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.]

Decisions vs Execution

Idea 1: The two most basic categories of challenge are this:

1. Deciding what action to do
2. Performing an action successfully

All challenge-oriented games are about one or both of those things. Most games involve a mix, but some are exclusively one type.

For example, Chess is a game that only ever features decision-challenges. There is never a risk that you fail to execute a move you've decided on. If you want, you can play the whole game without even touching the board, only ever verbally calling out your moves and allowing the execution to be handled by someone else / a computer / whatever.

By contrast, the sport of High Jump is pretty much only concerned with execution. Ever since the introduction of the Fosbury Flop, there aren't really any decisions you have to make when playing the game. I mean, I assume. I don't actually know anything about track and field. But you get the point.

Eight-ball pool is an interesting example, because while it includes both decision-challenges and execution-challenges, which type you focus on shifts over time. When you're new to the game, by far the biggest source of difficulty is simply being able to successfully hit the cue ball and make the shot you're trying for. It's a technique that takes most people awhile to get a handle on. But once you gain more experience, you reach a point where you can reliably make whatever shot you intend to without too much sweat. Yet that mastery of technique also opens up new options to consider in any given board state. You unlock the privilege of being able to decide between different possible shots, some of which would have been prohibitively difficult to attempt when you were first starting out.

Fighting games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Super Smash Bros, etc. are a high-intensity mix of both decision-challenges and execution-challenges, which players are rapidly alternating between. To an uneducated observer, it's difficult to tell which kind is happening at any moment. Sometimes a player does something that you wouldn't be able to tell was actually super tricky to pull off, and sometimes a player does something that you don't realize was a brilliant idea to even attempt at all. When a player makes a mistake, do you know if it's because they failed to execute their idea, or if it was just a bad idea to begin with? Evo Moment 37 is legendary both because it seemed like a superhuman feat and because it was nuts that Daigo would opt for such a gamble (instead of, say, trying to dodge any further harm, since blocking was no longer an option).

I think many gamers have a broad preference between these two types of challenge. Super Mario Bros obviously throws both types at you pretty constantly, but Kaizo Mario basically removes any decision-challenges from the equation. Instead, each level is about perfectly executing a single correct sequence of inputs, which is extremely difficult to pull off. There is the initial decision-challenge of "figuring out what the intended solution is" but that's not usually where the focus lies. Kaizo games are all about maximizing execution-engagement.

What does it look like to maximize decision-engagement?  Well, by definition, sandbox games (e.g. The Sims, Minecraft on creative mode, and a lot of open-world free-roaming games) not only focus on decision-challenges, but they usually don't actually have a "correct" decision to make. Many different choices are all valid, even in the pursuit of overcoming challenges.

Speedrunning is such a cool hobby because it often enhances both decision-challenges and execution-challenges. Obviously, speedrunning involves mastering a lot of sophisticated techniques to progress faster. But I always found the routing aspect to be the most fascinating part. Watching someone beat a game in the "wrong order" blows my mind. Of course, those new routing decisions are usually only available because you've mastered the execution of certain techniques, so you're going to be facing both types of challenge no matter what.

But what about when all the decisions have already been figured out? It's not like every individual speedrunner is expected to formulate their own route. My favorite speedrunning game, Super Metroid, had its main Any% route cemented, like, a decade ago. Does that mean it's only about execution-challenges now?

Nonsense! This is why God invented Randomizer Hacks, a type of mod where various elements will be scrambled around (e.g. upgrades that allow you to progress, or the locations of locks and keys, or even the locations of areas themselves). This means that you have to make routing decisions on the fly, because every time you play a new game, the required order of actions to make progress is totally new. Especially in a race against another player who's playing the same random seed, the kinds of decision-making required to "solve" the game as quickly as possible is pretty staggering.

But hey, this is still a D&D blog, right? Let's talk about D&D (and similar games).

Tabletop RPGs typically place a lot more focus on decision-challenges than execution-challenges. Which makes sense, because we typically associate execution-challenges with physical feats, like reflexes, speed, timing, stamina, coordination, perception, and even just patience. D&D is mostly played through conversation, so if you want to test a player's ability to execute an action successfully, it's probably going to have to be a verbal action. And in most cases, it makes more sense to just abstract the execution of actions instead.

