The Delta Theory of Meaningfulness

[icefractal]

The "Why Hexcrawls?" thread got me thinking about this subject, and I decided to write it down to formalize my thoughts and in case it's useful to anyone.
Delta in this case refers to amount of difference, as in - "How differently will things go in the game as a result of this choice?"

For me, that's the main factor in how meaningful / important something feels. Not everything in a game needs maximum delta! For example, a game with a linear plot has very little delta in that area, but that doesn't mean it won't be fun anyway. But it does mean that a scene like "discussion about which route to take, that's IC supposed to be intense and meaningful" isn't going to hit very well for me if I know that we're getting to the same destination in the same condition regardless.

So for IC decisions, delta is obvious - how much actual impact does the decision make? Obviously as players this usually isn't easily measurable, because we don't know how things would have gone in an alternate universe. GM transparency can make delta more apparent - for example, if the GM decides on the full security layout of a heist target before we even start the heist, and commits to not changing it, then we know our decisions within the heist are potentially meaningful. Conversely, if we're playing an Adventure Path and the GM has no intent to significantly rewrite it based on events, then we know there's an upper bound on how much our decisions can matter. Do fake decisions (as in, illusionism, the GM presents a choice but both paths lead to the same place) yield delta? Yes, but it's risky. Because if the players ever discover the deception, they're going to perceive any future delta as fake unless it's so transparent that deception is impossible.

Delta also applies to char-gen decisions, and how much a given decision has depends on how the GM is running the campaign. For example, consider the choice of being a Fire Sorcerer vs an Ice Sorcerer. If the opposition is fixed (due to being a sandbox and/or a fully-made adventure) then this is a pretty meaningful decision. But if the GM is creating the opposition just in advance and adjusting the difficulty to provide a desired level of challenge, then it becomes pretty much a cosmetic choice. Even having a capability vs not having it may or may not be meaningful. For example, being a master hacker vs not seems like a pretty big difference, right? Well - usually. But if the GM just has your hacking yield the same information that (in the absence of a PC hacker) they would have had a contact provide to the PCs anyway, then it's become more of a cosmetic choice.

Delta can also apply to things that aren't choices. For example - how meaningful are levels? In a sandbox game, they're pretty meaningful, because you're facing the same foes (at a given place) either way, so being higher level is going to turn "run away!" into "we can take them" and "we can take them" into "no problem". But if the opposition always scales with the PCs, levels become less meaningful. It can still generate some delta if the style of interaction changes - for example, a 20th level 3.5E party facing CR 20 foes is a fairly different gameplay experience than a 1st level party facing CR 1 foes (although it depends on the foes and the PCs - some classes don't change as much).

IMO, it's better to be honest about how much delta things have. If I know that a choice isn't going to make much difference, then fine, I'll just make a quick decision and move on. But if a choice is present as important, I spend time agonizing over it, and then it turns out to mean very little? That's annoying.

[Atranen]

A good, and imo accurate, summary of an important concept. I like Sid Meier's take on it: "A game is a series of meaningful choices". To the extent RPGs are a game, the players need to be able to make choices and have those choices matter. I also like GMs who telegraph more information for this reason--DCs and the like--because it let's the players make informed choices.

I think one of the biggest divide in RPGs is where those are being made. In D&D, the focus has shifted more to "pre game" choices, i.e. character builds. Your important choices are what fear to take, how to divide your class levels, what spells/maneuvers to select, etc. Story games and the OSR are both responding to this, in different ways, by redirecting the meaningful choices to be primarily in-game. There aren't as much "builds" or optimization discussions, but there's a greater emphasis on choices that affect the narrative.

[NichG]

I guess for me, it has to go a bit further - not just a delta, but an informed delta. Or maybe another way to look at it is, there are lots of different kinds of ways to perceive deltas. Maybe it boils down into three categories: 'you can predict the delta', 'you can retrodict the delta', and 'there's a delta but you can't tell'.

For me, the 'predictive deltas' are the most meaningful, even when the prediction ends up being wrong. It kind of ties to agency - there's a situation, my choice can influence the situation, and I know enough about how my choice might influence the situation to feel like if the situation goes one way or another way it was my responsibility.

The (in-character) 'retrodictive deltas' are kind of okay - you chose to be a fire wizard rather than an ice wizard, and it turns out that the adventure the GM wanted to run has a bunch of ice creatures, so in retrospect clearly your choice did matter - but you couldn't have know how it would have mattered, so its sort of like being lucky or unlucky. But you can't really say 'I was responsible for knowing that there would be ice creatures, so I made a good choice'.

