Big Skills

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 1:55 pm

Here is the thread I promised: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54690& ... c&start=50

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 11:05 pm

deaddmwalking wrote:Trying something and it not working is usually 'worse' than trying something and it succeeding, but both can make the game more interesting. Always succeeding on the first try is not terribly interesting.

I don't think you really follow this conversation at all. You don't seem to have any real understanding on how content gating skills like search or knowledge do work or can work and you seem to keep mixing them up with any and every other possible skill or ability in the game as if they were the same and perfectly exchangeable.

Failing a search check to find Camelot is NOT the same as not having the flight powers to reach it. Period. And your brain fart of an idea of turning what would normally be a binary ability to fly into a rolled content gating check is fucking stupid.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 11:56 pm

There are lots of ways to gate content. Content is gated if the PCs can't get to it without using a skill or ability. That would put it behind a gate.

Content that is accessible automatically is not gated.

I contend that having some content gated is not a bad thing. It rewards players for the choices they make. If there is a wide variety of gated content, and each PC has a chance to contribute extra content because of the skills and abilities they chose to access that content, it makes the game more enjoyable.

If there is a chance for characters to obtain 'extra' content, then there is a chance that they will fail to obtain that extra content - possibly because of a failed skill check.

Your argument has generally been disingenuous. If the PCs must find the content to move on, eventually they will. If you need the blue key to open the blue door and there is no possible way to move on, yes, that is shitty design. But it's also a strawman.

Generally, extra content is not required. Having everything given to the players is disempowering. If plater choices matter, players will undoubtedly on occasion make less than optimal choices. That doesn't mean 'game over'. It usually means the game continues, building on these new circumstances. Almost definitionally, players won't know what content they missed but they will know what extra content they found.

Not being able to find Camelot due to a failed search check makes no sense unless perhaps we're trying to get in through a secret entrance. But assuming the players know that the content exists, there will be a way to access it. If the players fail through the expected means, they will try other things until they succeed - unless the content isn't worthwhile in which case there is no argument for including it.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 12:01 am

deaddmwalking wrote:Your argument has generally been disingenuous.

And yet YOU aren't talking about the same skills or mechanics at all, and even your meaning when using the term "content gating" or even just content isn't even the fucking same thing.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 12:13 am

Yes, I'm sure yelling at me that my definitions are apparently different than yours is the best way to ensure we're on the same page, instead, of you know, trying to clarify.

But I will assert that sometimes missing the love letters due to a poor skill check enhances the game provided that when those types of checks make new content available the players feel they got something 'extra'.

Finding your jacket in the closet is routine - finding $20 you didn't realize you left there last winter is surprisingly gratifying.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 12:22 am

deaddmwalking wrote:But I will assert that sometimes missing the love letters due to a poor skill check enhances the game

No it doesn't. No it clearly doesn't. You would have to be insane to think it does. What the hell is wrong with you to think it does?

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 1:04 am

PhoneLobster wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:But I will assert that sometimes missing the love letters due to a poor skill check enhances the game
No it doesn't. No it clearly doesn't. You would have to be insane to think it does. What the hell is wrong with you to think it does?

I don't think I'm insane. I know I'm not alone in thinking this.

You can't miss something you didn't know was there. If you walk down the street and you didn't see a $20 bill, you won't be sad that you didn't see it. If you did find it, it feels likeep a special treat.

Basic psychology is on my side. People prefer a random large payout even if they could instead get a regular small payout that actually pays more. Winning $5k in a slot machine feels like something much more special thanks working for 2 months - so much so that people throw away ungodly amounts of money on games of chance that are stacked against them.

Maybe you missed Frank'Sinatra post on the subject, but I'm in complete agreement.

FrankTrollman wrote: If you always get all the content, then your contributions don't matter. You're basically just running into the ancient gaming paradox:

Winning is more fun than losing.

Winning isn't fun if you didn't have a chance to lose.
It's more awesome to win the Super Bowl than it is to win one of those "everyone's a winner" scenarios in kindergarten. Because most people don't win the Super Bowl. Most teams lose before they even get into the Super Bowl and one of the best teams in the league loses the Super Bowl in front of millions of viewers. And all of that losing is required to make victory at the Super Bowl as special as it is.

