"You cannot expect participants to behave in a way other than in their own interests, that is an unreasonable assumption of the designer. You must account for strategic behaviour. If you don’t do it carefully, you will get unexpected and often undesirable consequences."
Matters of system design that properly take into account the strategic behaviours of the participants come under the term, "mechanism design."
D&D, as a game, is a mechanism — one not designed by persons coached in game theory, but by a bunch of amateur game designers in a much more primitive world without the benefit of quality assurance by others with experience in RPGs ... because RPGs did not exist. Expecting D&D to be sufficiently functional, just because the guys who made it were "smart," is like saying the original horseless carriage with an internal combustion engine should also be sufficient, because Karl Benz was also a smart guy. Yet, constantly, many, many participants of the game fervently argue exactly that, when touting the original models rolled off the assembly line by Gygax and Arneson in 1974 and 1975. Even AD&D is no better than a Model T.
Why are we arguing that because a Model T runs, that's all we need for the design of the mechanism?
In the badminton example above, a mis-alignment occurred between the strategic goals of the players and the strategic goals of the tournament's designers. The players wanted the best medal possible. The designers wanted the best effort from all teams in all matches. However, by deliberately losing a match, some teams realised they could compete for the silver and bronze medal effectively, if they weren't knocked out by the team everyone acknowledged to be the best in the world — who did, in the end, take the gold. The result were two highly laughable matches in which multiple competitors deliberately sought to lose their games against each other, so they'd not have to face best team early in the knock-out process.
Car manufacturing also features two groups: buyers of cars and manufacturers. Buyers wanted a reliable machine that would go faster, look better and be more comfortable; and they absolutely would not settle. Manufacturers who produced cars towards those goals could rely on owner of lesser cars to forsake older models to buy new ones — as long as the new ones met the buyer's standards. Goals for both sides were aligned, so cars grew radically better over the decades, despite the fact that they regularly cause the deaths of thousands, while disastrously promoting local disorder, greed, war, ecological destruction and so on.
D&D, and most role-playing games, feature two groups: the players and the DM.
The players strategic goals are to get more stuff, more money, more power, more choices and in general seek the easiest path towards these things. In the original game, the balance of these were measurable. Higher numbers defined coin, experience and level, while the decimation and effect caused by magical items were plainly evident, though somewhat less measurable. The "easiest" path suggested not dying, and indeed not coming close to dying, with a minimum of hard problem solving — the sort that required coaxing or clues from the DM.
The DM's strategic goal, for the most part, has never been valuably defined. As someone whose written much about DMing, and has much experience with the subject, I'd boil down the general attitude towards the DM's goal as, "Provide a good game."
I don't want this to be a strawman. If someone would like to advance an alternative goal, one that can be pointed to on the game company's website, or any other official source, I'd be happy to read it. At the same time, I can easily find hundreds of examples that exhaustively describes what the DM does, and is responsible for, without a single word of what the DM wants.
Verbs used include in charge, controls, describes, making rules, develops, serves, modifies, removes, creates, says and draws the line.
Not only do we ghost the DM's goals, we're oblivious to why an individual would take on the role. In part, I believe, this is because virtually any discussion related to "a desire for power" must be censored from correct political discourse (see chatGPT) ... but also because I frankly believe most people haven't a clue. Like trying to explain why a masochist would be a masochist, anyone who doesn't want to be a DM can't understand why anyone would want to be.
The remainder — on stackexchange, reddit, in the comments section of the company and those seeking my advice — seem most concerned with appearing or being capable, effecting a game that people will like, finding new ideas to present or just, as I've said, providing a good game. There are a few deplorables who gloat about the acquisition of power. That's about it.
It stands to reason that this acts disfunctionally as a design formula. First off, the DM's desire for a good game isn't measurable in any degree. Informerly, it translates as everyone leaving the table having had a "good time" or "fun," which must assume that from the player's perspective, something was achieved towards their goals of becoming wealthier and more powerful, and not dead. From that we can extrapolate pretty easily that if a DM consistently makes the players less wealthy, less powerful or more dead, what's not being run is a "good game."
In the short term, the game remains sustainable under this premise. Initially, the players accept that they must achieve their goals through boundaries imposed by the rules, where the doling out of their goals is also defined somewhat, and where achievement has to occur through situations of combat and problem solving. Many of Gygax's earliest skeins of wisdom revolve around not making the game "easy" for the players, which goes directly against the player's goal of easy winnings ... but so long as the players are achieving most of their other goals of wealth and power, "easy" can be overlooked and in large part mitigated by a predictable collection of both easily-won and hard-won victories on account of the random die roll.
