Making PVP Fun

There are essentially two major problems that PVP games can fail to. One essentially amounts to "being boring", and the other essentially amounts to "being unfair". At least, that's how the players see it. Game designers tend to see it written oppositely - "being boring" is actually called "good balance", and "being unfair" is actually called "dramatic and exciting".

The thing about the two is that they tend to fall along a spectrum:

Balanced But Boring <----------------------------------> Exciting but Unfair


This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course, but it's still highly applicable to a wide variety of PVP games. Before we go into why/how/what to do about it, let's talk about another aspect of games in general: skill and luck.


Skill and luck are the two basic things that can determine who wins a PVP game. They also kind of exist on a spectrum, but only in a strange way. Skill and luck can't coexist inside of a given mechanic: at any given point in time, you're either able to influence the outcome of a given in-game act with your skill, or it's left up to luck. But in the gameflow as a whole, it's an everyday occurrence to see several tightly-related acts, some skill and some luck, all influencing the same overall result.

For example, if you're playing Settlers of Catan, and you have 2 Grain and 3 Sheep in your hand and you need to build a city, you have a few options. You could hope that you get lucky and roll the Ore you need, or you can try to manipulate a series of trades with other players that will end up giving you your Ore, or you might manage some combination of the two. OK, back to balance vs. excitement.


In a very real way, the excitement of a game is based largely on moments of luck within the context of a mostly-skill-based game OR moments of skill in a mostly-luck-based game. For example, a game like chess that is 100% skill based has drama in it, but the drama generally comes in response to a truly amazing or truly horrible move -- the player doesn't realize the drama until after the move has registered in the minds of the observers. But in a game like Magic: The Gathering, the drama frequently comes on one specific draw that might change the course of the game entirely, or might not. M:tG is mostly a skill-based game (though the skill comes mostly outside of the context of a given match, which leads to other problems we'll talk about in the next post.) The luck that impacts the game, however, is profound when it does occur, and that makes the game exciting.

On the other hand, moments of skill in a largely luck-based game are equally exciting. Take Texas Hold'Em: the main mechanic of the game is completely luck-based, and much of the game is played hyperconservatively, waiting for that one lucky break where things look to be going your way -- and when a skilled player finally does decide that his time has come and goes for it hard, every heart at the table pounds, even if they are trained not to show it.


So, back to the original topic: boring vs. unfair. Let's look at a game that was never intended to be PVP, but that players can't help but getting the rulers out and measuring themselves over: Dungeons and Dragons. In 3rd edition D&D, the problem was that the game was unfair. Low-level characters were tolerable, but well-played moderate-to-high level spellcasters dominated everything whereas nonspellcasters basically sucked. There was no amount of skill in character building that could make up for the discrepancy in the rules, and people hated it.

Then, 4th edition happened, and the opposite occurred: Suddenly, in the paraphrased words of a friend of mine, "the exact thing you chose to do on any given round didn't really matter anymore." All of the abilities were so carefully balanced, and all of the combination-and-permutation crap that made 3rd Ed so lopsided was excised, and the result was a game that was so balanced that you could replace a Cleric with a Rogue midgame and not meaningfully change the results of the combats at all. They had fixed the balance at the expense of excitement.

The optimal balance point, then, has to come somewhere in the middle. Somewhere where both skill and luck have a part in the action, where choices the players make are meaningful but the results of those choices don't feel arbitrary.

You can't play Flip A Coin or Soy Mas Fuerte Que Tu and have it be a fun PVP game. The third option is Rock Paper Scissors -- and next time, we'll talk about how to make RPS fun on every level.

The Many Types of Games

There are an infinite number of ways that someone could decide to divide up the very broad category of 'games'. One excellent book I read was entitled "Finite and Infinite Games". But for the purposes of this blog, I'd like to talk about games in the same way that authors talk about types of conflict. Assume that I'm politically correct and swapping gender pronouns appropriately even though I'm too lazy to actually do so.

