TTRPGs should punish people who play DMFs.

[Whipstitch]

And people will take the game in directions which the designers don't intend. Doesn't mean the designers screwed up, or that the RPG's a failure.

It certainly doesn't rule it out, however. Emergent gameplay certainly exists but you must be careful not to confuse the game for the deck it's being played with. If I invent playing cards en route to creating the game War, that doesn't mean I am a great designer if people skip my turd of game but use the cards to invent cribbage.

[Stubbazubba]

I'm with K on this one; there is nothing ethically defensible about purposefully breaking someone's expectations 'for the greater good.' If you present 4 options equally, but are in fact not OK with someone choosing #3, and punish them afterwards for it, the player has every right to be upset, and will not learn to stop choosing option 3, but rather to stop playing either the game or with you. If punishment is your reinforcement mechanism of choice, you can't control the extent of the effect. Doing things that people don't like is a great way to make them go away, but not to teach them to be different. If your game is pushing away an otherwise interested player, you've failed as a game designer.

Punishment's effectiveness as a behavior modification tool is directly correlated to how unavoidable the operator's punishment is. A single peer simply cannot 'teach' another to behave differently by punishing them; the target will just avoid the operator and continue the behavior away from him/her, likely resenting the operator in the process. Masses have the power to punish behaviors in order to change behavior, because they're unavoidable, and individuals with significant authority (teacher in a class, parent in a home, or other enforcer of rules) can achieve behavior modification when they are present, but individual peers just can't muster that kind of leverage over each other.

A single TTRPG, therefore, can't realize the behavior modification Lago wants here by punishing anyone. Even if 5e is everything Lago wanted, there are too many other options for the base to flee to to avoid how bad they feel when they play DMFs in this game.

That being said, I don't see how Frank's suggestion of putting Fighter into the NPC class list and replacing them with Paladins, Warlords, etc., even counts as a punishment. It's a snub to Fighter-lovers, but it's not triggered by an undesirable behavior, so it's not behavior-modification. I'm totally OK with this idea. It's also essentially what K is saying.

[ishy]

When you give people the ability to mod your game, then by definition, one of the things you want them to do is mod your game.

Thank you for quoting my examples and restating one of the points they were examples for I guess.

Lago claims that getting people to play the game in the way you want is the most important thing of game designing. And now you are claiming it is your entire job to keep people from playing in ways you don't like.

Whut?

Then you shouldn't ever design a game, because getting people to play the game the way you want is the most important thing of game designing.

Putting in a rule that incentivizes people to act in a certain way is the exact same thing as putting in a rule that punishes people for behaving the opposite way.

If you reward people for roleplaying or building their character or treating their teammates a certain way, you've contrariwise implemented a relative punishment for not doing such. Thus any addition or omission you make to the game by definition means that you are corralling people into behaving in a certain way. This seems so incredibly obvious to me that I am completely floored that this is apparently a controversial observation.

I do agree with this last quote, but I don't agree that getting people to play the game the way you want is the most important thing of game designing.

[Username17]

That being said, I don't see how Frank's suggestion of putting Fighter into the NPC class list and replacing them with Paladins, Warlords, etc., even counts as a punishment. It's a snub to Fighter-lovers, but it's not triggered by an undesirable behavior, so it's not behavior-modification. I'm totally OK with this idea. It's also essentially what K is saying.

Well no, that is not what K is saying. Although it is fairly close. K is suggesting:

The only solution is to not have bad options at chargen.

And that's a lofty goal to aspire to. So lofty in fact that it is literally impossible to achieve. We can't actually remove all of the bad options. If players are really determined they spend their Paladin's starting money on a sextant instead of a breastplate. If rules for commoners exist, then it's possible for a player to demand to play one even if the rules tell them not to.

The number of bad options can be minimized, and it definitely should. And certainly "secret" or "trap" bad options (like playing a Monk or having Spring Attack) can and should be excised from the game for the most part. But you're never going to be able to make the game such that all of the bad options don't exist.

Step one is therefore to make there be as few bad options as possible. PC classes like the Fighter just have to go. Step two is then to make all the options that are supposed to be good be actually good. Classes like the Monk should be good (like the Dungeonomicon Monk) instead of shitty (like the Pathfinder Monk). But then the next phase of your mission as a game designer is to set up incentives and instructions so that whatever bad options you cannot eliminate from the decision space are at least not used. In short: your job is in fact exactly to "keep people from playing in a way you don't like".