(Although, note to self: consider using tongue-twisters as an obstacle in a future D&D game)

For example, let's look at combat. When you're in a fight, some things are up to you, the player, while other parts are handled "by your PC." You make all the big decisions, but the execution of those decisions is abstracted into narration and dice rolls and whatnot. You face the challenge of deciding who, when, and how to attack. But once you've made that decision, the execution is outside of your hands to influence. In some games, it simply works. But in most games, there's a dice roll involved, which means the execution is uncertain. However, don't mistake that for being a type of execution-challenge. You, the player, still aren't the one failing to time the strike, aim the swing, etc. Rather, that uncertainty is just one of the variables that figures into the decision-challenge you faced a moment ago when you were weighing the choice of who, when, and how to attack.

Contrast this with the challenges that come with social gameplay. In this context, it depends on the system you're using and/or the way the GM chooses to run the game. Let's imagine that the players want to sway an NPC to, I dunno, let them into the castle to talk to the king. No matter what, players always face the decision-challenge of choosing how they want to approach the situation. Do they appeal to the NPC's pity? Or their sense of urgency? Do they intimidate? Flirt? Deceive? But once the decision is made, the next part can vary. 

Many systems and GMs would handle it like an attack: the execution is abstracted, rather than being another challenge for the player. Maybe you resolve it with a dice roll, maybe the GM just decides the outcome, whatever.

Yet other systems and GMs, perhaps more thespian-minded, would instead force the player to carry out the action they've decided themselves. "Put on a performance" by speaking in character. Sure, you say that your character has decided to try reasoning with the NPC. But can you now sell that approach convincingly? Counterintuitively, even though I think many of us often view the "theatre kid" playstyle to be less challenge-oriented than, say, the "wargamer" approach to D&D, this process actually throws more challenges at the players to overcome. Though the player passed the first challenge by making the "right" choice, they may still fail this second challenge if the GM isn't impressed with their delivery.

"Social skill" is maybe the other biggest category of execution-challenge after physical skills, and is uniquely hard to quantify. Whether it's pulling off a bluff in Poker, Mafia, or Secret Hitler, or it's winning over allies in Diplomacy, Model UN, or Twilight Imperium, it's not enough to come up with the right strategy: you still have to sell it, which is a different challenge entirely.

One of the most fascinating "social" execution-challenges I've played is Once Upon a Time, a card game about competitive storytelling. The decision-challenges of figuring out "how does my story go" is obvious, but you'd be surprised at the pressures of narrating it. Especially because one of the main threats is other players interrupting you and stealing the mic, you have to also learn how to tell a story with a certain cadence that is immune to attack, which feels more like an execution-challenge.

Takeaways from idea 1

One could argue that even this simple dichotomy I've drawn is a bit false. After all, making a choice is an action you perform, and making the best choice may be something you fail to execute because of various pressures. In bullet chess, the whole point is that you now don't have enough time to think through decisions, bringing it much closer to the experience of an execution-challenge.

A like kind of game to this is a type that Jay and I have talked of at times, where you can speak with but one sound beat per word (which can be found in this game). A clear type of choice-test, yes. You must choose each word with care. But it feels more like a "do"-test, since the stress weighs on your brain like the strain you feel in a sport.

So yeah, I'll admit that the line gets blurred, and examining where the lines blur is always interesting. But in general, I think we can all recognize the difference between challenges that are more about thinking versus challenges that are more about doing.

More importantly, I see people misunderstand the nature of difficulty all the time, and especially its value, because they don't think about this distinction.

When I was growing up, my older brother would often get very frustrated watching me fail at video games again and again. When he'd criticize me, he'd say "why'd you do that?" or "what are you thinking?" or "that's not what you're supposed to do." Being a child at the time, I couldn't properly articulate to him that he was misunderstanding my mistakes. "That's not what I was trying to do!" "Then why'd you do it??" They were failures of execution, not decision-making. But of course, he's always been much better at the kinds of execution-challenges that video games test than I am, so I think that he (who was also a child at the time, to be fair) just didn't expect that to be the "hard part" for another player.

Similarly, it's helpful to remember that different people find different kinds of challenges fun. For example, JRPGs are traditionally all about decision-challenges. But at some point, Final Fantasy acquired action elements on top of making decisions. I've heard some people claim that this is an objective improvement, but I disagree. A game does not automatically become superior just because it added a new type of challenge. For years I'd hear bozos claim that JRPGs "have no difficulty" because they don't test speed, reflexes, timing, etc. But for many of us, the lack of those challenges is exactly what made the series appealing to begin with.