The third category is when, technically, things would have been different - maybe even in very significant ways - but you can't guess anything about it, nor can you even really tell after the fact that it made sense that your choice had this consequence. Like with the fire/ice thing, even if you couldn't plan it in detail, you could know in advance that 'if I play fire and there are ice creatures, good! If I play fire and there are fire creatures, bad!'. But if its a blind intersection where you go left vs right, and the only way you know that it would have mattered that you went right is that maybe the GM shows you their notes or something after the campaign, its just pretty empty to me. Maybe even anti-meaningful in the same sense as the caveat around illusionism - if you can't tell which decisions will be meaningful, and arbitrary ones may be far more important than ones that *seem* important, it just encourages not trying to anticipate things at all...

[Biggus]

I broadly agree with you, but something you don't address is that in practice, it's difficult to impossible for all your decisions to be meaningful in a TTRPG. The DM only has so much time to prepare, and can't prepare a vast branching storyline with all the possibilities fully fleshed out, and many DMs wouldn't be willing to do so even if they could, knowing that 90%+ of the work they do will never be used. Good encounters take time and effort to make, so there's an argument that it's better to produce a limited numbers of interesting ones than a huge number of formulaic ones.

It also requires a certain type of player for delta to genuinely be high: in particular, one who's prepared to accept fairly regular TPKs, and who's happy with fairly regular breaks in the action while the DM works out the next bit. My group only plays for about 90-120 minutes per week (we're middle-aged, most of us have jobs and other commitments), so anything other than very short breaks in the action seriously eat into our playing time.

There are some things which can be done to mitigate this of course: in a world which is already realised in considerable detail like Forgotten Realms, more sandboxy games are easier to do. If it's the DM's homebrewed world that's not likely to be the case unless they've had a LOT of time to work on it.

So while the DM can give you a general idea of whether you're doing a prepared storyline or a sandbox game, and you certainly don't want all your decisions to be completely meaningless, I think your ideal of knowing whether a particular decision is meaningful isn't really possible in a lot of games; the best the DM can do is to make some of your decisions meaningful, but you don't know which ones, thus preserving the tension while not requiring near-infinite work on their part.

[Maat Mons]

Delta can also apply to things that aren't choices. For example - how meaningful are levels? In a sandbox game, they're pretty meaningful, because you're facing the same foes (at a given place) either way, so being higher level is going to turn "run away!" into "we can take them" and "we can take them" into "no problem". But if the opposition always scales with the PCs, levels become less meaningful. It can still generate some delta if the style of interaction changes - for example, a 20th level 3.5E party facing CR 20 foes is a fairly different gameplay experience than a 1st level party facing CR 1 foes (although it depends on the foes and the PCs - some classes don't change as much).

This is why I’ve really cooled on the numeric aspects of character advancement over the years. “Sandbox” games that always scale enemy spawns to your current level. Level scaling algorithms carefully crafted to undo all the numeric effects of being higher/lower level than an enemy. DM’s who add extra HP to monsters on the fly if they’re dying “too fast” or fudge dice rolls if the monsters are having trouble hitting the players’ AC. Skill check DC’s picked based on knowledge of the player’s skill modifier to ensure whatever failure chance the DM thinks all rolls should have.

What’s the point of being able to invest in offense if it doesn’t result in things dying faster? What’s the point of being able to invest in defense if it doesn’t result in taking fewer hits? What’s the point of becoming a master of lockpicking if it causes all the locks in the kingdom to spontaneously become higher quality?

There’s a quote I can’t remember the source of, which was something like “If high levels are just low levels with bigger numbers, there’s no point to having them.” I very much agree with this sentiment. If being a level 20 Fighter fighting a level 20 Goblin feels the same as being a Level 1 Fighter fighting a level 1 Goblin, then the progression of both the Fighter and Goblin are horrendously designed. This is the true root cause of the martial/caster divide. “High level” martials are just low level characters with inflated numbers. High level casters actually have more meaningful choices available to them than low level characters.

[Atranen]

A good, and imo accurate, summary of an important concept. I like Sid Meier's take on it: "A game is a series of meaningful choices". To the extent RPGs are a game, the players need to be able to make choices and have those choices matter. I also like GMs who telegraph more information for this reason--DCs and the like--because it let's the players make informed choices.

