Patreon DevBlog #13: Why D&D is Like Mario Party

I didn’t really work on much substantive D&D work this week (though I did publish the first video in the Dungeon Mentor how-to-DM series; check it out here!), so I don’t have any “problems” to talk about this week, per se.

However, I have been doing a lot of thinking regarding the “pillars of gameplay” that I’ve previously mentioned in passing in other devblogs, and I figured it was about time I got around to actually summarizing my thoughts on the matter (and the practical impact for D&D game design).

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Designer’s Commentary: Pillars of Gameplay

It’s often said that D&D has three “pillars of gameplay”: social interaction, combat, and exploration. The Player’s Handbook says so itself. However, in my time actually creating D&D gameplay, I’ve come to realize that these are unhelpful categories at best, and actively dangerous to rely upon at worst.

Let’s start with an easy concession: If you boil D&D down to “things you do in combat,” “things your character says outside of combat,” and “things your character does outside of combat,” then yes, you can pretty readily sort D&D into those three pillars of gameplay (combat, social interaction, and exploration, respectively). This is certainly true if you look at each “pillar” as a separate way for the player to interface with the world of the game—i.e., select an action in combat, select an action outside of combat, or select something to say aloud.

But the problem arises when DMs and content creators start talking about these “pillars” as actual molds or templates for the types of stories that their campaigns tell, which is an entirely different thing! Remember: these “pillars” are merely “interfaces.” Saying your campaign is “combat-heavy and exploration-light” is about as meaningful as saying that your campaign will involve “lots of mashing the B button and basically no use of the X button”!

This is where so many online discussions and tutorials go wrong: they present their campaigns and session plans as though an entire game of D&D can be memorably and meaningfully distilled into “stuff I did in combat,” “stuff I talked about,” and “everything else.” That last category is doing a lot of work!

This, consequently, is why there’s so much division over the concept of what the “exploration pillar” even means. Does it include puzzles? Hexcrawls? Skill challenges? Foraging? Random encounters? Mysteries? Encumbrance? It’s entirely unclear!

(And what about the “social interaction” pillar? If I really love Game of Thrones-style intrigue, do I have any way of distinguishing between that kind of gameplay and gameplay that mostly involves chatting about your day with Animal Crossing-esque friends?)

To make matters worse, DMs often struggle to implement these gameplay concepts in an engaging, meaningful way. How do you make these elements fun? How do you even implement a “mystery” in a way that doesn’t involve (1) railroading, or (2) thirty thousand “clues”? And so on.

This is an unsustainable paradigm, and worse—an unhelpful one. We need a better way to talk about these concepts.

Understanding Challenge-Oriented Design

Why do people play games?

That’s a big question, but I’ll try to tackle it with one possible answer: People play games because we enjoy overcoming adversity.

This doesn’t always mean playing against someone, mind you, nor does it require facing meaningful difficulty (as any TTRPG munchkin will tell you). However, it does mean that any discussion of “gameplay” has to begin from that core concept of “adversity.”

Games have another meaningful dimension, though—traditionally, games require you to make more than one action or decision, and to do so repeatedly in slightly different contexts. (For example, Monopoly requires you to repeatedly decide whether and when to purchase properties, whether and when to make deals, and so on.) Even games that require only a single decision to be made (such as a coin flip or rock-paper-scissors) are often performed iteratively, allowing players to adapt their tactics and strategy as time goes on.

Dungeons & Dragons is not like most board games or games of chance—or even like most video games. It’s an RPG—and like most video-game RPGs (e.g., The Witcher or Skyrim), it’s better-viewed as a “system” of games, with the “role” you choose determining how and how well you can play the component games within.

Put another way, D&D—like Nintendo’s Mario Party series—is a system of many different smaller games (“mini-games,” if y’like), each of which the players can face as their adventure unfolds. Each mini-game has its own role, decision tree, iterative gameplay loop, adjudication tool, and narrative (i.e., a “dramatic question”).

The number of mini-games—or “challenges,” if you’d like to use a more dignified name—you can include in your D&D campaign is, functionally, limited only by your creativity and design expertise. The two universal ones, however, are:

Combat Encounters. This challenge begins when one or more groups of creatures open hostilities and roll initiative.

• The decision tree includes how and what to attack, where to move, and what to interact with.
• The gameplay loop is defined by actions, turns and rounds.
• The encounter is adjudicated by damage dice, attack rolls, and saving throws.
• The dramatic question is, “Can the players defeat their enemies?”

Social Encounters. This challenge begins when the players decide to try to change an NPC’s mind through dialogue.

• The decision tree includes what to say and how to say it.
• The gameplay loop is defined by statements, rebuttals, questions, and answers.
• The encounter is adjudicated by skill checks and DM discretion (i.e., “Would this NPC find the players sufficiently persuasive so as to bypass the need for a die roll?”).
• The dramatic question is, “Can the players change the NPC’s mind?”

