Source
r/RPGdesign•
Sebeck

What are the types of choices a player can make an an RPG?

Feedback Request

Edit: great start, I didn't proofread the title.

This may be a bit meta but hear me out please.

When designing mechanics, magic items, classes, etc, for an RPG we come up with all sorts of cool ideas like once a day you can do x, or when activating x ability you get do y action but are at risk from z problem. These two are very different types of choices that a player has to make.

I'd like some help creating a list of some of these choice types, maybe even with some psychological examination of each, in order to pick and choose what to add to my (our) RPGs, as I believe that choice is the primary reason for playing an RPG. (right?)

Choice types:

  • Spend now or later - any ability, item, etc of limited use that the player has to decide if the current situation is worth spending it on. This may lead to the player hoarding potions or ending the day with unused spell slots.

  • Advantage at a risk - any mechanic that gives the player an advantage but increases the risk at the same time, like 5e barbarian's Reckless Attack that gives you an increased chance to hit but with an increased chance to get hit. These types of choices are my favorite as the choice matters every time, and the player has to weigh the risks every time.

  • Push your luck - Similar to advantage at a risk but I think the choice is a bit different that's why I'm including it separately. One implementation could be: PC either already rolled or is about to and the GM says: roll with disadvantage if you want and if they're both successes you crit. Can make tense moments even more tense.

  • Delayed dis/advantage - The player elects to take a penalty now for an advantage later, or vice versa. This is a really awesome idea. Like a devil's bargain. I did read somewhere of a sort of meta currency called "conviction" - when you do something characteristic to the PC you're playing that puts the party at a disadvantage (like alms if you're noble, or insulting the king) you gain 1 conviction (can't have more than one) and you can spend it later for a mechanical benefit.

  • Character build choices - The choices the player makes upon character creation or advancement. Examples include races, classes, backgrounds, backstories and so on. This is actually a pillar of gameplay for most systems out there, it's so ingrained that I didn't even think to add it here initially.

  • Narative decision/control - Either present or in retrospect the GM places the burden of explanation on the player. E.g: The player asks: does my character know X? GM: Does he? And if yes how?. This is the type of choice that empowers players but some of them that aren't used to it may get deer in the headlights syndrome as they aren't used to be storytellers, but I think it can lead to a greater interest in the setting and their characters. See this great answer for more detailed examples.

  • Moral dilemma - The best kind of narative type decision imo. If a big decision point is coming up but the decision is easy than it won't be as memorable. Fight for the city or join the invading orcish horde? Easy. Fight for the city of corrupt slave trading nobles or join the invading orcish freedom fighters? Bit more gray.

  • Broad options, narrow resources - The player has a limited number of resources and must choose from many good alternatives. This may be which feat to pick or which noble house to support, which buildings to build in their town, etc. Very common but easily overlooked type of choice.

I'm sure there are other types of choices but I can't think of any at the moment. I would appreciate any input from the community, and I will expand the list using your answers.

Edit : wow, lots of great answers that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. I'm adding links to the answers that helped me with the list. List updated! Thanks everyone for your help!

Posted Sep 26, 2021, 6:54 AM UTC · edited

3715
tie-wearing-badger•

Just pointing out here that you’re conflating player IMPACT on the world with LIMITATIONS.

You could for instance have a narrative ability (‘you know a reliable friend in any settlement’) that is spend-now-or-later (‘usable twice per game session’).

You have listed diegetic and non-diegetic impacts. A non-diegetic impact would be one making explicit use of the game system (‘Gain two stress’, ‘act twice this round’, ‘Mark d6 damage’). A diegetic impact would be a change happening directly in true game fiction (‘you know someone important’, ‘the baron loves you now’, ‘declare an NPC who can’t act against you until you say so’)

What a non-diegetic choice would look like depends a lot on your system.

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SebeckOP•

Hmm, I see what you mean. But having for example a once per week ability to heal some damage or an NPC you can ask a favor from once a week is the same type of choice of "spend now or later" but one is non-diegetic while the other is. (I think, I just looked up the term after reading your comment)

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tie-wearing-badger•

Yup, you've got it!

I suspect you're thinking a little mechanistically about player 'choice', and thinking primarily of 'game mechanics'. You've really folded a lot of sub-categories under 'narrative control'.

Different systems have dealt with diegetic player choice in different ways. Apocalypse World, for instance, gives the GM a list of MC Moves which are all supposed to provoke players to make choices within the fiction.

From 2nd Ed, those moves are:

• Separate them.

• Capture someone.

• Put someone in a spot.

• Trade harm for harm (as established).

• Announce off-screen badness.

• Announce future badness.

• In􀃬ict harm (as established).

• Take away their stuff.

• Make them buy.

