Decision Paralysis
Posted by Rob Herman at August 15th, 2006
I am back from GenCon and I return with renewed excitement about both the design and play of board games. Also, I return with the knowledge of how to pronounce famed German designer Reiner Knizia’s last name. It’s “kuh-NIT-zee-uh.”
Two things about GenCon are really stunning. One is the program of events. I’m guessing that on the average about 100 events run every hour from Thursday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. You get a book with a tiny blurb for each of these events, listing the name, location, cost, a couple of codes for suitability (experience required, PG-13 or R rating, etc.) and maybe a one-sentence teaser about the game itself, all in glorious tightly kerned 7-point font. Unless you know going in what you want to play, I have no idea how you’d make a decision. There’s just too many options to browse through. Through my two days, the only organized events I hit were a Euchre event, a demo session for an upcoming Playroom game, and a seminar on game design.
The other is the Exhibitors’ Hall, colloquially known as the Dealer’s Room. It’s the size of several gymnasiums and entirely packed with retailers selling games and gamer-interest stuff (T-shirts, swords, jewelry…) and gaming companies showing off their latest products. In terms of crowd and noise, think of a really busy cafeteria—then multiply the size by 200.
Did I mention I’m an introvert?
I walked through, trying not to run into people. My budget for Stuff was flexible, maybe $100 or so, and I was definitely interested acquiring some interesting gear. But as I walked through, I saw so many things, so many games, that I had no idea what I wanted. Taking 30 minutes to research a game, to test it and find out whether I really liked it, would mean that I could only ever see like 5% of that huge exhibit hall. And the sensory overload was pretty overwhelming.
So when I stumbled out to meet friends, 90 minutes later, one of them asked me whether I saw anything good. “Heck yeah,” I replied, “but… I have no idea what it was or where to find it.”
This is sometimes termed “decision paralysis” and it applies at a much smaller scale too: within a single game. It is particularly harsh for new players, because what you get with experience is the ability to quickly weed out the 95% of choices that are very poor. For instance, in the middle of a game of chess, it’s not unreasonable that a player could have 80 moves available. Novices get lost and confused and, after what seems like too much thought, often end up playing moves that don’t help the situation or are just plain wrong. By contrast, an experienced player can quickly find the four or five moves that are likely to do any good and consider the implications of each of them, drawing upon memory of similar positions or plotting several moves ahead. Go has a similarly large decision tree.
With examples like these, I clearly don’t mean to say that decision paralysis makes games unplayable, just that it steepens the learning curve. Pointing players to the good moves makes the first few games more enjoyable for the learning players (who feel less scared and frustrated) and any experienced players (who have the game move faster.)
For example, consider the opening moves of the game Power Grid. On the first turn, all players are required to buy one power plant. Most of the power plants are shuffled into a deck, but the first 8 in every game are fixed, and only 4 are available at any one time. All are cheap plants that will leave the players plenty of cash for fuel and expansion, and so there is no need for fretting over which one you end up with or fighting hard in an auction. By the time serious decisions are needed, the players have had a couple turns to see how the game is working out.
Even cosmetic factors can help. For instance, consider the little pips on Settlers of Catan resource chits—the ones that remind you that a 6 is rolled 5 times in 36, while an 11 is rolled only 2 times in 36. Is that difficult math? Does it need to be there? No and no, but it helps new players overcome the decision paralysis by driving home the fact that only the intersections at good numbers really need to be considered.
There’s a very similar phenomenon in RPG character creation, especially in games like D&D, where you basically create your character by picking things from lists. Compare, say, Unknown Armies, where you assign your skills by thinking “What am I good at? Punching people in the face!” and writing Punching people in the face down on your sheet. Even though you actually have more options in UA then D&D, you don’t get bogged down reading through the long list of skills, feats, spells, etc. You write what you like and go.
Totally true. D&D suffers particuarly in this regard unless you have a party suggesting a character for you. The flipside of this is that knowing what the GM wants and is likely to throw at you is all the more important in a more freeform game. If I build a cleric in D&D, I’m going to make myself useful healing somebody no matter what. But if, in a more freeform system I build (say) a diplomat while my GM tends to favor more sneaky, underhanded ways of solving problems; or if I build someone who knows how to fight and my GM resents that; I could feel useless during the session and not really understand why.
In regards to Rob’s comments, this is why I’m leaning more towards instructing players in _any_ traditional system to just build combat characters, and specifically warn them against spending lots of points on social skills. Why? Three reasons:
1. A mix of combat and non-combat oriented characters is hard to work smoothly for the GM.
2. I don’t want to roll dice for social interactions with NPCs. Ever.
3. The difference between characters, socially, should rarely be, “character A is more diplomatic than character B.” It should be more like, “Character A is a Cordelia-esque Southern Belle with a talant for out-charming the local money set” and “Character B is a street smart punk who can strike the right balance between bravado and respect when dealing with the local thugs.” It’s hard to capture this in numbers.
