For Christmas this year my wife bought me Dante’s Inferno. Not the poem, the video game. Yes, I know, I’m about a year late to the party but that’s not really the point.
Thanks to Snowpacalypse 2010 I had the opportunity to play it a lot this week. As I did, I came across a couple of things that really irritate me in video games, and realized that those things have parallels in D&D, and I might actually be guilty of doing them as a DM.
My first issue is that of checkpoints. I despise them. They made sense 20 years ago when memory was expensive but there is no excuse for them today. In Dante’s Inferno it takes an excessive amount of time between checkpoints, so if you’ve done quite a bit since your last save, you need to keep going (even while your wife is glaring at you to wrap it up) so you don’t lose everything you’ve done before the next checkpoint.
The parallel to my DMing is creating encounters that “must” happen. I’m guilty of this type of railroading. My group, once they’ve embarked on an adventure, are served a hot plate of “whatever I determined they’d do while planning this past week.” Players, both in video games and on the table top should be in control of their own fate.
It’s irritating to be constrained to the whims of a game’s developers, and I’m sure it’s frustrating to my players to be constrained by my design as well. Now, don’t misunderstand, I don’t run a sandbox game where the players can go anywhere and do anything. I don’t expect that of Dante’s Inferno, and that game does not deliver such. It’s a linear dungeon crawl-type game. I am fine with a railroad in this sense. There is a storyline in Dante’s Inferno, as there is in my game, but playing the video game or in my campaign should allow for breaking at player-determined times. Dante’s Inferno should allow me to save whenever and wherever I want. My players should be allowed to stray off the path at their own pace while the story of my world continues in the background. I definitely need to work on that.
The second thing that irritates me in Dante’s Inferno is its reliance on “gotchas.” I am a video game cheater most of the time. I grab codes, I read walkthroughs, etc. However, sometimes I do just play the game. Dante’s Inferno is one of those times. The problem for me with this game is that there are times where you just scratch your head and wonder why the developers were so lazy.
One example is early on the game where you face an onslaught of demons. When you’ve finally beat them you’re faced with another wave. Then, once you’ve finally beat them, you get one more wave, with one hardcore beast-riding demon. It’s incredibly hard, but only due to sheer numbers, not because the game’s developers have out-thought you.
Later in the game you are on a platform that is plummeting down a shaft. As it falls, huge chunks of stone are falling and crashing through the platform. That’s fine, except you can’t move! So basically, if you haven’t positioned yourself in the one spot that won’t be hit with the chunks, you’re dead. So reload and try again. It’s not “hard” it’s just annoying.
I think I do that in 4E myself. There are times where I am just lazy when designing a night’s adventure. I’ll simply load up a few encounters with L, L+1, L+2 XP and call it a day. These encounters tend to just grind along as a series of me trying to whittle down HP and dailies from the party and them fighting through.
It’s interesting that feeling the frustration while playing a video game could “wake me up” to my own design flaws. Obviously the situations aren’t truly “parallel”, however, the video game really awoke me to these behaviors in my own style. Have you ever had a similar experience? Did this post perhaps call attention to something you didn’t realize you do? Talk back to me in the comments below! By the way, while you’re here, may you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year! See you in 2011!
Here’s one: If my players don’t take care of me properly, I get all fuzzy and start to sound really weird. After that I break into speech that can best be described as Japanese poorly translated into English. “The tiger is your sunshine pinwheel,” and such…
Seriously, though, as a DM that writes a lot of campaign arcs, I can be guilty of getting a main outline in my head. Every now and then, I’ll go with an open-ended campaign, and let things develop organically.
Wow, these are good points. The checkpoint/required encounter and the gotcha/unavoidable pain, I’m completely guilty of both of these. The other video game parallel I’ve seen is the difficulty escalation, where encounter 2 will be harder than encounter 1, and encounter 3 will be harder than encounter 2, and so on.
In the game, we the players are NEVER allowed to feel like true bad-asses, since we’re always getting completely smoked in every single combat. I’ve got this huge gun/sword/floor lamp, and I’m still getting my butt handed to me in every encounter, gosh dammit!
@The Opportunist: Yeah, I think in the future if I ever DM again (and there are no guarantees I will, I think I dislike it too much), I’ll go with a more open-ended campaign. I just really want to play out the one I’ve planned for this campaign, to whatever end it meets. I know who the big villians are, and who the final confrontation will be against, and I really want to see it come to fruition.
I know. It’s really railroady, but it’s the only thing that drives me to even show up to DM at this point.
@Dixon Trimline: Good point! I think @SlyFlourish on Twitter makes the point really well. We DMs have to learn that our monsters are really there for being slaughtered, and our encounters should be built to make the players feel heroic.
I’m definitely guilty of making challenges almost too hard in an effort to see at least one PC go down unconscious. It’s not that I’m doing it to “win” but more that I like challenging the players (and I have one player who has an uber character so it really hurts the design) while letting them survive. I know one player has expressed that he likes beating challenging encounters (though he did get upset last session when his character went down for a couple of round).
I’ll definitely have to pay better attention to putting in encounters that make the players feel badass though. Thanks for spotlighting that!
I can relate to the “I’m too lazy to do anything creative this week.” I think players are willing to forgive this from time to time, as long as it isn’t overtly frustrating and deadly, as the “elevator with only one right place to stand” would be. I can’t believe no one flagged that part of the game in development.
The sad things is that I’ve been guilty of this in my own encounter design. I’ve put floor traps that the players weren’t supposed to spot and when they get close to activating them, it’s all Reflex attacks or take tons of damage. Not so much out of design laziness, but because I used to think these sorts of things would be interesting & challenging to the players. But they just slowed things down. Now I tend to give the PCs a chance to notice them beforehand, and give them a reason why they would want to get into range.
In the ice elevator case, I’d give the characters a chance to dodge, and the ability to deflect the ice at monsters or push monsters into the way of falling ice, etc.
@Brian: Yeah, you’d think that would raise a red flag during at least testing, but then you play the rest of the game and realize that the platform thing is simply just one example of “gotcha” in the game, on top of many others. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun game, but there are enough of those “gotchas” to drive me crazy. Even my son, who has been watching while I play, has sat there at times saying “Really? Really?!”
@Mike: That’s part of my problem. I’ve put in “challenges” that I thought were cool and interesting, but it turned out that it was simply frustrating to the players.