Stop pretending TTRPGs have objective difficulty.

[Archmage]

And stop pretending that "overcoming challenges" in a TTRPG is somehow meaningful or "hard" outside of its value as part of creating a procedurally-generated story.

Because unless you are running your players through an official module, every enemy, every obstacle, every everything that stands in the way of the PCs was explicitly put there by the GM, who is presumably fully-aware of all the PCs attributes. The only way you can create "objectively difficult" challenges is to write a module blind with no knowledge of the PCs that will be played in that campaign. Which I think most people are going to agree results in shitty railroaded games because at that point you have by definition not allowed yourself to improvise new content. If the PCs go off the rails and you have to challenge them with something that wasn't already carved into the stone tablets you used to write the module then you are making it up on the spot and it cannot possibly be "objective."

You can argue that it is possible to improvise an off-the-rails encounter if you determine the nature of that encounter randomly, but in that case the random encounter table must also have been generated in advance with no knowledge of the PCs. And even then, unless your monsters have pre-written scripts that they cannot deviate from, the DM cannot possibly play the monsters "objectively." Even if the module is entirely pre-written by an "objective" outside party the DM is going to interpret it through their own lens and the PCs will be more or less likely to survive encounters and live through the campaign depending on how the DM plays the bad guys and adjudicates the impact of environmental hazards.

So, sure, let's have a dozen-plus page thread about TPKs and how eliminating the threat of a TPK or player death means that TTRPG accomplishments are hollow and meaningless. Because they weren't already hollow and meaningless anyway. Beating Red Hand of Doom or Age of Worms or is not the same thing as beating Ninja Gaiden on the hardest difficulty, and trying to pretend that there's any similarity between the two is doing disservice to the hobby.

[shadzar]

stop pretending GMs dont design things in advance, which dont take into account characters created at the beginning, newly created characters to replace lost ones, or new players joining, and the simple fact of level increases and things that cause the characters stats to change over time since the material was created.

BTW even the "official modules" arent written JUST for the characters that went through it to play the homemade adventure that became a published "official" module, or werent a group of pregens, etc, or just random characters made without forewarning to playtest a module that is being rushed to print.

aka "level appropriate encounters" for the "current PCs", make shitty games.

[Dean]

For real. People pretend that their shitty DMing is acceptable because "If I were playing through I would play it RIGHT and I would WIN! I AM A MAN, I AM POWERFUL! I EAT STEAKS AND RAW MEATS!" etc

It's super bullshit and it's entirely disingenuous to the genre. Now it's not that I don't think people can be better at tabletop gaming than others, but tabletop RPG's have absolutely no competitive element whatsoever. And people who advertise victory over something totally lacking in opposition come across as incredibly sad to me

[Username17]

This is undiluted 4rry bullshit. The game world is supposed to feel like a world, and it's supposed to have some fucking consistency. If you go to a police station, there are cops there. If you go to a military base, there are soldiers there. If you teleport to the Abyss, there are demons. Blah blah blah.

If you whip out an ax and start hacking people up in a federal courthouse, it would be fucking insulting if all the enemies were miraculously scaled to your skill level and you could hack your way to the center and steal the federal reserves without being met by dozens or hundreds of police outside. While we can assume that the players mostly go on adventures that are level appropriate, this assumption is only true because the players put some fucking effort in to choosing adventures that are level appropriate and means of tackling those adventures that fit within their skill sets. The places on the map where "there be dragons" have fucking dragons in them, and you don't go there unless dragon hunting is a thing you think your character can handle.

In fact, the only time you can reliably Leeroy Jenkins your way through things, confident that everything behind every door is level appropriate is the prepackaged adventure. Because that gives you out-of-character information that the entire region is "for players levels 4-6" or whatever. Without that information, you'd have to do some scouting or rumor collection or something. And the pre-packaged adventure also has objective difficulty in its own way.

Your thesis is wrong and it is wrong in a way that is literally offensive. I can't imagine wanting to play a game with an MC that thought like that.

-Username17

[K]

For real. People pretend that their shitty DMing is acceptable because "If I were playing through I would play it RIGHT and I would WIN! I AM A MAN, I AM POWERFUL! I EAT STEAKS AND RAW MEATS!" etc

It's super bullshit and it's entirely disingenuous to the genre. Now it's not that I don't think people can be better at tabletop gaming than others, but tabletop RPG's have absolutely no competitive element whatsoever. And people who advertise victory over something totally lacking in opposition come across as incredibly sad to me

Yup.

The instant a DM does any action for story reasons, it stops being a game of objective challenges. It doesn't matter if the action is as small as choosing a monster's target in combat or as large as designing a whole encounter or adventure.

