Quality and Quantity of Player Choices

Just some brief design musings.

Player choices are perhaps the most important component of TTRPG play. They're certainly one of the very most fundamental parts of any game.

We know that having more, and more compelling, choices means more fun when it comes to (for example):

• Spells or powers that are one-use, very limited, or come with a dramatic cost
• Systems where combat is dangerous and clever play gets you a huge edge
• Traps, in the style of play where traps are fundamentally puzzles and roll-to-disarm isn't an option
• Exploration, in an environment where there are (a) resource costs + (b) threats + (c) a goal which can (only) be accomplished here + (d) no clear-the-whole-map expectation

So a natural question to ask is: Can we improve certain game loops by adding more, or more compelling, choices?

Some areas come immediately to mind – places where many RPGs, big and small, have struggled in the past.

• Researching and investigation. In some games these are a simple matter of GM fiat, or just an in-world-time commitment plus a few dice rolls resulting in binary success or failure.
• Social relationships. In the (unfortunately common) absence of mechanical support and game structures, the need for these puts a burden on the GM. Social relationships ought to have mechanical impact on gameplay and emotional impact on the player... but all too often you hear them relegated to meaningless flavour. Some games don't really even ask: how do you live your character's life?
• Wilderness journeys. These can sometimes become somewhat performative/menial resource juggling or a matter of having the prescribed One Combat Encounter.
• Trade. When it comes to selling loot / buying equipment, some games skip past it, make it abstract or automatic, or reduce it to a haggle mechanic. Playing out the 'social encounter' with every trader isn't any better, if it doesn't involve compelling choices!
• Dying. Why not give a dying character things to do with their last breath? Or offer a decision between a slim chance to survive and using one's last strength to attempt something?
• Hacking archetypes/minigames. My impression is these often have a poor reputation even in otherwise-good games.

Some of these certainly could be improved with a greater centering of player choice.

More choices; more compelling choices

It's far from trivial to solve, of course.

Adding player choices may actually make things worse unless you meet the criteria for quality, which I would say at a minimum are:

1. The choice is interesting, urgent, or otherwise compelling to players
2. The choice has enough risk or potential mechanical impact to be worth the game time
3. The choice can't just be resolved with a straightforward calculation in terms of concrete or absolute costs, preference ordering of relative outcomes, etc
4. The choice is presented alongside enough grounded detail for the players to actually make informed decisions

Worth thinking about.

 

Players not engaging

It's game time and the players are just sitting there spinning their wheels. They plan and what-if and weigh their odds and bicker in and out of character. Yeah, it's one of those sessions.

 What's happened?

1. The players might have insufficient information to make a decision. They may have forgotten some information. Perhaps one of your hints was inscrutable. The players might not see how some information they have aligns with one of their objectives.
   
2. The player characters might have unclear goals or clashing goals, or there might be disagreement in the group about which goal to pursue (due to differences in PC preference or differences in reasoning). They might be unclear about which goals should be prioritised above which others.
3. The players might have a real-life moral dilemma about acting to achieve in-character goals that don't align well with their own ideals, and are tip-toeing around having to confront that. This is a huge issue and is best served by halting the session to have the conversation.
4. You might have forgotten to give the player characters time pressure and stakes. There's a particular kind of malaise that can occur when you're using a subjective (or just subjective-feeling) experience/advancement system ('milestone' or 'narrative' or 'chapter' advancement) and you don't have a setting with big obvious time limits or opportunity costs or wandering damage. A feeling that the positive and negative consequences of action and inaction are all vague and distant can transition into a feeling that action and inaction don't really matter.
5. The players might be dreading that the wrong choice will endanger their PCs. This is a different way there can be a lack of motivation towards action over inaction. In this case, you've done such a good job as a GM getting the players invested in their characters and feeling the world has big dangerous stakes that they've become paralysed with indecision. Good work, bad outcome. I'm quite sad that I've never achieved this one. Probably the best way to coax things towards action is to remind them of how the world is ticking on in the background without them.
6. The players might be under the misapprehension that the GM should be deciding things for them. Apparently this can happen with novice players and/or due to 'learned helplessness' in the wake of unpleasantly railroady GM-ing. This is another huge issue where your best bet is to call a halt and discuss the problem in an understanding but matter-of-fact way.
7. The players might be too overloaded with information to make a good decision.

That last one's a joke. It might be possible to give the players 'too much' information but I've never seen it done (or even heard it complained about).