And it works the other way, too. Action games don't automatically become better by including skill trees and build optimizing and whatnot. There's nothing wrong with a game that's simply about mastering the execution of certain actions. Where the right answers are all told to you up front, but that doesn't make them trivial to fulfill. Especially when the execution is incredibly hard to pull off, and you're failing at it again and again, it can be nice to have no doubts about whether you at least have the right idea.

Two Dials

Idea 2: When calibrating the difficulty of a challenge, game designers have two dials they can adjust:

1. The likelihood of failure
2. The consequence of failure

The first dial is the more straightforward sense of a challenge's "difficulty." Phrased in terms of Idea 1 covered previously, we might say, "how much skill does it take to identify the best choice?" or, "how much skill does it take to execute the action successfully?"

Yet the second dial is where the feeling of difficulty often comes from. To fail at a task without suffering any consequence might be dissatisfying, but it also may just lead to... a lack of satisfaction. Most of the time, it's only by suffering a cost for your failures that you experience difficulty, emotionally.

From this, we can chart challenges along two axes:

[This concept actually falls within John Harper's idea of "position vs impact," although we're only looking at the negative side of that.]

Let's compare two extremes.

In the top left corner, you have something like Super Meat Boy. It's a very hardcore platformer that usually demands you play through each level dozens and dozens of times. Movement is fast and floaty and there are obstacles everywhere, which instantly kill you just by grazing against them. Beating levels usually requires highly precise timing and execution. In other words, dial 1 is turned up very high. But to compensate for that, dial 2 is almost rock-bottom. Yes, you "die" when you touch a spike, but you instantly reset to the beginning of the level, faster than you can blink. You can make as many attempts as you want without losing progress. By minimizing the time and pain the player suffers between failed attempts, it's easy to find the motivation to just keep trying again and again and again. If your point of comparison is a platformer like Super Mario Bros, then hearing someone say "it took me 50 tries to beat that level" sounds bananas. But you'd be surprised how fast you, too, would burn through 50 attempts, likely without realizing it!

Meanwhile, in the bottom right corner, you have a lot of Roguelikes. Let's go with, say, Ark Defender (which, yes, was created by my Dungeon Master. And he did a very good job and you should go play it). As is tradition, the game enforces strict permadeath. There's no way to rewind back to an earlier point by reloading a save. But because dial 2 has been set so high, dial 1 is thus set pretty low. Moment-to-moment challenges are not very tough. You make plenty of decisions, but almost all options are perfectly viable playstyles rather than being "wrong," and the execution-challenge of aiming your shots doesn't take much skill. Yet all you need to do is make one big mistake (or several smaller ones, if you don't recover from them in between) and you'll lose everything. The stakes are always high, meaning that you have to take every obstacle seriously, even if they don't seem like a big deal.

Interestingly, many games escalate both difficulty dials the further you go. In the first Super Mario Bros, your likelihood of failing each level increases as you approach the end, because the levels themselves get trickier. But also, the consequences intrinsically get worse because the further into the game you fail, the longer it'll take you to reach that point again. And then they had the nerve to also make 1-ups more scarce as you get further, too.

As a designer, how you adjust the first dial depends, of course, on whether the challenge in question is an execution-challenge or a decision-challenge. Execution-challenges can be made harder by requiring greater precision, greater accuracy, faster speed, etc. Decision-challenges can be made harder by offering more options to decide between, stringing together more decisions into one greater outcome, introducing uncertainty (e.g. randomness, imperfect information, other players, etc.), and so on. Randomness in particular is often used to increase dial 1 simply by giving a player low odds of success, even if they had made the "best" choice possible given the circumstances. In which case, me phrasing it as "requires more skill to succeed" is actually kinda inaccurate. Depending on the game, it may just require more luck.

Now, how you adjust the second dial is, in my opinion, much more complicated.

Probably the most common penalty for failure is a time cost. A straightforward example would be a time-out, such as when you're playing a competitive video game and you have to wait through a respawn period before you can play again. This is always a bit risky, because if the time-out is too long, a player may not be willing to wait through it. If you tell someone "just for that little oopsie, you're not allowed to play for an hour!" then they'll probably just go home.

Within the time cost is the progress penalty. If the game is such that a player's progress towards a goal can be quantifiably tracked, then instead of punishing them with a time-out, you could punish them with lost progress. This also functions as a time penalty in the sense that it takes time to recover their position to where it was before. But at least they're still playing the game.