The rules exist to create verisimilitude and force players along decision trees, and nothing more.

[Fuchs]

This is undiluted 4rry bullshit. The game world is supposed to feel like a world, and it's supposed to have some fucking consistency. If you go to a police station, there are cops there. If you go to a military base, there are soldiers there. If you teleport to the Abyss, there are demons. Blah blah blah.

You entirely miss the point. This is not about hell not having devils in it, this is about whether or not people can actually claim to have an objective difficulty setting in a TTRPG when facing said devils.

The OP simply says that even facing the exact same devils in the exact same place does not provide the same level of difficulty unless one uses hard-wired skripts to control the devils.

Which is (at the very least technically) true. As soon as the DM starts making decisions for the NPCs without following a skript things diverge. Attack the fighter or the paladin? Try to take out the mage or cleric first? Those two decisions alone can and often do result in wildly different combats with varying difficulties.

It's a bit like PvP compared to PvE. "Hey, I beat the Black Dragon in the first quest cave" is not the same as "hey, I beat 2 players by myself". In the first example, players of the game usually know what that represents, and can relate. In the second example, players usually ask "and how skilled were they?" (even if say level and gear was already known) before they even start to try to guess what if any achievement that was.

[infected slut princess]

The instant a DM does any action for story reasons, it stops being a game of objective challenges. It doesn't matter if the action is as small as choosing a monster's target in combat or as large as designing a whole encounter or adventure.

This is important. Now, isn't it true that ALL the DM's actions are "for story reasons"? Just like all the PC actions are for story reasons.

4e formalized the idea of monster "roles". But in every game the monsters and NPCs have roles. Whenever the DM puts a monster or an NPC in the game, he is supposed to make their actions consistent with their roles. Maybe the role of the dark elf is to attack the PC elf. Maybe the role of the DOom Beast is to try to eat the biggest PC. The DM is ROLEPLAYING all those non-PC dudes in the campaign. All DMs must do this -- to varying success of course, insofar as "quality of roleplaying" can be judged. It seems fair to say RPG players expect this from their DM.

So the difficulty is "subjective" because each DM will embody the the "idealized role" of the NPC/monster in a subjective way. It's like how people talk about a big D&D fight and say meaningfully "yo that monster acted stupid" or "I think the dark wizard would have done this instead of what he did in your adventure."

BUT.

If it is possible to conceive of the idealized role for the monster/NPC in some way, we must say it is to a greater or lesser extent embodied in the DM's choices for their actions. And since you have to always presuppose this is the case, you can still judge challenges, albeit imperfectly. To say otherwise is to say we cannot speak intelligibly about the difficulty with reference to truth or falsehood AT ALL. And that is clearly untrue.

I can look at, say, a 5th level party. Then I can grab five random monsters from the monster book. I might not be able to say that "Monster A is exactly 13% stronger than Monster C", but I can surely rank their difficulty in an ordinal fashion, like "Monster A is most difficult, Monster C is second monster difficult, etc." Who would argue with that?

We assume some kind of roleplaying when we analyze these things. Given certain actions produced by the DM, results of actions are determined by dice rolls. And we can judge the relative likelihood of certain outcomes based on what the probalities are, and therefore provide rational judgments about the difficulty of stuff.

To illustrate this, consider "GIANT CRAB" thread, where it is quite justified to say that the proposition "Giant Crab is too difficult" is true. So I would proceed by reductio ad absurdum: The "difficulty is completely subjective" thesis would imply that there is no right or wrong when it comes to the proposition "Giant Crab is too difficult", and that is ridiculous.

So I think "objective difficulty" is an abstract, yet intelligible thing that the DM approaches asymptotically -- that's what it means to create a game world with verisimilitude.

EDIT : can't spell so well.
Also, I beat Ninja Gaiden 2 on Master Ninja Mode.

[Fuchs]

The point is that the divergence resulting from even small decisions such as deciding who to attack first is so big, you cannot objectively compare two fights and claim their difficulty or challenge was equal. As soon as you have two different GMs objectivity is lost since their skill and expereince will vary greatly, as will their combat preferences.

[Murtak]

The point is that the divergence resulting from even small decisions such as deciding who to attack first is so big, you cannot objectively compare two fights and claim their difficulty or challenge was equal. As soon as you have two different GMs objectivity is lost since their skill and expereince will vary greatly, as will their combat preferences.

