is it just me or for an average tabletop player - /tg/

Anonymous03/09/26, 19:19No.97682105

Is it just me or for an average tabletop player, you can pretty much make them feel a game is "fun" and "enjoyable" by making them powertrip and turning the game easy, as opposed to providing a challenging setting where the enemies are tough and they might have to think outside the box? For example, let's say the party is fighting a group of enemy mercenaries. These enemy mercenaries are experienced, decently intelligent, and without gaining an advantage against them like ambushing them or attacking them while their guard is down, the fight can easily be lost. The party just decides to fight them head front and when they realize they're nearly evenly matched, the enemy "controller" is shutting some of them down, and they're getting injured, they start to get frustrated. The game sucks for them. On the other hand turn the enemies in to complete morons. Their archer decides to expose themselves easily. There is no "controller" shutting the players down. They utterly suck and go down in like one or two swings. They don't act tactfully whatsoever and it's just the party turning them in to their playthings. Players are now having fun and feeling like they're gods. I absolutely despise the latter and nothing bores me more than a world full of retards where the players can do whatever they want without consequences. But I feel for the vast majority of people it's the opposite. They want a world and setting that is in "Easy" mode as opposed to "Hard."

Replies

Anon03/09/26, 19:20No.97682116

didn't read but Kal'tsit sex

Anon03/09/26, 19:22No.97682125

>for an average tabletop player, you can pretty much make them feel a game is "fun" and "enjoyable" by making them powertrip and turning the game easy, as opposed to providing a challenging setting where the enemies are tough and they might have to think outside the box?Yes, that is correct.

Anon03/09/26, 19:22No.97682128

There is no mode easier than being the GM, since you have infinite resources.

Anon03/09/26, 19:24No.97682137

How big is your sample set on this one? And what's the (approximate) age distribution?

Anon03/09/26, 19:28No.97682160

It's not about power tripping, it's about being able to accomplish your game plan in a straightforward manner which sometimes intersects with difficulty. For these people, if you make Big Stick Hit Guy, and then the GM keeps putting obstacles in the way of hitting things, they are not playing the game. There is no argument you can make to persuade them otherwise.It's the same reason a subset of players will always bitch about control decks in MtG. For them, playing the game is accomplishing what they set out to do, NOT winning, NOT adapting to circumstances on the fly, just wanting to do a thing then doing it.

Anon03/09/26, 21:31No.97682806

Counterpoint, my DM decided to toss like 25 beholderkin at a group of 3 people + one lower-leveled NPC liability, and even though we were like level 15 we lost that because I alone was taking 28 eye rays every round. That was not fun. I guess it fits some definition of a challenge, but...there wasn't a lot of counterplay exactly

Anon03/09/26, 21:43No.97682893

OP, based just on the sour grapes tone of your post, it would be easy to assume that your idea of a “challenge” is less fair than you think. But I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I think your issue is more that you haven’t yet put together a group that wants the same kind of game you do, and the mismatch between your expectations and the players’ is dragging your experience down. I guarantee you that once you find players that explicitly enjoy challenging opponents and difficult combats, you’ll be a lot less frustrated overall.

Anon03/09/26, 23:12No.97683431

Idk, my table's best session was when we got TPK, but not really for narrative reasons. We talked after about our backup characters.

Anon03/09/26, 23:28No.97683522

Yes, putting in less effort and making the game very easy does satisfy a specific group of people. When you are presenting a hard campaign, you become the computer they want to spout accusations at when things go wrong. Accountability for one's own failures is really, really hard for a lot of people, and that applies to TTRPGs. Another component is the idea that the GM is the adversary in hostile encounters, rather than simulating an adversary. Since the GM is in control of everything in a TTRPG other than the physical rulebook and the character sheets of his players, it is extremely easy to imagine them 'fudging' or 'cheating' interactions happening within the game world. More over, because of the previous, genuine grievances with the GM's presentation of his world end up faithlessly dismissed, as it is easy to interpret any player complaint as 'whining'. GMs can and have structured complex situations where there is precisely one winning path for multiple sessions worth of gameplay, and any deviation from this point leads to a guaranteed defeat for the party 3 sessions in the future like an old Sierra point & click adventure title.tl;dr: Its a legitimate complaint co-opted by the most intellectually lazy players who want to beg for the GM's grace for every instance of personal failure they suffer.

Anon03/10/26, 00:31No.97683805

Are you suggesting that, when people play make-believe... it's for the sake of imagining something that they find gratifying? Stop the fuckin' presses.

Anon03/10/26, 00:51No.97683884

Yeah, that does sound like a bad time, but I don't really have to worry about the "average tabletop player", given that I design my own games. What's fun and enjoyable for me isn't mindlessly steamrolling everything like one of those retarded "survivor" games that zoomers seem to love, but rather the random nature of generating dungeons and encounters, with all sorts of possible results, opening up opportunities to try different tactics, or to decide if the characters should run away and regroup. Any problem I find, I can reflect on, and if something needs altering, I can just alter it without opening a committee or "doing a session zero" or whatever retarded faggots like to call it. Sorry that you don't have the personal agency to free yourself from needing others to have an enjoyable TTRPG experience.