Another penalty is a handicap, where the player loses an asset which itself helps them to "lower the first dial." This is also risky, because it can lead to a death spiral. The player was already struggling with the challenge, and now you've just made it harder! A classic example is the original Legend of Zelda: when Link is at full health, his sword shoots powerful laser beams, allowing you to attack from a distance. If you take even 1 damage, you lose this ability. This pressures you into one of two playstyles. If you're totally reliant on those sword beams, then you'll exercise extreme caution, forcing yourself to play so perfectly that you never take a single damage. Which is a shame, because your heart count is going to keep growing bigger and bigger, and you won't be taking advantage of that asset. Alternatively, you could accept the reality that you'll rarely be at full health, and instead just take the time to master sword fundamentals.

(And besides, arrows and bombs more than make up for the lack of sword beam, anyway)

One of my favorite types of penalty are subjective consequences: something that only players can assign a value to. For example, imagine you're playing some story-driven adventure game or something and the bad guys have taken a beloved NPC captive. You ambush them with the intent of rescuing your bud. If you fail to defeat them swiftly and carefully, then one of your favorite side characters will die! Does this tangibly impact play? Probably not, but you may care enough about it that it motivates you all the same.

Or how about the classic children's game Red Hands / Hot Hands / Slapsies / Whatever: two players, player A has their hands vulnerable, while player B tries to slap them before player A can withdraw them to safety. What's the consequence for failure? Literally just pain. And only you can decide when you've had enough pain to call it quits.

But perhaps most elegant of all are the penalties which actually just feed into further play. One of the reasons why Tag is a brilliant game is that the consequence of "getting tagged" is that you immediately become the chaser, which is hardly a penalty at all. Yes, you failed at your goal, but you've immediately acquired a new one that you can begin pursuing right away, which is also fun. It's more of a lateral shift, seamlessly reassigning roles.

In fact, most athletic sports have seamless consequences for basic mistakes. In basketball and soccer, making a shot for the goal also means forfeiting control over the ball. Therefore, the consequence of failure is essentially just a return to the baseline status quo. Your opponents may be better positioned to now gain control over the ball, but then again, maybe not. The only objective consequence of failure is "play continues as it was."

Or take something like Hangman. Yes, make enough wrong guesses and you can lose. But each mistake along the way is otherwise still ultimately beneficial, since the goal of the game is to learn information. Even if it turns out that there were no Q's in the answer, at least you've narrowed it down.

And then of course, there's the option of the cost cost: "please insert more quarters to continue." Remember kids, the lottery is technically a game. It's just a shitty one.

As you've probably noted by now, it's common to differentiate consequences even within the same game, whether by staggering them into layers or by making consequences proportionate to the types of failures they're tied to. You don't have to keep the dial on one setting for all challenges. For example, instead of having the player defeated after 1 mistake, you give them some HP. Now, mistakes only cost them a bit of HP, but they otherwise continue as normal. They don't really suffer any penalty until they've made several mistakes.

Time and progress penalties are also frequently staggered. In many classic arcade games, every time you die, you lose a life and start the level over. Replaying the level up until that point is a relatively small time cost. But when you lose your last life, you have to start the game over, which is a relatively large time cost.

For my last example, let's talk D&D some more.

Remember this post? A modern classic, to be sure. In it, I laid out the nuances of one specific quality of OSR games that sets them apart from the modern mainstream "new school" games they were designed to contrast against. Well, now we have some new verbal technology to articulate that point more clearly:

Modern D&D sets dial 1 to be very low (combat is easy for players to win), but dial 2 is very high (failing combat means you die). OSR is all about shifting dial 1 up (combat is hard for players to win), while traditionally dial 2 stays very high as well (death death death!).

I, however, argued that you can absolutely lower dial 2 to compensate for having increased dial 1, by downgrading the consequence from death to mere "defeat." To me, the essence of OSR isn't that consequences are deadly. It's that consequences are something the players actually have to contend with. Losing a fight is so rare in modern D&D that it only ever happens as a fluke, meaning that players' approach to combat almost never accounts for the consequences of potentially losing. It clearly doesn't inform their playstyle. OSR, meanwhile, is all about making players face the reality that they could fail, which, counterintuitively, is achieved by increasing dial 1, not dial 2.

