Trying to figure out the anatomy of challenges I like
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
Through no one's intention, this thread got effectively hijacked. Let's dial it back to the middle of the first page, not in the sense of ignoring what's been said since, but in the sense of what the thread's directly addressing. Daniel, if you want, feel free to write a one-sentence mission statement for it, or if you think you've done so already, quote yourself here.
Best, Ron
ThoughtBubble:
Ron, I guess my goals for the thread have drifted a little as well.
Mission Statement: Help me understand encounters that get levels of engagement like The Challenge of Agility.
I feel like I'm still missing a couple of social factors to the whole thing.
I guess I have two sub goals as well. I want to:
Understand what I need to do to craft 'fun' encountersUnderstand what/how game systems can make this easier or harder
Each of those might have to be its own thing though.
JoyWriter:
Something occurs to me about patience vs "challenge"; there are many real life challenges where you can try to get something one way and fail, say a ball on a roof. In fact I remember seeing a situation with two kids trying various things to get it off. They kept failing at different methods, but I could see that they would very likely eventually get the ball, even if it meant having to wait and get their parents to phone the park-keeper.
In this situation what made it fun or not fun was the fact that failure at a specific task wasn't the end; they were getting a bit despondent, until me and some of the other people walking through started providing them with multiple alternatives that they could try out. As the idea of victory (as opposed to dead stop) began to become a conceivable possibility, they started cheering up, and trying bigger sticks, looking for ones with built in hooks etc.
So inevitable victory and total failure can be fine, so long as they can keep trying alternatives until their patience runs out.
An important part of what made this real life situation have that property is that they could keep expanding the scope, bringing in other elements and working out how to deal with the complications that might introduce (angry dad?). Also the more the scope expanded, the more likely complications were to be long lasting (although not always).
JoyWriter:
Hang on, I thought I'd posted a response to your other examples before, must've lost it.
So digging that up from memory:
I notice your definition of an enjoyable challenge is quite self-less: You enjoy your players enjoying it, which is nice. It also suggests to me that to make an all categories good challenge for you will require a toolbox long term, as you come across players with different styles. At the same time, I imagine that there is a portion of the task that can never be simply reduced to "are the players having a good time?", instead there will be things about it that will be uniquely interesting to observe or do when setting up the challenge, and if we can find that, awesome, because you'll be able to put that in the intro to games you run as a sort of introduction/specification.
To get there we will need more examples of challenges that were crap, unfortunately, although I'd much rather talk about good ones. Have you had some challenges that you didn't like but your players did?
On the successful challenges:
You cover a lot of what I notice in your current specification, but I also notice that one feature all the good things share is overlayed objectives/purposes, criss-crossing over each other in the same space. Sometimes these are sub-strategies with players in large scale agreement, sometimes these are but an important thing is that the teamwork isn't too rigid; there's no real command hierarchy, and there is also no conflict between players, instead you have overlapping and partially assisting attempts by the various players.
One thing that makes this happen is that mucking about is resolutely allowed; there's no time limits requiring people to be businesslike, and there aren't any scarce resources they must judiciously guard (or are there? I get the impression you were mostly using "at-will" type stuff).
Secondly, and related to the first, organised cooperation is not required for survival, only success. That stops people reacting with fear when other players muck about and the overlapping stuff becomes fun instead. That's not to say there isn't danger, but people can focus on mitigating danger and do so, even if it makes them a bit useless for a bit.
Then finally when players do cooperate success is not a matter of "assist rolls" but the sort of "reasonable effect" power use you've referred to before.
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