There are orthogonal mistakes, of course: giving the players too much false information from bad sources, giving the players too little likely-immediately-meaningful information, obfuscating information excessively, giving the players information in ways that makes it seem irrelevant, giving the players information that makes them regret their goals and objectives, giving the players information too fast for them to digest or note down, giving the players information after establishing a GM style in which nothing they learn ever really matters, etc.

Manage information to avoid a 'players not engaging' session

I have two tips here.

First

Establish PC goals early. Always summarise PC goals at the start of a session along with information you know they have which is likely to be relevant to those goals (and other key information). Constantly restate PC goals and key information during play, if even a glimmer of an opportunity presents itself. It's hard to overdo this. Remind PCs of their character motivations if those are substantially different from their immediate and long-term goals.

When the player (character)s acquire new information, try to frame it in terms of PC goals and other key information they already have, so that it slots neatly into their mental framework.

Second

When you're handing out any kind of information "X" via narration, you might have a tendency to hedge or use filler words. You absolutely must learn to overcome this. Cut out any qualifying language like this:

• "I guess it makes sense that X"
• "it's sort of X"
• "I suppose X would"
• "it's kind of... you know, X"
  
• "you think that maybe X"
• "[sigh and grimace] well... X"
• "Y! ...No, well actually, X"
  

Phrasing things this way undermines a player's trust in the quality, validity, and importance of the information content! It conveys, consciously or unconsciously, that the GM is uncertain about what's true in the world. It also conveys that the information wasn't important enough to pre-determine. And it conveys that the information wasn't connected enough to other things in the world for there to be an obvious answer.

Brains can only pay attention to so much, and are constantly filtering information into buckets based on its perceived usefulness. Hedging/filling will get information filtered disproportionately into the mental bucket with 'discard immediately' written on it.

The solution is just a matter of practice. Learn to pause and work out exactly what you want to say, then give a precise, confident, unambiguous answer. Even after a long pause you'll be much more likely to get information to stick in the players' heads.

d6 degrees of success with anything

Is the badger's burrow wide enough to squeeze down? Is the giant scorpion's flesh edible? Are the bars set in a stone weak enough to chip away? Will the dead tree's branch stand up to the dwarf's weight? Does the abandoned generator have any gas left in it?

You're a GM and need to determine some aspect of your world. Roll a d6. 1 is the worst plausible outcome for the characters, 6 is the best, and everything else is shades in between.

Why do this?

• It's quicker than any other rules-based approach
  
• It's helpful if you have trouble just snap deciding the answers to questions
• It's useful when something would affect the PCs, so you would be either 'handing them a win' or 'screwing them over' by fiat
• The dice can surprise you and challenge you
• When not everything has the most likely default answer, it can make a world feel more real
• There might be a rule for this situation (or one that can be adapted), but you don't remember where it is

The "crawling down the badger burrow" example:
1 - Looks barely wide enough to get down, but narrows partway through, so characters can get stuck upside down in the middle of a twisty dirt tube
2 - Isn't wide enough to squeeze through
3 - Is wide enough to squeeze down but requires a little digging around the bends
4,5 - Is wide enough for the smaller characters, but not the largest
6 - Is just large enough for everyone to get through

The "eating the giant scorpion meat" example:
1 - Is poisonous; incautious consumers suffer a minor ongoing poison effect
2 - Is mildly toxic; characters start throwing it up shortly after getting it down
3 - Is edible but tastes really bad
4,5 - Is fine to eat
6 - Is not merely edible, but delicious and keeps well

Etcetera.

The key understanding is that you don't even have to assign numbers and degrees of success before rolling. Just mentally frame - or speak out loud - your question. Then you roll, say, a 2. All you have to do is think, what's the second-worst answer to the question?

Advanced versions:

• Rarely, you'll have a question where the range of plausible outcomes are neutral with regard to the player characters. Just orient yourself on whatever axis you can find, and roll.
• Sometimes there will clearly be more possible axes than 'good' or 'bad'. Something could pose a high or low threat but offer a high or low reward, for example. Just use several dice, associating one colour with one axis.
• With a basic intuitive understanding of dice probabilities, you can determine the answers to questions about populations, off the cuff. Say you've randomly generated a group of 21 soldiers on the road. How many are in poor morale? Could really be any number of them: 1d20. How many are currently battle-ready? Probably most but not all of them: 1d8+10. How many are carrying bows? Let's guess it's likely to be about half: 2d10.
  