Of course, if you turn down dial 2 too far, players will adopt a "Meat Boy-esque" approach to combat, thoughtlessly flinging themselves headfirst into bloody carnage because they know that losing isn't a big deal. I would concede that this would no longer qualify as OSR, but that doesn't mean it isn't an interesting idea...

Takeaways from idea 2

Of the three ideas I have to offer in this post, this one is by far the most common source of confusion I notice when I hear people disagreeing about difficulty. When one person calls a game hard and another person finds that baffling, it's usually because one of them isn't really considering one of the two dials. 

You can underestimate the role of dial 2, thinking "but hitting the ball is so easy!" without accounting for how badly it sucks when you still miss the ball anyway. And you can underestimate the role of dial 1, thinking "but there's no pressure!" without realizing that having infinite tries doesn't matter if you're simply incapable of overcoming the challenge.

Fine-tuning these two dials is essential to properly motivate a player. The sweet spot is to inspire a healthy amount of caution and discipline in approaching a challenge and a feeling of accomplishment in overcoming it. Too little difficulty is unstimulating to the challenge-seeking brain, while too much difficulty makes you pissed off from losing or, sadly, too afraid to even try in the first place. But of course, everyone has a different sweet spot.

Frustratingly, I think that some games turn dial 2 up so high that it also turns up dial 1. How does that work? Consider: one of the most common ways for a player to improve their skill level at something is through trial-and-error. For decision-challenges, you're gathering data with each attempt, ruling out bad choices and getting a sense for how things work. For execution-challenges, you might just need a bunch of attempts to build up some muscle memory, or to calibrate your sense of timing, or whatever. Either way, we learn from our mistakes. In theory, there is always this one small benefit to every failure.

But sometimes, a penalty for failing can be so harsh that it keeps you from being able to reap that benefit. If failure just means losing a bit of HP but then continuing as you were, you can immediately take a lesson from what happened and incorporate it into play. But if failure means you get set back an hour, then you might have trouble processing what exactly went wrong, and what you should do differently when you finally get back to that challenge.

The first time I played Metroid Dread, I absolutely hated the final boss fight. It's three phases long, and each phase has a ton of brand new patterns to memorize. None of the patterns are hard to counter (that is to say, the execution-challenges are not the main source of difficulty). But learning 1) what the patterns are, and 2) how to counter them, takes many, many attempts. Even with maximum health, you just can't survive that much trial-and-error learning.

By itself, this isn't a huge problem. It's a pretty common formula for boss fights in video games. The real source of pain is the fact that you have to restart the full fight whenever you make a mistake. Finally getting through phase 1 took me a decent chunk of time, but getting through phase 2 took exponentially longer merely because I'd have to work my way through all of phase 1 again each time. So now I'm faced with the dual-challenge of trying to master phase 1 just so I can more reliably even get an attempt at phase 2, during which I'd hopefully learn some tiny crumb of new information. As you can imagine, getting to phase 3 took so much time and effort on each attempt that I'd usually only reach it once every hour or so. And it wasn't uncommon for me to immediately get killed without learning anything new, making it a wasted attempt.

This is what I assume people get so heated about when I hear them talking about Silksong. I haven't played it, but I'm obviously aware of its reputation for brutality. And when others have described the experience to me, the one aspect that sticks out the most is the fact that you have to backtrack to each boss every time you attempt to fight them. That consequence doesn't just sound disproportionate. It sounds counterproductive to the point of the game. Demotivating to the point where it feels like the game surely must be trying to tell you something, like "you're not supposed to be attempting this," even if that's exactly what you're supposed to be doing at that point.

Clearly, plenty of folks are happy to power through anyway, and credit their enjoyment of the game to its ruthless difficulty. But I'm skeptical that it wouldn't be just as acclaimed, if not moreso, in an alternate timeline where they softened that one penalty somehow. After a certain point, the consequence itself becomes a separate challenge testing your endurance, or as it so often seems from popular discourse, your moral fortitude and loyalty to the game.

Framing

Have you ever gotten really far in a game before you discovered some critical fact that you had somehow missed early on, but which would have been a game changer? On the one hand, anyone watching is going to think you're bad at the game. On the other hand, isn't it a little impressive that you got this far without it?

Idea 3: Everything you could say about difficulty is always a matter of framing.

