The Gaming Den

This is a long-delayed sequel to this thread. Don't worry, there's nothing in here about my more controversial D&D crap, just general game design principles I believe in.

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Suboptimal choices or outcomes on both player and DM side are not only desirable but necessary for long-term play. If every choice made by the actors is optimal then you have a predictable and thus boring game. If a party has no incentive to create a suboptimal choice at some stage in play then something (randomness, ignorance, compromise) must force them to.

As a corollary to the above, there has to actually be a chance for the players to fail for there to be any suspense. This failure need not be the end of the campaign and/or death, but it needs to be some kind of permanent setback.

Reduced versimilitude is usually a fair sacrifice for improved gameplay.

People are not creative when given unlimited or even a large amount of choice. This ironically locks people into uninsightful and predictable reactions. People are most creative when given a restriction on choice but not have it taken away altogether.

There's a limit to how creative a player can be, both from ability and desire. Asking for too much creativity can exhaust and frustrate players. Oftentimes you'll need an option to let people punt and let the story continue.

While the Oberoni fallacy cannot be used to excuse bad design, trading edge case brokenness to get general playability is fine. The problem is of course that this tradeoff rarely needs to be made, so you should be skeptical of anyone going 'but it won't come up in normal play' unless they can prove that it's A) not worth the trouble to fix and B) really won't come up in normal play.

Counting has a basic player usage difficulty lower than addition or subtraction but rises faster in difficulty with complexity than those two operation. It's easier to count 6 eggs than calculate 11 - 4, but it's harder to count 26 eggs than calculate 54 - 28. The same comparison can be made for multiplication and difficulty, but no game should reach the point where it's easier to divide/multiply by a number other than 2/5/10 than it is to add or subtract repeatedly.

TTRPGs should not generically reward any campaign-agnostic foresight more deep than 'there are fire trolls in this dungeon, let's pack fire-resistant gear'. When that happens the game becomes predictable and boring. See caveat #1.

By the same token, because the TTRPG is not single-author fiction, The Unspoken Plan Guarantee should be used sparingly for TTRPGs outside of some mechanic that manipulates luck or story. Pulling this too often in favor of the Unspoken Plan will make it feel like someone (usually the GM) is hijacking the story, pulling it too often to screw the Spoken Plan disengages and frustrates players.

Because human beings are risk adverse and nostalgic, it's better to not introduce a mechanic or paradigm that needs to be retired or obsoleted in place at all unless it's absolutely vital for genre emulation.

Horizontal advancement should be used sparingly and not as a replacement for vertical advancement. Horizontal advancement tends to be either ignored or ends up stepping on other peoples' toes if it doesn't go far enough/goes too far.

Since TTRPGs are a cooperative storytelling experience, the rules should invite player input as much as possible unless it steps on other peoples' toes at which point a referee or randomness must be used to adjucate. Unless the players are mostly new or lazy, the GM should not shoulder all of the story decisions.

There's a soft limit for how many words, concepts, and stories you can devote to any product before the base reaches saturation. Regardless of the solution you choose (make it evergreen, release a new edition, retcon new or old stuff) you should be aware that filler crap like Dungeonomicon reduces the lifespan of your edition. There's a reason why 'evergreen' games like Monopoly are simple.

Most of the time if there's a mistake in your product just ignore it and live with it. Fixing it should be a last resort. Trying too hard to fix middling mistakes reduces faith in your product and frustrates people who pride themselves on up-to-datedness.

While there are many players who don't conform to some or even all of these categories, if you make your game on the assumption that players and GMs will be A) risk adverse B) selfish C) lazy D) attention hogging E) naive optimizers (the psychological definition, not 'trying to optimize but failing') F) trying to optimize but failing G) play in both the GM and PC seats H) have what Admiral Rickover called 'the belief that just because something is desirable to have happen WILL happen' then it's very hard to make a game that will go wrong.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Since TTRPGs are a cooperative storytelling experience, the rules should invite player input as much as possible unless it steps on other peoples' toes at which point a referee or randomness must be used to adjucate. Unless the players are mostly new or lazy, the GM should not shoulder all of the story decisions.

sounds like a good VtM LARP you have in mi...wait you said TTRPG?

I agree with all of these ideas at first glance, especially the player input, need for danger, and ignoring of mistakes.

What does "evergreen" mean in terms of game design?

...You Lost Me wrote:What does "evergreen" mean in terms of game design?

constant stream of revenue... green being the color of money, so the product is (for)ever green...evergreen.

the money tree is always green.

PHB, isnt an evergreen product, because you need only one to play. DDi is an evergreen product, because a subscription must be paid for again and again.

so the marketing is interfering with game design.

Monopoly is evergreen? It seems sort of like a one-time-purchase to me...

Yeah, there's only a few of these that strike me as being terribly controversial. Some of them are even obvious extrapolations of sociological facts backed up by scientific studies and such. I can think of one or two controversial opinions you've espoused within the past few months, but none of them are on this list.