• Activate their stuff’s downside.

• Tell them the possible consequences and ask.

• Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost.

• Turn their move back on them.

• Make a threat move.

Now, some of these seem to offer explicit choices and others seem like consequences, but the philosophy is that these GM Moves are meant to create a 'Moves Snowball', where the players are continually given new situations to respond to and make choices.

Similarly, the OSR movement is very big on given players 'choice', and only occasionally relies on mechanical options (PC abilities, rules) to do it. Whilst there can be slight differences about the OSR 'philosophy', this post on Information/Choice/Impact gives a pretty good overview of how the OSR play loop is giving players information so they can make a 'choice'.

Other examples of diegetic choice would be offering players various degrees of narrative control. There's control purely over what the PC has experienced in the past ('Tell me about a time you faced an Elder Dragon before, and one lesson you can use here'), control over the immediate setting ('What two initiation rites do the Water-folk practice, and why are they dangerous for you, now?'), and control over outcomes ('You've rolled high enough to defeat the guard. Tell us what happens now.')

Summary: Diegetic moves can also offer players 'choice types', but they wouldn't look like mechanical options like a dice pool or roll with Advantage. To some GMs, some forms of diegetic 'choices' might just look like 'good GM-ing', but if you want to be explicit about 'player choice' they all matter.

3
Lucis_Torment•

A variant from "advantage or risk" may be: "sure result or random result" (like pick 10 or roll a d20)

Also "disadvantage now for advantage later" or viceversa. This can be called "advantage for a price"

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NarrativeCrit•

Moral dilemmas are a good one. Both the kind where you choose between two narrative outcomes for others, and the ones where you may sacrifice yourself vs others.

The choice to "win friends or win battles" is easy to miss. There is usually a patient and considerate way to resolve conflicts that is minimally adversarial. Diplomacy is often a long game. It's not always the right choice either.

An equally subtle choice is, "What is the conflict about?" Whatever the players engage with, that's what the game is going to be about. I actually bring this to players attention if someone seems to be diverting attention away from what they said they wanted to play. Example: :If you track down that escaped person, it could lead to something fun, but it leads away from the vehicular combat you wanted to do."

6
__space__oddity__•

These seem to be rather micro / mechanic / metagame level

I’d say on a more macro level:

  • Who is my character (i.e. every decision made during character creation, minus the ones needlessly relegated to dice rolls)

  • What does my character do? (Anything during playing the game, i.e. words and actions)

Basically, the PC is how the player interacts with the environment and the story.

5
NarrativeCrit•

Push your luck. How far do you want to go, knowing you could lose it all?

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Ryou2365•

Metacurrency like hero points is often based on how the players act. It combines two decisions. Often the player has to act in a specific way to get the currency ( in the best form of metacurrency this puts the character at risk or pushes the story further). If he don't act this way he doesn't get the currency. The second decision is pretty how and when to spend the currency (spend now or later).

I really like metacurrency, if it is focussed on the theme of the game. In other words it rewards the players for the behaviour that the game wants of them.

Another decision is every conflict in which there are multiple goals but it is impossible to reach all goals (atleast one goal has to ne unfulfilled).

Pick your consequence is also a great decision (PbtA games use this, 7th Sea 2e is entirely based on it).

How to spend?-decisions: like in 7th Sea 2e or in games with action points, even D&D 1 action per round. You have a limited amount of points to spend on actions and you can't save them for later.

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Ryou2365•

Even more choices/decisions:

Bidding decision: how many resources to spend to reach or negate a goal

Gambling/Push your luck decisions: depend very much on the game. In Call of Cthulhu you can roll a failed roll again but if you fail again the consequences are much higher. In Houses of the Blooded you can reduce your chances to succeed on a roll to have more influence on the outcome (it works especially well in opposed rolls, in which the one who rolls higher wins, but the winner can then be at the mercy of his opponents influence).

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SalindurthasDabbler•

Some more mechanics choices:

  • Character build decisions: Many games have huge choices at character generation that impact your raw numbers which then feed into every aspect of such games. These can be fun in a puzzle-solving/crunchy manner, but can also cause noob-traps by hamstringing your character by making a sub-optimal choice.
  • Similarly, there are character advancement decisions: usually a recurrence of the above, but later in the game.

