The Difficulty in RPGs thread

[K]

If demographic data insults you, I'd consider getting over it.

Designing games for "some people" who turn out to be a very small part of the demographic is ridiculous. Thinking you can design a game to make everyone happy is ridiculous. Thinking that the most successful game designers in the world are using bad data and flawed philosophies to personally insult you is ridiculous.

The only actual insults in this thread are from the people accusing the high-difficulty guys of being assholes and the people accusing the low-difficulty guys of being crybabies.

But hey, you guys get back to that. It's been eight pages of useful progress and I'm sure a winner will be declared at any time now.

[Foxwarrior]

I read this latest post before reading the posts immediately before it, and now I'm extremely disappointed that you don't actually have any particular demographic data.

[Mistborn]

Let's add a second dimension to the Ron Edwards Big Three.

>2013
>still taking GNS seriously
>ISHYGDDT

[John Magnum]

Come on, LM. Really? Do I really have to spell it out?

[Chamomile]

Alright, K. First, your argument about demographics is empty unless you actually have the demographic data to back you up. Second, your argument that how hard a game is and how long it takes to play is completely false, because I Wanna Be The Guy can be played in 20 minutes segments and can be beaten in under an hour, while World of WarCraft requires hours upon hours upon hours to experience all of its content but even at the highest-end raiding it is never all that difficult. And third, the statement people are disagreeing with is this one:

The high difficulty gamers are living through the game to get a sense of self-worth since their actual lives don't have that, and that's just not a world-view that can be reconciled with any ordinary gaming experience.

That's a statement about the motivation of a demographic, not just its existence, and you can't seriously expect people to not notice when you backpedal from "high difficulty gamers are losers who play hard mode to feel good about themselves" to "high difficulty gamers are a demographic that exists."

[Wrathzog]

Come on, LM. Really? Do I really have to spell it out?

Yes, you probably do.

-e-
Also, I've never met the Unicorn Man, so I honestly can't say that K is wrong. In fact, it's tempting to say that the only reason it's being so badly received is because it may be hitting way too close to home for some.

[Mistborn]

Come on, LM. Really? Do I really have to spell it out?

No GNS was a shitty concept created by a shitty person, I thought this was settled already.

[John Magnum]

That's the fucking point, Mistborn. I am mocking K's thoughts by comparing them to and associating them with GNS, which is universally understood to be terrible.

[nockermensch]

K, you just went full crazy. Take a step back, take a long calm breath, and meditate for a moment. People who like to play games on hard mode are exactly like people who like to play games on easy mode. It's a completely irrelevant personal preference. And people who are in one camp or the other are not morally or spiritually superior to anyone else.

-Username17

I believe (given, from personal anecdotes, without seeing relevant studies) that there's a correlation between "free time you have to play" and "wanting easier successes".

So it's not the 1:1 relation that's implied by K generalist assertion, but it's also not perpendicular as Frank is saying here.

With this single point of contention being resolved, everybody else can resume loving each other.

[Mistborn]

That's the fucking point, Mistborn. I am mocking K's thoughts by comparing them to and associating them with GNS, which is universally understood to be terrible.

Given that this forum has that one guy who unironically shills for Runequest and AW plus nocker it's kind of Poe's law in here.

So if K is done spazzing out, let's try to get back on track. So back near the beginning of the thread this was posted.

to say that objective difficulty doesn't exist is just obviously wrong. Like, Elennsar levels of wrong, because you're making Elennsar's actual argument. While the DM can make a lot of choices that affect the difficulty of an encounter, an adventure, or a campaign in ways likely too subtle for even the DM to notice, at the end of the day there will be a certain number of die rolls and they will have specific chances attached to them of producing specific results and collectively they will create a total decision tree and have discrete chances of ending at each branch.

Unless anyone disagrees with Frank here we don't have an argument. Really the only thing that has been going on in this thread is people raging at Roy in absentia and raging at me for at one point being associated with him.

[nockermensch]

Let's add a second dimension to the Ron Edwards Big Three.

>2013
>still taking GNS seriously
>ISHYGDDT

That one flied over your head so hard, that I think it reached escape velocity.