...You Lost Me wrote:Monopoly is evergreen? It seems sort of like a one-time-purchase to me...

dice get lost, the board wears out, the cards wear out, pieces get lost...

there was a time you could buy these independently of the entire game to replace them. that time the game itself was double what it is now at $10.

monopoly requires little more investment now than to constantly manufacture it because it is a done system. rules dont have to be reqorked, no new artwork.. the seed was planted and the tree mooney tree can always be picked.

D&D requires constant design, artwork, etc.

imagine it more fire and forget....so the DDi is evergreen in terms of constant revenue stream, like Monopoly. yet DDi is about as close as you can get for D&D because of the nature of being an open rather than a closed system like Monopoly.

An evergreen product is one in which the product is sold and used as-is (theoretically) forever with no further changes or revisions.

Tetris (not the wacky Arcade versions) is an Evergreen product. So is Monopoly. Even though those things are decades old it's not hard to see them continuing to be as or even more popular 40 more years from now with no further changes. The same cannot be said for, say, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or any edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

The defining aspect of whether a brand is evergreen is A) the product can continue on inertia for at least a decade and B) whether a replacement would necessarily reduce sales even if the revision was regarded as superior. Bejewelled can be regarded as Evergreen, but Super Mario Galaxy is not.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Reduced versimilitude is usually a fair sacrifice for improved gameplay.

I'm not sure I agree with you here, but I can live with that. I would appreciate some expansion on this point if you have the time.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Counting has a basic player usage difficulty lower than addition or subtraction but rises faster in difficulty with complexity than those two operation. It's easier to count 6 eggs than calculate 11 - 4, but it's harder to count 26 eggs than calculate 54 - 28. The same comparison can be made for multiplication and difficulty, but no game should reach the point where it's easier to divide/multiply by a number other than 2/5/10 than it is to add or subtract repeatedly.

11-4 is 7, not 6, fyi.

Otherwise, I think I agree with you.

That just illustrates how much more difficult it is.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

That big ability is poorly worded. I'm not sure if it should be able to return other people's lands to their hands, but it definitely can't return them to your hand. The ability should, presuming it can't return other people's lands, read as follows:
"If Wall of Text would enter the battlefield, do one of the following instead: return a basic land you control to its owner's hand, sacrifice a creature with converted mana cost 2, return an enchantment from your graveyard to the battlefield, or sacrifice a Wall. If you do, put Wall of Text onto the battlefield. If you sacrificed a wall in this way, add {3} to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast Wall spells. If you don't, put Wall of Text into your graveyard."

If it can return other people's lands, replace, "return a basic land you control to its owner's hand," with, "return target basic land to its owner's hand".

Templating based on Lotus Vale

Phoenix, I'm pretty sure that may have been the idea.

Winnah wrote:I'm not sure I agree with you here, but I can live with that. I would appreciate some expansion on this point if you have the time.

There's an implicit agree as to how much you can trade gameplay for story to begin with. No (playable) game is going to have the wealth of details required to procedurally generate what the opposing army had for lunch even though that may be important in of itself or lead towards a good story. That established, we can also see that even with IPs that we already know have or lead to good stories (like Star Wars) bad gameplay can wreck the experience. This is important because while bad gameplay can ruin a good story (and thus lead to a bad TTRPG experience), good gameplay does not depend on a good story. Partly because it's just plain easier for groups to come up with fluff than rules, also partly because it's easier for groups to play bare-bones storyless games (like Stratego or Chess) than it is to play baroque games with an ostensibly good story.

Now what makes it a suggestion rather than a standard rule is that good gameplay is hard to define in more than generalities. Bad gameplay is easy to define however. A bad story is easier to define than a good story but is harder to nail down than what good gameplay is. So all while all things being equal if you're unsure of what to do the answer is to go for improved gameplay, sometimes this won't be the case.

Ok, I think I better understand what you meant now. Reduction as opposed to minimal.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Suboptimal choices or outcomes on both player and DM side are not only desirable but necessary for long-term play. If every choice made by the actors is optimal then you have a predictable and thus boring game. If a party has no incentive to create a suboptimal choice at some stage in play then something (randomness, ignorance, compromise) must force them to.

This, I disagree with, in part; there should be no trap options in character creation, because trap options in that phase can be made in ignorance and totally ruin a character forever. This is different from a jack of all trades being a master of none, which might be considered an acceptable tradeoff... but there's no reason to have strictly inferior options exist in actual play. Whatever character-creation process you're using, you should take a good deal of care to ensure that there aren't any traps lurking; whether that means balance between classes or between various point-buy options, it really is quite important. It might not be possible to make everything completely balanced, but that doesn't mean that you should embrace imbalance into the very character creation process; that's the kind of philosophy that produces stuff like Rifts.

That said, once past character creation, the gloves come off. If you want to flip off the king, trigger obvious traps, or bother the sleeping dragon, you can totally do that, and whatever comes of that is well-deserved. Even gross stupidity shouldn't necessarily be immediately fatal, but there can totally be consequences for it. My point is that there's a big difference between a mistake made in actual play and one made in character creation, since character creation is likely the first thing any player will do with your game system, and punishing them over the entirety of their gameplay for a mistake made while they're first starting is poor game design.

