Trying to figure out the anatomy of challenges I like
ThoughtBubble:
This is all inspired by the "Challenge the player" thread from last year.
I've fallen into a pretty heavy "planned to showcase ability x" rut in my dungeon/encounter design. So I started thinking about challenges I've run before, which ones had worked in the past, and which ones hadn't. There's a definite pattern in the ones that I like, and I'm trying to figure out how to make more of those fun moments.
I think I can make things clearer by talking about a session of our saturday cartoon superhero game. The heroes had been transported to a magical video-game like realm where they had to do some fairytale like quests. Each of these things was pretty blatantly a challenge. To start, they had to prove worthy by beating the test of agility, the test of strength, and the test of intellegence. Also - out of genre powers were replaced with abilities that fit in more. Mostly movement abilities were removed.
The test of agility had the players facing a series of platforms above a pit. There was a ladder leading out by the beginning, but they'd have to deal with damage each time they fell. The dificulty was pretty high, enough so that the acrobat was the only one with a chance to make it through before falling. But the acrobat wasn't here for this session. How'd they finally make it, especially the low agility power-suit guy? It took a while, but eventually they started using a rope as a safety line. Most of the party braced themselves, and the super strong alien would throw the speedster at the next platform. A whole lot of jumping, throwing, shuffling, crazy laughter and trying again, and the party would be on the next platform, ready to do the whole thing over again.
The test of intellegence was a puzzle. There was a grid of numerical tiles with a pattern to them, the left and bottom rows needed to be filled in. It took about fifteen minutes, but those got filled in. The bottom left square? That took forever. There was some arguing, some trying random tiles. Things are getting tense, half an hour in, and arguements are about to break out. The acrobat's player finally arrived - he took one look at the starting puzzle, and handed me a piece of paper with the answer. Eventualy I gave the rest of the players a color coding clue, they figured the puzzle out, and we left that agony behind us.
The test of power had the heroes facing against a giant sized, hammer wielding, magically animated suit of armor so tough they couldn't hurt it. It also hit like 3 tons of bricks. This one was entertaining to watch. They started by swinging a few times, hoping to get lucky and do some damage. Following that, they disarmed him, tripped him, and held him down. The space alien picked up the armor's giant hammer and combo attacked with the acrobat. The acrobat was literally jumping off of the walls on to the hammer to add more force. The result? One crushed suit of armor.
In my evaluation, the test of intelligence failed. It wasn't much more than a variation on sudoku, but it was both too hard and too easy at the same time. It took up a lot of time, we weren't satisfied while doing it, and it wasn't fun afterwards. It also only engaged about half the party.
The test of agility ranks as some of the most fun we'd had gaming up to that point. It also took about half an hour, but was filled with description, laughter, teamwork and problem solving. They had to figure out how to use the abilities they had to overcome a situation where their chances of crossing the pit by just making the rolls was less than 10%.
The test of strength was a lot like the test of agility. Solid fun, took about twenty minutes total, and came with a lot of colorful description, a ton of movement and a good bit of laughter. They had to find out how they were going to even hurt this thing.
All three tests challenged the players. But the tests I liked challenged the players and their stat blocks. I think there's more to it than that though. Like, the powers they had were important, but so was the creative use of the abilites that they had and the tools at their disposal. Where I'm really stuck is figuring out what made the test of agility so much more fun than the test of power. Does anyone have any insight?
Jeff B:
I think it'll be hard to point to anything definite, to explain why agility was more fun than power. I'm going to take a guess and say that the agility puzzle really had everyone working together and improvising, whereas possibly only 1 or 2 people found the solution with the power test. You may have had some of the players feeling like they couldn't really contribute, even though the party as a whole performed well. I don't see any reason this would have to be true, since the suit of armor was its own kind of puzzle. It might've worked even better than it did, but maybe some were feeling tired or a little discouraged by the intellectual puzzle to put in more effort? It's strange that in rpg's there are so frequently problems with individualistic behavior, when most people I know would agree their best moments were when the party had to pull together to solve something, just like in your agility test.
I've had bad luck with intellectual puzzles also. People just don't like them. Maybe it's because it pulls them out of character -- they have to rely on player-brain resources instead of character-brain resources.
Callan S.:
Possibly the more immediate and strong threat, while the animated armour - well, perhaps they are used to winning combats mostly? I dunno if it applies, but alot of roleplay defaults to 'guys only die in combat if they do something really, really, really stupid'. So the armour just didn't seem threatening?
Filip Luszczyk:
For each challenge, what were your planned consequences of failure? Was it possible not to engage some challenges at all?
For the puzzle challenge, did you plan the color clue as part of the challenge, or did you modify conditions on the fly?
Excalibur:
One of the things I really enjoy is providing physical props for my players.
In one game a friend ran, we had to solve a series of puzzles in order to get from one room to another. They were given a reverse-printed word that needed to be viewed in a mirror (provided), a pencil and a strip of paper that had random letters on it, and some other stuff.
It was a simple cryptography puzzle that had most of us stumped but we figured out the correct way to wrap the paper around the pencil to get the next clue (point the wand at the lion's mouth or something like that).
I'm not sure if this was a print module or a bunch of different things from around the world. But it was able to keep us entertained without involving combat and dice rolling.
I ran a RIFTS game once where players were trying to catch a cyborg squirrel (who was pretty quick) and using a "make more successes on a d20 than the squirrel" mechanic along with narrative approach to how the PCs tripped or slid had everyone laughing. No combat involved there either, just a simple roll fest and mini story.
I've found that if you can engage more of the players at once in semi-intellectual puzzles or risk-type games (such as farkle or yahtzee...push your luck kind of things) that combat isn't a necessity.
You do have to take the real-world mentality of your gaming group into account. Not that they're stupid or not, but the range of material, schooling, and just plain random knowledge.
You now know that the sudoku puzzle was a bit out of range for them so look for something a bit different that's more up their alley. Though, the more you can bring physical objects into the game, I think that's better.
To this day, whenever my old gaming group gets together, we laugh about the squirrel chase adventure...
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