Last week I talked about elegance in RPGs in broad strokes. Today, I want to drill in and discuss a few examples of inelegance. As I said last week, elegance cannot be measured directly and it’s more of a tool of a designer rather than a way to judge games against each other. For example, if I have 6 different ways to deal bonus damage each with variable amounts (double, triple, +10, etc) and I substitute them for “Critical rate” (likelihood of a critical) and “Critical Multiplier” (the bonus damage dealt by a crit) I can maintain most of the depth while removing some of the complexity, with the addition of balancing rate and multiplier as a new form of depth. This is more elegant than the previous system so as a designer it is a much safer and smarter move.
So what is inelegance? Well in this case I am talking about exactly something like the case above, where two solutions exist and one is simpler with more depth than the other. When two systems achieve the same results but one is simpler and more deep than the other, that “worse” system is what I am calling inelegant. It sounds mean, but isn’t actually a crime or against design or something. It is just something I want to communicate strongly as something to be suspicious towards as a designer, thus I am using negative language to describe it. In reality elegance is value neutral. I value it, many designers and players value it. It doesn’t have inherent value, so the shots I am about to fire are not “objective” critiques.
Difficulty
Difficulty in RPGs has a lot of issues. The most egregious is that it works as “Soft Railroading” or what Neo-Trad players would call “hiding the rail in tall grass”. This is done on purpose or by accident to push players towards a certain direction and put your thumb on the scale to make the outcome you want more likely. The second being that it doesn’t do a good job of modelling reality. Locks are not harder and easier to open. They require different tools depending on the type and tend to be roughly about the same difficulty to open, give or take some tricks a manufacturer may play. Older locks were even simpler, yet the most common road block in 5e/PF2e/Heartbreaker dungeons? High DC locked doors.
I don’t really want to go into those complaints, instead I want to talk about how most games that include difficulty create inelegance (again, where there is a both simpler and deeper solution ready made and available). Prime OSR/NSR examples of just this are Shadowdark, Errant, and Knave, but it can be found in more and more places every year. It all comes down to one idea:
Difficulty exists to solve a problem, not to add depth.
Back up a bit, first by difficulty I mean the omnipresent difficulty of WotC D&D and it’s many many offspring. I do not mean rarely used/cautiously applied difficulty. This is even what I would call the most common mistake I’ve seen TTRPG designers making. Difficulty adds more complexity than depth, but was added and normalised in D&D 24 years ago not because it was elegant, but because it was necessary to counteract other systems. To have the depth of all the small bonuses involved in 3rd edition it was necessary that the adventure designers had a solution to deal with a game where tons of little fiddly bonuses were going to be added to everything and would constantly grow. Basically, it solved for the new character progression model and the consequences it would have had on the game as a whole (which is, to me, a sign of a deeper issue that should be resolved).
“So what, they did it for that reason but I have my own very good reasons for including difficulty in my game!” I hear you saying, which if fair enough (again, elegance is a preference, not an absolute need). I would still argue a large portion of designers do no fully appreciate the cost of ubiquitous difficulty. The refrain often goes: But difficulty exists with AC in combat, so why not just make it universal? Because, it is one of the most complex moving parts of combat. Why would you want that complexity for jumping a chasm? This is a good example of addition (of complexity) by subtraction. To make a complex system universal and get rid of another system is to make everything much more complex for the benefit of “simplicity”. It’s an oxymoron. You can’t bring combat’s complexity to the rest of the game to “simplify” the game. Only the opposite works to simplify. Only the inverse is more elegant.
“What if we take the game as a whole? Like you said 3e had all these numbers which added complexity. Why not just do that?” Here we arrive at the crux of the issue. As time has gone on these systems have been simplified and reduced so they are now easier. There are less fiddly bits. Shadowdark, Knave, 5e, etc have less of these numbers, which means they have less depth, but they keep this extremely high complexity tax of difficulty, and thus have an even worse depth-to-complexity ratio than the previous very complex games (overwhelmingly complex to many). This is because certain kinds of complexity have what I call a 1-to-1 ratio. Where for each piece of complexity you add you get 1 depth (whatever that means). Each individual tiny bonus in 3e makes something in the game matter more, that is depth. It’s 1-to-1, more to track (complexity) more that matter (depth). 1-to-1 is a pretty bad ratio, but do you know what’s worse? Removing all that 1-to-1 depth but leaving in the huge complexity tax that is difficulty in your game.
“Sure, but I feel like there’s a lot of depth and nuance about difficulty. Like this lock was built by the dwarven smiths it should be harder than a regular lock!” First off, do you really do this? Be honest with me, how often do you have a backstory as to why the treasure room has a harder lock on it. It’s usually for design reasons rather than actual world building reasons. It is also not that difficulty adds no depth, it’s just that it is very little, and the cost in complexity is very high, with other systems adding as much or more depth with lower complexity. There are ways to get this same depth without the complexity that difficulty tacks on. Thus, if we want and elegant game, there are better ways.
What Complexity?
I’ve hinted at the complexity difficulty adds to games a lot, but I’ve not directly talked about it. Complexity in TTRPGs typically can be seen in pain points, places where the game slows down. Places where players and referees find friction within the game system. Friction, and complexity are not bad things. In fact, it is exactly this use of complexity that can make us feel more zoomed in, like our actions matter more, but they can be distressing especially for new referees who handle the larger portion of the complexity of difficulty. Difficulty adds a huge weight of complexity onto your game. This complexity is a bit more involved than you might think at first, especially if you’ve gotten used to it (which I assume most people have). I’ll break it down into parts…
The first is that all tasks need a difficulty now. This complexity falls to the referee who needs to come up with that complexity for tasks either before hand or on the fly. I would argue that this has the biggest influence on the “Adventure Path” playstyle as it is a lot easier to do this if you can softly (or very harshly) railroad players into a few options that you can predefine and design ahead of time, to avoid making choices like “how much do I want the players to succeed at this… I mean how difficult should this reasonably be?” at the table frequently. Taken to an extreme, coping with this complexity becomes a menu that runs a choose your own adventure book where you can fail based on dice rolls.