Internally consistent magical paradigms: A paean to good design

I talk a lot about verisimilitude in fantasy settings, both here and in real life (whenever a friend doesn't manage to escape). One thing I often think about is the metaphysical nature of magic, and the competing desires in fantasy TTRPGs to have player-graspable/predictable magic, mysterious/fantastic magic, and sensible/plausible world design.

I think it's both possible and desirable to have an internally consistent magical metaphysics ('thaumaphysics'?). By which I mean: a framework of magic that is based on inviolable rules (not necessarily complex ones) that are theoretically discoverable by people within the setting. At this point, some readers will clamour that I intend to "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— / Unweave a rainbow", but my definition makes for a broader umbrella than you might think:

• The kind of spellcasting where you learn secret words and gestures which affect reality can be internally consistent.
• Magic where psychic phenomena are measurable in the universe, and spells are entities which occupy some analogue of physical space in your head, can be done with internal consistentency.
• If every magical effect is always completely random, in the sense of 'drawn from an enormous table or procedurally generated', that's internally consistent as long as the methods of invoking magic are.
• Magic that is fueled by spell points / mana / energy which the body recovers naturally over time can be internally consistent.
• Some creatures being innately magical by their nature, and defined methods existing to borrow those beasts' power, is internally consistent.
  
• If near-omnipotent gods are locked in conflict over the world, with factions and/or individual minor power variations, and all magic is that which they pass down, then with sufficiently delineated gods the magical framework is internally consistent.
• High fantasy magic aligned along ideas like "magic always requires a sacrifice" or "magic comes with a commensurate cost which can only be delayed or passed on to others" can easily be internally consistent, being based on a few simple rules.
• Frameworks where multiple types of magic and spellcasting co-exist (D&D-style) can be internally consistent.

What magic isn't internally consistent?

In most fairytales, magic is presented as something of a fait accompli. Sometimes there are rules based on the implied rules of storytelling, but not usually.

• The tree can be cut down with a single chop by a princess's hair pressed into the edge of an axe made of wax, and this idea goes unexamined. It says nothing about whether the same axe can break through a stone wall, or whether a prince's hair would work, or if a regular axe with the hair glued on would still have done the job in one chop.
• The wicked sorcerer tricks the king into agreeing to give up his firstborn child, but it's not clear whether the king follows through on this because of an ensorcelment, or because of the king's honest nature, or the king's fear of the sorcerer's unspecified magic.

Some TTRPG systems and settings aren't sufficiently well-described to have internally consistent magic. What Justin Alexander called 'dissociated mechanics' are sometimes an indicator that magic isn't internally consistent: characters, monsters, or environmental features might be able to do things or have in-game effects that "exist outside of the character’s world and they are only rough approximations of that world." They are insufficiently described in the rules for a player or GM to work out cohesive underlying principles (and use that knowledge to infer capabilities, make predictions, judge interactions and edge cases, etc).

Now, just because the metaphysics is insufficiently developed for the magic to be recognisably consistent doesn't mean the magic is inconsistent. But it does mean that the onus of filling in the gaps is on the GM, and usually the GM won't even think to try to do that ahead of time (which would require, at a minimum, reading and internalising all the official rulebooks and adventure scenarios of the TTRPG, and then coming up with something that is consistent - i.e., doing the rest of the game designer's job for them).

No, it will tend to only come up when some interaction in the game needs a ruling, and the GM has no (or too few) established 'first principles' of magic to fall back on. With every such ruling about the way the world is, the implied underlying rules of magic get squirrelier and squigglier, until it's nearly impossible to come up with an internally consistent framework. At some point, the GM makes a ruling which contradicts an earlier one or something else in the books, and all of a sudden magic is inconsistent.

(Those who went before warn those who go ahead; it's happened to me.)

Why care?

An absolutely fundamental aspect of a roleplaying game is that a player can get a measure of what is going on around them and make choices based on that. If you could boil down roleplaying to three words, "make reasonable choices" would be a decent first draft. That requires a character's surroundings to be (mostly) intelligible. As they travel, interact with things, look at stuff, learn and explore, 'a character's surroundings' expands to 'the observed world', and not just objects within it, but processes too. Simple logic has to work in the metaphysics, too, or it's impossible to do basic roleplaying.

If absolutely anything in the world can change at any time for any reason or no reason — if it's a world where things can stop being true, or retroactively not have been the case — then it's a world you can't roleplay in, let alone get invested in. You certainly can't identify character goals and plan to achieve them. In a world like that, when the GM asks "what do you do next?", the appropriate answer is "who cares?" and to start packing up your things.