There's a difference between suboptimal decision and mistake. It's a mistake to make a core-only monk of any kind for any level-appropriate adventurer, but it's a suboptimal decision to have made an enchanter or rogue for a 'surprise! All mindless undead' adventure. It's a suboptimal decision to shoot an acid bolt at the trolls when they reveal that they have acid-resistance armor 30. It's a suboptimal decision to have specialized in slashing weapons when the adventure module dumps a bunch of hammers and rapiers. It's a suboptimal decision to decide to attack the BBEG with an all-out attack blowing your X/day powers when you roll a string of natural 1s. Etc..

Yes, a lot of people will say that having the players make a string of suboptimal decisions will quickly frustrate and bore players. But a lot of game designers fail to consider that in order to have a game that doesn't disengage and bore players they need to make a suboptimal decision at one point. And yes, sometimes (oftentimes actually) you'll realize that the suboptimal decision you made was like a year ago. And more funnily than that is that even if you were able to go back and time to make the 'right' decision said decision would have screwed you over ever before or after the original screw-up point you tried to avert.

This is why I think that while 4E D&D making classes equal in aggregate to each other was a fine goal, 4E D&D making classes equal in all situations to each other was a poor one. Making it so that 'I waste it with my crossbow!' and sneak attacks and illusions always work so that there were much fewer bad choices to be had was a huge mistake. Punishing people for suboptimal choices is only a bad thing if it's an especially severe punishment or if it happens in a string with no chance for recovery or turnabout.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: It's a suboptimal decision to decide to attack the BBEG with an all-out attack blowing your X/day powers when you roll a string of natural 1s. Etc..

Wouldn't that just be bad luck?

Reduced verisimilitude is usually a fair sacrifice for improved gameplay.

This one, I have to disagree on.

RPGs are always competing with other games for the time it takes to play them, and I'm not even talking about video games, because there is the social aspect. I'm talking about board and card games. Board and card games (good ones, at least) have a larger pool of players, are faster to set up, take less time to play, and are better balanced and tested than RPGs, by a long shot.

So every time I have a long battle against some ogres, the game has to justify to me why I don't go play a board/card game instead. And the answer isn't going to be "better gameplay". Verisimilitude isn't usually the answer either, but it contributes to some things that might be the answer, because at least RPGs are actually ahead of the curve there.

Immersion, for one thing. Now some people don't care about immersion - well fuck them, I like it. And saying "well you're not really an elf, so it doesn't matter" is a false dichotomy. Maybe more important - ability to improvise and go outside the box. It's easier to extrapolate things outside the rules when those rules make some external sense, and when you don't have to fight the system to do so.

That said - it isn't a linear slope. You can remove a certain amount of verisimilitude without many problems. Then suddenly you remove just a bit too much, and the game falls flat. And that "too much" point will vary from player to player. Also to clarify, verisimilitude is not the same as detail or (necessarily) accuracy to the real world.

Oh, and somewhat pointless nitpicking - I know what you mean, but the way you're talking about suboptimal moves doesn't actually make sense.

If you're using WoF, and the only move you have available is "Mediocre Attack", then that's still the optimal move, because the alternative is to do nothing. If the incentive to make a suboptimal choice is actually worth it ... then that move becomes optimal.

Ice9 wrote:Oh, and somewhat pointless nitpicking - I know what you mean, but the way you're talking about suboptimal moves doesn't actually make sense.

If you're using WoF, and the only move you have available is "Mediocre Attack", then that's still the optimal move, because the alternative is to do nothing. If the incentive to make a suboptimal choice is actually worth it ... then that move becomes optimal.

At first I just assumed what Lago really meant when talking of incentives to use suboptimal choices was that he wanted there to be incentives to adjust what the optimal choice was.

Now I have no idea what he meant by that from the examples of doing obviously ineffective choices [acid damage vs acid resist] or just having bad luck [rolling auto fails on daily moves].

Leaving alone the definition of optimal and addressing the core concern of whether the game is fun: I don't think players need to occasionally make irrationally bad choices like using acid attacks vs acid resistance to enjoy a game, I don't get that. I do agree that a ttrpg should have an element where PCs can have bad luck, that goes along with a sense of tension/chance of failure and makes the accomplishments more satisfying.

What he was trying to say is that a game should be designed perform both perfect and imperfect actions. Like how in pokemon you can attack a water type with a fire move, but you would rather use an electrical attack instead; the existence of imperfect and perfect moves allows for interesting tactical decisions to be played out, to make tactical choices matter to engage the player enough to stop him from leaving the table and play smash bros.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:There's a difference between suboptimal decision and mistake...

I see where you're going with that, and agree; my point is that having options equivalent to 3.5 Monk are a mistake on the part of the game designer. Yes, the possibility of suboptimal decisions is an integral part of any real game, and it's totally possible that some things which are otherwise balanced might be less good options for the players to take then others within the context of a given situation. That doesn't excuse the game designer creating bad options.