Dragna's Blog: Choice & Challenge

My last homebrew session left me in a bit of a funk.

In fact, my last several sessions have.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I run a biweekly homebrew campaign for nine (relatively new) players. We started playing in-person last winter, and have continued with the same campaign via Discord since late summer.

If you’ve never seen a group of offline players make the abrupt jump to online play, the difference is stark. There’s no more crosstalk; no more side-chats. Distractions are common. Players struggle to adjust from physical dice to virtual tabletops. The chaotic, energetic, social energy of the room abruptly dissipates.

Which isn’t to say that you can’t all still have fun! But unless you play with a group of Terminally Online people, there’s no denying that it’s just impossible to replicate the experience of “hanging out” offline when you make the leap to virtual play - with or without webcams. Your players are no longer playing a role-playing game with friends; they’re playing a computer game with The People On My Computer.

And, again, that’s fine! But it does draw some potential issues into sharp freakin’ relief.

Specifically, I’ve noticed that many of my players are pretty quiet for the vast majority of games - even during combat. Now, some of these players weren’t particularly shy around a physical table - but move them to Discord and they rarely speak aside from saying “I shoot my crossbow; does a 15 hit?” In general, most of the forward momentum tended to come from two or three specific players, with the other six or seven mostly coming along for the ride and piping up only if something relevant to their particular interests (e.g., loot) arose.

As befitting the usual post-session crash, I was pretty depressed about this for around twenty-four hours. And then I asked myself: When was the last time I gave those quieter players reason to speak out?

Choice & Challenge
In my (in-progress) workshop handout about Agency, I write that gameplay, as expressed via Agency, has two core components: choice and challenge. A game has choice when it offers players meaningful IC tradeoffs (e.g., specialize in offense or defense; take the high road or the low road; persuade the queen or lie to her). A game has challenge when it offers players meaningful opportunities to improve outcomes through honing OOC tactics or skills (e.g., learn to use your environment; understand how to push NPCs’ buttons; pick optimal spells over trap ones).

My most recent session unfolded simply: My players investigated a church undercroft allegedto hold a sea mutant, found some spell scrolls in an old pot, found a secret door the sea mutant had escaped through, killed a darkmantle that was lurking on the other side of the secret door, belayed down a hundred-foot tunnel shaft, defused some toxic fungi blocking their path, and killed some giant crabs and cave fishers that ambushed them in a flooded cave.

Now, some of these encounters, on their own, provide choice. Rather than search for the secret door’s mechanism, my wildfire druid originally opted to use her wildfire spirit to teleport people to the opposite side of the secret door through a drainage grate. Later, during the giant crab/cave fisher fight, my players had to choose which monsters to prioritize and how they would take them down. 

Some of these encounters, on their own, also provided challenge. To get past the toxic fungi, the kenku bard realized they could use mage hand to trigger the patch’s spore cloud instead of risking it while climbing over some nearby boulders. To find the spell scrolls, the druid cast detect magic in search of any secrets, finding something that she otherwise would’ve completely missed.

But some of these segments - most notably, the descent down the shaft and the initial exploration of the undercroft - were completely devoid of choice or challenge. Much more significantly, on a macro level, the session as a whole was utterly devoid of choice or challenge. 

By way of comparison, take a combat encounter. A battle has “choice” if you have meaningful choices regarding what you’re going to do on your turn (e.g., “Will you target the healer, the brute, or the archer?”), and it has “challenge” if someone who’s good at D&D combat can achieve a better outcome than someone who isn’t (e.g., “If you’re smart, you can try to push the brute off the cliff, potentially defeating him in one turn instead of three.”).

This combat encounter has meaningful gameplay—but so does a fighting game. Now, I enjoy the campaign mode of Super Smash Brothers as much as anyone, but I wouldn’t call it a role-playing game—because the “game” of D&D doesn’t come from the combat but from the roleplaying.

Put differently, the “game” of D&D is about the decisions you make in the narrative and how you deal with the consequences of those decisions. Do you fight the goblins, or parlay with them? Do you go in the dungeon’s front door, or hunt for a secret entrance? Do you recruit the Thieves’ Guild as an ally, or the Kingsguard? Everything else—combat encounters, social encounters, puzzles, solving mysteries—is just a Mario Party-style minigame within that broader, beautiful tapestry of agency.