DMs often try to introduce other kinds of challenges into their campaigns. However, these challenges tend to fail because they lack one or more of these core “mini-game” elements—most often, a decision tree or an iterative gameplay loop. Let’s take a look at a few of the most common ones and try to build them out a bit:

Puzzle Encounters (e.g., mysteries or riddles). This challenge begins when the players decide to answer an unsolved question.

• The decision tree includes what to interact with, what possibilities to consider, what possible answers to pursue, and what information to apply.
• The gameplay loop is defined by interactions with the environment (e.g., to find physical or metaphorical “clues”), review of relevant information, deliberation amongst the players, and logical deductions.
• The encounter is adjudicated by the players’ ability to reach a “meeting of the minds” with the Dungeon Master (i.e., “Have the players found the answer that the DM prepared?”).
• The dramatic question is, “Can the players find the answer to the question?”

Skill Encounters (e.g., escape sequences, chase scenes). This challenge begins when the players decide to race against time to achieve a particular objective.

• The decision tree includes what actions to take, what tools to use, and which player should act.
• The gameplay loop is defined by the round-by-round appearance of complications and the use of actions and tools to surmount complications.
• The encounter is adjudicated by skill checks.
• The dramatic question is, “Can the players beat the clock?”

Obstacle Encounters (e.g., environmental puzzles, infiltrations, dungeon delves). This challenge begins when the players decide to approach or enter a difficult-to-reach location or area.

• The decision tree includes what to interact with, which routes to take, and which tools to use.
• The gameplay loop is defined by observations of (or interactions with) the environment, deliberation amongst the players, and applying tools to problems.
• The encounter is adjudicated by skill checks and DM discretion (i.e., “Do the players’ chosen tool(s) work sufficiently well so as to bypass the need for a die roll?”).
• The dramatic question is, “Can the players reach the location?”

Significantly, these challenges can be fractal—for example, a combat encounter can contain a puzzle encounter (“Figure out how to shut down the villain’s invincibility field”), an obstacle encounter can contain a social encounter (“Persuade the guards to let you pass”), and a puzzle encounter can contain a combat encounter (“Defeat the gargoyles to unlock the next clue”). Obstacle and puzzle “encounters” especially can be adventures in and of themselves, with each chapter and scene of the arc serving as a new obstacle or clue for the players to face.

Note that much of the so-called “exploration” gameplay discussed above—foraging, hexcrawls, and mysteries—either fits fairly neatly into these new challenge categories, or falls entirely outside of them, indicating that it isn’t “true” gameplay:

• Hexcrawls are a type of puzzle encounter in which the players are trying to answer the question: “Which hex would be the most profitable and/or least dangerous to proceed to next?”
• Mysteries are a type of puzzle encounter in which the players are trying to answer the question: “Who or what caused this to happen?”
• Foraging lacks any meaningful decisions (it’s a single dice roll), and therefore—at most!—is only meaningful as a single component of a much larger obstacle encounter (most likely in the form of a travel sequence).

Applying Challenge-Oriented Design

Once you’ve got these challenges stored in the back of your head, it’s trivial to incorporate them as components of your session planning.

For example—say you want to create an adventure in which the players are trapped in a haunted house and must get to the basement in order to defeat the villain and escape. This entire adventure is an obstacle encounter, which might include components like “sneak past a paranoid wight,” “avoid a collapsing pit trap,” and “navigate a room where gravity is sideways.”

As one of those obstacle components, you might also want the players to figure out how to open the sealed basement door (a puzzle encounter). As they work to uncover each separate clue within that puzzle encounter, the players might need to negotiate with a ghost (a social encounter), battle a poltergeist (a combat encounter), flee a pack of ghouls (a skill encounter) and find a hidden key (another puzzle encounter). Once you know what kind of encounter a particular scene or sequence is, it’s that much easier to build it out to ensure that you’re creating dramatic, engaging gameplay for your players to engage with.

It’s also helpful to do this in reverse, too! Imagine you’re planning a session at the last minute—a one-shot, maybe. You’re not sure what it’s going to be about, but you pull some challenges out of a hat: You’d like it to start with a combat encounter (to kick off the action), proceed to a puzzle encounter (to bring down the tension and provide exposition), move to a skill encounter (to add some tension back in), then have a single social encounter (to provide the final exposition) before a final climatic combat encounter with puzzle element components (to defeat the boss using, in part, the exposition learned earlier).

After all, D&D is, at its core, just a game. By understanding how those elements of gameplay actually work and fit together under the hood, it becomes far easier to evaluate, expand, create, and enhance your plans for the table.

Campaign Advice Roundup | April 28, 2023

• When figuring out how to characterize an NPC, first begin by deciding what kinds of emotions you want the NPC to inspire in your players (e.g., sympathy, disgust, irritation, or gratitude). Then, work backward to decide what about that NPC’s behavior inspires those emotions, and figure out ways to convey that behavior through specific conduct in gameplay.
• Not every “mystery” needs to be an actual mystery. It’s completely acceptable to give your players a clue that’s (1) so easy to decipher that it might as well be automatic (e.g., by taking it to a certain obvious NPC to inspect), and (2) immediately provides them with all of the information they need to advance. (Think the “Dex’s Diner” scene in Attack of the Clones.)