Yeah, I’m breaking the rules. Not only am I spewing Bullshit again this month, but I’m also kind of re-Shitting some Bull I already Shot.

And I know this ain’t the article you’re expecting. Look, things have continued to go tits up here at Angry Games Headquarters and in the Tiny-Angry Household. I’m doing my best and I’m sorry to change it up, but things continue to be a hell of a struggle. I’m sorry.

Based on the feedback I received, I made a giant-ass mess of explaining that whole Macrochallenge thing. And I’m getting hit with lots of questions about it. I tried clarifying things by releasing my most recent Monthly Live Chat to the general public — since I clarified some crap there — but lots of you didn’t listen to that. Apparently, most of you come to my text-based blog to read vast wodges of text. Who knew?

It’s also been suggested that, while I do an excellent job of clarifying shit for people in my supporter Discord server and via Live Chat, none of that’s preserved for posterity in a way people can stumble on later. So, to rectify that, I’m going to start immortalizing those discussions in Bullshit articles going forward.

This means my next Bullshit article will be about the difference between Overruling, Houseruling, and Hacking, and whether GMs should be Hacking at all.

But, in this one, I’m delivering…

More Macrochallenge Bullshit

Wow! That Macrochallenge thing broke lots of you, huh? Shockingly, I blame myself. It was a complex idea that I didn’t explain very well and it was kind of a sideline. Not to mention that I invented a clumsy term and acted like it was a definitive thing.

The story, in case you missed it, is that I posted a long, rambling article wherein I started by trying to define — in game design terms — what Challenge and Difficulty really represented and then tried to discuss those concepts vis a vis Dungeons & Dragons and then I tried to explain why the Dungeons & Dragons design expected — and instructed — adventure designers to build multi-Enocunter adventuring days and why the game didn’t work very well from a design standpoint if you didn’t and how that was a stroke of genius given that most Game Masters are not game design geniuses.

And somewhere in there, I invented this poorly defined term, Macrochallenge and then yammered on and on about Macrochallenge this and Macrochallenge that and I implied that there was this specific thing called The Attrition Macrochallenge that was built into the core of the Dungeons & Dragons game.

Yeah, I tried to do too damned much and I didn’t do it very clearly. And the result was a ton of questions that confused and baffled me because I knew what I meant when I said what I said, but I didn’t say what I meant and so people didn’t hear what I was trying to say.

I made a mess.

So let me take another stab at this Macrochallenge thing. A term, by the way, that I made up. And it’s very specific to how tabletop roleplaying games are generally put together.

Reminder: There is No Such Game as Dungeons & Dragons

It bears repeating that Dungeons & Dragons is not a game. The thing in the core rules isn’t a complete, playable game. It’s just a pile of game mechanics and game elements that someone can assemble into a complete game.

To be a game, a thing must include certain elements. And one problem I frequently encounter is mouthbreathers who refuse to accept that fact. They claim games are subjective. Different people want different things from games. There’s no point in being all definitive about it. Especially given that you’re dealing with the psychological effects of engaging with subjective entertainment media and so all your definitions are soft and vague and qualitative instead of hard and firm and numerical.

If you ascribe to that postmodern crap, I can’t help you. Your worldview is so screwed up that I can’t talk to you. It’s impossible to talk to someone who doesn’t think words mean things.

Addressing the rest of you, though…

Games are activities that have specific psychological impacts. Game designers and psychologists have spent many, many years building an understanding of what makes games and why they work the way they do. There are several different competing models, but we don’t need to get deep in those weeds.

Games need goals, they need rules, and they need one or more obstacles between the players and the goal. Here’s the finish line, here’s the lanes you have to run in, and here’s the hurdles you have to jump. Simple, right?

Dungeons & Dragons — as presented in the core rules — has no goal. “Bah,” you say, “Dungeons & Dragons has goals!” And you might point to the fact that you accumulate levels or gain experience points. Or that you have fun. But those aren’t goals. They can’t be finished. You’re never done “accumulating wealth.” And fun is not a gameplay goal, it’s a motivation.

Consider board games. You play board games because they’re fun. You choose a specific board game because it provides a particular kind of fun. Maybe you pick Pandemic because of its mix of high challenge and cooperation. Or maybe you don’t pick Pandemic because it isn’t a relaxing and chill kind of fun. Whatever.