Then again, thinking about this whole K diatribe, since I'm rich and successfula busy adult now, I don't have more time for the entire weekends of D&D play, but when I have like 30 min to spare, I read The Gaming Denplay a roguelike game (since they're single player and turn based it's irrelevant if I take months to finish a game) or seppuku on the higher difficulties.

[infected slut princess]

K is clearly trolling people here. It's actually pretty funny. I mean, c'mon. He says that gamers who spend time on "challenging" activities have nothing more important competing for their time.

This... from a guy with millions of posts on message boards about RPG stuff no one cares about. A guy who has spent thousands of hours writing about D&D and thinking about rules. A guy who has played of D&D and video games for a total number of minutes greater than zero.

All of that time could have instead been spent shagging sexy girls, advancing his career, or spending quality time with his family.

I mean, if anyone fits into the category of people who lack other important things to spend their time on, he does. Heck, basically anyone who has ever posted more than twice on this message board is wasting their life.

[echoVanguard]

K is clearly trolling people here.

Sorry, I don't buy it. And yes, I'm aware your post was probably meant to be ironic.

echo

[Orion]

He could have been shagging sexy girls while posting. Let's not make assumptions.

[ishy]

Or sexy guys if he's into that or both.

to say that objective difficulty doesn't exist is just obviously wrong. Like, Elennsar levels of wrong, because you're making Elennsar's actual argument. While the DM can make a lot of choices that affect the difficulty of an encounter, an adventure, or a campaign in ways likely too subtle for even the DM to notice, at the end of the day there will be a certain number of die rolls and they will have specific chances attached to them of producing specific results and collectively they will create a total decision tree and have discrete chances of ending at each branch.

The thing is, that doesn't have to be true. I know have seen plenty of examples of DMs whose monsters always succeed on saves, who change the hitpoints of monsters upwards on the fly if they feel like you do too much damage, who if you say you go one way, will just change the world around so you're still in their railroad. Does your DM houserule on the fly?
Or hell lets give some examples where you don't have terrible DMs. Lets say you need to make a skill check. Does your DM allow masterwork tools? Does your DM allow you to have a +10 or +20 to skill item? Does your DM give you a bonus or penalty because she feels nice / forgets one because she's tired?

[K]

Alright, K. First, your argument about demographics is empty unless you actually have the demographic data to back you up.

Since you apparently can't use Google, here is the first result of the thirty seconds I was willing to spend finding things that you should have been able to find yourself.

Consider doing your own research sometime. Be an active participant and not a consumer.

What would you say that your biggest goal going into Mists of Pandaria was?

Particularly on the dungeon and raid front, to provide content for everybody, for all kinds of players. And we recognize that there's a massive spectrum of millions of people who are playing and enjoying World of Warcraft - a huge range of skill, frankly, and time commitment, the whole casual-hardcore spectrum people always talk about. And one of the things that we've been doing over the evolution of the game is to add additional difficulties, additional ways of consuming that content. So, you know, we now have LFR, normal, and heroic raids, and now we've introduced challenge modes, a sort of new tier of actually legitimately difficult five-player content. It's one of the biggest differences from Cataclysm at launch; one of the things we heard from people who were in guilds with friends and they'd say "these dungeons are awesome, we're having a lot of fun" ... but the people who queued up in Dungeon Finder would have a miserable time.

And it's the truth that the latter type of player is now the majority. And that was an evolution that happened very quickly, over the course of 3.3 with Dungeon Finder. We had theories, but we hadn't really seen how it would play out with brand-new content. When we added it in 3.3, the majority of content was almost a year old and massively outgeared. One of the things that we discovered was that what we consider one of the core experiences of playing an MMO -- failing, learning from your mistakes, applying that knowledge, adapting, overcoming the challenge -- you feel good about that. But you also feel good about coming back next time and now you've mastered the fight! And you win! But that breaks down when you're not using repeat players. You're playing with a different group of four people next time; you learned the fight, but they may not have. So then you're back failing all over again while these other people learn. And that can be frustrating.

So we've recognized that, and the Mists dungeon content is tuned for the randomly-matched dungeon finder groups, so the people who were frustrated with Cataclysm launch dungeons should have a much better time this time around. And challenge modes are now there for people who have that group of four really skilled friends or guildies who are looking for a challenge.

I'd unpack this statement for you, but I think I'll leave this thread for the people who want to insult each other for wanting fundamentally different games.

