LOW OPINION: Short-Sighted Focus on Fun Ruins Long-Term Enjoyment of Tabletop Games
As related to the Cola Wars of distant years past.
Long ago, in the year 1975, Pepsi started a series of pop-up marketing events in America called the Pepsi Challenges. The point of these events was to demonstrate how superior in flavour Pepsi is to Coca Cola.
Pepsi absolutely murdered Coke in these tests.
About 60% of participants preferred Pepsi. PepsiCo tripled their market share in a decade, and the Pepsi Challenge success was used heavily in the marketing.
Coca Cola panicked, dropped an absolute shite, and released New Coke.
New Coke beat Pepsi in taste tests styled after the Pepsi Challenge.
Despite this, people absolutely hated New Coke. It got slaughtered in the market and Coca Cola went back to the old recipe.
PepsiCo peaked in the late ‘80s, but they’ve actually been on a steadily decline since. Cola still makes up the lion’s share of the market.
Now why did this happen?
Simply, the Pepsi Challenge test was a sip test, meaning it was purely focused on a single sip of the drink.
Pepsi is sweeter than Coke. People like more sugar for that single sip, but that can overpower other flavours or just make people sick across a whole glass. And who the fuck only takes a single sip of pop?
Even people who enjoyed a single sip of Pepsi had their preferences change because of the sweetness.
The thing that made Pepsi enjoyable in a small amount is the same thing that makes it less enjoyable over a long period of time.
And this is a pattern that you can see everywhere.
In vanilla World of Warcraft, a player had to find groups for dungeons manually and travel to the dungeon. This could take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour if you were going somewhere obscure like Maraudon or Dire Maul.
In Wrath of the Lich King, the Dungeon Finder system was added. Using this, you could instantly queue for a dungeon and teleport there. Players thought this was fucking brilliant, as they would not have to waste time travelling across the world.
Then players, especially new players, started to complain that the world felt empty.
Server communities started to fray, as the building blocks for them didn’t exist anymore. These negative elements of the gameplay experience were vital to a shared sense of struggle and development of communities.
There’s a good, and criminally underviewed, video on this by Jeff Strife Hayes, “Why Modern MMORPG’s SUCK! (and how to fix them)”.
Now how is this relevant to tabletop?
There’s a new tabletop game being made by the Critical Role people, called Daggerheart. It’s a pretty standard fantasy heartbreaker, made to let people do their fantasy shit or whatever. This is not a review or a critique of the whole thing.
This is a critique of one part of it: Players are expected to describe their attacks.
Yes, players are expected to describe every one of their attacks.
Sounds great, right? Dynamic combats, swashbuckling action, engaging with the scenery.
Except, this has been done before, and it is a fucking royal pain in the arse.
In Dungeons & Dragons 4e, the character classes have very generalised abilities, some of which they can use at will. These are your default MMO-style autoattacks. You are expected to describe what you are doing to keep the game in-flavour.
Bards, as an example, have Vicious Mockery. You should actually insult the enemy you are engaging with to keep the game fun and engaging.
I think you can all already tell what happens:
First session: “I shout at him that he is a pathetic waste of flesh.”
Tenth session: “Yeah, I just use Vicious Mockery… again.”
This is something people preferred until a few sessions had gone by. Then they reverted to using the names of abilities over and over, because the novelty of it had worn off.
Much like a overused joke, it stops being funny and starts being frustrating.
The same thing was done in Exalted 2e. Exalted is a naturally high-flying and superhero-like game, but the combats can sure fucking drag on.
First round: “I run across the dinosaurs’ backs and punch the infernal monstrosity in the face, my anima flaring out behind me.”
Fourth round: “I use my charm of light foot and use heavy fist martial arts.”
Unfortunately, in Exalted your descriptions made your attacks more likely to fucking hit. So players were spitting out a word slurry to convince the Storyteller that they were attacking in some profound way.
Absolutely miserable, and made the long combats even longer.
What’s my point?
My broad point is that you can increase temporary fun but decrease overall enjoyment, and it’s really easy to do.
Gamemasters and players get involved and they have fun in the first few sessions, but they find the long-term enjoyment draining away. By session ten, their campaign has fizzled out because all the added sweeteners makes the rest of the experience tasteless.
Beyond the boredom of the descriptions, the Exalted 2e and Dungeons & Dragons 4e design allows the design to be worse because the combat no longer needs to be mechanically good. The responsibility for making the combat engaging and dynamic is now on the players and the gamemaster rather than the game designer.
You don’t need me to tell you why that shouldn’t be the case.
Unfortunately, for those of you buying books, this doesn’t matter to certain game designers and most marketeers. The initial burst of marketing from the few sessions is more important than any long-term enjoyment or the ability to run meaningful campaigns.
What I want is that the people playing games to understand “unfun” things exist in them for a reason, and the people designing games to understand that removing them is not the conceptual marvel they seem to think it is.
Stop removing item weight because it takes time, stop ignoring ammunition because you have to count them, stop trying to act like basic maths doesn’t exist. You are shovelling sugar into your drink and trying to convince yourself it tastes better.
If you have any other examples of these sort of game design decisions, drop a comment below.
The information on the Pepsi Challenge was taken from “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell. He presents it as a failure of marketing, I think it’s a failure of design.
A big shout out to Melan / Gabor Lux. Melan is an unsung hero of tabletop writing and called out the “Tyranny of Fun” (which this is but a minor aspect) in 4e D&D long before most people even began to grasp it: Archived version of his writing on the tyranny here.
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This is exactly the kind of weird cross-pollination that I come to blogs for.
Short lifespan rules like you describe, they're a good fit for game tables who like to explore lots of different games, or ones who just don't play that frequently, right? If all you do is sip, you might as well have Pepsi. Likewise, no point keeping a rule that only yields benefits in the long term, if you only intend to play in the short term.
I wonder, how much pressure exists to play one game for a long time, but to keep resetting the characters and possibly the story? Like with D&D and other "build games" (where much of the fun comes from building and showing off your character), you often see people say things like, "I almost want to get my current character killed so I can try out my newest one." The allure of novelty is strong, and the irritation of feeling stuck with a bad character is one we all know, I think. One could imagine a D&D-alike where the levels are not a progression system at all, but exclusively a starter limitation, like points totals in Warhammer 40k. You would never REACH level 5, you would only ever START at level 5 -- and you wouldn't play that character long enough to get bored at that level. You could get out your best Vicious Mockeries and shelve that idea before it gets stale, and you could stockpile more Vicious Mockeries for later use while you were playing your other character ideas.
I think with the semi-recent popularity spike in multiverse stories we could see a game that uses this one-shot-adjacent framework to still tell an ongoing story about a consistent (or consistent enough) cast of characters. This Bard isn't a new guy, he's just a version of my previous guy, from a universe where... Etc. But now I'm just rambling.
You've certainly got a good point