I think one of the biggest divide in RPGs is where those choices are being made. In D&D, the focus has shifted more to "pre game" choices, i.e. character builds. Your important choices are what fear to take, how to divide your class levels, what spells/maneuvers to select, etc. Story games and the OSR are both responding to this, in different ways, by redirecting the meaningful choices to be primarily in-game. There aren't as much "builds" or optimization discussions, but there's a greater emphasis on choices that affect the narrative.

[MoiMagnus]

I broadly agree with you, but something you don't address is that in practice, it's difficult to impossible for all your decisions to be meaningful in a TTRPG. The DM only has so much time to prepare, and can't prepare a vast branching storyline with all the possibilities fully fleshed out, and many DMs wouldn't be willing to do so even if they could, knowing that 90%+ of the work they do will never be used. Good encounters take time and effort to make, so there's an argument that it's better to produce a limited numbers of interesting ones than a huge number of formulaic ones.

A small sideline here is that it's much easier to have a high delta if the GM does almost zero preparation and almost exclusively build things from what the players are suggesting. Like "for this heist, there was no vents planned in the building before the players ask if there was vents, and since they ask about it there is now a vent path that is quite practical" but for everything.

But maximising the delta is not the recipe for the perfect TTRPGs. Most players seek more than just "making meaningful decisions". There is a balance with other objectives, including "puzzle solving".

At its extreme, when you're puzzle solving, there is a "unique good solutions" and you're searching for it.

But in TTRPGs, the best scenes are usually a balance of both puzzle solving and making meaningful decisions. It's not just about making decisions that have are meaningful, it's also about those decisions being validated as "good"* by a consistent universe, and the result of the decisions should match how adequate they are to the puzzle at hand (and I'm not talking about riddles, I include here "combat encounters" as a special kind of puzzles, and so are simple actions like "travelling from city A to city B"). And crafting actually good puzzles/encounters take time, and how much player freedom will be compatible with the crafted puzzle is always a difficult balance.

*EDIT: well, making bad decisions can also be fun, but it's more fun when their bad consequences come from the "how the universe works" rather than coming out of the GM trying to make that bad decision meaningful at all cost.

[NichG]

Bottlenecks make things harder. If you project the consequence of a set of decisions to win/lose or good/bad, you've got at most one bit worth of connection between choices and outcomes.

If on the other hand you have consequences with a lot more detail - different costs, different directions things go in, etc - then it's easy to have every choice cause a change.

'What sorts of stories do the citizens of the New Empire tell about your character' is a much vaster space than 'Do you overthrow the old regime or not?'

[Jay R]

It depends on what level you’re looking at.

On the highest level, it’s a game. No matter what happens, when we’re done playing, we go on with our lives. The choices had no effect outside the game. Like watching a movie, it’s a pleasant way to turn 7:00 into 10:00.

But nobody thinks like that. We care if we win a game of chess or Monopoly. Go one level down, and we now examine what effects our choices have on the game.

In the original game of D&D, in which characters can and will die if they lose a fight, all choices were meaningful, and obviously so. If our characters don’t defeat (or escape) these ogres, they will die. And nobody ever had to ask if our choices were meaningful.

In the modern approach, with CR and the idea that characters won’t ever die, no choice will ever be as meaningful as they were in early games.

They can still be meaningful. If one choice leads to enough XPs to level up to a great new ability, and the other choice doesn’t, then the choice mattered – it affected what I can do next.

In the biggest sense, the choices in a modern game don’t have much effect. No matter what, after a few encounters, we will level up. We will eventually fulfill the quest, find the Mace of Guffin, save the kingdom, etc.

The meaning comes on the smaller level – my bard successfully talked the goblins into letting us pass, instead of our having to fight them. I bought a headband of intellect instead of gloves of dexterity. That affects what options I will have when we face the orcs next time.

What you are calling merely “cosmetic choices” are in fact the actual game. In the same way, we could call whether our PC dies a "cosmetic choice". If he dies, I’ll just create another one. What difference did it make?

So the real answer is to care about the cosmetic things within the game. Going up a level, gaining a magic item, using illusions instead of summoning, etc. Those things matter to my character. If I’m role-playing him, then they should matter to me.

[kyoryu]

So the real answer is to care about the cosmetic things within the game. Going up a level, gaining a magic item, using illusions instead of summoning, etc. Those things matter to my character. If I’m role-playing him, then they should matter to me.