[...You Lost Me]

ISP, that analogy doesn't work. K had a bunch of time to spend on D&D, so he worked on D&D projects that took a long time. If anything, his personal anecdote supports his position.

[nockermensch]

The thing is, that doesn't have to be true. I know have seen plenty of examples of DMs whose monsters always succeed on saves, who change the hitpoints of monsters upwards on the fly if they feel like you do too much damage, who if you say you go one way, will just change the world around so you're still in their railroad. Does your DM houserule on the fly?
Or hell lets give some examples where you don't have terrible DMs. Lets say you need to make a skill check. Does your DM allow masterwork tools? Does your DM allow you to have a +10 or +20 to skill item? Does your DM give you a bonus or penalty because she feels nice / forgets one because she's tired?

Does the DM look to the clock worriedly because it's almost 2AM and decides to "finish this quickly"? Did the DM spent time during the week reading about charop tricks and out of the blue pulls some strategy that nobody in that group is familiar with? (I don't think a lot of groups realize exactly how nasty solid/acid fog are, for example. I know mine doesn't).

Does the DM change to the monsters or uses them straight from the MMs? Does the DM use the monster advancement rules? (a dwarf Cleric 15 is "CR 15". And so is a stone giant Cleric or Psy-warrior 14).

Does the DM uses artifacts? The "rules" regarding artifacts are basically a bunch of pages all saying "lol, the DM makes shit up".

And so on.

Still, Frank is right in that the game has actual difficulties on it. As written, a nightwalker is a much more difficult opponent than an orc warrior 1. The problem lies in the vast gulf between the monsters as they appear on context-free SGTs at the hands of designers that are (hopefully) all in the same page, and in how they end being used by the game buyers.

It's at the moment that a game reaches the hands of the public that any objective difficulty evaporates. The game should ship containing tight mathematical models determining at level characters should be able to tackle which monsters, survive which challenges, etc. These models will be then followed more or less to the letter by some people and more or less ignored by other people. From the same player base! And there's pretty much no way, when listening to a gaming anecdote, to figure exactly on which part of the "adherence to the designers' ideals" spectrum that group is.

[Foxwarrior]

Here, let me have a go, K:

A raid in Cataclysm usually takes one attempt to figure out, and a second attempt to beat. If you team up with a different set of random players each time you try a dungeon, you'll probably be matched with some players who are trying that dungeon for the first time, and you will lose whether or not you've figured out how to beat the dungeon. Losing a raid despite having mastered it is pretty unrewarding. The designer decided to solve this problem by making it so people usually win on the first playthrough.

If the phenomenon can occur on the scale of two or three sessions, it doesn't sound like a hardcore vs casual problem to me...

Also, the designer would probably have been better off overhauling the Dungeon Finder algorithms instead.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Here, let me have a go, K:

A raid in Cataclysm usually takes one attempt to figure out, and a second attempt to beat. If you team up with a different set of random players each time you try a dungeon, you'll probably be matched with some players who are trying that dungeon for the first time, and you will lose whether or not you've figured out how to beat the dungeon. Losing a raid despite having mastered it is pretty unrewarding. The designer decided to solve this problem by making it so people usually win on the first playthrough.

If the phenomenon can occur on the scale of two or three sessions, it doesn't sound like a hardcore vs casual problem to me...

Also, the designer would probably have been better off overhauling the Dungeon Finder algorithms instead.

Yeah, adding a flag for, "has attempted this level before," (and maybe even, "has reached the following checkpoint in this level before") seems like the "right" solution for this problem.

[Wrathzog]

No, Blizzard actually took the best path here.

adding a flag for, "has attempted this level before,"

Casual Player enters the dungeon having never completed it before. Is queued with 4 other casual players who have never completed it before. They WILL fail. Some of them will probably never queue again.
This is great for people who know what they're doing, but not for the people who would benefit from having someone who could Mentor them through a new Dungeon.

-e-
Reading through that thing again. They dance around the subject, but when they say, "You're playing with a different group of four people next time; you learned the fight, but they may not have. " that actually describes the perspective of every person in that group.
So, they say that they're doing this for a particular subset of people using the queue system when they actually mean that they're doing it for All of them. Dunning Kruger in Full Effect.