If a game rule says that a spell of type X does Y, and another rule says that whenever a spell does Y it's [verb]able by any magical effect of type Z, then that tells the wizard's player something about how magic works. If there's a monster which accomplishes Y as an effect of its X spell, then the wizard's Z magic better bloody be able to [verb] it, and if not (because the game was poorly designed), the onus is on the GM to find a theoretical underpinning for that. They don't necessarily have to tell the player why not, but they do need to assure the player that there's a reason, and a theoretically discoverable one in-world.

If the GM has three options and they are 'sacrifice magical consistency to create this exception' or 'change an established rule of magic to support this monster design' or 'change this monster so it follows established rules of magic', they should understand those options to be terrible, mediocre, or necessary, respectively.

This is all such pain in the neck for the GM that a well-designed game goes out of its way to avoid it, by making its magic internally consistent and spelling out at least the more major of the rules on which it rests.

One particular example: Magical realism

Take the magic of artsy literature, 'magic realism'. Here's the kind of magic you would expect from that metaphysical framework:

The plants in your grandfather's garden all grow three metres tall and are well-stocked with flowers and berries. You have a photographs with you as a kid, overshadowed by them fivefold. You move for college, then for work, and when you come back to visit fifteen years later the plants are all in the same places you remember, as vivid as ever, but they only reach to your knee.

A knight in shining armour loses her child; her sword and armour break into splinters, leaving her able to be harmed by the worst of the world and unable to lead the charge against it. After a long period of character growth and psychological healing, an ogre appears on the horizon and, looking about for her sword and armour for the first time in a long time, finds them to be intact once more.

A stressed businessman goes home tired every night and must then spend hours shoveling food into the dragon's head that grows out of his bedroom wall, tongue lolling over his bed. He is completely exhausted by this and then has to sleep on the floor because his bed is taken up by the horrid mass. One day he sees an advertisement to work at a charity. He applies, gets it, and quits his former job, then goes home and finds the dragon's head has turned into the softest blanket in the world. He gets the best night's sleep he's ever had.

Despite its seemingly vague nature, magical realism can be made an internally consistent framework, by creating rules like:

• The world is divided into important characters and background characters by some criterion
• When an important character experiences a powerful or persistent emotion, their surroundings change to elicit that emotion in a hypothetical viewer
• The challenges an important character faces in their daily life give rise to the introduction of new fantastic objects into their surroundings representing those challenges
• When an important character develops as a person or solves a major problem, they undergo a corresponding symbolic transformation in their material possessions, environment, or body
• Any politically, economically, militarily, socially, (etc) powerful person, if they are a background character, has an appearance or key trait that is fantastic or phantasmagorical, and allegorical to the nature of their power

Not all internally consistent magical paradigms are equal (when it comes to TTRPGs)

Magic realism can be made internally consistent. But it still doesn't work in a TTRPG because of the interactive nature of the medium.

Readers can enjoy magic realism because they can, in the worst case, write to the author to say "when Jorris had his nightmare he should have woken up to find all the curtains in his room had turned into red-hot serpents, why didn't you turn them into red-hot serpents you hack". Most won't bother.

Players in a TTRPG tradition can't enjoy magic realism because not only are they able to say things like that to the game master, but they should. By  which I mean it's in their best interests to engage directly with, and explore, the magic system — as we've covered, magic is a useful technology and players would be idiots not to try to make use of it. It's not an 'exploit', it's the human condition.

A TTRPG world based on magical realism would be one of constant argument, or one where magic is proudly (unpleasantly) inconsistent, or one where the players have the (unpleasant) false belief that magic isn't internally consistent.

Other magical paradigms have other problems for TTRPG usage.

• Classic high fantasy magic in the vein of Lord of the Rings is typically too subtle for PC spellcasting. Also, the source media usually tries to hide its more detailed rules, if not its broad-stroke ones, in a way that's incompatible with a player wanting to know how many orcs their Concussive Wave is likely to knock down and how often they can cast it.
• If magic is (very nearly) random, drawn from huge tables or procedures, a spellcaster can't reliably do much other than cause a distraction, and (given the nature of many magical effects) can't do that safely.
• If magic is all in the hands of powerful entities, and people can use it to the extent that they can convince an entity to grant it, then you have too much 'roleplaying' and not enough 'game'. At the very least, you need additional game structures preventing degenerate conditions where the players talk to too many entities or win them over too completely. Along the way you need to solve the old dichotomy of player skill (at persuasion, in this case) versus character skill.
• If magic comes entirely from objects and materials, then the game must be very precisely designed to preclude too strong of a positive feedback loop whereby getting your hands on too much treasure lets you acquire too much magic which lets you seize more treasure which lets you acquire more magic which [...]