I think the best thing is to understand:

a) what it is you look for in a game
b) what the game is offering
c) your ability to enjoy what the game is offering

If you're looking for a game where you can effect plot-level things, then you're not going to be happy in a more linear game.

If you're looking for a game where you succeed or fail due to your build, you won't be happy in a game where that's not the case.

I don't think telling people to not have preferences is useful (though flexibility is obviously good). I think telling them to understand their preferences, be clear in expressing them, and understanding the game they're getting into is a lot more useful advice. And if you join a game not to your preferences? Do so willingly, and expect that some of your wants won't be met, so just almost treat it like a different type of thing entirely.

RPGs aren't a single hobby, really. They're a collection of vaguely-related hobbies.

[KorvinStarmast]

RPGs aren't a single hobby, really. They're a collection of vaguely-related hobbies.

The most accurate version of "a single unified theory of TTRPG" I've seen.

For the OP: meaningful is subjective.

[Easy e]

Sid is right in that games are about meaningful choices. The devil is in the details in what makes a decision meaningful.

Broadly speaking there are two types of decisions that should be split into Strategic and Tactical. Strategic are all the decision you make outside of the adventure, so char-gen, crafting, logistics, etc. Tactical decisions are the ones you make in-game such as routes to take, order of attacks, watch schedules, etc. Both those levels have different meaningful choices.

However, there is a third layer that are the wild card, the "Fun Factor". Unfortunately, that varies from player-to-player AND the players often don't know what exactly they find fun. To make it even worse, what one player considers FUN another player at the table will find NOT FUN. FUN is often on a per-player continuum and it impacts what is a meaningful choice to them.

That is a lot for a GM to juggle, but they can do it better than any distant Game Designer can. That is the beauty of RPGs, the GM can adjust them on the fly to meet the needs of the table in the moment.

[AceOfFools]

…
In the original game of D&D, in which characters can and will die if they lose a fight, all choices were meaningful, and obviously so. If our characters don’t defeat (or escape) these ogres, they will die. And nobody ever had to ask if our choices were meaningful.

In the modern approach, with CR and the idea that characters won’t ever die, no choice will ever be as meaningful as they were in early games.

...

Allow me to point out how old the cliche of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is.”

When my rogue died in AD&D, I rolled up his twin brother (because I rolled identical stats, it was too funny not to). I maybe lost some XP.

In my most recent game, using a way more modern system where characters couldn’t die, a character’s refusal to dump her ****ty girlfriend brought down a thousand year empire.

I’ve read pre-published adventures that included discussions about how to get the level appropriate encounters in without breaking the illusion of a static hexcrawl.

How much Delta a campaign has is entirely dependent on the GM and players, not at all a function of game style.

[kyoryu]

How much Delta a campaign has is entirely dependent on the GM and players, not at all a function of game style.

It's also possible to have "Delta" in various areas. Some people care about some areas more than others.

People have talked about D&D - in some ways I actually think that the increased complexity of builds in late 2e and 3e era was due to the more linear style of adventures that became popular - in essence, shifting Delta from "what happens in the game" to "how I build my character".

[Jay R]

Allow me to point out how old the cliche of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is.”

When my rogue died in AD&D, I rolled up his twin brother (because I rolled identical stats, it was too funny not to). I maybe lost some XP.

Agreed – this is from AD&D, not the original game of D&D I was talking about. And even so, you rolled an absurdly unlikely result.

But without a weird result from the dice, we *couldn't* just play an identical character. When my first Fighting Man died, I rolled up a character with 18 CHA. This one was a paladin (the first one our group had ever seen).

The cliché of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is" couldn't happen in the first several years of my playing – not when we rolled 3d6 in order.

How much Delta a campaign has is entirely dependent on the GM and players, not at all a function of game style.

It is now, yes. But in original D&D, character death was a possible result of the PC's actions. And so those actions were inherently meaningful. I know exactly what stupid choice led to the death of my thief Luthor.

---

On a separate issue, I like Sid Meier’s definition of a game as a series of meaningful choices. It fits the game theory definition I studied in math. But we need to be precise in what we think of as “meaningful”. It’s not merely that the choice has an effect, but also that the choice had clear meaning to the player when chosen.

Suppose the GM tells you that your PC has two levers in front of her. Pulling one of them will kill your PC, allowing the great evil wizard to take over the kingdom. The other lever will defeat the wizard, allowing you to have all his treasure, to save the kingdom, and to be proclaimed the Great Hero of the Age. But you don’t know which is which.