Role Playing Games are all about the slight of hand. To present the players with as much victory as possible while still presenting the very real ability of the players to lose as being a much more likely possibility than it actually is. So to maximize the actual victories while maximizing the perceived chance of defeats. That is how fun is maximized in an RPG. But obviously if you set the actual chance of defeat to zero this sets the perceived chance of defeat to zero and is not fun-maximizing even if it is maximizing one of the key components of fun (victories).

But we're not just talking about the wholly abstract concepts of victories and defeats, we're talking about the specific trope of player character ability gated content. I am going to say that it is good and that your objection is wrong.

If content isn't gated by anything, then it's all bears. Whatever inputs I bring to the table, I get whatever content Mr. Cavern brought. That "lets me see all the content," but it's not interactive. I might as well be reading a book. For there to be interactivity, for it to matter that I'm playing a cooperative storytelling game, then there has to be different sets of content available depending on my inputs. And if there exists a possibility of me seeing different content, then by definition some of the content must remain hidden. That's just tautologically true.

Now there are basically three ways to gate content:
Player Choices.

Character Abilities.

Random Die Rolls.
And I am going to say unequivocally that all three of those are good.

If the players choose to go into the Fire Swamp instead of attacking the Ice Palace, I expect Mr. Cavern to fucking sit on whatever Snow Queen content he had planned. If one of the characters speaks Orcish, then I expect to be able to get the content of overhearing the Orcish guards discussing the Dark Lord's plans, and if none of them do I expect Mr. Cavern to fucking sit on that content. And if I roll a critical hit I can get Mr. Cavern's descriptions of explosive gore, and if my character misses instead I don't want to hear it.

The fact that you'll get different content by making different choices and playing a different character and rolling a different number is why you bother playing the game. Content feeds much faster by just watching a movie than it does by playing a cooperative storytelling game, so the impact of my contributions is absolutely critical in the appeal of the genre.

The issue then becomes one of having enough content. If not having the right character ability or choosing not to go deeper in the Dark Temple means that we all just fucking stare at each other, then the game has failed. If shit keeps happening and it's simply different shit, then it's fine. And necessarily that means that you're going to need to cut a lot of corners in content generation. If you write two branches for every choice the players could make you'll have had to write over a million outcomes to cover twenty decision points, and that is not happening.

Now there are a lot of tricks you can use to get around that. You can create content decision points ahead of time and then plug them together into a narrative whole on the fly (which would mean that you'd only have to write 40 bits for those twenty decision points rather than 1,048,576, which is doable instead of impossible). You can alter and reuse content that players didn't see at other points later in the adventure (that pirate you were going to use if the players took the boat route could be recast as a bandit chief later in the story). You can buy yourself time to write new content by having time filling encounters like social talky bits or set piece battles. If you run out the clock on the night, you can even get yourself a whole new week to write content to an unexpected direction of the story. And so on and so on.

But the solution is never to simply declare that everyone gets a participation trophy and everyone sees all the content no matter what. That's just "bears" and it's so disempowering that there's no point in playing the game at all.

-Username17

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 2:15 am

My group sandboxes a lot, and that means players have lots of choices, and if they decide to make a character who is awesome at picking locks and search checks then I'm gonna use locks and secret doors. Maybe they'll miss something, but if there's anything critical then they'll have multiple avenues to get there. There's always multiple solutions, and rewarding characters for investing in various skills by letting those skills be one of the solutions is something I've found players enjoy. And sometimes a skill check, or a combat, or social encounter goes totally sideways. Those can be fun stories too.

We wound up accidentally burning the equivalent of the ghoul love notes in one adventure, except they were sheet music pages needed to pacify some ghost bard and put him to rest (I think we failed either a knowledge check or a search check). So we instead had a combat where we re-killed him and he would respawn 1 year later because that's what the curse said... giving us a year to take over his tower as our new haunted base, and plan our next re-killing of him. It's those kind of unexpected twists from failure that you remember. We closed one door and opened another.

I remember one puzzle in a dungeon, maybe rappan athuk, I dunno, was a stupid magic elevator room that went to various rooms via a pattern. We realized that if we changed rooms long enough we'd get where we wanted, pattern be damned. We explained to the DM this was our method of solving it, not as fast as if we figured the direct method, but it served our needs because we didn't give a fuck about the puzzle. We moved on. Sometimes the players don't care about your content.