One man's mistakes are another man's hard mode. What some call a game breaking exploit, you could just as easily re-label as "being good at the game." Oddly enough, people do seem to be broadly aware of this idea, because they routinely invoke it in the context of jokes. But it's not a joke. It's just actually true, and a valuable insight to wrap your head around.

Whereas I could offer lots and lots of simple examples like I did for my previous two ideas, I think this third idea is best demonstrated with a handful of in-depth examples.

Example 1

Let's talk about the 2016 reboot of Doom. The designers at id Software have described a lot of what went into that game, and key to their vision is a playstyle they refer to as "push-forward combat." Some of the tenets of this playstyle include:

1. Always be moving (including using verticality).
2. Swap between weapons as appropriate for the enemies you're facing.
3. Make frequent use of "glory kills," a type of melee attack you can do on stunned opponents, which both instantly defeats them and restores some of your health.

All three of these techniques bring their own difficulty. Constantly moving means that you have to be very aware of your surroundings, and you can't take much time to aim carefully. Swapping between weapons means you have to be thinking a lot, never turning your brain off. And glory kills are intrinsically risky to attempt, since they require you to get right up in the opponent's face.

Thus, if the designers want to see players adopting these tactics, then they need to make any alternative tactics worse. By introducing various pressures that punish you for not doing these things, they "push players into the fun zone" (as they often describe it in interviews).

However, there were lots of players who refused to do much weapon swapping anyway, stubbornly sticking to their shotgun instead. And yes, they suffered for it. While it's a more straightforward tactic, it definitely made a lot of challenges harder than if they'd been picking the right tool for the job. But they powered through anyway, merely concluding "boy, that sure was a tough game!" when they finished.

So I ask you: is it a tough game? Or are they just bad at playing it?

I believe that either framing is valid. I mean, I'm sure it's probably still pretty tough even if you do adopt "push-forward" tactics. But there's a sense in which those stubborn shotgunners "failed" at the decision-challenge of "how should I approach this fight?" And the consequence for that failure was that the execution-challenges which followed took more skill to overcome.

Then again, the only actual fail-state is when the "game over" screen appears. And the only actual victory-state is when the credits roll, right? There's no "wrong way" to beat a game, as long as you beat it eventually. So I have a hard time settling on "those players just suck at the game." On the contrary, I'm inclined to say they must possess even greater skill if they managed to win using inferior tactics.

Example 2

How we define "success" and "failure" is itself oftentimes a matter of framing, too.

The Uncharted games are completely linear. They're basically like playing through a movie, with many scripted sequences breaking up the gameplay. If I were to stop playing one after completing only 2/3 of its content, then everyone would agree that I'd left the game unfinished. Does Nathan end up with Chloe or Elena??

But if I stop playing Silksong after only completing 2/3 of its content, I could walk away proudly claiming to have beaten the game. Why? Because that's where the story ends (or rather, can end) and the credits roll. The entire "Third Act" of the game is optional.

Many games do this, in fact. Super Mario Bros often has additional "bonus levels" after you beat the game, totally optional but extra challenging. Just the other day, I "beat" Mario vs. Donkey Kong for the Gameboy Advance. There was a victory screen and a credits sequence and everything. Then, the ending cutscene showed Donkey Kong getting back up to his antics, and Mario pursuing him. Suddenly, I had unlocked "optional levels," which literally doubled the length of the game. If I beat all of those, will I get a second ending? I don't know yet!

Of course, the notion of any content being "optional" is a clever sleight of hand. Everything in a game is "optional." You can always choose to stop playing whenever you want. This is entirely a matter of framing. When a game chooses to hand you the "you win!" screen and roll the credits before you've completed 100% of its content, it's basically just providing you with an off-ramp to exit from the game without feeling like you're giving up. It's giving you permission to stop playing while still having the satisfaction of "winning."

Speedrunning is an entire hobby premised on redefining the goal of a game. Very few games are designed with the intent that you beat them as quickly as possible. In fact, the methods people develop to do so often go against the intent of what the designers thought of as the "goal."

And even with the games that you're meant to speedrun, it's not so simple. Let me ask you: who is "winning" Super Metroid more? The player who collects 100% of the items or the player who beats the game the fastest? You're only graded on your completion time when you reach the ending screen. Yet we commonly agree that "collecting items" is one of the goals of the game, is it not?