Considerations like these act as design constraints on fantasy TTRPG elements.

Design tensions in fantasy TTRPGs

I quoted Keats' Lamia above to set up a juxtaposition.

Yes, I think it's best that magic be discoverable, explicable, rules-based, and consistent.

No, I don't think that magic should be all discovered by NPCs in the setting, that it should be explained to the players, that its rules should be in a player-facing rulebook, or that its applications must all be obvious outcomes of a single consistent pattern.

Magic should be internally consistent (a) as a matter of elegance, (b) so the GM doesn't have to do a ton of extra work to avoid making bad rulings, (c) so that the world has verisimilitude, (d) as evidence that the designers knew what they were doing, and (e) so players can adequately roleplay in a world where they will interact with magic.

But the players shouldn't be sat down with a complete overview of the exact details of magical metaphysics and all the implications, any more than a fantasy book should open with a dry five-page essay on underlying rules and cosmology.

Graspable, yet mysterious. Sensible, yet compelling. Consistent, yet fantastic.

Interacting with the world: Insert pun about 'character limits'

I was thinking about something with regard to this recent article on The Alexandrian.

In tabletop roleplaying games, what is the exact extent of a player character's interaction with the world?

A common answer is: The player determines their character's actions. (In settings where thoughts and feelings can supernaturally impact the world without action, the player determines those too.)

I think that this holds, at least in traditional games (I'm not looking at collaborative storytelling here), with five caveats.

The player determines their character's actions

1.  ...Or several characters' actions
2.  ...Except sometimes when they don't
3.  ...But is not obliged to model a mental state
4.  ...And nothing else in the game world
5.  ...And more, when creating characters

...Or several characters' actions

Familiars, cohorts, hirelings, apprentices, summoned creatures, mercenary troops, battlefield formations... A player may at times be called upon to take responsibility for a character that is not strictly "theirs". A few games directly support or require multiple characters per player.

Often there is a distinction: these are not 'player characters', but the player has a secondary character assigned to them, perhaps temporarily. This distinction can mean that they are treated as special cases: the GM might assign a player to determine a character's actions but still use morale rules, or the responsibility begins (or ends) at combat, or the GM might sometimes overrule the player's decision based on their own conception of the character.

Sometimes a player might take over a character for a missing player. But in general, other than in exceptional circumstances, no player directly decides another player character's actions.

...Except sometimes when they don't

Sometimes the GM will need to take partial or full control away from the player. Usually this is due to organic or supernatural effects on the mind: charm, hypnosis, terror, hallucinations, mind control, sleep deprival, infiltration by doppelgangers, and so on. Without some within-world effect, in traditional games pretty much The One Thing The GM Cannot Do is depriving a player of agency by dictating their character's actions.

Characters' actions are also, technically, constrained by spoken or unspoken rules about what is acceptable gameplay. Even if a player determines that their character thinks X is the best move in the current situation, they will not (or at least ought not) have their character do X if X is contrary to the social compact at the table. This can be difficult for a player to reconcile, but a minor consideration due to its rarity (or if it's a common occurrence, then something is going wrong at a deeper level).

...But is not obliged to model a mental state

Characters, whether GM-controlled or player-controlled, should have a set of beliefs, goals, prejudices, flaws, values, etc, i.e., an internal mental state. However, because it's not fun (and also not possible) to fully model every aspect of an imagined mind, the internal mental state is always significantly abstracted.

In practice, people roleplay in different ways, along different axes. Here's one:

Some people default to roleplaying by immersion: they mentally take on the mantle of their character's abstracted internal mental state and that determines the choices they make 'as' their character.

Other people default to roleplaying by decision-making: they look at the component pieces of their character's abstracted internal mental state and use them to make choices 'for' their character.

So players aren't necessarily keeping track of a character's changing mental state. (Possibly relevant: Research says a small majority of people don't experience inner monologue at all.) This means that if the GM ever has an interest in what a character is thinking, it's not as simple as just asking the player.