However, speaking personally, I’m realizing that this fundamental roleplaying gameplay terrifies me. In the words of G.R.R. Martin, I’m an architect, not a gardener. I like knowing where I’m going and where I’ve been. There’s not a creative bone in my body—the only place I get my ideas is from a little scheming gremlin in the back of my brain. If that gremlin can’t scheme, then there’s no juice in the tank.

And scheming around big, narrative-level consequences is scary. It’s a lot of work. How am I supposed to plan out a single arc—let alone a longer campaign—if I have to give the players (or allow for the possibility of) Big, Meaningful Choices that can dramatically change the direction of the narrative? 

(“But Dragna,” I hear you say, “what about approaches like the Sly Flourish Lazy DM method, which lets you just prep each session one at a time?” There’s definitely a nugget of wisdom in Sly’s approach—in general, you should never have to prep scenes in-depth more than one or two sessions ahead—but you risk losing a lot of opportunities for foreshadowing, character arcs, and so on if you never take the long view.)

(Sly’s approach works great for Gardener Georg, who has fifty creative and cool ideas every day on the drive home after work, especially if Gardener Georg is driving to a friend’s house to play D&D while joking around and sharing beer and pizza. But if you’re not Gardener Georg, and especially if you’re not looking to make “random stuff to do as an excuse to hang out with friends in-person” because you’re playing online, then you might have a problem.)

Creating Choice
So what kinds of Big, Meaningful Choices can players make on the narrative level? Well, let’s start with the narrative itself—the tension. Every good narrative has a strong dramatic question (“When [inciting incident], can the players [overcome the obstacle] and [complete the goal] in order to [achieve the stakes]?”). The question then becomes:

• What method do the players use to achieve the goal?
• What steps do the players take to pursue that method?
• What order do the players take those steps in?
  

A game that poses meaningful iterations of these questions offers an opportunity for meaningful choice. Importantly, while you can offer players a choice as to the goal itself, it’s not necessary if all you need is to give the players a sense of agency! Choosing what route to take to your destination can be as empowering as which destination you’re headed to itself.

(Which isn’t to say that some players don’t enjoy setting their own goals! Sandbox campaigns exist for a reason. For the purposes of this limited article, however, I’m going to stick to linear/flexilinear campaigns, rather than sandboxes, which require a lot more player input, initiative, and engagement, to the point where the players are basically co-DMs in certain respects.)

So let’s try and think how I might have reorganized my last session, but without making a huge amount of extra or redundant work for myself.

First—allowing the players to choose a method. The players are trying to chase down a sea mutant from the church undercroft through some underground tunnels. How might we provide them a choice as to the means by which they can do so? The most obvious choice is “which route do we take”—do the players go through the flooded caves or the dark caves?—but (1) that’s a lot of extra work given that they might not go down both routes, and (2) if they find that the sea mutant took one route over the other, they’ll probably just take that route automatically, removing any semblance of choice.

Hrm. Wait a minute—dramatic questions have two parts to their tension: the goal and the obstacle! If the players aren’t choosing a method for pursuing the goal, maybe they’re choosing a method for bypassing an obstacle.

(I’m abruptly realizing, of course, that the dramatic question of pursuing the sea mutant lacked an obstacle, which probably contributed to the session’s lackluster vibes. Come to think of it, there wasn’t really a clear sense of stakes either, was there? Maybe I should do a better job of following my own advice.)

Back on topic—if the players aren’t choosing a method for pursuing the goal, maybe they’re choosing a method for bypassing the obstacle. I’m suddenly imagining that the tunnels are occupied by, say, a coven of sea hags and their posse of giant crabs and giant octopi. Do the players hack and slash their way through? Try to use diplomacy and/or animal handling checks? Do they go for a stealth route? (I’m suddenly having flashbacks to the Wizard of Wines “stealth mission” in Re-Reloaded.)

Second—what steps do the players take to pursue that method? Let’s take a step back and look back at our goal—follow the sea mutant. Sure, so they’re following it through the flooded tunnels and caves—but maybe there are multiple rooms that they might explore. Do they take a detour? Maybe there’s a dead-end room with something interesting there (e.g., the underground spring in Re-Reloaded’s version of the Werewolf Den). If they’re stealthing, do they try to cause a distraction, move along the ceiling, or use an illusion/invisibility spell?