[Stubbazubba]

extremely well-rounded, successful, and fulfilling professional and personal lives

Not only do those kinds of gamers not exist, but those kinds of people don't exist. I don't know why you think that these unicorns are avid gamers.

?? Wow, K, I have never thought so little of a regular poster here. Just because you have failed to find success and meaning in your life is no excuse to project that on the entire population. That's utterly stupid and you should feel bad for insinuating that because you're unhappy, no one is really happy. What a petulant child you are today.

But more important than your sudden and abrupt insanity, I never said they were avid gamers. I said they enjoyed challenge and competition in their recreational activities, including the numerous times I've played video games and the handful of times I've played TTRPGs with them. They don't do this to compensate for failures elsewhere, it's just what they like, in play as well as in work.

I stand by my appraisal that hyper-competitive gamers are overcompensating. You can't achieve high levels of skill without sinking a lot of time into a task, and spending that time means that there is not a lot of remaining time for friends, family, and career.

The guy who games all weekend does not have a good marriage, happy kids, and a promotion on the way. It's a simple matter of hours in the day and the amount of time it takes to accomplish those tasks.

Come on, K! Think! You said "The high difficulty gamers are living through the game to get a sense of self-worth since their actual lives don't have that." Not "hyper-competitive," but "high difficulty." But let's ignore your obvious goalpost-shifting for the sake of fully detailing how logically unsound your conclusion is.

Your argument assumes that gamers who enjoy high difficulty must have or pursue high skill levels. Is that a given condition in the scenario? No. People who play games occasionally can still enjoy high difficulty games, even if they don't ever put in the time to master them. Some people like to play Chess against difficult opponents, even if they lose. It doesn't follow that they will then slavishly practice the game until they can overcome any difficulty. What's stopping them? Rewarding experiences in work and personal life, probably. To think that to enjoy high difficulties one has to invest the time to master those difficulties violates the most basic of logical rules. Enjoying difficulty is not necessarily the same as overcoming it. I cannot emphasize this enough; people who enjoy high difficulty are not necessarily the same as those with high skill levels.

But lets break this down even further. If you played a game for just two hours a week for 1 year, you'd have over 100 hours of experience, you'd get very good at it. You wouldn't get there as fast as someone who played 25 hours a week for a month and then moved on to the next game, but we're measuring end skill, not speed of acquisition. So it's entirely possible to have a high skill level without compromising work and personal life, but it will come at a slower pace, if at all. You are declaring all of these scenarios as not just "outside the target demographic" (as you've now backpedaled to), but inherently impossible, which is unfathomably stupid of you to say.

EDIT:

Thinking that the most successful game designers in the world are using bad data and flawed philosophies to personally insult you is ridiculous.

Who are you and what have you done with K? Isn't that what we do on this forum? Just because WoW designers are higher paid or their products more popular than their counterparts in the TTRPG industry doesn't magically make them immune to stupidity. Seriously, what happened to K?

[Username17]

K, that doesn't support your core assertion at all. The people at Blizzard have a game that uses up a huge amount of total time and they also find that they have customers with a huge range of skill levels and desired difficulties. And of course, absolutely none of that corresponds to how filled and fulfilling the lives of their customers in the periods that they are not playing WoW are.

Even among the people who spend 20 hours a day playing WoW and use the remaining time to sleep, there are people who want to be constantly challenged and people who just want to gold farm. Your claim about Blizzard research supporting any of your claims about peoples' desired difficulty levels is totally and unremittingly false. It doesn't even support your idea that you can't make a single game to appeal to people to whom different difficulty levels appeal, since the Blizzard design docs talk about doing just that.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

?? Wow, K, I have never thought so little of a regular poster here. Just because you have failed to find success and meaning in your life is no excuse to project that on the entire population. That's utterly stupid and you should feel bad for insinuating that because you're unhappy, no one is really happy. What a petulant child you are today.

But more important than your sudden and abrupt insanity, I never said they were avid gamers. I said they enjoyed challenge and competition in their recreational activities, including the numerous times I've played video games and the handful of times I've played TTRPGs with them. They don't do this to compensate for failures elsewhere, it's just what they like, in play as well as in work.