The goal in Pandemic isn’t to have a fun experience, though. That shit’s the payoff for testing yourself against Pandemic. The goal in Pandemic is to cure the four plagues before they decimate civilization. When the plagues are wiped off the board, you win. When the turn-timer runs out, you lose.

In that sense, Dungeons & Dragons lacks a goal. It relies, instead, on individual adventure modules and campaigns and Game Masters and players to create goals: rescue the princess, recover the treasure, steal the artifact, defeat the dragon, whatever.

Because Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have a goal out of the box, it also doesn’t have any obstacles. How could it? If there’s no defined finish line, there’s no way to put things in front of the finish line. Instead, Dungeons & Dragons contains a bunch of pre-made game elements from which can be built obstacles. And it contains instructions for building obstacles from those components.

Dungeons & Dragons is not a complete game: it’s a pile of Lego pieces from which one can build a complete game.

Some of you might think I’m belaboring this point, but it needs belaboring. Because this is one of those points that are really obvious and evident if you get, but totally brain-warping if you don’t. It takes some brain rewiring to glom onto it and I’m therefore happy to patiently help everyone adjust their brains accordingly, however long it takes. Within reason.

But I Don’t Want a Game

I have to mention here that there are people — lots of people — who don’t actually want roleplaying games to be games. They want roleplaying activities. Roleplaying experiences. They want to smash their dress-up action figures together and tell a story without giving two craps about challenge, goals, and rules.

And that’s fine!

If you want to pour out your Pandemic pieces, set them on the board, ignore the rules, and tell a plague-fighting story to explore the age-old conflict between safety and freedom — or whatever — have at it.

But if you e-mail Z-Man Games and ask them to change the game to facilitate that, I’m going to e-mail a counterpoint because I want a game, I bought a game, and I want the next new, shiny release to be a game too. At the very least, I get to say, “If you take the game out of this board game, I ain’t buying it.”

I’m talking about game design here. If you don’t think Dungeons & Dragons should be a game, I got nothing to say to you except I think it should. And games need goals, rules, and obstacles.

A Quick Note on Campaign Play

It’s worth noting, by the by, that tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons are meant for campaign-style play. At least, they assume it. That means it expects the players to play many different games all strung together with the same characters. A campaign need not be a game in itself, but rather, is just a way of structuring a bunch of games in continuity. But a campaign can also be a game.

And it’s these kinds of side notes that lead to all sorts of confusion.

Scenario Design is Game Design

Let’s say you have an idea for a fantasy adventure game in which the players take on the roles of fantasy heroes and fight a dragon. Let’s call it The Dragon of Smolderthorn Thorp. And let’s say Dungeons & Dragons didn’t exist. What would it take to build that game?

You obviously can’t start mapping a dragon’s lair and put a dragon in it. First, you need to decide how the game works. What do the players do? How do you determine the outcomes? What do the monsters do? And so on.

Next, how do you represent the players? What do player avatars look like? Statistically? Do they have races and classes? What are races? What are classes? Which races and classes exist? You’ve got to design them all.

What about equipment? Weapons? Armor? Spells? What statistics do they need? How do spells work? Now design all the weapons and armor and spells in your game.

What challenges does the game present? Are there traps? Monsters? Skill tests? Mazes? How are they put together? What statistics do they have? How do players interact with them? Now design all the different challenges.

And so on and so on…

Eventually, after a crap-ton of work, you get to map a dungeon, put some monsters in it, and call it a game.

Dungeons & Dragons lets you skip all the preceding crap and jump to the part where you get to map the dungeon, put some monsters in it, and call it a game. The mechanics and gameplay elements are there, you just have to design a game out of them.

That’s called Scenario Design, by the way. I stole that term from video game design and development. It’s a good term.

But did you notice what I said there? It’s important. But it’s subtle.

You have to design a game.

When you write an adventure for your Dungeons & Dragons campaign, you are designing a game. You’re doing game design. You ain’t just slapping shit together, you ain’t just following instructions to build a Lego castle, you’re designing a whole new thing. You’re designing a game.