Technically, this leads to a disconnect between the characters played and the numbers on the sheet, but the more I think about this, I’m okay with it…
Well, it depends on the game. D&D, say, or Exalted characters have to be combat-survivable, because those are both high-combat games. I submit that no one reads D&D and thinks “Wow, this would be great for a high-stakes social intrigue game!” But compare Burning Wheel, Unknown Armies, Nobilis, or many of the White Wolf games; it’s not only possible to go an entire session without throwing a punch, it’s not even uncommon, depending on your group. In a situation like that, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to say “Well, my character is a monster social-fu badass, but I’m not, so I’m just going to roll for it”.
To bring it back to Rob’s point, that’s why in anything more involved than old-school dungeon-running, I prefer group character creation, and try to tailor the game to the group. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it has better odds, and players are more likely to enjoy it if I base scenes on what they’ve indicated they find interesting, through their chargen choices. This cuts down on the decision paralysis, too, because they can get some advice from the other players.
I read Paul’s comment and thought to myself “that doesn’t work for Exalted… I’m not sure how I’d roleplay out the Venomous Rumors Technique or Underling Promoting Touch without dice.” Then J. Vogel brought it up. :)
All of these are reasons why I’m still very fond of Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Your innate powers and Gifts are so good that you have to try really hard to build an ineffective character. And nobody needs to worry about being useless in combat.
I do agree this is a big advantage of Werewolf, and to a lesser degree, Vampire. It’s not bad in D&D either, since combat effectiveness is tied to level, more or less. It’s really really bad in other White Wolf games, Legend of the Five Rings, Seventh Sea, etc., since you easily run into the situation where in order to have the combat machine have a 50% chance to hit the baddy, the balanced characters are outmatched, and the diplomatic characters needn’t even bother… It’s not really a question of survivability, since it’s easy enough to match the strength of the mooks to the aggregate strength of the party, it’s the problem of having some characters more or less sit out combat.
In heavy social games with infrequent combat, it’s not _so_ bad, but it means the GM has to go the extra mile and figure out what the non-combat characters can do to feel useful during the big climactic fight.
I think you’re looking at this from the wrong angle - the problem isn’t “how can we make combat interesting for non-combat PCs,” it’s “how do we make combat primary for the combat PCs, and secondary for the non-combat PCs, at the same time?”
Consider Shadowrun, and how it addresses the issue. I speak from experience that the most boring part of an SR session is a straight firefight. It’s a dicefest of the worst sort. However, Shadowrun is tailor-made to avoid a straight firefight (especially 4th edition). Originally, I thought the idea of being able to hack an enemy’s gun was the stupidest thing ever, until I realized that it made the hacker character more directly useful in a fight than he ever was before.
D&D has random encounters because every character is functional in a straightforward combat. Vampire, L5R, etc. don’t because they aren’t. It’s the GM’s responsibility to craft encounters such that no fight is a simple slugfest, which I admit is more work, but I happen to enjoy.
Wecome to R0, qualistarian. I don’t suppose I know you?
I approve of that Shadowrun mechanic, although I’m afraid it puts a lot of work on the GM’s shoulders. One issue is that even if you have something useful for noncombat PCs to be doing, it can feel slow or boring unless you get to roll dice.
Also, I think D&D has more or less moved away from the wandering monster tables. There are certainly valid criticisms of the game but I think that after 25-or-whatever years, its combats are finally resembling the RPG-tactical mix they always wanted to be.
Hey, Rob. I’d figured that you’d see my e-mail & figure out who I am. It’s Eric.
As to feeling slow or boring unless you get to roll dice, I happen to disagree with Paul’s “never roll for social situations” rule. In a game like L5R/7th Sea or Vampire, PCs pay some pretty heavy costs for their social bonuses, and I feel like they should get to use them. If the plot hinges just as much on convincing NPC X of something as it does on killing NPC Y, then it should require both characters to have equally specialized skillsets. A combat monster should be out of place in a social setting, and if they screw it up, it should be just as tough to weasel out of it as saving a social character who wandered into a firefight. Yes, this should be supplemented by good roleplaying, but I don’t think it should be replaced by it.
As to D&D, yes, the wandering monster tables are gone, but your average adventure still consists of a series of combats separated by the occasional social situation.
In L5R (not counting Shadowlands critters) or 7th Sea, antagonists tend to be human, and therefore subject to bribes, diplomacy, reason, intimidation, misdirection, and subterfuge. They can be mindless roving statblocks if you want, but I think that’s a mindset best left to D&D.
Even D&D has room for creativity, though - one of my favorite bits from the office World’s Largest Dungeon campaign was when we were facing a troop of goblins, and Geech (a Goblin PC with 15 ranks in Profession: Cook) asked them why there attacking, and they said “to kill and eat you, of course.” Geech promptly pulls out the owlbear jerky he’d made from our last encounter, succeeds at his Diplomacy check, and ends the encounter without rolling initiative.
As to keeping social characters busy during combat - in my last Exalted game, I played an absolute social-fu god monster. Combat-capable, of course, but not especially dangerous.
So instead, I made as many combat encounters as I could into social ones. Hell, I managed to talk an extremely pissed off Abyssal down to negotiations thanks to some well-timed use of the environment, my anima banner, and about twenty motes of Essence. 32-die social pool turns a lot of heads.
Then the Lunar bull-rushed him off the floating landmass and both fell to horrible deaths. But that’s not the point.