A more personal choice (this is a bit meta, but maybe that is exactly what you want):

  • What to care about i.e. determine personality: Players can form a pattern (or reject a pattern) of what their character cares about. A random NPC might get a lot of their attention, or they might write a spouse and kids into their backstory, or choose a character quirk where they'll never lie or avoid casting fire spells or whatever, or they can be willing to die for freedom. The players can make up behavioural and mental constraints for their own character. (Some games can leverage this mechanically, or instruct players to care about certain things, or give bonuses/penalties for how you interact with them, but at the core of things is the typical assumption that players invent their character's personality.
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SteenanDabbler•

I see three main kinds of decisions:

  • Moral
    • What is good and what is evil?
    • What is important to you?
    • How to prioritize different values when they come in conflict?
    • What cost of achieving a valuable result is acceptable?
    • What is your responsibility and what is not?
    • How does context affect all of the above?
  • Creative
    • How to express specific aspects of who your character is?
    • What interesting thing you may do now?
    • What interesting arc you may initiate, pursue or support?
    • What could happen now to your character, outside of their control, to make the game more fun?
  • Tactical
    • Which opportunity to exploit or which risk to mitigate?
    • How and when to spend available resources?
    • Go for something sure or push your luck?
    • Pursue your goal now or prepare to do it better, later?
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sjbrownDesigner - A Thousand Faces of Adventure•

Chris Zinsli writes that he likes to think of choices as trade-offs between "good things", things like:

Points: progress toward victory

Resources: requisites for completing goals

Money: currency, spending power

Strength: more potent attacks or improved defenses

Speed: moving farther faster

Turn Order: better initiative

Powers: more or better abilities

Actions: doing more things on a turn

Engine Building: improving each turn’s impact (often through Powers and Actions)

Information: making more well-informed decisions

Flexibility: giving yourself more options

Certainty: knowing for sure what the benefit is

Opportunity: the potential for a greater benefit

Safety: protection against negative consequences

Penalty Avoidance: stopping bad things from happening in the first place

Better Odds: higher chance of success or other good outcomes

Reduced Risk: lower chance of failure or other bad outcomes

Dealing Damage: harming your opponents’ position

Blocking: denying something to your opponents

Secrecy: keeping your plans hidden, maintaining the element of surprise

Laying Low: keeping a target off your back, staying out of a dispute

Self-Determination: control, not being at the whim of the game or other players
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BragorasDabbler•

I'm sure someone will have a nicer way of putting it, but "Can do X (well) so cannot do Y (well)" should cover all the character creation and progression decisions.

Together with your decisions, those seem to cover pretty much everything. All the additional decisions listed in this post either have a different understanding of" decision" or are some instantiation of the above. E.g., re-rolls are either "spend now or spend later" (Savage Worlds bennies) or "Advantage at a risk" (Push mechanics in Y0E).

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hacksoncode•

So... not going to try to list them all, because... there are a lot, but...

The ultimate goal of an RPG is to allow someone to make every choice they'd make in the real world for an imaginary character in the game, and have some way of representing what the outcome of that choice is.

Whew... now I'm really glad I didn't try to list them all.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you try to list all the specific ways a particular RPG mechanically supports choices... most of what you're doing is figuring out what tiny corner of the choice space the RPG supports... which in a sense is a good way of observing the negative space of things that the RPG can't support that it wishes it could.

Typically, even RPGs that have generic "resolve anything" mechanic will have some other mechanics that offer the kinds of choices you're talking about here... which is an interesting space to explore.

But... to answer your question for the basic resolution mechanic of our homebrew, which is: "Opposed 3d6+skill vs. 3d6+difficulty, success/failure proportional to amount over/under the universe's roll"...

If we left it to that, and didn't have all the other rules, it would in a sense be "the ultimate RPG", because it provides a balanced way to resolve any choice the players make... minus the small problem of "how do we determine the skill and difficulty plusses? And... you know... make it an actual game?".

But at the same time... it wouldn't be that satisfying, because it lacks all the progression, skill balancing, niche protection, combat mini-wargame, etc., etc., that the full system has...

I guess that's a long-winded way to say: that's a really good question to use to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your RPG. Thanks!

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SebeckOP•

I see what you mean, but I am trying to look at choice types not just choices, so a bit more macro, so that I can build different mechanics off of that.

Example:

  • spending gold on that cool armor vs that cool weapon
  • spending a feat choice on that cool charger feat or that cool crusher feat.

These two choices above are very different but they are the same type of choice. The player is spending a limited resource on something.

However, -the player choosing to spend gold on that cool armor knowing full well they won't have any more money to payback the loanshark- is an advantage at a cost type of choice(or advantage now for disadvantage later).

By writing down the types of choices a player might face, I can more easily analyze them for their potential for fun when building the rpg I'm working on.

For example: I'm not a fan of the spell slots system, or once per day abilities as my players tend to become hoarders. As such in the rpg I'm currently working on you can cast as many spells per day as you want, but each spell has a failure chance, the more difficult the spell the higher the chance of failure and the graver the consequences. This alters the "spend now or later" type of choice to "risk management" type which I believe to be more fun.

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