This effect of this choice is meaningful, in the sense that it will affect the game situation. But the choice is not meaningful.

By contrast, suppose your character can buy a wand of either magic missiles or grease. In the long run, it will make very little difference on the game world – probably none. In either case, you will defeat the orcs and get the treasure. But how you do it – what actions you take in the battle – will be greatly affected. If you know which wand is which, then this is a meaningful choice.

[Atranen]

People have talked about D&D - in some ways I actually think that the increased complexity of builds in late 2e and 3e era was due to the more linear style of adventures that became popular - in essence, shifting Delta from "what happens in the game" to "how I build my character".

Yeah. Which way do you think this operated? More complex builds --> less comfort with character death --> more linear gameplay, or more linear gameplay --> less meaningful in game choices --> a new focus on builds?

Agreed – this is from AD&D, not the original game of D&D I was talking about. And even so, you rolled an absurdly unlikely result.

But without a weird result from the dice, we *couldn't* just play an identical character. When my first Fighting Man died, I rolled up a character with 18 CHA. This one was a paladin (the first one our group had ever seen).

The cliché of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is" couldn't happen in the first several years of my playing – not when we rolled 3d6 in order.

Agreed. The more lethal games I've played in don't have this issue, and all of the characters feel unique; randomized generation does a lot. If this is happening, it may be a mis match between what the players want (persistent characters) and the game structure.

On a separate issue, I like Sid Meier’s definition of a game as a series of meaningful choices. It fits the game theory definition I studied in math. But we need to be precise in what we think of as “meaningful”. It’s not merely that the choice has an effect, but also that the choice had clear meaning to the player when chosen.

I also agree this is very important. Imo, DMs should be very generous with the information they give players, either about the description of the world, the difficulty of certain tasks (by giving DCs often), how much health enemies have, and the like, so that players can make informed choices.

[NichG]

I don't agree that character death is what inherently makes things meaningful.

I mean, if we're talking AD&D, I was in an AD&D campaign where one of the players lost their character literally before they had a chance to do anything - rolled it up, joined our group, we had a random wilderness encounter, an enemy that won initiative one-shotted them.

I'd say that living with the consequences of your decisions has a lot more potential to support meaning. That can mean you the player living with the consequence of not being able to play a character you liked, sure. But it can also mean, e.g., spending the next 6 sessions in a regency romance politics arc rather than fighting a dinosaur army. Or a wilderness arc where there will be no shopping for anything for the next 3 months of real time - a choice whose consequences will transcend character death since it'd be as true for a newly introduced replacement character as your veterans.

The Wand of Grease vs Wand of Magic Missiles thing is like that. What makes it meaningful is that you're going to spend the next several months of the campaign viewing encounters from the point of view of 'can I solve this with Grease?' versus the point of view of 'can I solve this with Magic Missile?', at least a little bit. If you like the feeling of trying to figure out weird ways to use Grease to resolve things, versus the more direct 'add damage to things until they die' of Magic Missile, then it's going to matter a lot to you that you committed to one path versus the other.

And it could be a visible choice if and when you go back and tell the story of that campaign. That storytelling isn't just going to be 'we won', its going to be the bits you personally thought were cool or surprising or revelatory or funny. 'Remember that time we Greased the ropes on a pirate ship and half of their boarders fell into the water before they could get to our ship?'. The specifics of what people find meaningful will vary from person to person, sure. But there is still a commonality that if each person went back and told the story of what they remember of the campaign, the meaningful choices were the ones that let that person recognize their own place in that story - the stuff where the story would have been different (in the way the person cares about) if it had been some other player playing through it.

[KorvinStarmast]

It is now, yes. But in original D&D, character death was a possible result of the PC's actions. And so those actions were inherently meaningful.

So were the choices that went into "he we got to the third level of the dungeon, and out again, without dying. The HOW was the fun. (As was the bit of luck sometimes needed).

By contrast, suppose your character can buy a wand of either magic missiles or grease. In the long run, it will make very little difference on the game world – probably none. In either case, you will defeat the orcs and get the treasure. But how you do it – what actions you take in the battle – will be greatly affected. If you know which wand is which, then this is a meaningful choice.

We have a winner. The how is what makes each party's story unique.

I don't agree that character death is what inherently makes things meaningful.

It is one of the things that does, not the only thing that does.

Heh, original Traveler: combat could make you reach for that next index card with the back up character on it ...

