I am going to quote something at length from the CRPG Addict because I think it’s important:
The problem [in The Bard’s Tale] is, it costs a lot to resurrect a dead character, especially a high-level dead character. Resurrecting six dead characters cost way more than I had at this point. I had to create a dummy character just to exit the Guild. I was able to resurrect one character immediately, but to get the other five, I had to build up my savings. It took a good three hours before they were all happy and healthy again.
It sounds horrible, especially to modern gamers, but I actually really, really like this aspect of The Bard’s Tale. Death isn’t a game-killer the way it is in Wizardry, but boy does it have consequences. Since you can only save in the Guild of Adventurers, every dungeon foray is a risk, creating a palpable tension as you wander your way through the passages. And every once in a while, you stumble into an encounter like this one (there were actually two more on this same level, with a dragon and a high-powered wizard) that makes your stomach drop and an expletive escape your lips.
Modern games make it far too easy. In something like Baldur’s Gate, you would save every five or ten minutes. If you stumble on to a soul sucker, you might treat the first battle against him like a test run. If your characters die–or, heck, even just lose more hit points than you want to spare–no problem. Just reload and run the encounter again with the experience at your back…
Because of the frequent save points, modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging. In The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, and other games of the era I’m playing, there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty. You must constantly strategize. How much gold do I need to get from this encounter to make the “trap zap” spell worthwhile? What should I set as my bottom hit point threshold before I return to the surface? Do I want to expend 15 spell points on this group of wights, or take the risk that they’ll turn me into a crippling old man with one touch? I’ve only got 15 squares left to map on this level, but my characters only have 1/2 their hit points. Should I press on or go back?
Exhilarating. Fortunately, I have a lot of games like this left to play.
In computer games, this is a trend which extends beyond CRPGs. In FPS games, for example, Halo ushered in the era of rechargeable shields/stamina and ending an era in which players shepherded health packs and treated entire missions as strategic challenges (instead of a string of tactical encounters).
If this sounds familiar, it should. Tabletop RPGs have been embracing the same trends, starting with a My Precious Encounter(TM) design ethos for published adventures and then hard-coding that design ethos into the game system.
Allow me to emphasize this one last time with two key pull quotes:
Modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging.
In [older games] there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty.
Obviously this is a design ethos which has been most strongly championed by WotC in the 4th Edition of D&D (and then pushed even farther in D&D Gamma World). But it can be seen cropping up in a lot of places.
The argument can, of course, be made that this tactical focus is “more fun”: You’ll never end up trapped in the lower levels of the dungeon (nor will you figure out a clever way to escape). You’ll never find yourself desperately low on health (nor feel the exhilaration of overcoming the cyber-demon between you and the next health pack). You’ll never need to make a tough choice about whether to use your spells now or later (nor experience the satisfaction of blowing away an opponent with your well-earned stockpile of powerful enchantments).
But, ultimately, I think there’s a reason why we refer to “strategy and tactics” as a matched pair: They go together hand-in-hand. They complement each other. They improve each other. Strategic decisions shape (and re-shape) the immediacy of tactical play, naturally resulting in varied and disparate tactical challenges that must be overcome.
Of course, there will still be a great deal of variance in My Precious Encounters(TM) scenario design. (That is, after all, the “precious” part of carefully crafting your “perfect” encounters.) But in my experience, the result still feels curiously bland. Maybe in this encounter you’re fighting a couple of big brutes and in the next encounter you’re surrounded by grunts. But the encounters still all seem to follow the same basic trajectory.
This is probably unsurprising, of course: By removing the strategic portion of the game, you’ve gutted a huge chunk of meaningful choice and consequence. In other words, you’ve crippled the gameplay.
Dead on.
Heh. More of the trend where designers focus intently on the bit that people enjoy most; and end up destroying the underlying reasons why people enjoy it.
Good points, I think there are some pro’s to the tactical system that you have glossed over or ignored though. There are reasons that modern game design has gone more towards the ‘My Precious Encounter (TM)’ route.