Third—what order do the players take those steps in? The ur-example to this is flexilinear plotting, inspired by Justin Alexander’s node-based design theory—to get to the Bad Guy Hideout, the players need to go to at least two of the Movie Theater, the Old Boathouse, and the Construction Site, but in any order they choose. This order can, in turn, influence the resources and methods available to the players in subsequent steps. (For example, if you do the Puzzle Area before the Combat Area and the former has a scroll of pass without trace, then you suddenly have a much stronger opportunity to turn the Combat Area into the Stealth Area.)

And so there we have it—our three strategies to give the players meaningful choice in a narrative without disrupting our plans or otherwise wasting time creating unused material and—oh, wait, crap.

I’m realizing, unfortunately, that I’ve just recreated the idea of a dungeon.

When you think about it, that’s all a dungeon (at least in the abstract) really is: a place with complex obstacles, assorted detours, and a nonlinear layout. There’s no reason why that formula has to be completely restricted only to “caves and other underground areas with treasure chests in them.”

But, tellingly, I think it’s also noteworthy that an underground cave does not a dungeon make—or at least, an underground cave, on its own, doesn’t create the opportunities for choice and agency that a “real” dungeon does. It’s the game design of the narrative—the intentional decision to manufacture and leave “gaps” for player choices—that creates the dungeon, not the setting or aesthetic.

Creating Challenge
Okay, so that solves choice—but what about challenge? If my druid hadn’t thought to cast detect magic, she never would have found those spell scrolls, and the time I spent preparing them would’ve been wasted. I could have made them absolutely obvious, but that takes away the challenge and just returns us to the “point-and-click adventure”/”walking simulator” linear model that was so much of the problem in the first place.

Well, let’s break down the meaning of “challenge”: a narrative, whether it’s a scene, a chapter, or an arc, has challenge if the player’s OOC skill (not dice rolls—dice rolls are gambling, not gameplay!) can impact the ultimate outcome. That smells an awful lot like the “degrees of success” I’ve discussed once or twice before!

There are six degrees of success: 

• Exceptionally successful (you get what you wanted plus a bonus); 
• Completely successful (you get what you wanted);
• Mostly successful (you get what you wanted, but at a price);
• Mostly unsuccessful (you don’t get what you wanted, but you get a consolation prize); 
• Completely unsuccessful (you don’t get what you wanted); and
• Exceptionally unsuccessful (you don’t get what you wanted and you suffer an extra penalty).

A narrative has “challenge” if you can move between two or more of these degrees of success depending on your OOC skill. For example, at the scene level, if your goal is “convince the queen to do X,” but you make a really crappy argument, then you might go from “completely successful” down to “mostly successful” or even worse. 

But what about at the macro level? If you’re not playing the combat/social/puzzle/etc. minigame, where’s the room for player skill?

Let’s say there are five levels of skill: grand strategy (choosing a strategic vision and long-term objectives), strategy (devising plans and setting goals to achieve that vision), logistics (obtaining and organizing useful resources), tactics (optimizing specific resources and maneuvers), and techniques (executing tasks effectively and efficiently). What might these look like in practice?

Grand Strategy is basically pre-chosen for the players in all campaigns, arcs, and chapters other than pure sandboxes. (You can view “grand strategy” as choosing a goal—and, in the ordinary course of business, the DM chooses this when making a dramatic question.) In Reloaded this is “free/escape Barovia”; in an arc like Arc K: The Stolen Gem, the goal is “clear the winery.” 

Strategy is how the players pursue the goal. At the campaign level, the strategy is usually predetermined—”reunite the seven lost ancient MacGuffins” or “defeat the Big Bad Evil Guy in combat” for example. At the arc level, I think a lot of the agency of strategy depends on how much of a “soft magic system”—i.e., the level of arbitrariness—the DM is working with.

(For example, in Arc I: The Lost Soul, Victor Vallakovich arbitrarily needs a night hag’s heartstone to get to the Ethereal Plane and restore Stella Wachter’s soul to her body. Do the players have any other options to do this? Nope; it’s a “soft magic” system—the players can’t reason their way to an alternate approach because the DM has deemed that This Is The Way The Problem Gets Solved. Similarly, while it’s not really “magic,” the Forest Folk in Arc K: The Stolen Gem are just arbitrarily devoted Strahd fanatics who really hate the Martikovs—there’s no diplomatic route to getting them out of the winery, and so the players’ only option is “slice and dice.”)