What about a low% run? Is it harder to collect more items or fewer? On the one hand, collecting more items is harder, because it takes more time and effort, right? On the other hand, those items aren't just useless pinecones. They're assets that help your performance. Which one is "more difficult?" Sounds like it's just a matter of framing.

Example 3

And just like before, let's include a D&D example, this time by discussing dice math. Specifically, we're going to look at d20 games. The classic rule (simplified a bit to focus on my main point) is something like this:

If a player attempts at action where 1) the outcome is uncertain (here defined as both "there is a non-trivial chance of success" and "there is a non-trivial chance of failure"), and 2) there are meaningful consequences, then we resort to dice to give us an answer (a "die check"). The GM sets a target number (in D&D this is called the "Difficulty Class" or just DC). The player then rolls a d20, and compares the result against the DC. If the total is greater to or equal than the DC (the "meet or beat" rule), then they succeed!

[Note: the first criterion corresponds to position, or "dial 1," while the second criterion corresponds to impact, or "dial 2." Many, many, many GMs fail to understand that a dice check depends on both variables. Harper didn't create these variables, he just recognized them.]

For example: if a player attempted something that you think only has a 1% chance of success, you probably wouldn't allow them to roll a check. According to these rules, you can simply declare that their chance of success is trivial, and assume that they automatically fail.

So how does the GM set a DC for a dice check? Here, the Dungeon Master's Guide has a handy chart:

There ya go! If you think the player's action should be easy to accomplish, set a DC of 10.

…Except that this means the player will have a 45% chance of failing the action. If you ask a group of 6 players to all make a DC 10 check (for example, if everyone is sneaking around), then you should expect about half of the group to fail.

Does that fit anyone's definition of "easy" in everyday life? A task that you have a nearly 50/50 chance of failing is something I normally consider to be pretty tough. Yet this is the framing that D&D has chosen to use. A version of this chart with these labels has appeared in every DMG since 3rd edition, more than a quarter-century ago. And it's been misleading GMs ever since, leading them to be shocked when they set up their players for failure.

Interestingly, I've met quite a few people who say that they would never call for a DC 5 check, claiming that any task that easy isn't worth rolling for. But that's actually inconsistent with the stated rules of the game, and contradicts the logic they follow when calling for other dice checks.

How do I know? It's just math. A DC 5 check means that you would fail on a roll of 1-4 on a d20, which has a 20% chance of happening. Well, a DC 16 check has a 20% chance of success, and people call for checks of DC 16+ all the time. But if, as those GMs claim, a 20% of failure is negligible, so low that it makes more sense to simply assume that the player succeeds, then shouldn't we also consider a 20% chance of success to be negligible? By that logic, shouldn't we just skip the roll and assume that the player fails? Pretty wild, considering that attacking anyone wearing chainmail requires passing a DC 16 check. We're just rounding up the effectiveness of chainmail to DC ∞ now?

But because of the way D&D frames difficulty, GMs are given skewed expectations. People overlook the logic of the math itself. Recall our check criteria above: you only call for a dice roll if the chances of success and failure are each "non-trivial." To many folks, that sounds a bit fuzzy, and so they attempt to apply their own imperfect and inconsistent judgement for what constitutes "trivial." But you don't have to make a judgement call! There's a mathematical definition baked into the mechanic itself:

Each gradation on a D20 equals 5%. The lowest DC you can possibly set is a DC 2 (because of the "meet or beat" rule). Therefore, the threshold for when the chance of failure is non-trivial is "at least 5%."

Any other interpretation would violate the rules-as-written.

Does that sound weird to you? I think it sounds pretty weird! While I do call for a DC 5 check every now and then, I would feel a little silly calling for a DC 2 check. This is, incidentally, why I prefer a d6-based system instead of a d20. Each result has a 16.66% chance, which is big and chunky. But that's just me.

Takeaways from Idea 3

This is definitely the most nebulous point I'm here to offer, but remember the stated goal of this post: to arm you to be better at discussing the topic in the future. I feel that another of the most common sources of confusion and disagreement about difficulty just comes from people failing to see with eyes unclouded. Either they don't consider alternate perspectives or they take a framing given to them completely at face value or whatever.

If we return to the Doom example, I think we can arrive at a more fundamental truth about the nature of challenge-oriented games. There's a sense in which you never need to add a "hard mode" or an "easy mode" because the effectiveness of a players' own actions is measured by how the difficulty is shifting up or down. Whether by making different choices or by applying a different degree of discipline, they are themselves calibrating the difficulty on their own end.

