Module design: difficulty as a shape

[Two orcs]

There are many mechanical yardsticks to measure difficulty in old school D&D. Number of HD of the opponents, their organization, expected resource drain due to attrition from wandering ecounters or enviromental hazards, resource drain in the form of obstacles that require gear or spells to overcome, hidden passages that need to be found (draining time or spells!) and puzzles that need to be figured out etc. etc.

But I want to discuss not the how of the challenge but rather the shape of the challenge. The shape I aim for when designing is a moderate upward slope with some obscuring vegetation which could very well conceal an ambush or pitfall. Basically, if the players sleepwalk through the challenge they'll encounter moderate resistance before falling afoul danger they should have predicted that maim or destroy them. In a way this is anti beer & pretzels, if you as a player just throw some dice and take things casually without engaging your spider sense or empathy (of the designers intent or the known or unknown NPC opposition) you'll ideally be met with failure.

A small example in my latest module (Tidal Terror Tower). A level appropriate party can probably hack their way through the tower, if raided when its own raiding force is away. But if they don't account for the lizards sending a swimmer to alert their force which is ashore they'll soon face overwhelming odds. If they just hack through the tower they'll gain the treasure inside, but if they don't understand the (literally) underlying threat the bigger prize (a barony and saving local civilization from collapse) is lost.

Anyone else think of their difficulty design as a shape? What shape(s) do you use?

 

[PrinceofNothing]

Anyone else think of their difficulty design as a shape? What shape(s) do you use?

Traditional would be a softball in the beginning so as to indicate the shape or nature of the ensuing challenge, or perhaps a series of rumors/signs to forewarn clever players, with a series of encounters/challenges of gradually increasing difficulty as they progress deeper into the dungeon, culminating in a 'final exam' where they may lose some people, and more importantly, plentiful hidden treasure that can be missed.

Palace is a wicked curveball in the beginning to signal I am not fucking around, and direct hack/slash will probably get them killed. Then it is a series of challenges, ranging from the more cognitive problems of surmounting the natural obstacle of the Mercury lake, to the various factions, to the optional tomb with the deadly traps and so on. Max assholishness kicks in somewhere in the Palace section, where all three element return in more potent form. Hopefully a good time. So a hockeystick.

The best illustration of an increasing difficulty curve is probably still Tomb of Horrors, in particular the lull in the middle with the fake tomb should reinvigorate the by now thoroughly frustrated players, and the way the danger becomes ever more subtle and ingenious is terrific. Fine ass module. I mentioned in my review of Mud Sorcerer's Tomb that it might be harder then ToH not because of pure lethality (both are insane), but because MST goes from zero to 100 and has various strange lulls interspersed with the more pure challenge maps.

 

[Grützi]

when i plan/design for my homegames i tend to go with the ascending hills shape.
You start slow, then some smaller hills to get the party "up to speed"... then follows a rather steep cliff, with some more bumps towards the end.


Like this.
Grey is the "normal" path of challenges in the adventure when the players basically stay on "autopilot".
There are certain breakpoints at which players have the chance to change the way the challenge curve goes either by player skill (asking the right questions, good thinking and tactics,...), by character skill (a dwarf havin nightvision, someone knowing to read elvish,...), by sheer luck (lucky roll) and probably by some other factors as well.

At points like A,C,D,F and G the group can thus change course onto a path (blue) that offers them a more steady way of challenges. While this may seem more taxing it would prevent the sheer "cliff" in the middle... the group basically spreads the challenge over a greater time thus exerting themselves less.
At points like B,D and E the group would then change onto a path (red) that would keep the challenge low for some adaptional time thus allowing a group to better prepare for harder challenges in the future. The essentially trade more time now for a harder challenge later.
Or they can skip some challenges completely (points D and E).

Like always this is a rough mode of operation for me... and sometimes I just ballpark it or throw something in because I like it in that moment.

 

[squeen]

I don't subscribe to a linear shape. It's too monotonic and "scripted" for me. I prefer something that branches to areas that are disjointedly hard or easy, and allows the players to choose a tempo and temperature.

However, there is also a hornet's nest aspect that once you've alerted an adversary to your presence, they will generally chase the player and attempt to neutralize the threat. The only hope of escape can be into one of those branches, and into another power's zone of influence, benign or malign.

In dungeons at least, down is generally dangerous. The more remote and undisturbed, the greater the potential for forgotten treasure and ancient (stratospheric) dangers.

 

[Osrnoob]

Golden ratio

 

[Two orcs]

Btw should have posted this in the theory subsection. I'll have to give Tomb of Horrors and Palace of Unquiet Repose readthroughs. I friend's group played through it and got almost all the way unharmed before suffering near complete destruction.

Golden ratio

Please elaborate.