So the game world has dirt farmers and spear catchers and shit. There are rules for those people, but you don't want people to play them because they are fucking terrible. So you label them as "NPC only". That's an incentive to not play them. In fact, it's a punishment for playing them, because in order to play one you will have to go through the gauntlet of having the DM look at your character sheet and say "This is an NPC class, what the fuck are you trying to pull?" And while you aren't going to do anything so drastic as that to discourage people from writing up Paladins who don't have arms and armor or to discourage people from writing up Wizards who don't have attack spells in their spellbook, you're still going to do something to guide players in the right direction on those fronts as well.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

And that's a lofty goal to aspire to. So lofty in fact that it is literally impossible to achieve. We can't actually remove all of the bad options. If players are really determined they spend their Paladin's starting money on a sextant instead of a breastplate. If rules for commoners exist, then it's possible for a player to demand to play one even if the rules tell them not to.

Nah, you just make the Paladin's armor a class feature instead of equipment he has to buy, so when you write "Paladin" on your character sheet you automatically get a level-appropriate breastplate that you cannot sell.

Or you can go the other route and just put the sextant in the big pile of stuff that everyone gets for free because it makes no mechanical difference and bookkeeping all that stuff is a pain in the ass.

No trap options means fewer options and fewer statistical differences between characters, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. At the most extreme, you can balance everything by saying that everyone is literally identical. Players would only have one option, but at least it wouldn't be a trap.

[DSMatticus]

Players would only have one option, but at least it wouldn't be a trap.

That is a technical but impractical truth. Identical characters is a pretty big limit on your game. And even then, you can have trap options; both characters may have identical statblocks and actions, but one character may prefer action A over action B, despite action B being objectively superior in all cases. If you really want to prevent (in the strictest sense of the word) people from gimping themself, you basically have to get rid of choices entirely and replace every event with a script where the player gets to be the rollDice() function.

[Stubbazubba]

Well no, that is not what K is saying. Although it is fairly close.

Yes, I did say essentially on purpose there.

So we put NPC classes in the DMG, away from the place the lay person will look. Then, at least for the new generation of players and the casuals who make up a sizable chunk of the base who aren't as attached to legacy stuff as grognards on the internet, people who want to play Fighters get the strange look and interrogation from the DM that they do on the Den.

And while you aren't going to do anything so drastic as that to discourage people from writing up Paladins who don't have arms and armor or to discourage people from writing up Wizards who don't have attack spells in their spellbook, you're still going to do something to guide players in the right direction on those fronts as well.

And at this point you have to really ask yourself; do Paladins need total freedom to buy whatever they want, and do Wizards need total freedom to choose any cocktail of spells they want, or are we better off pre-making some of those decisions for the player? Is the possibility of pwning the character building/spell selection mini-game in order to be ahead of the proverbial curve worth the cost of people who don't know better dragging down the party on accident (or on purpose in a passive-aggressive way that's still in the rules)? How you answer that question will tell you whether you just simplify those choices or leave them there but further incentivize the better part. At some point, though, further incentivizing of the correct options just increases the learning curve with decreasing marginal benefit for the average group, so I prefer the simplification method.

[Kaelik]

When you give people the ability to mod your game, then by definition, one of the things you want them to do is mod your game.

Thank you for quoting my examples and restating one of the points they were examples for I guess.

Hey idiot. Your example was an example of where designers incentivized people to play the game in the way they wanted them to play it.

That doesn't contradict Lago, that is literally an example of Lago being right. You dumbfuck.

[fectin]

Kaelik, think that all the way through. If anything designers give you the ability to do is "by definition" playing the way the designers intended, then any suboptimal choice is playing the way the designers intended, and this whole thread is about punishing players for doing what the designers intended.

[echoVanguard]

In retrospect, I think my statement about "stopping people from playing in a way that I don't like" was unfair and at least partially untrue - our resource rules are pretty much specifically designed to prevent the 5-minute workday, so I think I owe Lago an apology on that front. I do totally disagree with Frank's assertion that it is a designer's entire job, but I'm pretty sure that's just hyperbole to begin with.

echo

[sabs]

Well, here is the deal.
Assuming 2 things:
1) You're designing a specific game (and not lolz rifts!Gurps!Hero!)
2) You aren't pants on head, on fire, retarded. (Or Mike Mearls? wait redundant)

You have a vision of the kinds of stories you want to see. The kind of characters you envision. Your job is to communicate that in a way that it happens. You are telling people how to play Wizards In Mythical Europe, or Barely sane humans vs the horrors of Cuthullu.