In general, in a traditional game, the GM asking 'hey Derek, what is Dyrok the Thundersworn thinking about this revelation?' is breaking the rules, or at least this should be understood as coded language that actually means 'hey Derek, does Dyrok the Thundersworn visibly react to or say anything about this revelation?'

(That's not just pedantry. In traditional TTRPG play, other players' characters shouldn't know what another player character is thinking/feeling, unless the player decides that their character announces or indicates their thoughts/feelings via action! If the GM really truly needs to know something about the player character's abstracted internal mental state – e.g., due to something magical which interacts with thoughts or emotions – then this should be conveyed secretly.)

Corollary: In general, a player or GM can find out what their own character is thinking/feeling by deciding the answer, and has no way to find out what another character is thinking/feeling except by having their own character interact with the world (ask a question, cast a spell of divination, etc).

...And nothing else in the game world

Players decide how their characters act (and might decide what their characters think/feel) and don't decide anything else.

Again, I'm talking specifically about traditional tabletop roleplaying games. Collaborative storytelling games, and adversarial storytelling games, and group storytelling activities, and semi-structured roleplaying, and improvisation games, and so on, are a different beast.

Some modern tabletop roleplaying games officially (i.e., in their rules) depart from this model. Some modern tabletop roleplaying game groups unofficially (i.e., in their mode of play rather than the rules of the TTRPG they're playing) depart from this model. 'Hey Derek, you recognise these as the Sleety Mountains, which you've read about extensively. Tell us what the Sleety Mountains are like.' This is fine of course, as long as everyone is on board with it.

I think it's worth a word of caution, though: if this is your default way of playing, you might not know that it yucks some people's yum. Asking some players to build some of the world they're playing in will ruin the game for them (especially if it's unexpected, or contrary to the rules of the TTRPG). Players having the ability to implicitly determine parts of the world can make it feel less real: a lowering of the stakes, a reduction of verisimilitude, a perception that the GM is winging it or not invested in their own world or has lost control, a feeling that the way things go is a result of players' whims instead of characters' in-world decisions, etc.

(Aside: I quite often see group norms of player creative input into the world these days, even when using rule systems that don't allow it. I wonder if it's a trend that developed from getting into the hobby via D&D streams, where it's natural that professional actors doing improv for public entertainment would bend in that direction. Or maybe that's just a highly visible instance of a phenomenon that's always been there: in accounts of original Blackmoor, arguably the world's first TTRPG, Arneson was often incorporating and changing things based on his players' ideas - the cleric class, 'multiple hits', etc.)

In general, in traditional TTRPG play, players can expect there to exist a GM-determined answer to every question they could potentially ask about the world. However, their character may or may not have a way of accessing any particular answer, and the GM may or may not have determined the answer ahead of time.

...And more, when creating characters

There's an exception to the last subsection.

Players do have creative control outside of their characters' actions in one domain: character creation. Players are almost always allowed to choose their characters' parentage, gender, name, and age. Usually they can also choose the details of the character's mind and body. And often they can create their character's past, via backstory, which typically involves doing some limited worldbuilding.

Systems and GMs vary as to expectations and extent in this regard. But even in the most traditional oldschool game where a character is mostly a tuple of <nine numbers, name, list of starting equipment>, the scope of the player's interaction with the world is expanded when it comes to how their character came to be.

In sum

Those are, I think, the permissible ways for a player to have their character interact with the world from a traditional TTRPG play perspective. In general, the GM's control of the world is absolute outside of a player character's thoughts, feelings, actions, and history, and the player's control of those things is near-absolute.

I like games with some storytelling elements, too. I even helped write this free one. But I think there's something clean about the players having control over exactly one little set of things. It helps their skills shine.

Early impressions of Diablo IV --- Thoughts on ARPG vs TTRPG

Let's consider some general design principles for traditional role-playing games and modern action games.

Traditional role-playing games deeply involve meaningful choices (with meaningful consequences and no clear best choice), a wide range of possible choices, information as a resource, verisimilitude, and meaningful character development. These are commonalities at the root of almost every traditional RPG.

Action games revolve around fast adrenaline-pumping action, a very short action-reward cycle, semi-random rewards, and rapid character development.

These design principles are at odds with each other, in that weighty choices demand time spent on consideration, and information as a resource slows play even as it broadens it.

It's possible (although difficult) to implement traditional RPG principles as a video game - for example, the Divinity and Dragon Age games.

Diablo 4 is an upcoming action role-playing game (ARPG). I played the open beta through a couple of times, having poured a lot of time into Diablo, Diablo 2, and Diablo 3 over the years.