From Game to Good Game

There’s a massive gulf between a game and a good game. And professional game designers spend years and years mastering their craft and learning how to design good games. Game design is a skill. An art. A profession. And it must be honed. You can’t just pick it up from playing games. That’s why there are bazillions of gamers, many thousands of aspiring — and failed — game designers, and only a few hundred truly good professional game designers.

And it’s why the really good ones are celebrated.

The point is that building an adventure is real, honest-to-God Game Design. It ain’t building an entire bespoke game, sure, but it’s building the most important parts of a game. Mostly from scratch. And every design is unique. However similar any two Dungeons & Dragons modules might look, each is uniquely designed. Yes, they’re designed from the same pieces, but so are Lego spaceships and those Lego architectural sets.

A Whole Greater than the Sum of its Parts

Here’s the problem…

Building a good game ain’t as simple as throwing a bunch of game ingredients in a pot, stirring them together, and baking them for a half hour at 350°. That definition above? Goal, rules, and obstacles? That’s the bare minimum. It’ll get you something that’s technically a game. But what makes a good game is something game design academics have written hundreds of thousands of pages about. And while I devour that shit, I recognize it’s all just theory. It’s descriptive. Good games come first, then come the theories about why they’re good. I ain’t saying the theory’s useless; it’s useful. But you can design a great game without a lick of game design theory and then the theorists will be ripping apart your game trying to figure out what you did and why it’s good.

But I digress…

The point is, a good game is greater than the sum of its parts.

Take Magic: The Gathering. From 30,000 feet up, it’s pretty simple, right? Take your opponent down to zero Life Points before your own Life Points hit zero. Choose cards to play each turn to deal damage or defend yourself and win the hit-point race. Yawn.

But it’s way more complicated than just dishing out and avoiding damage, ain’t it? It has to be. If Magic: The Gathering boiled down to two kinds of cards — Deal X Damage and Prevent X Damage — it’d suck donkey butts. I know some of you think it sucks anyway. That’s fine. That doesn’t make it any less well-designed just because you don’t personally like it.

See, in Magic: The Gathering, there are ten thousand other things that make the game more than just a hit-point race where the highest damage wins. You have to build up resources over time and manage them. And depending on how you play, you have to build or draft decks. You have to choose between short-term damage-dealing and long-term strategy.

Put another way, to win Magic: The Gathering, you must consider your turns in the context of the game as a whole. If you just play each turn to deal — or prevent — as much damage as possible, you won’t win a lot of matches.

That’s what I mean when I say it’s a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The Elements of Challenge

The word challenge is a giant pain in the ass. It can be a noun — something that opposes or tests you — or a verb — to oppose or test — or even an adjective in the right form — how much of a pain in the ass a given opposition or test actually is. In game design, it can describe game elements that oppose or test players — you must overcome this challenge to proceed — or it can refer to the fact that games oppose or test players — a game must present a challenge. And in Dungeons & Dragons, it also describes the relative statistical power level of a monster — that monster is Challenge Rating 5.

Challenge is a loaded word.

And yet, after I carefully and pedantically laid out exactly how I was using it in my discussion about Challenge and Difficulty, I crammed a different form of the word carelessly into an invented term and then yammered on and on about it.

In that case, I was trying to describe the ways in which a game tests its players. The thing the players have to overcome to succeed.

In Pandemic, the players must eradicate four plagues before the outbreaks grow out of all control. To do so, the players must gather sets of resources to cure each plague while containing outbreaks and contending with random events.

 

In Magic: The Gathering players must defeat their opponents before they are defeated themselves. To do so, they must amass mana and use that mana to cast damaging spells or summon creatures. Creatures can attack opponents, opponents’ creatures, or block opponents’ creature’s attacks. They must also use spells to counter opponent actions.

All that To Do So crap? That describes the game’s Challenge. Roughly speaking. In brief. That’s what the players must deal with to do what they’re trying to do.

Two notes…

First, those descriptions are vague and incomplete. Most games present complex challenges and there are lots of layers of detail. It’s impossible to fully describe a game’s challenges without just explaining how the whole damned game works. That’s because the challenge is the game.