This is not to trivialize the importance of the designer considering the difficulty of certain choices or actions, and how they might tweak the dials on their own end. But the player has a hand on the dials as well, and the very act of adjusting them is that thing which we often call "play."

The main difference is probably intent. Are you playing sub-optimally because you want the game to be more challenging, or was it out of ignorance? However, I think fixating on this is an easy trap to fall into. Merely being aware that you're making a suboptimal decision before you do it will not protect you from being framed by others as "bad at the game." You have to fight a battle to re-frame it in your favor.

And while so much of the discourse about difficulty is dominated by value statements about "good play" and "bad play," that framing just doesn't reflect what people tend to value in games, whether they realize it or not.

For example, whenever someone tries to formalize a game into a competitive sport (most often athletic games, but obviously this also applies to board games and e-sports and whatnot), they almost inevitably have to start making judgments on which actions are permissible vs which actions constitute "cheating." And very often, the things we decide to categorize as "cheating" are just... strategies that are too good. In many ways, the concept of cheating is a tool invented to preserve difficulty.

As another example, in Skyrim, by far the most effective build is the stealth-based archer. Seriously, it trivializes almost all combat challenges in the game. But you know what? It's boring as shit to play. Trust me, I did it, like, 2 or 3 times before I realized that a "worse" playstyle would be way more fun.

So while there is some joy in cheesing a challenge, it's possible to reduce dial 1 so much that you remove the very thing you actually wanted out of the game. Because while the "stated" goal might be to reach the ending, score the most points, get the fastest completion time, or whatever else, that's just one subjective framing we impose onto play. Goals are constantly redefined, often internally and even unconsciously.

For one final example, I'd like to quickly cite Dark Souls. I had been avoiding it for the rest of this post, but I think this one last point sums up the importance of recognizing framing. Like many RPGs, you pick a class at character creation, such as a Warrior, Thief, or Sorcerer. But one class is called "the Deprived," which is just a naked guy with a stick and terrible stats across the board. Sounds rough, right? But while players can debate about the balance of other classes, nobody would look at the Deprived and label it as "underpowered." Nobody actually thinks it's meant to be equal in effectiveness with the other classes. It obviously isn't, and the intent behind that design decision is equally obvious: it's not a "bad class," it's just a built-in "hard mode" option.

Alright, now we're ready to try talking about difficulty

To get you started, I came up with a list of interesting topics related to difficulty that I couldn't cover in this post, but which I think could make for some good discussion. Swish these around in your mouth for a while.

1. Not all challenges have a fail-state. Sometimes, there is only "not yet succeeded." For example, a crossword puzzle. How does this affect our ability to understand or design for difficulty?
   
   
2. Even non-challenge-oriented games, like playing House, kind of do have a challenge. That is, the challenge of successfully playing towards whatever it is you're playing for. "Aesthetic pleasure" or "tell a dramatically satisfying story" can be goals, and you can fail at those goals! Truth or dare has no intrinsic challenge, yet you often suffer under self-imposed challenges while playing.
   
   
   
3. What about when failure is the goal? Think about the game Telephone. Keeping the message intact may be impressive, but the game is at its most entertaining the worse the group fails.
   
   
4. I claimed that what we brand as "cheating" could be reframed as merely "effective play," or to put it another way, "playing on easy mode." But when you get caught, you get punished in many of the same ways that we punish inept play, making the game harder. This makes cheating seem almost like "gambling with the difficulty settings," which is itself an idea that I think has a lot of potential.
   
   
5. Everything I wrote about "dial 2," assumes that the consequences of failing a challenge are meant to be negative in some way, often to motivate the player to approach challenges with more discipline the higher dial 2 has been set. But what about games where players are given a boost after a failure? A clue to answer a question or a new asset to get over an obstacle, to help get you through the pain point. Would anyone ever consider this a "reward for bad play"? Don't you have an incentive to intentionally fail so as to secure this boost, thereby gaining an advantage? I don't think I've ever seen anyone take this attitude towards this sort of design, but I'm curious if there's an example I'm missing where that's the norm.
   
   
6. Is temptation to sin a decision-challenge or an execution-challenge? I've always experienced it pretty exclusively as a decision-challenge, but the way other people describe it sounds much more like it just comes down to execution. And how do guilt and shame function as consequences for failure, from a game design standpoint?

-Dwiz