Diablo 3 was a slash-em-up which really embodied the action game design principles I outlined above, and stepped further away from the traditional role-playing game principles than either of its predecessors. This is despite the advances in technology and the greater budget available for its design, making it clear that turning the Diablo franchise into more action, less RPG was a deliberate design choice.

My tone probably establishes that this is not my preferred style of play for any kind of RPG. So how does Diablo 4 stack up?

The 25-word review is that it continues in the Diablo 3 vein of pure action game while deliberately (perplexingly) draping a thin veneer of traditional role-playing game over itself. The long review follows.

In-world choices

Diablo 3 did not offer choices. Diablo 4 does - literally fake ones, in that as far as I can tell they don't have consequences in the game. (I am mad about the Rite of Passage ritual.) There are no real choices to be made that have impact on the world. There are no time-sensitive quests, apart from 'world events' meant to encourage playing the game as a MMORPG. Key NPCs cannot die and enemies ignore them. If there's a little minigame to save NPCs, well of course THOSE NPCs can die and be targeted by enemies.

The story kind of plays itself. For example, I let the NPC Iosef kill all the cultist villagers by himself, just to see if he could. He could. The cultists didn't even try to target him, of course.

Gameplay choices

Some surface elements, like potions and skill respec costs, are walked back slightly from D3 style towards D2 style - that is, from action role-playing game game towards traditional role-playing game.

But most things still don't matter. You can unsocket items, respec skills, refine and un-refine crafting materials, etc, for little to no cost. Your character dying does nothing but reduce the durability of your equipment.

Narrative / structure

The game has a linear narrative. The dialogue is middle of the road. The plot has the modern preoccupation with surprise twists, but delivered only minutes (at best) after the initial information was given, so that the twist has no weight whatsoever.

Inexplicably, D4 has a LOT of narrative, dialogue, and cutscenes, all of which are completely at odds with the gameplay style of doing everything as fast as possible. This is the point that left me with the most confusion. Were the devs unaware of what kind of game they were making? Or did they think these narrative trappings are what makes a game an RPG? It was actually quite jarring: it's hard to take the grim, dark narrative seriously when NPC villagers are teleporting from place to place, ignoring the demons fighting on the screen, and a stranger named XXDogLover <Tongue clan> is pestering you to trade.

Verisimilitude

Diablo 4 feels very 'video gamey', for want of a better word. There is more or less no consideration given to verisimilitude, only to making the game play as fast and continuously as possible. Things phase in and out of existence or teleport around as necessary to make gameplay faster. NPCs follow you on quests and stand blankly in the middle of fights, unharmed and unreacting, sometimes chatting (this is partly a limitation of the format, but it's not impossible to give them dynamic behaviour).

The world map seems to want to be a continent, but judging by the actual time it takes to walk around it, is less than 5 km wide. Everything feels like World of Warcraft.

The MMORPG elements are firmly on display - you are forced to share the world with other concurrent players. They too appear to phase in and out of the server instance in order to smooth your gameplay experience.

Events appear out of thin air. Everything is announced: 'Event joined', 'dungeon complete' or 'cellar complete', 'You have reached your destination'. There is a big button to 'Reset dungeons'. The map just tells you in advance what the big reward for completing a dungeon is going to be when you hover over it on the map(!!!)

Information as a resource

You are told everything you need to know to accomplish something. You have map markers, and in many cases the closer you get to them, the more they zoom in(!) until they point exactly to where you need to go.

For crafting, you're given a complete list of all the ingredients and what they mean and do before you ever find them. I think that speaks volumes.

Combat

Combat is really all the game is and has, of course. This is not a criticism: Diablo 4 is an action game, after all. The tactical combat is mostly like D3, but avoiding enemy attacks feels somewhat more important (at least as the rogue and druid I played). You're given a dedicated dodge skill.

Meaningful character development

I mentioned having to pay a (tiny) cost to respec your skills, i.e., completely rewrite your character from the ground up. Very much an ARPG.

Writing

The descriptive text badly needs a copy-edit. This ingredient fluff text somehow uses FOUR qualifiers in just ten words: "Only mostly toxic in spite of its beauty, but still [...]"

The fluff is belied by the crunch (which from an RPG lens is very bad design). In the crafting system, 'Crushed beast bones' are "Found by killing beasts and animals [...] wild creatures". Except you notably do not ever get them by killing the foxes, deer, rats, etc, which wander the overworld. I'm pretty sure deer have bones. Interestingly, they did think about this for the 'Demon's heart', where the fluff text goes out of its way to explain why every little Fallen doesn't drop one.