My quick examples before don't sound like they had a lot of time spent on them, because they literally had as much time spent on plotting them as the few seconds it took me to type them. They were brief examples to make a point, not fully fleshed out adventure campaigns.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 3:14 am

deaddmwalking wrote: I don't think I'm insane. I know I'm not alone in thinking this.

You can't miss something you didn't know was there. If you walk down the street and you didn't see a $20 bill, you won't be sad that you didn't see it. If you did find it, it feels likeep a special treat.

You clearly ARE since you can't fucking seem to tell the difference between getting to experience additional beneficial content in a game AND FINDING FREE MONEY IN REAL LIFE.

Here is a hint. GET YOUR PERSPECTIVE BACK INTO SHAPE.

This isn't a fucking conversation about how you didn't feel bad in the real world because you didn't know you didn't notice a dropped fucking penny. This is about the GM preparing some nice harmless little beneficial fluff content and having to THROW IT OUT FOR NO REASON.

You don't get to go "but no one knew!", the GM certainly knew, hell, the players certainly knew they just had a bit of a bullshit shallow unexplained encounter and failed a pointless gating check to explain it with some value adding fluff. And knowledge is largely irrelevant when an RPG encounter is clearly and fucking objectively worse if you miss out on the nice contextual fluff for no reason.

Hell even your example pulled from your inability to differentiate between games and reality is pretty fucking stupid because I think we can agree that walking down the street+free cash IS objectively better than just walking down the street. The fact that you don't seem to understand that is part of why I'm calling you insane on this. Because you clearly don't share the most fundamental valuations of games OR reality that the vast majority of humans have.

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 4:10 am

FWIW, I agree with deaddmwalking. GM prep time is a finite and valuable resource, but a GM who is using an efficient scenario design methodology (rather than of laboriously building a railroad) should already have sufficient awareness of the scenario to anticipate important decision points and have at least a few stubby notes on possible outcomes that are consistent with the scenario and can be fleshed out on the fly as needed.

The way PL is pitching a fit, it's as though he thinks that players missing a throwaway detail like "love letters between ghosts" is the same level of wasted GM prep effort as the party abandoning an entire political intrigue campaign in favor of traveling around solving mysteries in a van.

I think that PL should consider getting his meds adjusted. He's been doing an awful lot of irrational threadshitting lately, even by the generous standards that normally apply to him.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 5:10 am

Mord wrote:it's as though he thinks that players missing a throwaway detail like "love letters between ghosts" is the same level of wasted GM prep effort

You are conflating two issues here. Losing an adventure or a major NPC to ,lets remember, an entirely gratuitous single roll no one needed to make, is a prep time issue. Losing minor beneficial fluff, to a roll no one asked for, is simply a matter of a needlessly worse experience.

The GM shouldn't need permission from a dice to provide a slightly improved descriptive experience.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 5:11 am

deaddmwalking wrote: Maybe you missed Frank'Sinatra post on the subject, but I'm in complete agreement.

FrankTrollman wrote: If you always get all the content, then your contributions don't matter. You're basically just running into the ancient gaming paradox:

Winning is more fun than losing.

Winning isn't fun if you didn't have a chance to lose.

I would question the first point.

Since the DM is playing team monster/trap, and team monster/trap is expected to be defeated, then the DM is almost by definition someone who can enjoy losing. The alternative is that you're saying the DM isn't allowed to have fun unless the party loses.

Although I guess "Winning is more fun than losing" would still be true for to the majority of players, and that's why finding willing DMs is always harder than finding willing players.

brized · Post by **brized** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 5:40 am

GM prep time considerations notwithstanding, Deus Ex and Deux Ex: Human Revolution were each highly praised for their skillful use of content gating. There's a huge analysis of Deus Ex's first stage, because it executed it so well. A study on learning and games features the same level. There's another article on how the philosophy carried into each game's combat.

Each game rewards different play styles with different rewards while also allowing players to accomplish all the major goals in different ways. They're concrete examples of what deaddmwalking is talking about and if you're serious about game design as a discipline you should study them.

phlapjackage · Post by **phlapjackage** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 6:44 am

brized wrote:GM prep time considerations notwithstanding, Deus Ex and Deux Ex: Human Revolution were each highly praised for their skillful use of content gating. There's a huge analysis of Deus Ex's first stage, because it executed it so well. A study on learning and games features the same level. There's another article on how the philosophy carried into each game's combat.

