RPG Difficulty and Punishment Levers
In response to my previous post on DK: King of Swing and Difficulty, To Be Resolved asked if I had seen the newest NakeyJakey video on Hollow Knight: Silksong as its discussion of difficulty seemed pertinent to the topic at hand. Well of course I'd seen the NakeyJakey video! It was simply out of scope, see I meticulously plan every post and I made the conscious choice not to...I can't lie anymore, I completely fuckin' forgot about it and it's extremely important to the discussion.
I've timestamped the important bit of this video, which I still highly recommend watching in full before briefly summarizing what Jakey's getting at here. In essence, Jakey defines "Friction" (or colloquially a "bullshit factor") in two parts:
- Difficulty, the amount of skill/knowledge required to pass an obstacle
- Punishment, how much the game sets you back upon failure to overcome the difficulty I tend to get along best with games that provide their friction through high difficulty and low punishment. I will keep going at it again and again on Celeste. When difficulty is combined with punishment, I get my gradually increasing stack of unfinished FromSoftware games1, abandoned after one too many obnoxious-as-hell boss runbacks. In my previous post on DK: King of Swing, the issue I describe of dirt-cheap healing is a case of extremely low punishment eliminating all friction. As an even more extreme example, have you ever played Metal Slug on an emulator, just churning through with infinite credits until it feels like nothing even matters? You really don't want your game to feel like that.
Most traditional RPGs will sit somewhere in the middle of Difficulty, adjusted by the level design of the scenario at hand, while its formal rules point towards a huge amount of punishment. I'm of course referring to the idea of permanent death. Characters in a game like Call of Cthulhu, GURPS or honestly even D&D5e can take a lot of time to create, so you're not only saying goodbye to whatever emotional arcs you'd planned for your OC-Don't-Steal2, but may also end up sitting out of the game for a long time while you prepare your next character.3
OSR games skew more difficult, but I actually believe the punishment is lower. As the play culture focuses more on exploring the world, an increased narrative investment on the development of factions versus individuals, there is less of an emotional gut punch when a character dies. Just stay in the back of the party for a bit and your character will level back up to a reasonable amount quite quickly, if your game even uses levels. Oftentimes you'll end up rolling up a new character and joining back in 15 minutes to pick up your dead PCs gear and get right back into questing. Plenty of OSR games even relish in this, the novelty of the Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel rests in the comical splatterfest of level 0 nobodies.
I'm not as into your Forged in the Darks or Powered by the Apocalypses (is that the plural? You tend to only see one apocalypse at a time so I'm not sure), but they seem to rest somewhere in the middle on the punishment scale, assuming you even care about overcoming a challenge in that way. A lot of these games have rules preventing a GM from killing off a PC without their approval, but in turn the GM is encouraged to make hard moves like killing NPCs and making important goals untenable. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure if games focused primarily on making exciting stories rather than presenting challenges can be mapped on this scale, but that was my attempt.
In 5e or other trad RPG spaces, I feel as if I see too many GMs focus on micromanaging the difficulty slider when they could instead take a peek at punishment. There are a lot of easy ways to hack this into your trad game of choice: Fabula Ultima borrows the common PbtA mechanic of allowing players to choose when their character is permanently dead. GURPS provides a shockingly large cushion between "down for the count" and "rolling death saves", allowing for a lot less GM intervention to provide those "you wake up in a jail cell" moments when the party wipes out in combat4. Lancer honestly goes too far in my opinion, as losing your mech just entails 3d-printing another one at no cost, as the system does not track currency and explicitly details its setting as post-scarcity. I think it'd be much cooler if blowing up your mech meant an embarrassing explanation to your angry employer, or ending up in debt with a third party to finance the repairs.
In general, when you are running a tactical combat focused tabletop RPG, I think it's better to think about how you can adjust the narrative to prevent a TPK rather than fudging the dice. You could even make a mechanic out of a powerful wizard intervening to save their asses, gamify currying favor with powerful NPCs to serve as a flavorful extra-life mechanic. Hell, even a looser scenario structure with less urgency can allow players to just hit the bricks when things go bad rather than trying to tough out a difficult fight because the fate of the entire world rests upon it.
When designing for an RPG, I think it's important to question the sacred cow of permadeath, and think in terms of both levers to generate the proper amount of friction.
To date, Elden Ring, Sekiro, and Bloodborne. I won't buy any new ones until I beat at least one of these, I promise.↩
I am still a roleplay kiddie at my core, I mean this lovingly.↩
And don't even get me started on some trad GM's obsession with introducing the new character at "the right time". Critical Role waits 20 hours of gameplay before introducing a backup because they're being paid to make a good story, so don't be an asshole and just let Dave play his backup barbarian as soon as its ready to roll.↩
High-tech weapons churn out enough damage to all-but-eliminate this cushion, but it works well for a decent amount of scenarios.↩