Gygax was, however, ignored. With the Dragon magazine, a discourse becomes evident during the second group of fifty issues of pushing back against many of the game's rules, asking for additional abilities and powers, starting players in a campaign at higher levels, pre-made characters and abandonment of encumbrance and other accounting — anything that winnowed out player inconvenience or boredom with certain game requirements. In short, unable to achieve ease through the actual game, players and DMs alike strived to redesign the "meta-game" in accordance with player goals. Arguably, this helped align what the DM wanted with the players; a good game progressively became giving the players what they wanted, primarily because what a "good game" was had never been effectively or satisfactorily explained.
This alignment has resulted in considerable degradation of system performance. Consider how it's created an equilibrium. A typical DM knows what the players want and realises that a change that imposes an additional difficulty on the players may result in quittage of play. There's even a resistance against encouraging other DMs to create difficulties.
If I, for example, were to tell you, dear Reader, that you should force your players to use encumbrance, and you do, there's a danger your players might quit your game. This would give you reason to hold me responsible for giving you bad advice. Fear that I might give you bad advice of this sort discourages me from taking such a position. Therefore, I strive instead to give you advice that I know your players will like, which perpetrates the overall degredation of the system. And you, the DM, can point to my advice and say, "Well, Alexis approves of me making things easier for the players." Not only are your players "happy," you have the benefit of authority to tell you what a good job you're doing.
This has gone on for 40 years, with many "advisors" making good book by playing it safe with players and DMs they'll never meet.
Imagine that the entire car industry, after the Model T, suddenly found that the only thing that buyers cared about was "safety" and "cost." For whatever reason, the whole population ceased to want any car that went faster, looked more sleek and cool, was more comfortable or was even more reliable. Maybe everyone in the world somehow acquired this terrific fetish for cars that would break down all the time, were uncomfortable to ride in, had trouble making journeys of more than three miles, couldn't possibly go fast enough to cause a serious injury and so on. This would mean far less demand on fuel, no real change to the way cities are arranged and probably the disappearance of the automobile altogether. Not saying this is a laudable goal, I'm just proposing a circumstance.
In that sort of culture, it would make sense for someone to make a case for what a great car the Model T used to be. After all, it ran pretty well, it got you where you wanted to go, it was more comfortable than a horse and so on. In a world where automobiles made after the Model T ran like garbage, promoting the Model T would make a lot of sense.
This is what happened with OD&D, and is now starting to happen with AD&D. Mechanisms that were, in fact, not very good, are being lauded as superior because they are to the degraded hunks of junk roaming around now, pretending to be part of the originator's vision.
I've never had any trouble telling DMs to do irascibly hard things with their games because I'm of the opinion that if your players quit, you should get better players. My definition of a "good" game is drastically different from that of what was embraced by the industry and pundits fearful of losing their "official" status. I believe that good games throughout history have been good because they're HARD, not because they're easy. The easier we make a game, the less value it has. There may always be people who are ready to spend an evening playing a rousing game of rock-paper-scissors, but most of us grow out of it at a young age.
"Hard" is rather indefinable. If you play checkers against a 6 y.o., you'll find it's a pretty easy game for you. On the other hand, play it against a tournament player and good luck. It stands to reason that D&D, and any RPG, must be measured on the same scale. If I run a bunch of 10 y.o.'s, I can't employ the same mechanics as I do with a group of adults. The subject material can't fit the same format and the problem solving must suit the participants. I may be able to run a more complex, dilemma-ridden game, but my ability is not, and should not be relevant.
At the same time, it wouldn't be my desire to make it easy on the little tykes. Like examples JB has given with his children, possible death remains part of the context and the need for uncertain choice as well. The overall must maintain that the game is difficult to play, without being excessively frustrating or impossible. 'Course, a definition of "excessively" is wanting. Players find it excessively frustrating to write up their own characters, or track how much food they've eaten, or what clothes they're wearing, or accept that no, they can't climb a giant like a tree. Trees don't move, they don't have hands, they don't kick climbers off their legs or slap creatures in the face who have their arms full. It's a little funny that these climbers usually purport to accomplish this feat one-handed, since the other one's carrying the knife to be plunged into the giant's neck.
I do not, therefore, encourage that people should get excited about driving a Model T. Yes, it's an improvement.
But for fuck's sake people. We can do better.
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