The most important being that a single statistical outlier combat can ruin an entire adventuring day with an ‘old school’ type game. This has happened to my group a few times; a wandering monster comes along and crits a guy, now the whole group has to call off the adventure and rest up for the rest of the day because it’s not worth pressing on when the first encounter already went so badly. Hence the 15 minute adventuring day. The alternative, to force them to press on despite their bad luck, (the hobgoblins will execute their captives by sunset, you must get there first!) means they can feel railroaded into a likely suicide mission. Some people enjoy the challenge. A lot of players would be turned off right from the outset though. ‘Oh great, that stupid dire wolf random encounter critted me so now we’re all going to die if we go into the caves of chaos’. They die a thousand times in their mind before the next battle is even fought.
One approach is to blame that kind of player for having a ‘bad’ attitude. Another approach is design around statistical outliers by ensuring that players always have enough out-of-battle resources to make recovery between encounters trivial, even if they wound up getting hurt a lot more than they should have.
The downside of that design approach is that the only way to make the game challenging is with individual encounters dangerous enough to kill a party. Any encounter that has no potential to result in TPK is a trivial encounter and thus basically a time-filler. So there is now much less variety of encounters, making the game drier overall. And also suspending disbelief a bit (hmm, the last 16 times we met monsters/traps they were always JUST easy enough for us to overcome with some difficulty, what an amazing coincidence!!)
To me, it ultimately comes down to what is the true source of ‘fun’ for the players. Is the game meant to a challenging test of wits between players and the adventure designer (adjudicated by a neutral DM) in which the players have just as much chance to fail as to succeed? Or is the game meant to be a true ‘role-playing game’ in which players take on the rules of true heroes and save the day pretty much every time (with the only element left to chance being how long it takes/how much they suffer before inevitable success)?
Video games have the same philosophical conflict. When a person purchases a game, does he treat it as a true test of his game playing skills in which ultimate success is by no means certain? I bought plenty of NES games that I never was able to finish. Is that a design success or failure? On the one hand, if I wasn’t good enough, I guess I don’t deserve to ‘beat’ the game. On the other hand, the modern line of thinking is that my friend and I both paid 60 dollars for that game, just because he happens to be better at video games than me does that mean he deserves more content? All the content that I never experienced due to my lack of skill was wasted–I didn’t get my 60 dollars worth, did I? Games that were too hard weren’t fun because they did nothing for your ego, and in fact it could even seem like you were being robbed by the designers. The Game Genie became popular for that reason–people didn’t like to feel like they weren’t getting what they paid for; all they were getting was what they had the skill and patience to achieve.
And players who come to sit down and play an RPG are investing a huge amount of time and energy into getting a certain experience–many times the experience of being the hero that saves the day. If they fail and die, their investment is lost for no return. Is that fair? Is that right? Is that fun?
Those are the questions you have to grapple with as a designer, whether you are designing a whole ruleset or a single short adventure.
This is quite true, but with CRPG you tread a fine line between being patronizingly easy or frustratingly hard. Especially on a long-haul with no save points, this can turn a particularly difficult level into something downright punishing. There is no game master to adjudicate in a CRPG or to find a way to keep the game moving in the face of failure, there is only failure… over and over again.
In this light, it is unsurprising that the modern CRPG has forsaken long-term consequences. Punishing and frustrating your customers isn’t exactly a good business model. It’s a real shame, though, because this is an interesting dimension that is almost completely lost to the CRPG realm.
“(the hobgoblins will execute their captives by sunset, you must get there first!)”
Interesting example, because it actually highlights another method of taking meaningful strategic choices away from the players. (It’s not really a choice when the stakes have been designed so that they don’t really have a choice at all.) Thus, IMO, it creates a different flavor of the same
Which isn’t to say that my players will never face stakes that force them to rush encounters or scenarios in which the encounters are leisurely paced so that they can rest up completely between them. Strategic variance is interesting and keeps the game fresh.
Real example from my Ptolus campaign: My players spent the better part of two sessions launching multi-pronged assaults on a cultist stronghold. They met with huge success, but by the end of it they were completely tapped out for the day. They desperately needed to rest, regroup, and re-supply.