Second, note how hard it is to describe Dungeons & Dragons in those terms without resorting to some bullshit copout like “Dungeons & Dragons isn’t the sort of thing you win” or “everyone wins Dungeons & Dragons by just having fun.” But you can describe a Dungeons & Dragons adventure or scenario in those terms. Curse of Strahd is a game you can win; Dungeons & Dragons is the engine and toolkit that was used to make Curse of Strahd.

A String of Isolated Incidents

Now, Dungeons & Dragons games aren’t like Magic: The Gathering and Pandemic. They ain’t divided into turns so much as they’re divided into events. Or happenings. Or — dare I say it — Encounters.

A dungeon crawl comprises a bunch of Encounters in disconnected rooms in a dungeon. A wilderness trek consists of navigation tests, wilderness Encounters, and wandering monsters. A mystery involves investigating locations and interrogating witnesses. Which are all Encounters.

An Encounter is a little, bitty, individual Challenge. Effectively, an Encounter is a minigame. And you can describe most Encounters as “the players must… and to do so, they must…” At its most basic, then, Dungeons & Dragons is just a string of minigames. And Dungeons & Dragons provides you all the tools you need to build a Minigame Obstacle Course. You can set a goal — get the thing — and then throw a bunch of obstacles in the way — defeat the mook, bypass the trap, defeat the boss — of the goal. If the players circumvent every obstacle, they get the goal. Hooray.

But that ain’t a game that’s greater than the sum of its parts, is it? Players never have to think beyond any of the individual challenges. They never have to decide what to do about this challenge in the context of the larger goal.

Considering roleplaying games are all about long-term campaign play where Encounters add up to Scenarios and Scenarios add up to Campaigns and considering roleplaying games rely on the continuity of characters and their actions’  consequences, that’s pretty damning. The game must be more than a string of isolated events that must all be won.

Micro- and Macrochallenge Redefined and Refined

To really talk this shit through, I needed an easy way to differentiate the isolated little chunks of D&D challenge — the Encounters — from the greater-than-the-sum challenges at the heart of well-designed scenarios. So I coined the phrases Microchallenge and Macrochallenge.

A D&D Encounter is a Microchallenge. It’s a single test the players must overcome. And it’s the equivalent of a turn in Magic: The Gathering or Pandemic.

A D&D Macrochallenge represents the goal of an adventure. Or, rather, the thing the players must somehow manage to pull off to accomplish the goal.

And it’s worth noting Microchallenge and Macrochallenge aren’t absolutes. There ain’t just one Macrochallenge and a bunch of Microchallenges. Every turn in an Encounter is a challenge in itself. And scenes or acts in an adventure can have greater-than-the-sum Macrochallenges that, themselves, serve as Microchallenges in the scope of the whole scenario. Microchallenge and Macrochallenge are relative terms. They don’t mean anything except when compared to each other.

Dungeons & Dragons scenarios must have Macrochallenges. Otherwise, they ain’t games. Every D&D scenario has a statement like, “The players must do X and to do so they must Y.” Every. Last. One. This ain’t an optional component adventure writers choose to include. It’s something that shows up, wittingly or unwittingly, as part of the act of scenario creation.

All that crap I said last time about Macrochallenges wasn’t about the danger of leaving them out, it was about the danger of writing shitty Macrochallenges. Macrochallenges that weren’t greater than the sum of the Microchallenges. Macrochallenges that didn’t test the players to think beyond the individual Microchallenge they might currently be playing. Or to think about whether the Microchallenge they might be about to play is even worth playing or should be avoided, even if it means losing out on Experience Points or Treasure or whatever.

In short, I was talking about the difference between slapping together a functioning game and designing a good game.

A D&D adventure that’s just an obstacle course isn’t a game with no Macrochallenge, it’s a game with a bland, shitty Macrochallenge. It’s a shitty game. There’s nothing interesting about what the players must do and how they must do it. Nothing beyond whatever’s interesting about each obstacle in turn.

Every Macrochallenge is a Special Snowflake

I knew I was in trouble when, in response to that last article, people started asking me to list the other Macrochallenges they could use instead. I knew I’d fucked up explaining this crap. There’s no such list. There’s no way to write such a list. Because every Macrochallenge is a uniquely designed play experience. It isn’t something separate from the game it’s in; it isn’t a component to include. The Macrochallenge is the game.

