Endowment Effect

Thunderspire Labyrinth must have been getting sick of Duergar (I know I was) because suddenly we get a Ruined Chapel full of wights.

This is the Horned Hold's "secret passageway". Once players have reached the western guard post, they can choose to come here via a neglected and disused corridor as an alternative to fighting through orcs, ogres, and a very grumpy paladin of Asmodeus.

The Duergar apparently avoid this area because they're too lazy to clear out the undead that infest it. The undead in question are wights, described here as "long dead human warriors in tattered black mail".

This, of course, doesn't make a lick of sense. In case we've somehow forgotten, the Horned Hold used to be a minotaur fortress. More recently, it's been run by Duergar. How armed undead humans managed to make their way to this single room of the complex is a mystery mortal minds were not meant to solve. The obvious improvement is to make the creatures here either Duergar wights (meh) or minotaur wights (highly awesome).

Players of previous editions know wights as monsters to avoid. That's because of their energy drain, also known as "level drain". That is to say, by merely touching you they could strip you of a character level. Recovering that level by any means other than re-acquiring the XP called for one of several medium to high level cleric spells. Those are spells, naturally, that PCs don't get until many levels later.

The level drain was scary. It was a longstanding tradition. It was one of the memorable things about fighting undead.

But, importantly, it was bollocks. Losing things is not fun. We hate it. In fact, we hate it disproportionately.

In 1980 a man named Robert Thaler noted that, contrary to standard economic theory, people seemed to place a higher value on items that they own than an equivalent item that they didn't. That is to say, people would ask for more money to sell an item that they currently had than they would pay to buy an identical item. He called this the "endowment effect".

In 1990, Tversky and Kahneman went on to demonstrate this as a result of a specific form of cognitive bias called loss aversion. Humans, they argued, are essentially averse to loss. We find losses more distressing than equivalent failures to gain. We are much happier about missing the opportunity to gain $100 than we are about losing $100 we thought we had.

What does this mean for game design? It means that taking things away from players is a big stick. It is a disproportionately big stick. It means that people will make bad decisions when a loss is a possible consequence. It means that people will get irrationally upset when a feature or resource of their character is deleted.

You only need to look at the forums to see this. People hate having their favourite class nerfed. They're not nearly so worried about missing out on being buffed, though. People scream loudly about cancelled D&D Insider features they thought they were getting; they're not quite so vociferous in requesting additional features that haven't already been offered.

D&D 4th Edition has taken loss aversion to heart. Classic "progress eating" game mechanics have been dramatically changed. The Rust Monster, for example, no longer deprives players of thousands of gold worth of magical items without offering commensurate reward. Enemies with "weaken" powers no longer lower stats, and being raised from the dead won't permanently erase a point of Constitution.

And the wight, our feature monster here, doesn't drain levels. He instead knocks off his victim's healing surges. A horrifying permanent loss has been replaced by a temporary elimination of the PC's ability to regain hit points.

It's an improvement. I can tell you, I am absolutely never going to miss having one of my levels drained. That is an experience I am overjoyed to see in the past.

But at the same time, I kind of miss knowing that there were things out there that could steal levels. How are DMs going to terrify low level players now?

Poll Result: Combat and Diplomacy

The latest Eleven Foot Poll is in and the numbers say that 47% of you like combat.

That's no surprise; it's like saying you enjoy shooting things in Halo or rolling dice in Snakes & Ladders. Mechanically speaking, combat is 4th Edition, and it's certainly the best designed and most intricately elaborated part of the 4th Edition package.

That being so, I talk about combat at least every other post, so I'm going to skip right past your love of bashing things and look at the runner up: diplomacy.

Diplomacy is the odd man out on the list of poll options. It's anomalous because it's not supported by rules. 4th Edition spends quite a bit of time detailing the mechanics of shopping, of looting, of levelling up, and of overcoming traps. It's got rules for skill challenges - in fact, it has a bunch, with the original skill challenge mechanic having been errataed, revised, updated, explained, apologised for, and then featured in an extended series of patronising and contradictory articles in Dungeon Magazine. The 4th Edition focus on battlemaps lends itself naturally to mapping, and in as much as Dungeons & Dragons is a game where players make choices that have consequences puzzle-solving is built right into the foundation.