In your blistering rage, you're confusing "people I like" with "successful, well-rounded". Successful, well-rounded people are (by K's very obvious definition) people that are good at everything and do everything a little bit. That doesn't make sense, because if you want to be successful, you need to sink time into things, thus not being well-rounded. He's not trying to insult your friends, he's trying to demonstrate a contradiction of terms. Put your dick away.

Come on, K! Think! You said "The high difficulty gamers are living through the game to get a sense of self-worth since their actual lives don't have that." Not "hyper-competitive," but "high difficulty." But let's ignore your obvious goalpost-shifting for the sake of fully detailing how logically unsound your conclusion is.

I don't see the difference...

Your argument assumes that gamers who enjoy high difficulty must have or pursue high skill levels. Is that a given condition in the scenario? No. People who play games occasionally can still enjoy high difficulty games, even if they don't ever put in the time to master them. Some people like to play Chess against difficult opponents, even if they lose. It doesn't follow that they will then slavishly practice the game until they can overcome any difficulty. What's stopping them? Rewarding experiences in work and personal life, probably. To think that to enjoy high difficulties one has to invest the time to master those difficulties violates the most basic of logical rules. Enjoying difficulty is not necessarily the same as overcoming it. I cannot emphasize this enough; people who enjoy high difficulty are not necessarily the same as those with high skill levels.

Oh lord, he already said they're in the minority. Do you know why? Because they are.

If you and all your friends love playing and losing at something over and over, then you and your posse is the exception and not the rule (or you're playing QWOP / Winnie the Pooh: Home Run Derby). People will tailor their play difficulty to their skill level 95% of the time, and their skill level is determined by their practice, and their practice is determined by time spent.

But lets break this down even further. If you played a game for just two hours a week for 1 year, you'd have over 100 hours of experience, you'd get very good at it. You wouldn't get there as fast as someone who played 25 hours a week for a month and then moved on to the next game, but we're measuring end skill, not speed of acquisition. So it's entirely possible to have a high skill level without compromising work and personal life, but it will come at a slower pace, if at all. You are declaring all of these scenarios as not just "outside the target demographic" (as you've now backpedaled to), but inherently impossible, which is unfathomably stupid of you to say.

Yes, if you played a game for two hours a week for 1 year, you would start at the lower level of difficulty, just like K already said. Once you have 100 hours, you will be OK playing tougher games, but you will do that after the 100 hours of play which is exactly what the point is.

Who are you and what have you done with K? Isn't that what we do on this forum? Just because WoW designers are higher paid or their products more popular than their counterparts in the TTRPG industry doesn't magically make them immune to stupidity. Seriously, what happened to K?

Seriously, it's like someone rustled your jimmies and in your desire to call them dumb and wrong for making fun of your friends you're completely forgetting to write a decent argument.

Your argument is that a WoW designer, who is getting paid and was selected for his position, who likely has a vast collection of data to draw from, who is making a statement (indicating confidence within the organization) as to which of only 2 groups is a majority, is dumb and wrong because you don't like his opinion. That's the dumbest thing I've had to read in this thread, including the OP and Mistborn's greentext post.

[Dean]

Really the only thing that has been going on in this thread is people raging at Roy in absentia and raging at me for at one point being associated with him.

There is some truth to that. But I also think that not accepting D&D as a thing that can be beaten has more merit than you're accepting. Can you even imagine trying to run D&D competitively? Can you envision a D&D tournament with a million dollar prize that could even kind of work without such a complete overhaul of the game structure that it would no longer be recognizable? It is community theatre plus wargames plus cops&robbers plus fucking magic plus a partial judge. That's unworkable in a competitive environment or even a competitive mindset. There are some games rules that were not made to be usable as a competitive measure of one's skills. They have other goals. Like apples to apples, D&D, or when a girl in your bed bets you you can't get her bra off with your teeth. Thinking of these things as legitimate competitive fields is mistaken. They are for fun and enjoyment.
Someone could memorize all the cards in Apples to Apples and read books on the art of Improv and try to learn what every one of his regular friends finds consistently funny. But I wouldn't say that means that person is a champion Apple to Apple player. He's taking it very seriously and no doubt he is a valuable addition to any table. But that's all we fucking are man. We're people who spend far too much time caring and working on some fucking game we like. The fact that we can make broken DMM clerics and Uberwizards and shit just shows that we know a lot about this thing. But we know a lot about a non-competitive thing. Which is fine, and something you should deal with.