All the card gathering and firefighting you do in Pandemic that’s the basis for that game’s Macrochallenge? That is the game. And while you can summarize the gameplay, you’re really not defining the game’s Macrochallenge when you do so. Nor are you defining it when you use terms like Cooperative and Hand Management and Point-to-Point Movement and Set Collection and Variable Player Powers. Those are just terms to compare and contrast game mechanics between games. Just ways to say, “if you like Pandemic, you might also like…”

And tabletop roleplaying gamers have their own vaguely summarizing, comparing, and contrasting terms too. Terms like Dungeon Crawl, Wilderness Adventure, Mystery, Intrigue, Event-Based Adventure, and Ticking-Time Bomb? Those are vague ways to summarize, compare, and contrast the basic sorts of Macrochallenges one might face in this or that adventure.

When you build a Dungeons & Dragons scenario, the first thing you do — the first thing you should do — is describe what the characters will be trying to do and how they’ll be trying to do it.

“In this adventure, the heroes must recover the Orb of Macguffin from the Dungeon of Fredhitch. To do so, they must travel through the wilderness to the dungeon, deal with the dungeon’s denizens, locate the Orb in the dungeon, and overcome the Guardian Beast.”

The Macrochallenge isn’t in that statement, but rather it’s in the game’s design itself. Richard Garfield could have made Magic: The Gathering a simple, boring damage race with Mana Cards, Damage Cards, and Defense Cards. He didn’t. He built a very complex challenge.

Likewise, my adventure could boil down to, “navigation test, three rooms of combat, then fight a boss.” Or I could make it complex. Maybe the players must first figure out the location. They must gather clues through research and rumor and then plot those clues on a map of the area to pinpoint the dungeon’s location. And maybe the guardian beast has all these power crystals scattered throughout the dungeon. The more of them the heroes destroy, the less powerful it is.

That’s how you design a good scenario. It ain’t about reading down a list of Macrochallenges, picking one, and then fitting the pieces to it. It’s thinking about how you can challenge your players and designing those challenges.

Designing a good scenario is designing a Macrochallenge. They’re the same thing. Macrochallenge is just a term for “how all the elements of a scenario add up to challenge the players.” And designing that shit is down to actually inventing and then designing a game. It’s game design. And game design takes creativity, careful design, innovation, and lots of practice. Especially lots of practice.

That’s why I can’t hand you a list that’s more detailed than, “solve a mystery” or “manage resources good.” I can’t do the game design for you. And I can’t do it without designing an actual game.

And that’s what makes Dungeons & Dragons’ attrition gameplay so amazing even though some of you refuse to recognize how impressive a feat including it was.

The Terribly Named Attrition Macrochallenge

Here’s the thing: Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t tell adventure designers to build obstacle courses. If you follow the instructions in Dungeons & Dragons and build an adventure its way, you’ll end up with something that isn’t just “win all the encounters or else lose.” Dungeons & Dragons isn’t designed to care whether players win or lose individual Encounters; not unless they lose so bad the characters die. Instead, Dungeons & Dragons is designed such that if you build a dungeon crawl its way, winning’s down to effective resource management. If the players blow all their resources — which include everything the players can run out of: spell slots, ammunition, food, inventory space, hit points, healing potions, magic item charges, hit dice, torches, everything — if the players blow all their resources in the first encounter, every other encounter will be much, much harder. And eventually, they’ll have to retreat and take a nap.

Dungeons & Dragons isn’t too punitive about it, though. The penalty for retreating and sleeping is about how it feels to retreat. It feels crappy. One of the reasons you’re not supposed to let players rest in the dungeon is so they feel like they’re slinking back home with their tails between their legs. Or at least, so they have to reflect on whether they managed their resources well. Did they, in fact, have a good adventuring day?

That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough. Whatever you might think, players do care about retreating. Especially if you, the Game Master, waste table time on it. Make the players walk to the dungeon exit, go back to camp, stop making forward progress, set a watch, consume rations, wake up, prepare spells, and break camp. Or make them secure their position in the dungeon lest they get attacked by wandering monsters. Or just emphasize how boring it is to sit around at camp all fucking day waiting until night falls so they can go to sleep.