If the DM puts a lot of work into the why of something—e.g., an antagonist’s underlying values and interests beyond “wanting to do Evil Stuff”—then players get a lot more control and agency here. This is, I think, why strategy is a lot more present at the chapter and scene level—DMs are preprogrammed to view “dungeons” and “rooms” as geographic areas with Stuff Just Lying Around, which generally contributes to a lot more emergent gameplay, in contrast to a more scripted experience.

Logistics is how the players prepare to pursue the goal. This might involve information-gathering, obtaining gear or allies, and so on. Players love this kind of thing (especially if you say the words “crafting system” within earshot), though 90% of them basically never think to do basic stuff like espionage, reconnaissance, surveillance, etc. unless there’s a blindingly obvious way to do it (e.g., doing reconnaissance via find familiar or wildshape) or an NPC tells them outright to Do That You Idiots.

Tactics are how the players implement their plans to pursue the goal. Do you go in through the back door, or the front? How do you prioritize different goals or subgoals? How do you triage when you have competing priorities? Do you split the party, so that half the group goes in the front as a distraction while the other half sneaks in? Which allies do you choose? How do you shepherd your resources? (Will you burn a one-use speak with dead spell scroll to learn about the hidden entrance, or will you try to find it yourself?)

Finally, techniques are how the players execute their plans. Did you remember to check for guards before picking the lock or breaking down the door? Did you remember that the Queen despises being reminded of the Old Rebellion? Did you figure out that the spice merchant is having an affair and use that to blackmail him into funding your expedition?

(Note—I’m not entirely happy with some of these distinctions or examples, but I think they’re good enough for now to give a vibe for what I’m talking about.)

To sum it all up, we’ve got:

• Grand Strategy, which is the overall goal and generally chosen by the DM;
• Strategy, which is the players’ plan to pursue the goal;
• Logistics, which is the players’ preparation to pursue that plan;
• Tactics, which is the players’ implementation of that plan; and
• Technique, which is the players’ execution of that plan.

Put differently:

• Grand Strategy asks, “Are the players choosing the right goals?”
• Strategy asks, “Are the players making a sloppy or brilliant plan?”
• Logistics asks, “Are the players acting unprepared or with proper preparation?”
• Tactics asks, “Are the players prioritizing the wrong things or managing their assets poorly or with skill?”
• Technique asks, “Are the players getting sloppy, or do they have a good eye for detail?”

Now, I’m not entirely sure how, in practical terms, you can artificially create challenge vis a vis grand strategy. What are you supposed to do—give them red-herring goals that are Bad To Pursue, Actually? (Actually, on reflection, I guess the orb in the Darklord’s Shrine in Death House is an example of creating challenge through grand strategy—stealing the orb is a Bad Goal because it gets the players nothing and angers some shadows. YMMV on whether this is an example of good design, though; it feels punishing and unfair in the same way that Vasili von Holtz does, especially if you never give the players an opportunity to remedy their mistakes.)

I do think you can artificially create challenge via strategy—but that this might come at the cost of choice. After all, choice is all about tradeoffs between equally viable options—if one of the options is worse in practice than the other one, it’s not really a meaningful tradeoff. So if you offer the players a choice between “stealth mission” and “violent siege” and “peaceful parlay,” but stealth is worse than siege is worse than parlay, you’ve created challenge but at the cost of choice. (I do think that this is fine—god knows some players need to learn that “guns blazing” is not always an acceptable solution to a problem—but it’s just something to be conscious of.)

It’s a lot easier (and simpler) to artificially create challenge via logistics. For example, you might create secret weaknesses that your players can uncover, or neutral allies they can recruit or sway to their cause. (Maybe the dragon is allergic to chocolate, or the dragon’s kobolds feel unappreciated.) You can also hide secret rewards or boons for the players to uncover, but I feel you might be walking a tricky line to avoid creating a situation where your players feel obliged to spam detect magic and Investigation checks in every room they enter. This is a TTRPG, not Skyrim, so you’ll want to be very judicious with it, and to try to lay down foreshadowing/hints wherever possible so it doesn’t feel random.