So where's the diplomacy? We've got skills called Diplomacy, Bluff and Intimidate you can roll against, and when you roll against them a bunch of times in succession we call it a skill challenge. But is that really a rules system? Is that really a game? Or is diplomacy just an extended session of improv acting that gets inserted in between the things that 4th Edition actually cares about?

There is a dilemma that arises whenever your character enters a conversation. It is this. Is conversation intended as a challenge to your character - that is, a test of the accumulated words and numbers on your character sheet? Or is it a challenge to the player - a test of skills and abilities possessed by the human portraying the character?

Dungeons & Dragons - and indeed, most RPGs - have never resolved this duality. D&D tries to have it both ways. It's both, it says. And it suffers as a result.

It's not a problem we have with combat. Combat is clear - it's a challenge to the player to deploy the resources represented by their character to achieve the best tactical result. There's a division of skill (player) and resources (character).

In conversation, however, there's not that clarity. On whose side does the skill fall? Are resources a relevant issue?

One approach to take is that both skill and resources lie with the player. The words the player says are the words their character says, and the DM makes a decision as to how NPCs react. In the absence of strong mechanics for combat, this typically makes for the most exciting and interesting gameplay.

It has its problems, however. If the player is the mouth of their character, the character can only ever be as intelligent, as witty, as eloquent and as confident as the player. Naturally poor speakers - those with stutters, with weak English, who are overshadowed by their louder peers - are disproportionately penalised - especially given that the scrawny and obese have no problems leaping and smiting all hours of the clock.

How do statistics fit into this model? When a half-orc with an intelligence penalty delivers a stunning well-rendered argument through their player, which just makes sense, do we all ignore it because "it didn't sound that smart"? How smart is too smart? What debate can an Intelligence 9 character aspire to that an Intelligence 8 character can't?

On the other hand, we can treat the character's abilities as resources, and the player can apply them. Need to convince a guard to let you in? Roll Diplomacy. If you roll high, we'll assume you said something sensible-sounding. We never hear what's actually said, and the fact that characters' skills are accurately represented comes at a cost to immersion in the game world.

We also have the issue in 4th Edition that conversation resources are infinite. If you can Bluff one goblin, surely you can bluff every goblin? Can not one character with maximum Bluff swindle his way through an entire dungeon, leaving nothing for his allies to do? Combat uses an attrition model, where victory typically comes at a cost to healing surges and power availability, but a successful use of Diplomacy leaves the player in the same strong position that they started.

Many DMs opt for a hybrid model - get the player to say something, and depending on how good they sound, give them a modifier to their roll. I've been known to do it myself. But isn't this the worst of both worlds? We're averaging the skills of the character and the player out. The weak speaker knows that no amount of stats will fully compensate for their lack of eloquence, and the player with the gift of gab knows they can safely ignore the "talking skills" because they can use their own abilities to even it out.

As written, if 4th Edition had to choose a camp, it would seem to be a mechanical approach. All dice rolls, all the time. The shame of it is, if it had explicitly chosen to go down that path it probably could have come up with much better rules. It would be entirely possible to design a system that made a conversation as dynamic and interesting as combat, without overly abstracting talking into something artificial.

Imagine a system of conversation points - physical tokens assigned to you in proportion to your stats that you can spend to "get a word in edgeways", "make your opponent's argument look weak", "cite supporting facts or precedent", "call for support from onlookers" or "stir emotions". We could create a system where the resources to create a strong argument are finite (requiring important decisions from players on where to spend them) and derived solely from the character. Points might refresh during an extended rest, but in the short term they're a valuable, exhaustible resource that should be saved for when they're needed. It would work well with a hybrid system as even the eloquent player knows that he'll have to have points available in order to get a chance to be heard.

I'm actually surprised that in my travels through the RPG world I haven't, to my memory, come across any "finite resources" conversation mechanics. Have any of you readers seen any? Leave your experiences in the comments.

The Functional World

DMs can learn from Hitchcock.

Director Alfred Hitchcock believed that every element of every shot should be deliberate; that the smallest thing that appeared on screen should have an intention and a purpose; that purpose being to further the plot, theme and tone of the film. He was not the first or only proponent of this theory, but his works provide many accessible examples of this principle being put to practice.

How many of us have known the DM who embellishes his world with cascades of maps, scores of named NPCs, and encyclopaedias of historical facts and dates? How many of us have been that DM? (I raise my hand.) This kind of thing is fun for lots of people. Worldbuilding is great, and letting players explore those worlds is exciting.