My point was that if you follow the adventure-building instructions in Dungeons & Dragons’ adventure-building toolkit, you don’t get a shitty Win Every Encounter Macrochallenge. You get a slightly more interesting Manage Your Resources Macrochallenge. One that requires the players to think about how they’ll handle the next three Encounters while they handle the one in front of them.

That Macrochallenge ain’t just a part of the scenario’s structure, either. It’s hard-coded into the game’s mechanics. It’s built into the Dungeons & Dragons engine. Unless you break it.

Calling that The Attrition Macrochallenge was a huge mistake. When I did that, I implied it was a thing. Something the D&D designers added like an ingredient. They didn’t and it’s not. What I should have said is “Dungeons & Dragons’ default Macrochallenge is based on Resource Management.”

Pandemic is about Set Collection and Action Management. Magic: The Gathering is about Income Generation and Hand Management. And Dungeons & Dragons is about Resource Management.

In a generic Dungeons & Dragons adventure, the players must accomplish a pre-defined goal. To do so, the players must overcome a series of scripted obstacles and random events while carefully managing their resources and without being reduced to zero hit points.

That’s how I should have explained this shit.

And I really wish some of you could just get over your overwhelming and inexplicably negative bias against Resource Management and recognize just how amazing it was that 3rd Edition’s designers built their entire toolkit such that, if you followed their instructions, you wouldn’t just get a game, you’d get a well-put-together game whose whole was greater than the sum of its parts. All without having to know a single damned thing about good game design.

And, make no mistake, that was all D&D 3E.

But Attrition Always Existed in Dungeons & Dragons

Lots of you insisted that attrition’s always been a core part of the Dungeons & Dragons gameplay experience. And you’re right. From the very earliest editions, players have always gradually watched their resources get sucked up by the game’s challenges until they either died or went back to town for a nap. I don’t contest that.

But, before 3rd Edition, Dungeons & Dragons did not supply a rigorous dungeon-building toolkit that would consistently deliver balanced and well-designed resource-management gameplay challenges. Hell, Encounter Balance was still being flagged as “optional” in the AD&D 2E Dungeon Master Guide. Monsters and resources weren’t built and doled based on defined rates of attrition around which Game Masters could design challenges. Game Masters could not set any expectations at all about how far into a challenge players should get without needing to recover and resupply.

Early Dungeons & Dragons relied on the Game Master and the players to create a good game. It relied on an emergent fun that arose from the players running headlong into and interacting with whatever elements the Game Master injected into the game world. Whatever the Game Master dropped on that map; that was what the players had to cope with. If they didn’t — or couldn’t — they’d flee. Or die. Whatever.

Is there fun in that? Sure. I ain’t saying that’s not. It worked for me from middle school into college and beyond. It worked because there was nothing like it. But it was really unstable. The quality of a game was entirely down to the quality of the Game Masters and how the players played along with them. Meanwhile, gaming’s become a lot more sophisticated. Game designers in other media have discovered you can deliver the same kinds of emergent fun in more stable ways that are less dependent on the players just finding fun in whatever chaos happens.

That’s why, by the way, I’m not an OSR wonk. I love the open-ended emergent story that comes from players freely interacting with the game world, but I also think roleplaying game systems have to empower Game Masters to design good, stable, reliable gameplay experiences without a degree from Game Design University. Or without reading twenty-thousand words of screed every month from some accountant turned armchair designer.

The designers behind Dungeons & Dragons’ 3rd Edition — and 4th Edition too — put a lot of work into empowering Game Masters to build good, stable, reliable gameplay experiences. To create well-designed games. Sure, they’re rudimentary and generic. They’re foundational. But they’re perfectly satisfying. If a Game Master never grows beyond them, they and their players can still have years of adventuring fun. And if a Game Master does strive for more, there’s an excellent foundational underlay so that, if they fail, there’s still a layer of good game to catch the players.

That’s why Dungeons & Dragons’ Resource-Management Based Default Macrochallenge deserves your respect. Why you shouldn’t throw it away lightly and why you shouldn’t shit on it. And it’s why I can’t give you a list of optional other Macrochallenges to replace it with.

If you want to replace Dungeons & Dragons’ default Macrochallenge, get your slogging boots on because you’re designing a game bucko. And designing a game is hard, creative work and there’s no road map to follow.

Good luck.