False Conflicts

This is something I see a lot of in games. There's a conflict, and you win... or you start the conflict over... until you win. There's only one acceptable outcome.

Now, that can be okay for some games. Some games are all about the challenge, and building skill to defeat the challenge, so you can move on to the next one. It is, however, really bad for many story-based games.

Players like multiple endings. We like to feel that our decisions make a difference. Even the very basic choice of the two endings of the original Blood Omen added a lot to that game. The many different endings to Ogre Battle and Princess Maker are in many respects the entire point of those games.

A desperate siege can end like Helm's Deep or like the Alamo. Those are both perfectly valid stories, and when a game's designers choose the outcome for you, they remove a chunk of your ability to participate in the game.

It doesn't even have to be all or nothing, I think you could do a perfectly good game where you had a siege set-up, and a number of story-significant characters... and at the end you'd get a blurb about what happened to each of those characters based on the outcome of the game. Characters who survived could be heroes, or cowards if they escaped, or captured, or whatever. Characters who died could be forgotten, or martyrs, or even just remembered by the enemy as worthy foes.

One of the best games for avoiding false conflicts is Way of the Samurai. Your character wanders into town with no backstory or agenda, and is immediately put in the position of making choices. Stand up for the common folk, or join one of the factions that oppress them? How far will you go for money? And the game is very short, because there's no saving the game, and you're supposed to play through it many many times to explore what different decisions mean.

Possibly the best genre for this sort of thing is, unfortunately, Japanese dating simulations. I say unfortunately, because it's not a genre that really appeals to me. At the same time, the typical dating sim is all about managing relationships with a handful of different potential love interests, and your relationships with each of them are tracked separately on certain scales, and at the end your choices have created some wildly variant outcomes. That's worth a lot to me.

I just wish that there were more action and/or strategy games that took that route. Imagine a strategy game with a large branching tree of scenarios, where losing one battle doesn't mean that the game boots you back to the start of that battle (or more commonly to your most promising saved game), but merely takes you to another battle which is the logical next step after losing. I'd play that.

Flavors Of Overly Difficult

Hey, so I have a chance to make up for one of my missed days. Good times.

Everyone who is even vaguely old-school as regards RPGs knows about the Tomb of Horrors. It was an old AD&D module, designed to be run at conventions and tournaments. It was supposed to be so difficult that to have your characters survive through it would be worth major bragging rights.

And it was seriously difficult. There were traps that set up patterns to avoid them... and then broke those patterns to mess with you. There were nested secret doors that led to dead ends. Even getting in was tricky, because there were two false entrances to the dungeon. Hell, there was even a false ending, with a false boss fight and an illusionary self-destruct of the tomb.

Here's the thing, though. Most of it was not the kind of difficult you could solve with clever or reasonable thought. Most of it was the kind of completely arbitrary Death-No-Save nonsense based on choices you made. And there were so many bluffs and double-bluffs that those choices were essentially blind ones. So getting through was impressive, but in the way that throwing a coin ten times and having it come up heads every time is impressive.

Even the end-boss, Acererak the Demi-lich was a unique home-brew (at the time) monster with entirely arbitrary invulnerabilities and responses to spell effects. There was no way to know or to deduce how to defeat it. Which is the rub, because dealing with the unknown is a fine way to test people's skillz, but only if their skillz are at all applicable.

The ToH was originally designed to defeat some specific and very clever players, who as it turned out, when faced with the thing, just cut the Gordian Knot and sent a huge number of disposable creatures in first, since most of the traps would kill any warm body no matter how badass, but only once. Or at most ten times as the pit slowly filled in with corpses.

Contrast that to the 3rd-edition equivalent module, The Red Hand of Doom. That's a genuinely very difficult adventure. It is filled with fights where the PCs are just plain outgunned. It's like they wrote it, then just said it was designed for lower-level characters than it actually was.

But while TRHOD is difficult, it's not difficult in a totally unfair way. It doesn't have Death-No-Save traps that are mysteriously unfindable by Thieves like TOH. A party of adventurers that are super on top of their game can beat the thing. There's just a really small margin for error and a lot of opportunities to screw up. Which makes it, of course, an actual test of skill.

So if someone has legitimately taken a character through TRHOD, then they actually have bragging rights as an awesome tactician. If someone has legitimately taken a character through TOH, you should let them pick your lottery numbers.