, he was the guy who was use to running the PC who could run circles around the monsters. Anyway, the fateful session came when Phil introduced an enemy NPC into the adventure that wasn’t part of the published material. He created him as the same level as our PCs but pulled out every trick in his bag. There were only two of us playing that night and the other guy tended to play and build very defensive PCs. He was able to flee the “combat monster” that was destroying us. I was not so fortunate. After Phil’s NPC killed me he then cut my head off and took it with him. For those not familiar with the rules on raising the dead in 3.5, missing my head meant the cost to bring my character back to life was going to be thousands of gold pieces more expensive.
Anyway, it wasn’t long after that the rest of the group took a vote and Phil was ejected from the gaming group. So, D&D is supposed to be a cooperative game. The DM is not pitted against the players but has the job to run the adversaries, though hopefully cheering alongside the heroes when they are triumphant. That is not always the case. Competition can be a difficult beast to tame.
Have you ever been a player or a perhaps a DM in a game where the cooperative goal seemed to get blurred or lost entirely? How did your group deal with it? Were you able to work your way through it and continue on, or, like in my group, did someone lose their membership rights?
ShadowDark
ShadowDark
“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”
Welcome future readers to my first blog. The inspiration for this blog came from what is known in Psychology as the shadow. The term shadow was first used by the late Swiss psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung to describe that part of a person’s psyche that resides in the unconscious, consisting of everything that is repressed, undeveloped and denied. It is commonly associated with negative traits but can easily consist of positive attributes that the person does not recognize as belonging to themselves.
While the shadow can show up in all areas of our lives, I will be focusing on how it shows up in regards to role-playing games from my personal perspective. However, I will be looking at issues that I believe affect most if not all gamers, at one time in their gaming life.
My own fascination with the shadow begin in high school when I took my first Psychology class and was introduced to the term. The idea of a part of my consciousness that I was unaware of whose revelation could lead to personal growth was utterly fascinating to me. I was particularly drawn to the idea that while my personal shadow was unknown to me it had the possibility of being much more obvious to others.
Now, if only I could find a way to have others share their experience of my shadow side, how much quicker could be my evolution! I will leave this thought here as it strays too far from the purpose of this blog, but if you ever want to get a reaction out of someone, just ask them what they say about you behind your back.
Currently I am mainly playing D&D 4th edition and most of my experiences will be referencing that as well as my experiences playing D&D 3.5, but these incidents could have occurred during any type of game or system.
There’s a lot of talk about DM’s fudging dice rolls. Generally this occurs when the players are having a challenging encounter and it is done in their favor. I have also heard, though I believe it is more rare, that there are DM’s who might increase a dice roll if the players are having too easy of a time. If the DM has the best interests of the players in mind and is striving to provide an entertaining experience, then I believe that some fudging here or there does not have a negative impact on the game.
However, when players fudge their dice rolls it is not a good situation. The sanctity of the random chance factor involved in the game is something I consider sacrosanct. There are so many good gaming moments I’ve had because of a crucial hit, or critical hit or sometimes even a natural “1”. The game is already geared towards giving players the edge in that adding to their dice rolls, to me, means they might as well not play.
If a player is going to “make-up” the numbers on their dice, why bother rolling at all? My personal experience with this came up around initiative. I was playing with someone who I hadn’t known for long but had joined a home campaign that I was also a player in. At first, I didn’t pay too much attention, but after a couple of game sessions I noticed that this player always seemed to be going first and usually their initiative was 20+.
I’m not very comfortable with confrontation and I didn’t know this person very well and didn’t have any actual proof, so I decided to start tracking his initiative rolls to gather evidence. I tried to be circumspect about the process but during the second session that I had started tracking his rolls he noticed what I was doing. I didn’t deny what I was doing but I also didn’t outright accuse him of cheating. It didn’t seem he was making up numbers as much as he had a habit of rolling his d20s when there was no call from the DM to do so. It was more making “practice” rolls and the good roll became his initiative roll. I’m not claiming this is any better or worse than just making up a number for initiative, but I believe that he was more dissembling about cheating than consciously doing it. Anyway, after that second session it seemed his initiative rolls started to even out into a more consistent pattern that could be expected from random dice rolls.
Have you ever had to deal with someone making up dice rolls? Were you a player or DM? How did you deal with it? Ever had the urge to do it yourself? I’d like to hear any other comments or feedback or stories around this issue. Do you feel as strongly as I do about the sanctity of the random dice rolls?
Cendragon
Welcome