Setting / style

There's a stylistic mixture of grim, bloody tone and cartoonish, childlike design. For example, you can harvest chunks of metallic iron from big blocky columns standing proud of the ground. But you will also find impaled bodies everywhere.

This version of Diablo has far more influence from specifically Christian motifs than previous ones did. They leaned HARD into it; so much that I am generally curious if the designers were looking for specifically Christian themes (rather than fantasy religious themes), and if so, why.

Gameplay loop / action-reward cycle

Absolutely everything in the game is a tiny quest and grants you a tiny reward. In practise it feels like nothing really matters. After a while as quest text constantly pops up and disappears, you have to pay attention to even notice it. If you're playing as fast as the game wants you to, you will complete the tiny quest before you have time to read it. Fortunately there are no meaningful choices offered, so this does not matter.

You'll get quest updates for every little thing - opening doors, unlocking waypoints, getting closer to the right spot on the map, etc. The quests are D3 style, very small and quick, such as 'slay this miniboss' ones that pop up when you get to a site. The rewards are correspondingly too meager to care about, and you get them automatically. Compare the D2 RPG-style system: six big, chunky quests per act. You had to go find things instead of the text telling you exactly what to do then finding the right symbol on the map and teleporting towards it. And the rewards were large and you had to go seek them out: Cain's identification, imbuement, the Horadric Cube, etc.

In D4, gear basically doesn't matter for at least the first dozen hours of play: just scan for green numbers and click to equip it without reading. Time spent comparison shopping is wasted compared to fighting things for more loot and experience. We only get 25 levels in the beta, but presumably it's like D3, where the specifics of gear just doesn't matter until the endgame (beyond the end of the campaign) where you spend most of your time. Compare D2, where you would sometimes switch your entire play style when you got an early unique item, buy new gear to support that item, and only reluctantly retire it many levels later.

I found only a few small secrets in the game. If there are big ones which you'd be proud to find, they're either beyond the scope of the beta or well hidden.

Modern meta-gameplay elements

Like D3, there are tons of unlockable cosmetics to (non-meaningfully) customise your character.

Like D3, there are achievements ('challenges'), some of them infuriatingly only attainable in the beta.

Like D3, rather than trying to make gold wealth relevant, Diablo 4 has meta-currencies for all the actually useful stuff. I counted literally fifteen different meta-currencies and meta-progression systems before I gave up. XP and bonus XP, levels, tiers, combo points, challenges, aspects, emblems, titles, renown, potion charges, skill points, obols, max obols, paragon points, etc etc. Very video gamey.

There's a crafting system, of course, because it's the year 2023. Like D3, crafting materials stack infinitely rather than taking up inventory space.

You choose your own difficulty. Everything about the world is relative to your power level, with enemies scaling up with you. You can't save something and come back to stomp it. I tried to get somewhere where I was seriously outmatched but couldn't get more than a 2 level disadvantage.

Bugs and annoyances

It's a beta, things may get ironed out.

• I had one crash requiring a restart for my graphics card to start working.
• I saw some animation errors when you approach a quest object from the 'wrong' angle and end up e.g. kneeling down and simultaneously gliding across the map.
• If there's something to do in town and it requires a loading screen, you lose your town portal. You can also lose progress in other quests when this happens.
• I found the loading screens pretty annoying, especially for a game where you have to teleport yourself all over the map constantly.
• Having stools you can accidentally sit in (and take a while and an additional click to get up from) while you're trying to get around seems like an obstacle to the extremely fast play experience they're trying to create; I'm surprised that made it as far as beta.

Summary

All in all, Diablo 4 builds directly on Diablo 3's foundations. Those who know what the implications of the D3 'treasure goblin' are for gameplay and tone will understand what I mean when I note that D4 features treasure goblins too.

There's lots to like, of course. The monster designs are compelling, the visual effects impressive, and the soundtrack stunning. The game is meticulously inclusive. There's incremental character improvement, adrenaline pumping action, and a strong multiplayer focus. There's a few good narrative beats - the vision of Tristram and the soulstone, from way back in D1, got me right in the nostalgia. I enjoyed clearing out the enemy occupants in a stronghold to turn it back into a friendly encampment, like in a Far Cry or Soulsborne game.

Overall, not much of a fantasy RPG, but a compelling action game.