It's not necessarily good storytelling, though. If you have a world you want to show people, go and write a novel. Make a film. Worldbuilding is ultimately about the worldbuilder; it's you pitting your toy soldiers against your toy heroes. An overly detailed world is just as offensive as an overly-competent Mary-Sue.

Roleplaying is not about you, it is about the players. Each and every aspect of your world should be about the players. History is character development; maps are foreshadowing. If knowing the world's history does not substantively change the way your players behave, it is wasted history. If you have a map marked with "Here be dragons", the players had better be going there, and you'd better have some dragons ready.

Your encounters exist because they change things. If nothing is different after the players kill the goblins, then there was no point in having them kill the goblins. Either the defeat of the goblins has a lasting impact on the game world, or it costs the players something valuable, or it teaches the characters a lesson about who they are and what they believe. Random encounters are masturbation.

Keep on the Shadowfell features a set of caves that there is no reason to visit. The only incentive to go there is if Balgron the Fat escapes the battle at the Chieftain's Lair, which is a problem with Balgron being able to flee at all rather than an exciting subplot that screams out for spelunking.

The caves take up six pages of the module. The total space devoted to fleshing out NPCs is less than one page. When designing an adventure, it is important to have your priorities right.

Better To Stay Silent And Be Thought A Fool

I've clearly never followed the maxim I'm quoting in the post title, but the most cursory trip around the internets confirms its providence.

Some statements I've been subjected to about the gentle craft of roleplaying this week:

[1] "If you're going to play a system that uses a 20-sided dice you may as well just convert it to [the] d20 [game system] because everything else is just too complicated."

[2] "D&D 4th Edition removes the beautifully crafted storytelling and deep character-driven roleplaying that D&D is famous for."

[3] "It's a pretty disappointing campaign unless you have a total party kill (TPK) somewhere in the first three sessions."

[4] "I don't like D&D 4th Edition because it's too hard for the DM to win."

Hopefully you're laughing with me and not at me, but if anyone's in doubt as to why these are dunce-cappers, drop a comment, and I'll do a post.

The Urge To Document

I read a large number of videogaming blogs; these are largely concerned with opinion, with analysis, with criticism, and with speculation. They engage directly with the medium, and in as much as they contain personal experience, that experience is used as a form of commentary upon the game itself.

I've been looking for that sort of thing in roleplaying. It exists, but it exists at the bottom of the deep and murky sea of roleplaying journals.

Roleplaying gamers document. They do it obsessively. They write up sessions, they describe characters, they relate anecdotes, they diarise worlds. If your game is good, chatters the gestalt, then it must be recorded.

Videogamers don't do this. No matter how much you loved Mario Bros, you don't write up your play sessions as prose novellas. Not even computer RPGs. You can love Final Fantasy, you can talk Final Fantasy, you can even create Final Fantasy fanfic, but you don't ever translate the actual game into text.

There are some reasons why roleplayers document, both valid and invalid. The most pressing is the impermanence of the medium. Once a session is played, it is gone. It's a transitory experience, like watching theatre, and performance can never be recaptured once it is performed. Humans don't deal well with impermanence, and we're forever attempting to trap the momentary in the illusion of eternity.

Another reason is the mistaken belief that a story is a story is a story. It can be easy to think that what makes good narrative at the gaming table will make excellent narrative in a novel. This just isn't the case. Interactive multi-participant stories lend themselves to certain techniques that don't pace well in a novel; they demand validation for multiple protagonists and they thrive on cliches and stereotypes that fall flat on the printed page.

Gamers often mistake the sequence for the game. Documentation rarely rises beyond an embellished narration of what has happened to the player characters. It seldom captures the performances of the GM and the players, the pre-conceptions of the players, their interactions with the mechanics, and the ebb and flow of pacing caused by late arrivals and pizza orders. Good players and good GMs take these things into account every bit as much as the rest of the game, and a session can be made by a snappy and compelling in media res resumption after dinner as much as it can by the structure of a key encounter.

I'm against documentation. It's a crutch for GMs. Documentation provides the illusion that a weak game can be made strong by reduction to writing. Games should embrace the medium, and work because of the impermanence, the group interaction, the unexpected intervention of the real world, and not in spite of it.