This translates to: because things other than the challenge itself may influence the difficulty of the encounter there is no point in even providing a baseline. Which is pure bullshit. Of course the goblin sidekick may roll five 20s in a row and kill Conan by himself. And of course Asmodeus can roll five 1s and fail to do so. But that does not mean it does not mean whether your encounters feature kitchen boys or lords of hell. Unless you really can not tell the difference between a goblin and a Balor or a rentacop and a cyberzombie there is a point in evaluating encounter difficulty.

[Fuchs]

The point is that the divergence resulting from even small decisions such as deciding who to attack first is so big, you cannot objectively compare two fights and claim their difficulty or challenge was equal. As soon as you have two different GMs objectivity is lost since their skill and expereince will vary greatly, as will their combat preferences.

This translates to: because things other than the challenge itself may influence the difficulty of the encounter there is no point in even providing a baseline. Which is pure bullshit. Of course the goblin sidekick may roll five 20s in a row and kill Conan by himself. And of course Asmodeus can roll five 1s and fail to do so. But that does not mean it does not mean whether your encounters feature kitchen boys or lords of hell. Unless you really can not tell the difference between a goblin and a Balor or a rentacop and a cyberzombie there is a point in evaluating encounter difficulty.

Again, it's not about comparing balor to goblin, it's about comparing balor played by GM 1 to balor played by GM 2. The differences due to different GMs are big enough to make those encounters too different to treat as providing the same challenge.

[FatR]

You entirely miss the point. This is not about hell not having devils in it, this is about whether or not people can actually claim to have an objective difficulty setting in a TTRPG when facing said devils.

Yes, people can. Otherwise even talking about, say, whether a GM used bad or good tactics for a monster, or even about whether pit fiends are strong or not, would be completely fucking impossible. But it isn't impossible. People do it all the time. Therefore, there is an assumption of objective difficulty. It is exactly because of this assumption we can say that at level 6 a party that gets thrown into Hell is fucked unless dragged out of danger by plot hooks, but at level 20 it is hardly in real danger, unless it goes to confront Asmodeus personally.

Now, of course, in actual play, difficulty will inevitably vary due to:
(1)Accepted sources and level of optimization.
(2)How tactical-savvy and ruthless/forgiving GM is, and how much/little time he spends on preparation.

So, in any really complex RPG, levels of difficulty will vary from group to group. This still doesn't mean that they either can't be consistent within the same group, or that consistency is not something we should strive for (because if the world does not react consistently to player actions, then players have no framework to make meaningful choices).

And this consistent reaction means that if you decide to challenge the Great Demon King of the Million Despairs 10 levels too early, you will, in fact, die horribly. Or, sometimes, albeit (hopefully) quite rarely, the Great Demon King just rolls really well when you're ready to fight him, the party unexpectedly gets its souls sucked and the world is enslaved until the next band of heroes rises to the challenge.

I can understand when people don't want either of these outcomes to be possible at all, and decide that their game should run on action movie plot logic. I mean, I don't like this decision, because action movies plots generally are fuckbad and RPGs don't feature cool visulals to compensate for it. But anyway, this still allows the game to have a degree of consistency enabling players to make informed decisions, even if it is much harder to make these decision matter, because action movie logic also dictates that the hero wins (see: various genre-emulation indie RPGs).

What I completely reject is talking the talk how the game has danger, and risk, and meaningful choices, and so on, and then refusing to walk the walk, when the risk comes true or the players choose poorly. This is the very opposite of consistency, this makes informed decisions impossible and meaningless, and once we get to this, we might as well just be MTPing a collective fanfic, because if the rules do not provide any sort of predictable framework for character actions, why even have them?

[Fuchs]

This is not about PC death or TPK, go to that thread to argue it. This is about how it is stupid to argue that Group A beating an adventure somehow means something compared to Group B not beating an adventure since just having a different GM means they have faced wildly different challegnes even if playing the same module.

[tenuki]

That point is so obvious, people have to ignore it deliberately in order be able to keep arguing.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Again, it's not about comparing balor to goblin, it's about comparing balor played by GM 1 to balor played by GM 2. The differences due to different GMs are big enough to make those encounters too different to treat as providing the same challenge.

That's total bullshit. Consider a university class for example. There will be some professors who grade harder or teach worse or cover more material than others, so Vector Calculus class A can be more difficult to pass than Vector Calculus class B. However, barring some really rare black swans, passing Vector Calculus is going to be more difficult than passing Remedial Algebra.

The net effect is that when someone says that they got an A in Vector Calculus, that's a more impressive accomplishment got an A in Remedial Algebra. Even if the Vector Calculus profess was a marshmallow that was nonetheless a whiz at teaching and the Remedial Algebra teacher was an asshole who sucked assholes.