 

[Beoric]

Hmm, I don't think I give any real consideration to "shape". When I construct encounters for a particular level, I follow one of two guidelines. Generally, I just assign difficulty randomly within certain guidelines (I have a small random table in a spreadsheet) that tells me if it is going to be theoretically easy or hard. Unless a difficulty (i.e. number of creatures suggests itself from the situation - for instance, if I have a larger population of hobgoblins, they will deploy their forces strategically, so the edges of their territory will, for instance, have guard stations with a prudent number of guards.

I used to pay more attention to the pattern of difficulty, but found it didn't matter; the real difficulty depends on how smart or dumb players approach the situation, or how luck or unlucky they are, so theoretically easy encounters can give players a lot of difficulty, and theoretically climactic ones can be a cakewalk with good decisions and a couple of lucky die rolls. Honestly I bet I could make every encounter the exact same theoretical difficulty and my players wouldn't notice because of the noise.

I tend to assign level ranges by population and type, so a village and surrounding (inhabited) area is safer than the nearby swamp and maybe the forest or hills. A poor neighbourhood may have more potentially violent encounters (say, muggers or thugs), but they are less individually dangerous than a rich neighborhood (say, high level assassins doing their work, or nobles with time and money for lots of training and good equipment and/or highly trained bodyguards). Industrial areas (wharfs or warehouse districts) are safe during the day, where there are lots of people, but can be dangerous at night when smuggling or other criminal activity is going on. Basically, if there are a lot of 0-level guys it is going to be relatively safe, otherwise the 0-level guys wouldn't be there.

Level range is also determined by who you are associating with; the wealthier the people, the more property they have to protect and the more power they have, the more resources their enemies are going to have to bring to bear against them - or the more resources they will have to use against you. It's kind of like a dungeon, you get to have some control over your danger level, and potential rewards.

With cities in particular, there may be hot spots (say, a drug lab in a poor area), but they tend to be "gated" by soft gates; they are hidden and harder to find at lower levels, you are less likely to hear rumors of them at lowers levels, you are less likely to interact with people associated with them at lower level, and if you stumble onto them you will likely receive "friendly" warnings before you get into real trouble.

So I guess I assign level ranges organically and with some predictability, and encounter difficulty within those ranges are pretty random.

 

[Osrnoob]

Happy to! I got you.

Difficulty is a shape where we suppose that the whole is the longer and harder part plus the shorter easier part.

The whole is to the longer easier part as the longer part is to the shorter harder part.

And thus must all things be golden, module difficulty as shape.

 

[Maynard]

I'm with Squeen here in that I like to let the players choose to make things more or less difficult for themselves.

I also really enjoy the idea that some things have to be earned through difficult deeds. If your player wants to play a hero, the game I run doesn't set them up to do that. There are opportunities to do heroic things, and the players generally have to fight uphill or go out of their way if they want to do it. Same with villainy, extra riches, cool magical powers/items, etc.

 

[Osrnoob]

Tower Zenopus with Purple Worm is a good example of that.

The anti skyrim that v games themselves have gone away from.

That said even dark souls long form has advocated for upscaling not down

Could be more a v game problem bit open world DS + 4 5 6 makes the absense of upscaling a problem

 

[Osrnoob]

It is a line though, better for bosses and larger threats so you don't have small God rats

 

[Beoric]

I'm with Squeen here in that I like to let the players choose to make things more or less difficult for themselves.

I also really enjoy the idea that some things have to be earned through difficult deeds. If your player wants to play a hero, the game I run doesn't set them up to do that. There are opportunities to do heroic things, and the players generally have to fight uphill or go out of their way if they want to do it. Same with villainy, extra riches, cool magical powers/items, etc.

Agreed on letting players choose their difficulty; that is the whole conceit of deeper dungeon levels being more dangerous than upper levels, and there are ways of telegraphing it in areas other than dungeons.

I dislike any focus on boss fights. Yes, there may be a main villain, and he may be tough, and the players may end up fighting him, and he may be sitting on the best treasure, but I am very much against setting expectations that such fight is going to be the climax of the module. As far as I can tell, only DMs care about this. I have never had a player feel deflated because their careful planning and lucky breaks made a "boss battle" too easy; if anything they are happier to bask in the glory of their own cleverness at dropping a mountain on the dragon's head, than to bask in the glory of getting their asses handed to them and barely managing to survive a battle of attrition. But maybe that is a Classic/OSR playstyle thing: the game is not a novel; the planning is NOT a montage, it is something the players actually do; the things they struggle with are the challenges, not the things you intend them to struggle with; the NPCs that escape are the recurring villains, not the NPCs you mean to escape; a win that shows their power can be more satisfying than a win that makes them feel weak.