Anon03/10/26, 01:24No.97683990

Anon03/10/26, 01:42No.97684047

Challenge in and of itself isn't good or bad, it just is. A fun situation can be easy or difficult to resolve and that has no bearing on whether or not it was enjoyable. Nobody's going to look back on a game and think to themselves >Man, I loved that shit because it was hard!

Anon03/10/26, 04:01No.97684602

>Is it just me or for an average tabletop player, you can pretty much make them feel a game is "fun" and "enjoyable" by making them powertrip and turning the game easy, as opposed to providing a challenging setting where the enemies are tough and they might have to think outside the box? Its not just you. Don't recruit the average player. A group of like-minded enthusiasts takes time but is worth having. There's going to be some variance in that group but you can get closer to what you want by being clear about it upfront, listening to players you want to keep and getting rid of ones you don't. That being said, it is much easier to start clean slate with non-gamers than players that arrive with hard preconceived desires that are counter to the game you want to run.

Anon03/11/26, 23:25No.97693873

Depends on the group. My players would be bored to tears if I gave them nothing but power fantasies. In fact we dropped 5e specifically because I couldn't meaningfully challenge them and I pushed on them hard.

Anon03/11/26, 23:34No.97693910

>providing a challenging setting where the enemies are tough and they might have to think outside the box? Depends what this means. If you mean they have to make alliances, ask for help, avoid some fights and occasionally resolve confrontations in other ways than combat then sure. That is fun.But too often players here seem to think ”thinking outside the box” means trying to break the game by using whatever items, abilities and environment in ”clever” and cheesy ways they were clearly not intended to be used and avoiding doing anything by the book it is really really tiring. Like it is interesting every now and then, but when every challenge gets bypassed by some wacky way of interpreting real life physics in a fantasy adventure, and nobody gets to actually use their spells and abilities and to play the game, it is fucking annoying.

Anon03/12/26, 02:44No.97694570

Okay, I think it's more of a spectrum thing, I'll play devil's advocate though for 'no-challenge'.The drawback for challenging encounters can be way too long time spent on the planning and combat phase. Typically plans that can fail or succeed based on the roll. Complete reliance on your gm for information that's more vital than normal, and their sense of balance. Ontop of all that, loss ranges to, at best lost time, to at worst campaign ending.On the other side, without simply saying 'the opposite' of the drawbacks. People have limited time or these campaigns, and energy. With challenge being lessened, to a degree it grants greater autonomy, as gms dont' punish what they consider bad decisions with higher 'challenge'. The combat itself, and tactics might not be all that interesting and leaning into it, can feel more like gm vs player at certain points.

Anon03/12/26, 13:29No.97696575

>turn the enemies in to complete morons and SUDDENLY the illusion of them being experienced, decently intelligent, is fucking lost. GOOD FUCKING JOB IDIOT.

Anon03/12/26, 14:35No.97696797

You start off by winning until you notice that the players are getting bad rolls or before you decimate them you start acting like a moron and lie about your rolls and let them win. Comebacks are fun.

Anon03/12/26, 14:40No.97696819

Not sure about average, but I've definitely had to deal with players like that.

Anon03/12/26, 20:12No.97698477

If you only challenge your players, they'll want things to be easy. If you only make things easy for your players, they'll want a challenge. It takes about 14 sessions for the needle to move, and for fun to become boring, if you only do those extremes. If you vary what you do in a way that is sensible, players don't burn out nearly as fast, and a good player can last for about 85 sessions before they realize that you look down on them, and that running the game for them is your power trip.

Anon03/13/26, 09:44No.97701281

I see both sides, easy victories are hollow but not every flight needs to be a well planned brutally fought narrow success. The trick is achieving that balance.My current frustration is that my GM is a min/maxer who favors those close victories, my character nearly died losing a fight 1v1 with an enemy five levels lower. I understand a close flight between similarly leveled opponents, but this late in the campaign that level disparity should make a close fight nearly impossible.

Anon03/14/26, 07:46No.97705812

IDK I've only played one D&D campaing and it's on life support, the group chat is almost dead and we went from one game a month to one game every 3 months, fucking boomers and their jobs and families.

Anon03/14/26, 22:00No.97708664

>Is it just me or for an average tabletop player, you can pretty much make them feel a game is "fun" and "enjoyable" by making them powertrip and turning the game easy Most people who play RPGs nowadays (especially people who are very new to playing) have escapism as a high priority. Everyone has it as some level of priority, but the kinds of people you refer to have it as one of, if not the top reason they play an RPG instead of a videogame or something. The appeal is that they can do fucking anything.It turns out that being an adventurer, runner, or whatever, for the average person, is basically a fantasy of being able to do whatever the fuck they want without having to deal with the social status games of the real world. A lot of people resonate with the first half of the movie Falling Down for this reason. It's why the two cliches of RPGs are murderhobo-ism and critical role-esque narrative wankery.