[kyoryu]

Yeah. Which way do you think this operated? More complex builds --> less comfort with character death --> more linear gameplay, or more linear gameplay --> less meaningful in game choices --> a new focus on builds?

Given that Dragonlance kinda started the switch during the AD&D timeline, I'm pretty sure it's the latter. At least in D&D-land.

Also, I think that led to a lowered comfort with character death - when you've got a single party with 4-6 people, it's different than when you've got 20 or so occasional players, each of whom might have a half dozen characters.

The analogy I usually use is that losing a character in an open table game is kinda like losing a soldier in XCOM, while losing one in a long-term story campaign is more like deleting your Skyrim save. The first can suck. The second SUCKS.

Agreed. The more lethal games I've played in don't have this issue, and all of the characters feel unique; randomized generation does a lot. If this is happening, it may be a mis match between what the players want (persistent characters) and the game structure.

Most lethal games call back to old-school games in some way, and those have a much greater emphasis on "dealing with what you've been given" as opposed to "designing the perfect thing". They're two different playstyles, and are both pretty fun if done right.

See again: RPGs are not a single hobby.

I also agree this is very important. Imo, DMs should be very generous with the information they give players, either about the description of the world, the difficulty of certain tasks (by giving DCs often), how much health enemies have, and the like, so that players can make informed choices.

Absolutely. Players making informed choices (which may have downsides that they know about) is to me a lot more interesting than players bumbling about trying not to step on land mines.

[NichG]

It is one of the things that does, not the only thing that does.

Heh, original Traveler: combat could make you reach for that next index card with the back up character on it ...

My point is that intensifying the valence of a consequence has diminishing returns compared to enriching the space of possible consequences. Once someone already feels a consequence is meaningful, intensifying the consequence further doesn't actually increase the meaningfulness anymore. Win/lose, die/live can be very intense but they're still only one bit worth of information. And the nature of something like character death as the go-to consequence has a tendency to render lots of other past decisions meaningless, because it's a bottleneck that discards any information that was associated with the character.

So if someone wanted to make their campaign have more meaningful delta, I wouldn't recommend 'just make it more lethal!'. Instead I'd recommend that the GM pay more careful attention to how things get resolved over whether things get resolved, and act to keep the details of the 'how' relevant. If you killed the invading orc army with fireballs, NPCs remember that - someone shows up asking to be the party wizard's apprentice because of how cool it was when the wizard smoked those orcs, etc. If someone took a heavy hit and kept on fighting, NPCs comment on that, tell the story, maybe that PC gets offered a knighthood, maybe a wandering warrior shows up to challenge that PC to a test of endurance or bravery or whatever, etc.

Doesn't even have to be an 'encounter'. The PCs are entering a city and there are a handful of NPCs around involved in various activities - someone is being harassed by a guard, someone else seems to be running a three-card monty scam, there's someone who seems lost, etc. Don't try to make any of them critical to the 'plot', but if the PCs do choose one to get involved in, the NPC might become a recurring contact or friend or rival - or not - who not only just has interactions and is around but might be the way the PCs end up having a chance to get involved in this or that side-adventure. Make it so that noticing things, choosing between things to do and ways to approach people, etc all have long-term consequences. Not in the 'character dies' sense, but in the sense of shaping what the campaign will look like in 10 sessions.

If you make a habit of caring about the details rather than having the world aggressively summarize things down into 'we won' or 'we lost' and make sure that habit comes across to the players then you're creating lots of opportunities for the story to diverge, and you're creating a table culture where players can expect that some offhand comment or detail or interaction could actually matter. And that will also help your players start caring about remembering those things, which in turn will gradually grow their ability to find more and more things meaningful. Not even just in an aesthetic sense, but in the sense of understanding that choosing to be polite or brusque or aggressive or seductive or whatever to a tavern keeper is actually something that isn't just going to be forgotten when the scene ends.

[KorvinStarmast]

Nick, that's a lot of words.

The how is what makes each party's story unique.

same goes for "the how" making each PC's story/journey unique.

Doesn't even have to be an 'encounter'

Concur. It's a matter of interacting with the imaginary world.

[AceOfFools]

Having thought about it, high lethality is probably bad for Delta; at least how high lethality works in my limited experience with the old DnD editions and OSR games.

If a single bad roll in combat can kill you, you might have the massive and irreversible consequence of death as a result of no choice of their own. I know two people from different states whose parents’ lost a character to surprise beholder ambush. The only choice they made was “Yes, GM, I would like to play your game.”