• Man vs. Himself
• Man vs. Other Man
• Man vs. Society
• Man vs. Nature
• Man vs. Artificial Construct/Alien Life Form
• Man vs. Fate/Gods

Games that fall into Man vs. Nature include things like marathons; Man vs. Himself include things like How Long Can I Stand On One Foot, and Man vs. Society include things like Look Ma, I'm On Fox News. Man vs. Fate/Gods, I'll leave to the religious folk. (I suppose you could say that Let's Flip A Coin counts, if you really need an example.)

Most games that I'm willing to spend long times talking about fall into the categories of Man vs. Other Man (like Chess), Man vs. Artificial Construct (like Super Mario Bros.), or have aspects of both (like Elements The Game). Essentially, in gamerspeak, PvP and PvE games.

I am of the unshakeable opinion that, unless you have a weighted neural-net AI capable of learning on the fly from it's own mistakes, PvE (Man vs. Artificial Construct) games are essentially enormously complicated puzzles that are solvable. Given enough time and resources, it is always possible to construct a 'best' solution for any given PvE game. In fact, it's almost always possible to then create a flowchart to describe to a total n00b how to play that 'best' solution well enough to win a satisfying number of games.

Because of that, most of my interest comes when people talk PvP. Any game that has a PvP aspect should balance every element of the game around PvP, because PvP is interesting in a way that PvE cannot be once you've mastered the basics of the puzzle.

Next time, we'll delve into how best to make PvP an exciting and addictive process that keeps gamers coming back for more.

Aestheticians vs. Mechanics

When I ran my first D&D 3.0 campaign, the new rules had just come out, and we were all exploring them and having fun with it. The dorms were full of Mountain Dew and Cheetos, and we had seven guys, three books, and an epic quantity of dice.

They all made characters, and I gathered them together, and looked them over, and I immediately saw a huge discrepancy in the way that they had been designed. Little did I know that the lesson that I learned that day would become one of the more defining elements of my life as a gamer and an intelligent human being.

Without going into the rules of D&D, I'll use two characters as examples. Both were intended to play the role of "Former High Guard to the Deposed King".

Character 1 was a 7th level Fighter.

Character 2 was a 2nd level Fighter/1st level Monk/2nd level Ranger/2nd level Paladin.

The reasoning behind each choice was clear, coherent -- and utterly different. Player 1 said "I want my character to fight -- and what could reasonably fight better than high-level Fighter?" Player 2 said "Hey, the rules allow me to multiclass, and every fighting class is frontloaded, so if I take the earliest levels of each, I'll end up a much better fighter than any single-classed character."

Player 2 was right; his character outperformed Player 1's character in every combat. So much so that Player 1 objected -- and he did so by claiming simply that "There's no backstory that could justify that motley collection of classes." Player 2, who had never even considered a backstory for his character, responded by asking where in the rules a backstory was required. The argument between those two perspectives has never ended to this day - and I see examples of it everywhere.


Thus, I discovered first-hand the chasm that exists between Mechanics -- players who are interested primarily in what the game's rules require and allow -- and Aestheticians -- players who want the appearance of the game to matter just as much as the rules.

For the record, after seven years of DMing, I'm a Mechanic. And here's why. The appearance of things can totally make something that's unpalatable much more acceptable -- but without a functional core, no game is playable, no matter how pretty. I can't tell you how many times my wife and I have purchased a beautiful and amazing new board game only to run into a circumstance that the rules don't cover in the first three times playing through. It sucks. I'm a firm believer that the rules are the most important -- and frequently the only important -- thing about a game.


So what?

In many games, there are a lot of people who can't seem to distinguish between a mechanic and an aesthetic. Let me explain: a mechanic is something that actually allows or prevents a particular action in-game. An aesthetic is...everything else.

The aesthetic point of view is totally valid, totally true...and totally irrelevant to anyone actually playing the game for the game's sake.


It's precisely for that reason that I've now given up D&D entirely (well, 4th ed. helped)...and taken up Everway, an RPG that is mechanics-lite so they don't get in the way, and actually takes aesthetics into account as part of the core mechanic of the game (the book virtually says "when the DM is making decisions, he should always take into account what would be awesome." -- can't go wrong with that.)