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.

Thinking about Permadeath in Fire Emblem

About a year ago I played through Fire Emblem 7 for the first time. I got through the tutorial a couple times as a kid, but for some reason I never moved on to the main campaign. Now I've beaten it! Heads up: it's also the only entry in the franchise I've played, so I'm only vaguely aware of the various changes across all the other games thus far.

Recently I was thinking about its iconic permadeath rule: if one of your units dies in battle, you'll never get them back. Only the handful of protagonists must be kept alive to progress. Otherwise, no character's survival is necessary in order to complete the game. Growing up, I recall this being the one thing Fire Emblem was known for, the source of its brutal reputation.

Here are two seemingly-conflicting facts about it:

1) The game has several major design decisions that assume the player will accept a character's death and march on forward in spite of it. For example, they continue to introduce new characters all the way through the penultimate chapter, clearly intended to "replace" characters you may have lost up to this point (e.g. "better grant them a light-magic user at the 11th hour, just in case their other light-magic users died at some point!").

2) Almost nobody on Earth plays that way. The almost-universal norm for vanilla playthroughs of old Fire Emblem games is to reset the chapter the moment a character dies. That's just... how it's done.

What's with that?

Navigation Games

Dungeons & Dragons began as a game about exploring mazes, trying not to get lost as you navigate spaces with complicated layouts. At some point, these conventions fell to the wayside. The focus of dungeoncrawling shifted to other forms of engagement. Even key luminaries of the dungeoncrawl tradition, like my good friend Josh, openly advocate for removing this once-foundational cornerstone of the genre from your gameplay, encouraging you to simply give your players the map so they never have to experience what was once the main challenge of dungeoncrawling!

Similarly, other designers advocate dungeoncrawls where there's nothing to navigate in the first place. Sometimes that means strictly linear layouts, like a Five Room Dungeon. Other times it means abstracting the layout into a skill challenge, depthcrawl, or other mechanical contrivances. This isn't an invalid option, but it does sacrifice the dungeoncrawl experience in favor of merely evoking the aesthetics of dungeoncrawling.

Not all forms of gameplay appeal to all gamers, and that's perfectly fine. But dungeon-mapping gameplay has become so widely misunderstood and maligned that countless gamers have never even had a chance to experience it for themselves.

I'm here to explain the appeal of this playstyle, why almost everyone gets it wrong, and how to actually do it correctly.

N Monsters at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: John Bauer

Already covered previously: Nightmare and Nymph. Probably should have alphabetized this series better. I put "genie" under "D" for Pete's sake.

M Monsters at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: Joe Sparrow, from Dungeons & Drawings

Strap in, because there are a lot of M monsters. And guess what? Bangers, every one. All killer, no filler.

Archaeology: Dwarf Class for 5E

I had been playing RPGs for many years before I ever even considered getting into homebrew. Of course, I wasn't against homebrew. I routinely took homemade gameable content from my favorite RPG blogs and put them into the games I was playing. But I just never wanted to make it myself, y'know?

Boy how things change.

It was around 2016 that I started dabbling in game design, but even then it was all confined to 2014 D&D 5E stuff. That's when I came up with my first dungeoncrawling procedure, Advanced Darkness, some rules for 4E-style minions, and started working on my rules for mazes (all of which were essential houserules to bolt onto your 5E game if you ever wanted to run my megadungeon, I assure you).

Around 2019 I was getting into the really retro stuff, especially Greyhawk, and wanted to try making a "race-as-class" hack for 5E. The idea was that Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Gnome would all be made into a full class, levels 1-20. Any PC of a different class would therefore be a human (and should still get the human traits at character creation, obviously). I had lots of notes about how I was planning to create each one, but the only one I made serious progress on was the Dwarf.

You want to take a look together?