This is part of why I don't like the concept of using a steadily increasing difficulty level - at least if that difficulty is achieved through novelty. Players should feel like they benefit from learning things, and for that to happen, they need to benefit from what they have learned. One modern design conceit I particularly dislike is using such a great variety of monsters that every battle is different from all the others. That prevents players from learning how to fight an opponent and get good at it. Players ought to be able to take what they learn and actually use it later in the module, including in any confrontation with a "boss" monster.

I'm waffling about how hard it should be to "be a hero". My initial reaction was to agree with you, but I think it bears some discussion. The amount of effort it requires for players, as opposed to characters, to do "good things" is pretty minimal, but I have often been surprised about how much the imagined effort turns off players. Take for example the surrender of (human) bandits. It is very little effort for the players to declare that they escort the prisoners back to town and turn them over to the authorities; perhaps there is a bit more if they think about details of security, or the DM wants to roleplay the discussion with the local sheriff. The characters might experience a delay as they return to civilization, but the players do not. But it is funny how many players instead opt for literally taking no prisoners, and slaughtering them all instead. I sometimes wonder if this is why Gygax started to go on about adhering to alignment restrictions.

So at the very least I think there should not be a barrier to playing something other than a total dickwad - for example, unless there is an in-scenario reason not to, my sheriffs always accept prisoners without harassing the PCs, and such conversations with the authorities are handwaived. Maybe actually being "heroic" should be harder than that, but it shouldn't be particularly hard to be not-an-asshole.

 

[PrinceofNothing]

Btw should have posted this in the theory subsection. I'll have to give Tomb of Horrors and Palace of Unquiet Repose readthroughs. I friend's group played through it and got almost all the way unharmed before suffering near complete destruction.

 

[Beoric]

As a counterpoint to this discussion, I offer a link to a post by a disgruntled freelance designer describing the WotC design process in theory, and his experience in practice. TL;DR: what you submit, and what they publish, may be very different, and you might not even know it until you receive your published copy.

I can actually see WotC's point when it comes to a desire to control the introduction of certain bits of IP, but how they did it, keeping in mind the whole conceit of WotC was this was supposed to be a mystery triggered by the finding of a book, well...

The released adventure added an NPC at the beginning to get the ball rolling, however, the way they were introduced negated the need for the book at all; all the players need to do is talk to them, get some directions, and go. I understand that the beginning of my adventure was on the esoteric side of things, but this took it all out. On top of that, the book was altered to make it more mundane and less mysterious.

The travel part was altered to push characters towards the sea route and the crab maze, with a note about the land route advising DMs to throw some random encounters at the party to show them the error of choosing that route. I can tell you with no uncertainty that I would never write something like that into an adventure. Both routes were viable in the original.

All references to the Batrachi, World Serpent, Days of Thunder, the tome, or any other motivations were removed. The Yuan-ti were reduced down to just being evil for evil’s sake for the most part (without the cut lore, it makes less sense), the Grippli had their culture stripped out and so on. Colonialist language and imagery around the Grippli was inserted as well, moving them from being simple and utilitarian with obvious culture and technology to being “primitives” who “primitively decorate” their thatched huts with crab bits.

Essentially, where you could see the welds and joins before, you could now see the chop marks and bolts. The story was reduced to a simple rescue mission against unmotivated baddies with confusing parts where bits of the original plot flashed up as absent. This was especially notable in that there was no plotline or reason for anything the Yuan-ti were doing; the conflict between the good and evil Yuan-ti was left completely unexplained until a tidbit at the end of the adventure that, without the cut content, made little sense.

Justin Alexander reviews the final, published version here.

 

[Hemlock]

So much good stuff in this thread. I emphatically agree with all of this:

Agreed on letting players choose their difficulty; that is the whole conceit of deeper dungeon levels being more dangerous than upper levels, and there are ways of telegraphing it in areas other than dungeons.

I dislike any focus on boss fights... As far as I can tell, only DMs care about this. I have never had a player feel deflated because their careful planning and lucky breaks made a "boss battle" too easy; ... the things they struggle with are the challenges, not the things you intend them to struggle with; the NPCs that escape are the recurring villains, not the NPCs you mean to escape; a win that shows their power can be more satisfying than a win that makes them feel weak...

...One modern design conceit I particularly dislike is using such a great variety of monsters that every battle is different from all the others. That prevents players from learning how...

I'm waffling about how hard it should be to "be a hero". My initial reaction was to agree with you, but I think it bears some discussion... But it is funny how many players instead opt for literally taking no prisoners, and slaughtering them all instead. I sometimes wonder if this is why Gygax started to go on about adhering to alignment restrictions.

Unfortunately I don't have anything truly novel to add to this conversation yet, which means this forum is awesome! On reddit or GITP I have the urge to talk, but here I just want to listen and steal ideas. Good job everyone!

MaxWilson/Hemlock out.