Your game says that Wizards are better, and everyone else is a very distant second. But, everyone gets to play a wizard, so that's cool. Sure, you can play a companion too, but really everyone has a wizard character, and he's just freaking better.

The game is Police vs Zombies. If you include in the game a 2nd Grade School teacher class. Then you're failing at your job. It's your job to make sure everyone makes a Police officer of some flavor. Now, there might be trap options, like meter maid or something, but hopefully you aren't that much of a dick.

The game is SuperHeros. Yes, you can have someone whose power is they make things moist. But that's terrible, and you should be ashamed for putting it in there. If your game is Vampire, and you don't design it well so people think they can play human hunters and hang.. then you've failed at your job.

When you design a game, you're designing for a specific play style and feel and story telling element (or small group tactics combat). And your entire job is to make sure that the game supports the way you wanted it played.

edit:
Now it's possible Gary Gygax's entire design for D&D was "make people who want to play fighters feel small in the pants" In which case, they succeeded like champions.

[MGuy]

The primary point of contention between what Lago said and the bulk of what other people are speaking against is the idea that "punishing" people is a thing you should do. I don't believe, or really fathom, how making Fighter an NPC class is punishment. It makes it harder to be a fighter specifically (about as difficult as it is to be a commoner) but unless being a fighter is already an expectation in the imagined game making it an NPC is not something I'd call punishment for anybody. For me to consider it punishment it would either have to be someone making an effort to ruin someone's day or be something that the players had and you take away from them. If it is not a "real" option to begin with and starts off as a non option (like playing a monster is) then I don't know how you could rule that as punishment.

[Kaelik]

Kaelik, think that all the way through. If anything designers give you the ability to do is "by definition" playing the way the designers intended, then any suboptimal choice is playing the way the designers intended, and this whole thread is about punishing players for doing what the designers intended.

It is not that anything the designers give you the ability to do is playing the game the way the designers intended.

It is that Blizzard spent a lot of money creating tools and a marketplace to encourage people to make custom games. Counterstrike is built off of source, IE, the entire engine released in an easy to modify and use way.

His specific examples are wrong because technically, people could have made as many custom games as they did for Warcraft III using Empire Earth. And one reason they didn't is because Empire Earth didn't try to incentivize them to do so.

Halo pre-Forge had very few custom games and maps. Halo post-Forge has a lot. The reason is obvious, because the designers decided they wanted people doing that, and then made it easier for them, and gave them rewards for doing it.

The exact same thing applies to Warcraft III's plethora of mods compared to Warcraft IIs. Or Half Lifes to Quake.

He literally picked two examples of companies that made it one of their design goals to get people to make their own games using their content as an example of designers not incentivizing behavior, and that is fucking stupid.

[Username17]

I don't believe, or really fathom, how making Fighter an NPC class is punishment.

Getting the DM to question and harass the player in advance of them making a Fighter character is just about the only thing in the whole world that is "punishment". You can give the Fighter shitty abilities in-game or whatever, but that's just a reduced reward schedule. A "negative reinforcement" regime by which they stop having reduced in-game power when they stop making failtard characters. But that's really inefficient becuase outside of a Gygaxian hellscape, players don't actually make that many characters and they may never get around to making a non-DMF character to receive that reward.

Conditioning is just a really shitty model for getting people to play the kinds of characters you want them to play, because character generation is not an activity that is iterated very often. The expectation is that an individual player may create a character only once a campaign, and that a campaign may last an entire school year or even longer. That simply is not enough bell ringing to get saliva flowing in your test subjects.

What you want is unambiguous rewards and punishments up front. And there is very little in your arsenal as a game designer that can punish undesirable behavior. About the best you got is to tell the DM and other players to pressure the player to not make a choice that is bad. And clearly demarcating a class or archetype as being "not for players" is one of the best ways to get that to happen.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

What do you as the game designer do about players who insist on playing intentionally narrow concepts when the game provides and should require otherwise? See, that's where the DMF part came in because they're the clearest example of this problem WRT D&D. Which most people play. Personally, I say that the game should implement some kind of DM-initiated punishment. Or cutoff from reward. Which is the same as punishment.