The second is that setting these fairly requires understanding the underlying maths of the game. In Call of Cthulhu, I ask players to make a check, they roll under their skill. No maths required on either part. When setting a difficulty I need to know how that will impact their odds of success. This becomes worse in games with things like d20+mod vs DC because the system is already quite obfuscated, now setting that DC becomes really hard. (i.e. If my 3rd level party comes up to this door and I think they have a 60/40 chance of opening it what is the appropriate DC? If I’m making it for a module, what is appropriate for the average level 3 PC?)
The third is that in setting these things you probably need to keep in mind player bonuses and adjudicate things like “When is an advantage advantage?”, “When is a +1 not enough and a +2 is warranted”. This adds complexity, but it can also add additional complications as play could slow down more as people debate what is and isn’t a bonus.
Finally it adds maths. This is (like above) not always the case, but it is almost always. Few systems with universal difficulty don’t require maths for each and ever roll in the game. Difficulty necessitates this. It’s the reason DC exists, is exactly so this maths can be mitigated or built into the expectations of the adventure.
Difficulty is a moving part that is added to every other piece of the game. Sometimes, you need a rigid body when designing something otherwise it won’t hold together. Not everything needs a point of articulation.
Elegant Solutions
I could go back and forth like this forever, and probably not prove my point to people who really love this universal difficulty. Rather than doing that, I’ll discuss more elegant alternatives that accomplish the same thing. For this reason (of wanting equal or greater depth) I am excluding no difficulty. Which is very close in depth, but slightly worse, with the huge benefit of not having the complexity of universal difficulty. This is the roll under system you see everywhere. Roll over static TN. d6 for damage – armour. Etc. Very very popular and simple solution.
1: Die Pools
Probably the second most common solution is die pools. This allows a lot of customisation and fiddling with little pieces just like WotC D&D and an easy way to handle difficulty. Usually you need 1 success, rarely you require multiple successes. This is very similar to the “Multiple tries” method below.
2: Rare Difficulty
This is the other common solution. Found in Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, and Pre-WotC D&D. Most checks are static with no difficulty modifier with some rare cases having some modifier. This allows most rolls to be very simple with the added complexity of difficulty used in situations where you really want it to matter and to dig in and gain depth at the cost of complexity(i.e. combat).
3: Few Difficulties
Few difficulties serves the same purpose, and is arguably what Shadowdark, Knave, and 5e have done as they have removed a lot of the depth from earlier games, they made up for it with less difficulties. That said, I think the best example of this are games with maximum 3 difficulties (not including “Impossible” and “Trivial”, which don’t involve rolls). This could be done in 5e by just making all rolls DC 10, 15, or 20, for instance. Easy, Medium, Hard. Dragonbane is a recent example of such a game. This is a less common solution but one that works as a good middle ground.
4: Multiple Tries
I think this is the easiest and retains the most depth, while admittedly losing a bit of depth and readability of results. Multiple tries allows for depth in a very similar way to die pools. Simply roll multiple times and require either multiple successes or less % of successes. This is used in just about every table I’ve played at. Things like “Everyone makes a spot check” are this type of difficulty. More attempts for a single success make it easier, needing multiple to succeed makes it harder. The neat thing about this is it can be really intuitive (Sneaking in a group is harder, so everyone must succeed in a sneak check or the whole group is caught). This is also accidentally used by GMs to do soft railroading, but this is about elegance. This seems like it could be more complex (which in this case is a mistaken attempt to identify “slower”), but in a system like B/X with x-in-6 rolling a few d6 or rolling a d6 every turn in the dungeon etc is quite easy, quick, and simple.
5: Calculated Difficulty
Calculated Difficulty is a very similar form of rare difficulty, where when difficulty is used there is a simple way to determine the Difficulty of the task. A good example of this is the TN system in Ryuutama’s travel. Where each terrain type has a TN, and each weather type makes it harder one step for the weather severity. This keeps the GM honest with regards to soft railroading, and is generally easier to make rulings on.
Combinations
Combination of this can lead to really intuitive design that feels very simple even if the complexity is really high. The most common one is pairing rare difficulty with any of the other options. Tack on to this something simple like multiple rolls and calculated difficulty and you can have something very simple intuitive and fair, an important part of RPGs that I haven’t had much time to touch on here.
Conclusion
Universally applying difficulty in your games makes them much more complicated while adding very little to no depth (by itself). Adding depth on to a difficulty system is hard without having a bad ratio to complexity. Overall, it is not recommended that if your design goal is to have an elegant game that you include difficulty. This is, paradoxically, more true the more simple your game is. The more you streamline other systems the more this one system sticks out as a sore thumb. It is quite likely that to make a “maximally elegant game” we would always eschew all forms of difficulty, but if we don’t want to compromise on the depth difficulty adds there are a half dozen simpler systems that capture the same depth as before.
Next week, I’ll keep going on the theory topic, probably remaining on elegance if I finish my current draft post on procedural elegance. Until then, have a great week.
Thanks for reading.
Fae Errant 
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