Any challenge both in TTRPGs and real life have a range of difficulty, especially if you lay down some reasonable expectations or assumptions for it. The fact that sometimes ranges will overlap or are asymmetrically affected by certain factors does not mean that observers can't usually assign and rank tasks by difficulty.

[crasskris]

Any challenge both in TTRPGs and real life have a range of difficulty, especially if you lay down some reasonable expectations or assumptions for it. The fact that sometimes ranges will overlap or are asymmetrically affected by certain factors does not mean that observers can't usually assign and rank tasks by difficulty.

And difficulty assessments made by two independent observers may thus vary.
How does this make difficulties objectively (or anything nearing objectively) measurable again?

(not that I agree neccessarily with the original statement, but your example seems to stop halfway through)

[Fuchs]

Any challenge both in TTRPGs and real life have a range of difficulty, especially if you lay down some reasonable expectations or assumptions for it. The fact that sometimes ranges will overlap or are asymmetrically affected by certain factors does not mean that observers can't usually assign and rank tasks by difficulty.

The challenge provided by a balor played by two different GMs varies far, far more than an algebra test graded by two different professors. The more options you have, the more it varies. As one extreme example, one DM might have the Balor charge into melee, the other has it teleport away and start summoning an army of fiends or use similar indirect attacks to devastating effect.

"My party beat a balor" does really not say much since we don't know what kind of a challenge the balor was. Effectively, the range of most challenges in D&D varies so much from DM to DM they cannot be used to measure difficulties.

[Murtak]

Again, it's not about comparing balor to goblin, it's about comparing balor played by GM 1 to balor played by GM 2. The differences due to different GMs are big enough to make those encounters too different to treat as providing the same challenge.

Of course the encounters are different. But they would differ even more without a guideline to start from. And that is where CR, encounter guidelines and the like are useful - to give a starting point. You have a level 5 party, you look in the CR 4-6 encounters first. And if you find out the encounter was not difficult enough you can scale up gradually. Similarly players might have a difficult time with Bob the Balor even though Barney the Balor was quite easy. But without an encounter guideline they might face Bob, Bill and Barney at the same time.

The encounter guidelines do not need to be perfect, not even close to it. They just need to give a decent hint and a somewhat smooth progression of difficulty. You do not need to know whether fighting Debbi the Dragon will kill you 37.5% of the time. It is enough to know that Debbi is a very risky encounter for your level and that Barney is a little less powerful. And even DnD challenge ratings, even with all the bullshit they contain, work fine for the vast majority of monster.

[Fuchs]

The encounter guidelines do not need to be perfect, not even close to it. They just need to give a decent hint and a somewhat smooth progression of difficulty. You do not need to know whether fighting Debbi the Dragon will kill you 37.5% of the time. It is enough to know that Debbi is a very risky encounter for your level and that Barney is a little less powerful. And even DnD challenge ratings, even with all the bullshit they contain, work fine for the vast majority of monster.

They do not work to compare difficulties between campaigns by different GMs though. A single DM has a consistent style and usually learns how to refine the baseline provided by the CR rating, but based on his personal playstyle and skill. But that doesn't mean his game challenges are comparable to another DM's even if they use the same CR/encounter.

Which is the point of the thread: You can't really claim there's an objective difficulty in a TTRPG, it's far too dependant on your GM.

[Lago PARANOIA]

How does this make difficulties objectively (or anything nearing objectively) measurable again?

Because:

A.) You can still assign a range of difficulties to certain tasks, especially if you hold people to certain assumptions. For TTRPGs, this would be things like assuming nearly-optimal tactics, using the wealth-by-level assumptions, using a monster stat block as-is without any revisions or indirect modifiers (these monsters caught a disease before the combat!) etc.

B.) There are still factors out there that near-objectively increase difficulty. Shooting a full-court basket is more difficult than shooting a half-court basket. Shooting three full-court baskets in a row is more difficult than shooting one.

C.) Oftentimes, when people say 'you can't really determine the difficulty!' they're choosing the wrong way to measure it. It's really hard to say whether a titan or a balor is more difficult if you just use thought experiments. But if you got 10 tables together, had them repeatedly fight a titan and a balor, then looked at the after-action reports for resources expended and whatnot you would probably get a much clearer picture.

[Lago PARANOIA]

As one extreme example, one DM might have the Balor charge into melee, the other has it teleport away and start summoning an army of fiends or use similar indirect attacks to devastating effect.

What part of 'range of difficulties' is confusing you? Even a balor that's played with a minimal amount of competence is going to provide a baseline of difficulty.