Or you could do everything possible, and still die. I had a 3.5 rogue participate in a surprise ambush on a beholder, fight defensively with save-boosting buffs, and still get petrified by a pair of unlucky rolls. If the adventure hadn’t deliberately included “fix petrification” scrolls as loot, it would have been permanent. “Do we fight the boss monster actively working to destroy the world?” isn’t a meaningful choice in a DnD game. We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world. We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled.

[KorvinStarmast]

We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world.

Or die trying. That is the narrative tension present in a lot of stories and movies and comics and TV shows: that going out to save the world may get you killed.
a. The movie Armageddon (1998) for another example of "the protagonist dies" (or one of them does, in any case).
b. Wash in Serinity is but one example of "dead" in what was something like a Traveler based kind of adventure Traveler, original, was quite Old School in its framing.
c. One of the things that I liked about Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire (the books) is that 'heroes' and major characters get killed along the way (albeit quite a few of the heroes are something less than heroic).

We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled.

Without the chance of failure, there is no success.
Sun Tzu once wrote: the acme of skill is to win without fighting. (Or something very close to that).

"The heroes are guaranteed to win" is a story, I suppose, but it's a story that lacks tension and (perhaps) meaning.

[NichG]

In all my recent campaigns there's always been at least one conversation of the form 'what does victory look like to us?'. The heroes can be guaranteed to win, but defining the shape of that win can be harder than actually executing it. So the tension and surprise is in seeing how the journey towards that win shapes different characters' views on what the world should look like in the aftermath.

E.g. in the current campaign that 'win' looks like one of the characters being the head of a media empire, another character implementing psychic machinery that lets the wronged dead can exact karmic retribution against societal structures that led to that harm, and the third character wants to officially be recognized as the rightful owner of the moon.

[kyoryu]

Having thought about it, high lethality is probably bad for Delta; at least how high lethality works in my limited experience with the old DnD editions and OSR games.

If a single bad roll in combat can kill you, you might have the massive and irreversible consequence of death as a result of no choice of their own. I know two people from different states whose parents’ lost a character to surprise beholder ambush. The only choice they made was “Yes, GM, I would like to play your game.”

Or you could do everything possible, and still die. I had a 3.5 rogue participate in a surprise ambush on a beholder, fight defensively with save-boosting buffs, and still get petrified by a pair of unlucky rolls. If the adventure hadn’t deliberately included “fix petrification” scrolls as loot, it would have been permanent. “Do we fight the boss monster actively working to destroy the world?” isn’t a meaningful choice in a DnD game. We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world. We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled.

I don't know that high lethality is bad for Delta V (getting beyond the "failure doesn't have to mean death" discussion). What's important is that failure/death be, at some level, the result of decisions made, and preferably the result of multiple decisions made.

If you make a decision to charge a group of enemies by yourself, get beat up, refuse to retreat, and finally get killed? I find that perfectly in line with Delta V. If you're walking along in "cut scene time", there's an ambush that you had no ability to avoid, you roll for surprise and lose, the enemy takes their shot and kills you, that absolutely screws with Delta V. There's a result there that was not really a result of any decision you made.

I mean, this really kinda all boils down to "decisions should have consequences". And those should be positive as well as negative. But negative consequences, especially, must be the result of decisions..

So it's really two rules, put together.

1. Decisions should have consequences
2. Consequences (especially negative) should be the result of decisions.

Either way can be a recipe for failure. Being clear about where the players can have meaningful decisions (aka ones with consequences) is also a useful step.

[Atranen]

Having thought about it, high lethality is probably bad for Delta; at least how high lethality works in my limited experience with the old DnD editions and OSR games.

If a single bad roll in combat can kill you, you might have the massive and irreversible consequence of death as a result of no choice of their own. I know two people from different states whose parents’ lost a character to surprise beholder ambush. The only choice they made was “Yes, GM, I would like to play your game.”

Or you could do everything possible, and still die. I had a 3.5 rogue participate in a surprise ambush on a beholder, fight defensively with save-boosting buffs, and still get petrified by a pair of unlucky rolls. If the adventure hadn’t deliberately included “fix petrification” scrolls as loot, it would have been permanent. “Do we fight the boss monster actively working to destroy the world?” isn’t a meaningful choice in a DnD game. We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world. We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled.