To artificially create challenge via tactics, all you need to do is give the players competing priorities. A good way to do this, I think, would be to reverse-engineer an Eisenhower Matrix (“urgent & important / urgent & not important / not urgent & important / not urgent & not important”), such that if they choose the wrong thing to prioritize, they’re gonna get screwed. You can also give them opportunities to burn their resources wastefully—not in the sense of literally wasting those assets (i.e., getting nothing in exchange for using them), but kind of tempting them in the same way that it’s tempting to spend $30 on DoorDash instead of $10 on a box of pasta and a jar of sauce. (Teleportation is great for this—will they burn a spell slot to cast misty step, or do the hard work of searching for the secret mechanism to reveal the ladder/stairs up?)

As for technique—I think that creating challenge here literally comes down to “giving the players little nuggets of information that they might forget” and “including little tricky dangers that it’s easy for the players to miss.” You do need to make sure you’re being fair with it—if there’s a guard patrol, make sure to tell the players that there’s a guard patrol—but you don’t need to make it super obvious or remind the players about it.

So let’s (finally) turn back to my homebrew session. We’ve added choice by adding a coven of sea hags with some aquatic creatures that can be handled via stealth, combat, or diplomacy. Let’s say we’ve also added choice via including one or two dead-end rooms/detours with fun little secrets, as well as a nonlinear path that the players can take before getting to the end. Where does the challenge come in?

Well, to sum up our options, we can:

• offer the players a chance to pursue a Bad Goal (grand strategy)
  
• make one or two of the stealth/combat/diplomacy options harder than the others (strategy)

• give the hags a secret weakness, create a neutral character the players can turn into an ally, or plant a hidden boon for the players to find (logistics)

• give the players competing priorities or a way to burn their resources wastefully (tactics)

• create little dangers or pieces of information that the players might reasonably forget (technique)

For the sake of exploring the possibilities, let’s say we offer the players all of these types of challenges. What might we wind up with?

• Grand Strategy. One of the hags uses her shapechange to try to trick the players into doing something bad or harmful (either as a prank or to actually try and kill them)
• Strategy. Stealth is hard because the crabs and octopi are sensitive to disturbances in the water, and because one of the hags has a jeweler’s loupe that gives her truesight.
• Logistics. The hags have a weakness to iron weapons and can be bound if the players find their coven’s contract and use their true names to order the hags to set them free. The hags also hate and fear their reflections (e.g., in a mirror or polished metal shield), and the players can find a mirror or polished shield (plus an iron dagger) nearby.
• Tactics. Unsure about this. Maybe the hags have a prisoner/slave they’ve kept for many years—they can get him out by cutting a deal with the hags, but this will either force them to spend resources (e.g., give up a magic item) or give up on their stealth route. Maybe the hags can even draw vitality from him, using his life force to heal damage the players deal to them unless the players can figure out how to sever that bond.
• Techniques. One of the hags is allergic (literally allergic) to puns; puns make her sneeze uncontrollably on her turn, giving her attacks disadvantage.

So this seems pretty good.

Challenging Skill
Except maybe not.

I have a confession to make: I wasn’t entirely confident about the Grand Strategy/Strategy/Logistics/Tactics/Techniques breakdown. It felt too fuzzy and woozy and didn’t really click in the way the Choice options did. In particular, it didn’t feel elegant, and it didn’t wholly feel like it guided a DM in preparing gameplay - it felt descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

So I noodled around for a few days and finally realized: Challenge is about skill. Challenges test OOC skill.

. . . but which skills?

And then I remembered that games like first-person shooters test things like reflexes and hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness and oh wait could I come up with a list of similar skills for Dungeons & Dragons?

And so I did.

That list is as follows:

• Memory
• Spatial Awareness
• Prioritization
• Triage
• Teamwork
• Resource Management
• Risk Assessment
• Pattern Recognition
• Logical Reasoning
• Emotional Intelligence
• Diligence
• Time Management
• Communication
• Curiosity
• Perceptiveness
• Numerical Analysis
• Effective Listening
• Adaptability

Importantly, though, because (in most modern playgroups), we want even unskilled players to be able to win (so long as they’re not actively stupid), the addition of Challenge is more about creating additional degrees of success (i.e., between “mostly successful” and “exceptionally successful”) than about determining whether or not the players succeed at all.