Each game rewards different play styles with different rewards while also allowing players to accomplish all the major goals in different ways. They're concrete examples of what deaddmwalking is talking about and if you're serious about game design as a discipline you should study them.

While I love the first Deux Ex, and there might be many general design ideas to learn by studying it, I think the comparison of a CRPG (video game) and RPG is not relevant for "gated content".

In a CRPG, it's perfectly ok and easy to have gated content.
- For "pass this skill check or end the adventure / die", the CRPG is usually single player, so the player can restart the level or from a save or whatever
- For "find ghost-love-letters with the Search skill", it's no big deal if they player doesn't see the content, the "GM" (developer) doesn't care and is paid whether or not the content is found
- Also, CRPGs allow (and encourage) multiple play-throughs with different characters, so that content that's missed the first time around can be found on subsequent play-throughs

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 10:31 am

PhoneLobster,

I'm hearing you say 'Moar content is always better full stop'. While I disagree because I think the effort spent obtaining that content matters (and this is a psychologically demonstrable principle) let me ask it to you this way:

If obtaining the content is more fun than not getting the content, it would also follow that obtaining the content prior to the fight would also be more fun. Finding it beforehand certainly provides context and it may provide other options. Why are you arguing that retroactively making a fight more enjoyable is the best option when obviously for the reasons you provided it should happen before the fight .

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 10:53 am

deaddmwalking wrote:I'm hearing you say 'Moar content is always better full stop'. While I disagree because I think the effort spent obtaining that content matters

You are hearing that because you aren't listening. There are situations where these skills you seem to be defending at basically every level simply result in "no content at all". It's not MOAR CONTENT IS BETTER. Sometimes it IS any content is better. And other times it is better content is better.

At the soft level of content without extensive effort you have minor beneficial fluff like the love letters thing. If you let a skill check randomly burn that out of your game before the players ever get to experience it there is very likely just not going to be a substitute. It doesn't become a different scenario of equally poignant and interesting background, it JUST demotes to "eh, some random combat for no reason whatever, we seem to get a lot of those for some reason...".

Because however brief the effort for that fluff might have been, you just threw out "plan A" and plan B is by definition second rate, if it even comes into existence at the last minute at all, and bringing it into existence will have additional hurdles and effort required to match the same scenario. Seriously. Come up with your most exciting descriptive addition to a specific combat encounter... now throw it out you aren't allowed to use it. Come up with another one. Nope. It's gone too, now another one. Is it just as good? Remember you did all that WHILE RUNNING THE GAME and WITHOUT EXCESSIVE PAUSE. Only the first shot MIGHT have been planned in advance at all. Most GMs are going to run out of ideas worth even the time to actually describe somewhere after the first one that they at least had five minutes warning or more to come up with.

At the high end level of content with lots of effort invested that you apparently value, it means the content with the valued effort is discarded and it is replaced with content that had less effort put into it and by your own apparent value standards you agree that is worse content.

Plenty of content that real effort is put into will have to be discarded, or re-used in less than ideal circumstances based on actual player choices alone. Plenty of situations are going to be a bit flat on motivation and enhancing descriptive fluff just because even the best GMs have a finite amount of creativity and time. Large swathes of content will need to be ass pulled last minute improvisations as it is. Discarding either the "high effort/value" content AND the "minor creative flair" content just because of a search check is NOT something you should be adding on top of that existing burden.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 11:01 am

Sometimes if we miss something fun that the DM put some work into or thought we'd enjoy they offer to tell us OOC afterwards or we'll ask what was X about.

brized · Post by **brized** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 2:04 pm

phlapjackage wrote:Derp

Point 1 is a straw man already addressed by deaddmwalking. Points 2 and 3 are addressed by GM tricks specific to TTRPGs and has been discussed at length in this thread already.

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 3:21 pm

I'm a bit torn on Search and the like, but Knowledge (Exposition) rolls can suck my WotC President.