Unfortunately, that’s when a scheduled event triggered and they received a magical message from the guards they had left in the Banewarrens: Somebody had dug a new tunnel into the complex and effectively breached their defenses.
This was the cliffhanger on which we ended one session. In the two weeks between sessions, almost every time the players go together they were chatting about what they were going to do. Even away from the table, they were completely engaged.
First: The tough choice. Do they respond to the message or ignore it? If they teleport in and face a fight like they did the last couple of times, there’s a good chance that they could get killed. If they don’t, the guards are almost certainly dead.
They make the tough choice and teleport in. No immediate combat. But their subsequent investigation was completely influenced by the weakened state in which they were forced to deal with the problem.
And this is the real key: If they had made different choices, this sequence of events would have almost certainly played out in a completely different way. And that, to me, is the interesting part of playing and running a roleplaying game.
I think having something to lose and real choices are immensely important for a role playing experience. A hero whose choices don’t matter (or only matter in combat) isn’t really all that heroic. It is very satisfying as a player to arrive at a point in an adventure, where the smart choice is to back off and the heroic to press on despite being low on health.
“Interesting example, because it actually highlights another method of taking meaningful strategic choices away from the players.”
Nah, they just need to decide if they care if the hobgoblins execute the captives. C’mon, do we really need those guys?
Seriously though, this is excellent. Ive always been inclined toward thinking MPE wasn’t a good model, but this piece has really brought home to me why.
I saw in a 3.5E book one time (I want to say the Rules Compendium?) an idea about making healing spells turn lethal damage into nonlethal, rather than heal it outright. It seemed good because it brought more attrition to the game, but D&D is so focused on the heal-damage-heal cycle that it seems unnecessarily punitive.
Wawclam,
Assuming spells in the variant you mention wouldn’t remove any nonlethal damage, it would be even more punitive in situations that actually result in nonlethal damage. (As the normal healing rules say that a spell both returns hit points and removes an equal amount of nonlethal damage.)
If the variant would first heal X nonlethal damage and then turn X lethal damage into nonlethal, it might work. Then the party could spend a single cure spell and some time, or two cure spells if they have to move *now*. That’s actually an interesting idea. Anyone know where the variant rules are?
@Otus: I would say, in your post… just set x = 50% or maybe spell level or caster level for the first x, and you are ready to go.
Or try this: nonlethal damage for, say caster level, is turned into nothing, and the the full normal healing turns it into nonlethal damage. So a 1. level Cleric would turn only one point of nonlethal damage into nothing, and then “heal” 1d8+1 points of damage into nonlethal. Would work to eleminate the lay down/stand up routine, that sometimes creeps up in low-level play. Maybe give them fighters a feat that let them be staggered when they have more nonlethal damage than hp, instead of unconsciousness…
Just try it. 😉
This post… it coalesces and expresses some of my own thoughts better than I could have. Well done, sir.
Also, warclam is an awesome name, and a similar damage conversion mechanic was available in Arcana Unearthed, I think (as an Armor as Damage Conversion mechanic). I was also a fan of Iron Heroes’ reserve points as a similar strategic hit point mechanism. Each character had a pool of reserve points, which could be converted into HP at a rate of one per minute, with healing abilities (like the heal skill) restoring reserve points instead of HP. On the surface, very similar to healing surges, but upon further examination, gradualism and granularity really makes it feel different.
I strongly prefer the tactical basis for player capabilities and round by round combat. I like having few if any “easy” fights, and having “hard” fights not vary in difficulty based on what the party has fought before (at least not by much). Part of this is because I do a lot outside the dungeon, and one-fight days are not uncommon.
In a “Jaquayed” dungeon, scouting and bypassing the dragon will be important regardless of whether individual combats are tactical or strategic.
I can see why one would prefer one model or another, but at the same time I think a lot about ways strategic objectives might change based on tactical events (one reason I like critical hit tables and slow-cast healing is that it creates a point at which the objective changes to rescue or escape in the middle of combat).
[…] with their last hit point, which is not really D&D when you get down to it– it’s My Precious Encounterâ„¢. 4E attempts to implement World of Warcraft on the tabletop without leveraging any of the real […]