[Fuchs]

A.) You can still assign a range of difficulties to certain tasks, especially if you hold people to certain assumptions. For TTRPGs, this would be things like assuming nearly-optimal tactics, using the wealth-by-level assumptions, using a monster stat block as-is without any revisions or indirect modifiers (these monsters caught a disease before the combat!) etc.

"Nearly optimal tactics" is utterly theoretical. In actual gameplay two GMs will again vary too much to be comparably close.

B.) There are still factors out there that near-objectively increase difficulty. Shooting a full-court basket is more difficult than shooting a half-court basket. Shooting three full-court baskets in a row is more difficult than shooting one.

Examples for TTRPGs please.

C.) Oftentimes, when people say 'you can't really determine the difficulty!' they're choosing the wrong way to measure it. It's really hard to say whether a titan or a balor is more difficult if you just use thought experiments. But if you got 10 tables together, had them repeatedly fight a titan and a balor, then looked at the after-action reports for resources expended and whatnot you would probably get a much clearer picture.

Not really. Even if using the exact same party player and DM tactics vary so wildly you can't really say if the challenge was equal or not. It works with CRPGs, whose enemies always react the same, but with a DM who is supposed to do more than read a script? No chance.

[Fuchs]

As one extreme example, one DM might have the Balor charge into melee, the other has it teleport away and start summoning an army of fiends or use similar indirect attacks to devastating effect.

What part of 'range of difficulties' is confusing you? Even a balor that's played with a minimal amount of competence is going to provide a baseline of difficulty.

Yes, a really useless baseline since the range varies so much. Any player who talks about "killing a balor" is still talking in a vacuum, where no one not in his campaign has any idea how difficult the challenge was until a lot more details are added.

The very idea of D&D challenges having a universal, objective difficulty is wrong.

[crasskris]

Yes, a really useless baseline since the range varies so much.

You mean useless for the purpose of effortlessly determining the value of an achievement. As a guideline for MC is has its problems, but is still useful.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In actual gameplay two GMs will again vary too much to be comparably close.

Sure, there are some monsters out there that will take a massive difficulty plunge if you deviate from the expected tactics. There are people who have dragons land in melee against melee characters. Nonetheless, even a dragon played as a giant scorpion still provides some degree of challenge.

And hey, you know what? If you're skeptical about someone's story or after-action report, you can always press for details. People do that shit all the time. Finding out that one person's group had an Adult Black Dragon that used wraithstrike against the wizard and then used breath strafing runs versus another group that had the Dragon spam Acid Orb between breathing acid at one person in melee isn't that difficult. It requires like one extra line of explanation.

Examples for TTRPGs please.

There's a ton of them. Adding more balors to encounters, fighting in concealment that doesn't apply to your opposition (like dwarves fighting humans at nighttime), the absence or addition of magical equipment that gives cynical bonuses.

'I fought a Titan in the middle of an inactive volcano!' vs. 'I fought a Titan in the middle of a featureless field of grass' isn't without the addition of more details really telling. But 'I fought a Titan as a level 16 character with no magical gear or compensatory bonuses!' is pretty easy to evaluate vs. 'I fought a Titan as a level 16 character with standard wealth by level'. The former is straight-up harder.

Yes, a really useless baseline since the range varies so much. Any player who talks about "killing a balor" is still talking in a vacuum, where no one not in his campaign has any idea how difficult the challenge was until a lot more details are added.

Uh, how many more details do you want added? Is 'not altering anything directly or indirectly from the given stat block', 'using the tactics given in the monster description', and 'fighting in terrain that doesn't give any significant concealment or cover and doesn't throw any curveballs' not sufficient for you?

[Fuchs]

[quote="Lago PARANOIA]'I fought a Titan in the middle of an inactive volcano!' vs. 'I fought a Titan in the middle of a featureless field of grass' isn't without the addition of more details really telling. But 'I fought a Titan as a level 16 character with no magical gear or compensatory bonuses!' is pretty easy to evaluate vs. 'I fought a Titan as a level 16 character with standard wealth by level'. The former is straight-up harder.

Uh, how many more details do you want added? Is 'not altering anything directly or indirectly from the given stat block', 'using the tactics given in the monster description', and 'fighting in terrain that doesn't give any significant concealment or cover and doesn't throw any curveballs' not sufficient for you?[/quote]

Not really. How did the Titan fight? A fight against a Titan played by an inexperienced DM can be noticeably easier even without magical gear than facing a titan played by an experienced killer GM while in full gear. And that doesn't even go into what classes or splats were used.

The tactics in the monster description are often far too broad to provide a baseline, even picking a different target can throw odds off.