I don't need a granular-to-5% system to let my wizard maybe figure out the exposition or not. It's the kind of bullshit that should be gated behind "if someone can cast 4th level arcane spells, they know that" or "A level 6 Bard knows that" or whatever. Especially since most of the time that's exactly what it amounts to anyway, except with a small chance to fail at understanding the story you're playing through.

phlapjackage · Post by **phlapjackage** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 3:50 pm

brized wrote:
phlapjackage wrote:Derp
Point 1 is a straw man already addressed by deaddmwalking. Points 2 and 3 are addressed by GM tricks specific to TTRPGs and has been discussed at length in this thread already.

This thread is getting medium length, and sometimes I'm not able to pay as much attention to every single post as I should. Mind linking or quoting your rebuttals to my points ?

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 3:53 pm

MisterDee wrote:I'm a bit torn on Search and the like, but Knowledge (Exposition) rolls can suck my WotC President.

I don't need a granular-to-5% system to let my wizard maybe figure out the exposition or not. It's the kind of bullshit that should be gated behind "if someone can cast 4th level arcane spells, they know that" or "A level 6 Bard knows that" or whatever. Especially since most of the time that's exactly what it amounts to anyway, except with a small chance to fail at understanding the story you're playing through.

I'd be okay with a bunch of skills being deterministic especially ones like knowledge checks. They could be full passes like with speak language. That doesn't meld well with the skill point paradigm but that's one of the problems with skill points instead of proficiency. I'd rather have an "I know Kung fu" problem than care about 3 vs 4 ranks in Balance.

People could still roll search checks (proficiency giving a bonus) like a combat check.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 6:22 pm

I can't understand what the whole problem with the letters on the desk thing is, at all. It seems like the DM assigning appropriate DCs based on the task already handles the whole thing.

If the DM wants the letter to be found for sure, put them on top of the desk with a Search DC of 0. If the players make the choice to be in that room, the letters are found. No one rolls checks to find the the door to the tavern, or anything. If it's supposed to be a certainty, make it a certainty.

If the DM wants it to be extra content that may or may not be found, hide the letters in the desk, and assign a DC based on how well hidden they are. If that's the case, accept the possibility that they won't be found and move on with your life. If they need to be found, see the prior paragraph.

Why is this even an issue?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 7:45 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Why is this even an issue?

Because K is embracing the Philosopher King Fallacy and PhoneLobster is a raging asshole?

The issue here is that Democracy is in fact better than Dictatorship even though a truly enlightened dictator is theoretically capable of making all the same decrees as a democratic legislature writes laws in a tenth the time. Process matters. And cooperative processes necessarily involve some give and take.

To bring this back to RPGs, whatever "content" the MC comes up with is going to be provisional. No matter how cool it is (in the eyes of the MC who wrote it), it might not be seen. It might not come up in play because the other players also have inputs.

K wrote:Clearly, you didn't spent any time coming up with interesting and fun and memorable things for your swamp if a single check means you get birds to fly over it.

Or you know, maybe you did. Maybe the swamp was going to be totally fucking epic and the players still decided not to go to the swamp. Maybe they flew over it, or went to the mountains, or fucking whatever. Because a cooperative storytelling game has more than one person presenting inputs. The flip side is that one of the players could really want to run around in the swamp for whatever reason, and the other players or the MC could veto it. Because again, it's a cooperative storytelling game and no one idea necessarily dictates the direction of the story no matter how cool the idea seems to the person who has it.

-Username17

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Apr 29, 2016 10:44 pm

RobbyPants wrote:It seems like the DM assigning appropriate DCs based on the task already handles the whole thing.

With such a methodology to "handle the thing", precisely when is it appropriate to decide to put content behind the roll wall? The answer is a simple one. When you don't care if it is thrown away.

Essentially the appropriate content for actual search rolls is content we by definition don't really give a shit about.

If all your search mechanic in practice does is give out the content you care about as auto-successes and only ever rolls for content no one cares about then it is, definitively, a mechanic of little to no real value.

And you can have that largely valueless "harmless" variant of a search mechanic in your game. It's essentially nothing but window dressing to give an entirely false impression that search checks matter, because in such a system, they don't. But as the game designer you need to understand that such a methodology results in a largely valueless skill that shouldn't be costed in the same ways as, well, anything that actually matters.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sat Apr 30, 2016 12:29 am

If there's a chance of failure, then that means it has no value to anyone, evidently.