It depends what you mean by high lethality. It depends on the kind of campaign. For more narrative, I like PC deaths every ~10 sessions, while for games with "character stables" about twice as often. The point is for 1) the players to know the threat of death is real without 2) death occuring so often as to cut the dramatic tension.

The "surprise beholder ambush" doesn't feel great to me. The rogue dying does; they played well, but made the choice to fight against a beholder. I think that kind of fight should always have the threat of death.

[Ixtellor]

Read lots of good answers.

1) If characters can't die, then their choices are already limited. If players know they can't really die, then they will gladly charge into death. Having enemies that can 1 shot you before you can react is not going to make the game fun or promote agency. In the OG days when you rolled up the elf with 1 hit point... it never really resulted in a fun game. Most groups/DM'
s learned how to fix this, to remove the 'high lethality'. But lethality HAS to be on the table. Or you get the "You find a bottle labeled 'Poison'. Your player declares "I drink it all down" because you taught them their choices don't actually matter. Kyorya nailed this answer earlier.

2) NichG, nailed it. You can have 'encounters' that don't seem like they have meaning, but a good DM can make that choice matter in the future. IE You helped a merchant repair his wagon and load up his goods after an accident --- that merchant or his kin can make an appearance at any point in the future, and like good fantasy writers, the merchant can show up when it matters. (Billion examples --- Youre being chased by a thieves guild through a busy city, the merchant recognized you from long ago and offers you a place to hide, then convinces the thieves you aren't there, etc) There are lots of ways to escape a chase, but using the old choices just makes the 'story' more alive and interesting.

3) I'm an old guy, high school teacher, and I have students that play. They all play the railroad story line version of D&D.
I just think your not going to get into the depth RPG have to offer if you stay at this level. I'd say play World of Warcraft if thats your thing. RPG's have the ability to invoke strong and very memorable emotions once you move away from the story/puzzle game version of RPG's.

[icefractal]

To answer what a number of people have mentioned - no, I don't think every aspect of a game needs maximum delta. I was thinking about "how much delta is enough?" and came to the conclusion that (for me) it's about total delta vs total effort.

So all of these are fine by me:
* A game where there's little mechanical delta, but the IC decisions you make are important and change the path of the story considerably.
* A game where the plot is pretty linear, but the mechanics have plenty of delta and the opposition doesn't auto-scale, so you can consider the whole thing as a challenge (this is how I'd consider most PF1 adventure paths, IME).
* A game where there's not much delta (IC or mechanically) but it's also low-effort - easy char-gen, no need to go try-hard mode in battle, RP leans more light with no expectation of stress bleed.

But this would be like kryptonite:
* A game where the plot is pretty linear, mechanics are constrained so you can't 'get ahead' at all but still requires significant focus while playing, and the RP is serious with a lot of stress involved IC and likely bleed.

Now I'm sure some people are reading that last description and thinking "What's the problem? Sounds like a fine game to me." Obviously YMMV on what's important. But that's where my thinking's at.

[KorvinStarmast]

In all my recent campaigns there's always been at least one conversation of the form 'what does victory look like to us?'. The heroes can be guaranteed to win, but defining the shape of that win can be harder than actually executing it. So the tension and surprise is in seeing how the journey towards that win shapes different characters' views on what the world should look like in the aftermath.

It for sure can work that way, yes, and in this case system will matter quite a bit.

3) I'm an old guy, high school teacher, and I have students that play. They all play the railroad story line version of D&D. I just think your not going to get into the depth RPG have to offer if you stay at this level. I'd say play World of Warcraft if thats your thing.

Yes.
It is no accident, though, that plenty of modern players do come to the hobby from something like WoW, and they bring their assumptions with them.

I was thinking about "how much delta is enough?" and came to the conclusion that (for me) it's about total delta vs total effort.

Nice all around post, +1.

[Duff]

It is now, yes. But in original D&D, character death was a possible result of the PC's actions. And so those actions were inherently meaningful. I know exactly what stupid choice led to the death of my thief Luthor. .

An observatin - The 5e game I'm currently in had 3/5 of the party die at 3rd level when our cleric followed my bard into the spiritual guardians of the enmey cleric.
My tabaxi bard had the speed to get back out again and the cleric did not. Monk down, cleric down and one round later the fighter's down as well. I run away from the zombie, the other monk runs off in the other direction and we meet back in town to form a new party.

Death is still on the table.
And if it's present but rare, then it means more when it does come up