As a result, we wind up tying each skill to an asset or “boon” that it unlocks. For example, successful use of an OOC skill might make it easier for the players to defeat an obstacle, resist that obstacle’s assaults, complete the goal, or ameliorate a complication. (For example, at Van Richten’s Tower in Curse of Strahd, players who successfully exercise pattern recognition, logical reasoning, perceptiveness, and effective listening can safely unlock the front door to the tower and avoid the gargoyle attack and lightning trap, thereby preserving their health and resources for future combats.)

So let’s take another look at some of the challenges from the previous framework and see which skills they test - and which we want to keep or throw away:

• Stealth is Harder Than Combat/Diplomacy. This tests risk assessment (do the players accurately determine which route will be easiest?) and pattern recognition (do the players realize that if one group of sea critters can easily find them stealthing, the rest probably can as well?).
• Weakness to Iron. Unsure about this one; it really depends on implementation. Perhaps the players hear that one of the hags disliked an iron sword, but not a copper one, and it’s up to the players to figure out the distinguishing factor (logical reasoning)? Perhaps there’s an iron sword hidden somewhere in the lair that the hags have abandoned, which the players can find if they’re adventurous enough (curiosity)? I’ll have to figure it out!
• Finding & Leveraging the Coven’s Contract. Again, this seems to rest upon logical reasoning and perhaps curiosity. More brainstorming is needed.

I won’t do this for every challenge, but you get the idea. 

Skill-Driven Design

Let’s try the inverse - given a skill, can we come up with a challenge?

Let’s take, as a very minor example and thought experiment, a scene in the RAW Curse of Strahd module that I cut - the scene in which Bluto dumps Arabelle in Lake Zarovich and the players have to rescue her.

Now, RAW, this scene doesn’t really have any sense of challenge - the players make one or two Athletics checks and save Arabelle if they roll high enough. (As members of the Patreon Discord have heard me say twice now, dice rolls are just gambling - and gambling is not gameplay.) How can we change it to include some kind of challenge?

Let’s start with an asset - something that can impact the degrees of success. As given, this scene’s dramatic question is: “When Bluto dumps Arabelle in Lake Zarovich, can the players rescue her before she drowns?”

This seems to be a pretty binary situation: either the players rescue Arabelle or they don’t. For the sake of making it less binary, let’s add in an obstacle: “When Bluto dumps Arabelle in Lake Zarovich, can the players avoid the clutches of the lake’s drowned undead and rescue Arabelle before she drowns as well?”

Now that we’ve got an obstacle, we can create an asset based on that obstacle. Our options are (1) an asset that helps the players resist the obstacle (e.g., avoid getting grappled by zombies), or (2) an asset that helps the players overcome the obstacle (e.g., destroy the zombies or drive them away). Let’s go with #2 - an asset that helps the players drive the zombies away.

Given that, which skill(s) do we want to test? 

Well, I know from reading the RAW module that Lake Zarovich once hosted “the first navy of a landlocked country.” I’m therefore envisioning Arabelle in her sack sinking down beneath the deck of a sunken ship haunted by undead corpses and animate, bloodthirsty seaweed. 

Let’s go for spatial awareness (certain parts of the ship are easier to exit or escape through than others), prioritization/triage (do you focus on Arabelle, the undead, or the seaweed first?), perceptiveness (do you notice the hint that there’s a hidden trapdoor right above you? do you notice that there’s an area where none of the vampire seaweed seems to grow?), and logical reasoning (do you realize that the object in the middle of the bare patch is likely the cause for the lack of vampire seaweed?).

And just like that - we’ve got ourselves a skeleton for an engaging, dynamic, and challenging encounter with several different possible outcomes. The only thing left is to implement what we’ve got - we barely even need to flesh anything out.

Final Thoughts
I think it’s incredibly interesting how doing a skills-first analysis, rather than an asset-first analysis, lends itself much better to designing the actual gameplay that the players will need to engage with. Without this method, I might have struggled for ages trying to figure out how to implement something like “the hags have a weakness to iron” without just telling my players about it and giving them an iron sword outright; with this method, I can just choose a skill I want to test and immediately have an idea of what kind of gameplay I might grow around it.

It’s not every day you find a method that both (1) better accomplishes your goals and (2) makes your life easier. But if this method works how I think it works, I think I’m happy to call that a win.