At game time, what you do is to engage these guys with stuff from outside their zone of confort. This is how you "punish" them. Except you're not actually punishing, you're providing roleplaying opportunities, which is just one of the MC's jobs anyway.

Before the game even starts, you have a choice of telling these guys to play something else or not playing with you. Seriously, this is how you fix this thing you keep calling a problem. If you personally don't like some kinds of playing styles, you're free to not associate with people who enjoy them. What's bad it's you trying to turn your personal pet peeves into general principles.

Now I'd like to point to that "cutoff from reward" thing you say. That's some pretty bizarre thing to say regarding a RPG. The "reward" of playing D&D is that you have a good time with your friends. Consider two parties: Party A is cleric, wizard, druid and sorcerer. Party B is fighter, rogue, barbarian, cleric (which, given the other guys, is obviously a healbot). If D&D was a videogame you could win, everybody would be right to point and laugh at the huge failure Party B was bringing to the table. But since it's not, both parties may be, in fact, enjoying the same rewards from the game. That an adventure designed for Party A would trucidate Party B isn't even a problem because Party B isn't even invited for it.

I get the constant idea reading the "but the DMF can't even play!" that D&D is a videogame and you're only getting your bucks' worth from it if you win it at 100%, nightmare mode and unlock all the Achievements. I even get that Party B in the example above will never actually be playing in what is the the conceptual high level of D&D and I'm okay with it because high level D&D is crazy town, and not everybody can stomach it.

Once I destroyed an "epic campaign" (15th starting level) that one of my friends tried to DM, when I showed him on the very first scene how my wizard would solve the presented "mystery", in two rounds (Discern Location + Teleport Without Error, for those curious). That guy had come with a 3th level adventure concept and made the mistake of packaging it as a 15th level adventure, and I can't even blame him, because basically the only place you see "D&D high level adventuring" is on D&D proper. Mostly all the fantastic fiction (CRPGs, books, comics, manga, whatever) there's around display low level adventure concepts, possibly re-skinned to look epic.

TL;DR: While flexibility = good as a matter of principle, the actual flexible classes in D&D play way above the confort level for some people. This is yet another argument for why DMFs (or in the general case, characters with a narrow focus) aren't a bad thing, per se. Not everybody can stomach being the wizard or the non-healbot cleric.

[ishy]

It is that Blizzard spent a lot of money creating tools and a marketplace to encourage people to make custom games. Counterstrike is built off of source, IE, the entire engine released in an easy to modify and use way.

(,,,), people could have made as many custom games as they did for Warcraft III using Empire Earth. And one reason they didn't is because Empire Earth didn't try to incentivize them to do so.
(...)

Thanks once again for telling others why I chose those games to illustrate what you are saying here.

[Kaelik]

It is that Blizzard spent a lot of money creating tools and a marketplace to encourage people to make custom games. Counterstrike is built off of source, IE, the entire engine released in an easy to modify and use way.

(,,,), people could have made as many custom games as they did for Warcraft III using Empire Earth. And one reason they didn't is because Empire Earth didn't try to incentivize them to do so.
(...)

Thanks once again for telling others why I chose those games to illustrate what you are saying here.

Saying that Lago has a point is fucking crazy talk. Lago claims that getting people to play the game in the way you want is the most important thing of game designing.

You gave an example of designers getting people to play the game in the way they wanted as proof that Lago is wrong about designers getting people to play the game in the way they want.

You are an idiot.

[Username17]

Now I'd like to point to that "cutoff from reward" thing you say. That's some pretty bizarre thing to say regarding a RPG. The "reward" of playing D&D is that you have a good time with your friends.

Then why do you gain XP?

-Username17

[ishy]

You gave an example of designers getting people to play the game in the way they wanted as proof that Lago is wrong about designers getting people to play the game in the way they want.

You are an idiot.

No I didn't.

There are games which are designed to give players tools, which they can use to play the game in any way they fucking want.

See? That was the text in front of the examples I gave. And then I gave an example of people playing a game in a way the designers hadn't thought off at all.

[Omegonthesane]

Now I'd like to point to that "cutoff from reward" thing you say. That's some pretty bizarre thing to say regarding a RPG. The "reward" of playing D&D is that you have a good time with your friends.

