How to Talk About Difficulty

Artist credit: Jeffrey Hummel

Gamers suck at talking about difficulty. It's one of those topics that somehow never produces a good conversation. It's mired in bizarre value judgements, dumb clichés, and inexplicable lapses in logic. I find it exhausting.

In this post, I'd like to offer three ideas that it would seem have never once occurred to any of you (at least going by the way people argue about difficulty online), but which I myself consider critical to my understanding of the topic. I routinely invoke all three of these ideas in conversations about game design and play pretty much every single day, and certainly quite frequently here on this blog.

These will not conclusively resolve the topic of difficulty in games. On the contrary, they may instead allow it to finally begin. I hope by arming you with these frameworks, I can finally have a conversation with you that won't make me want to smash my face against a wall.

[Apologies in advance to Patchwork Paladin, as my examples are skewed towards video games. But I tried to include other types of games now and then, too.]

The Other Appendix N

Because I know that nobody reading this right now has ever read the D&D 5.0 Dungeon Master's Guide, that also means you almost certainly don't know about one of its best treasures: APPENDIX D: DUNGEON MASTER INSPIRATION (page 316).

This is separate from the "Inspirational Reading" list included in the Player's Handbook, itself based on the classic "Appendix N" from the 1st Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. While that list consists entirely of works of fantasy fiction, the DMG's list is instead a collection of resources that the 5E development team thought might be helpful for you to hone the skills of dungeon mastering. And I gotta say, I quite like this list.

I've transcribed the full page below, with some thoughts of my own at the end.