Then why do you gain XP?

-Username17

As a mechanism to facilitate noticeable growth in character power over the course of a campaign.

Granted, in practice bonus XP is typically handed out when players do things the DM wants to encourage, but character advancement up to a certain rate is expected rather than appreciated.

[John Magnum]

See? That was the text in front of the examples I gave. And then I gave an example of people playing a game in a way the designers hadn't thought off at all.

At this point you're even using different words for different concepts. Do you not recognize that there is a difference between playing in a way the designer does not want and a way that the designer has not thought of? Or, to put it another way, do you really think that a designer will necessarily have a totally comprehensive enumeration of all possible acceptable modes of play? Do you realize that they don't, and somehow thinks that this means that designers have no preferred or unfavored modes of play at all?

Newsflash: People coming up with mods and new gameplay experiences that had never before been thought of within the constraints of the map creation engine is one of the outcomes Blizzard wanted. There is no conflict in the facts that "Blizzard wants people to make mods" and "The specific mods that people created had not been thought of in advance by Blizzard."

So, recap: You provided an example of Blizzard creating incentives to encourage people to play their games the way Blizzard wanted them to. It also happened to be the case that the way Blizzard wanted them to play included "come up with new game variations that haven't already been seen". How does any of that remotely contradict Lago's claim that designers attempt to get players to play in ways the designers want?

[Kaelik]

Actually Josh, while you are 100% correct in most respects, his actual example was people using the map creation engine to create and play DOTA.

Is anyone so stupid that they think Blizzard hadn't thought that people might take the game creation engine in a game with heroes that level up and make and play a DOTA variant?

Well, I mean, besides ishy.

Because everyone else knows that "playing DOTA" is not something Blizzard hadn't thought of.

[Username17]

Now I'd like to point to that "cutoff from reward" thing you say. That's some pretty bizarre thing to say regarding a RPG. The "reward" of playing D&D is that you have a good time with your friends.

Then why do you gain XP?

-Username17

As a mechanism to facilitate noticeable growth in character power over the course of a campaign.

Granted, in practice bonus XP is typically handed out when players do things the DM wants to encourage, but character advancement up to a certain rate is expected rather than appreciated.

You missed the point entirely. XP is a form of positive conditioning - a series of rewards received for the continued action of playing the game. It's one of the things that keeps people playing long campaigns - the intermittent reward of additional character power is a motivator.

Nockermensch is thus completely off his damn rocker, because if there wasn't an expectation of reward for playing the game there wouldn't need to be any XP. XP rewards can be set up to reward anything from telling jokes to butchering monsters to bringing the MC a beer. But at the very least they reward showing up to the game. Making it to game night is the bell, the XP is the food. The fact that you locate your character sheet the day before is you salivating.

-Username17

[ishy]

At this point you're even using different words for different concepts. Do you not recognize that there is a difference between playing in a way the designer does not want and a way that the designer has not thought of?

Of course

Or, to put it another way, do you really think that a designer will necessarily have a totally comprehensive enumeration of all possible acceptable modes of play?

Depends on the game, sometimes yes, see for example tic-tac-toe

Do you realize that they don't, and somehow thinks that this means that designers have no preferred or unfavored modes of play at all?

This is just false, sometimes they do. And in no way does the designer having preferred or unfavored modes of play necessarily reflect the way the designer designs the game. Sometimes the designer wants the players to have access to options the designer themselves don't find fun.

Newsflash: People coming up with mods and new gameplay experiences that had never before been thought of within the constraints of the map creation engine is one of the outcomes Blizzard wanted. There is no conflict in the facts that "Blizzard wants people to make mods" and "The specific mods that people created had not been thought of in advance by Blizzard."

So, recap: You provided an example of Blizzard creating incentives to encourage people to play their games the way Blizzard wanted them to. It also happened to be the case that the way Blizzard wanted them to play included "come up with new game variations that haven't already been seen". How does any of that remotely contradict Lago's claim that designers attempt to get players to play in ways the designers want?

If you honestly think that people playing the game in ways you can't think of when designing the game is the same as "getting people to play the game the way you want is the most important thing of game designing" I don't know what to tell you.

[sabs]

Really? Fucking Tic Tac Toe?
That's your example of a game where the designer exhaustively thought about how people play the game? Now you're just smoking crack cocaine.