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When it comes to RPGs, I am an irredeemable savescummer. I admit it. I'll slam F9 at the drop of a hat (perhaps the hat was dropped as a result of a failed dexterity roll. Unacceptable. Reload).
So when I recently found myself reloading a Divinity 2 save for the umpteenth time in a single session, I started to wonder - in a genre that's supposedly about storytelling first and foremost, why am I viewing botched persuasion checks as something to be studiously avoided? And why is it that I feel totally different about making a horrible mess of things in tabletop roleplaying games?
After all, some of my fondest memories of real-life roleplaying are moments of extravagant failure: sometimes of the bathetic stepping-on-a-rake-instead-of-slaying-the-necromancer variety, and sometimes of the much more grounded, human, and affecting type.
It all got me thinking: how do RPG developers think about player failure? Would they recognise the distinction between digital and tabletop that I'm describing? And can they convince a savescummer like me to renounce my ways?
"Players of videogames tend not to react well to failure," Colin McComb tells me, whose credits include Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate III, and Torment: Tides of Numenera. "They throw their controllers through the screen or flip the table – but they do that because they've been taught that a failed roll represents them screwing things up." This is especially true in combat, McComb explains, where the sensation of screwing up isn't just felt in narrative terms – it's reinforced by game systems that might see you lose gold or items or XP. Even the time lost when you're shunted back to a checkpoint can feel punitive. "So if we want to actually make player failure interesting and worthwhile in a computer game, we need to teach our players early on that the game will react to their failure, and it will change and branch and show them something cool and different and interesting."
They've been taught that a failed roll represents them screwing things up"The first time I ever saw this done well was Planescape: Torment," adds George Ziets, lead designer on Wasteland 3, narrative designer on Pillars of Eternity, and writer on Fallout: New Vegas – as well as a designer on Torment's sequel, Tides of Numenera. "In your typical RPG at that time, if you were killed in combat it was game over and time to reload, right? Planescape: Torment turned that on its head by having players wake up in the mortuary, and characters would react to that. You got to experience narrative moments you never would have seen if you'd just reloaded after a failure, so you learn not to. You were motivated to keep going."
This emphasis on player expectations and motivations rings especially true to me. Going into these conversations, my own thesis was that player motivation may even be one of the key differences between digital and pen-and-paper RPGs. We tend to understand tabletop play as a shared enterprise – our motivation as players when we sit down to a session is to tell stories with our friends, to take turns as the centre of attention, to collaborate. But when we sit down to play a digital RPG, our motivation as players is often to beat the game, to dominate our adversaries, to win.
"Yeah I do agree with that," creator of the Citizen Sleeper games Gareth Damian Martin says. "But I think it's less that players inherently want to conquer digital games and more that those games tell us that victory is possible in every situation and that our power should be respected at all times. And I think that's one of my least favorite things about videogame RPGs – this sense of the player as some kind of supercop-slash-God, who gets to be the judge of everything with no problematization. You're the one who rocks up in town and says, 'well, I think we should hang that guy, not that guy.' And I think my favorite RPGs are the ones that really complicate that."
Ziets, similarly, takes issue with the power fantasy at the core of many videogame RPGs. "We need to move away from the idea that the whole point of this game is to murder 30,000 enemies and kill the boss at the end. We have to deliver some other kind of player fantasy, something other than the murder-hobo. I think doing that will make players feel less 'I need to win' and more 'this is a fun interaction with the game'."
But there are often barriers to bringing those kinds of games to market. The creation of any digital roleplaying game is orders of magnitude more expensive than a tabletop equivalent, and that expense can encourage a risk-averse, let's-stick-to-what-works mentality from those holding the pursestrings. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard a producer say that the player fantasy is to be the powerful sorcerer or massive barbarian," McComb tells me. "I don't know. My player fantasy is to share the spotlight with my friends. I wish more of us had the chance to develop the kind of game that wasn't so beholden to questionable marketing data and that we could make the kinds of games that we actually wanted to make without money guys coming in and telling us we'll have to trust them on what sells."
And so the videogame power fantasy – which by its nature primes players to view failure as a time-wasting spur off of the main path towards ever-greater strength and mastery – continues to flourish in spite of writerly misgivings. "It's like being the player at the table who gets to be the protagonist of the campaign and everybody loves them and everybody wants to romance them and they get all the attention," Christoffer Bodegård, creator of Esoteric Ebb, explains. "I mean, who doesn't want to be loved and adored? But that's why I do view the standard RPG experience as a bit masturbatory. Which is fine – people like masturbation! – but it does end up becoming hollow eventually."
I do view the standard RPG experience as a bit masturbatorySo, if the problem is one of player expectation, how might we reset those expectations in such a way that players like me are more accepting of failure? One answer might be to offer more rewards for bungles, foul-ups, and failed skill checks. This is something that Ziets and McComb both pointed to – the example set by games like Planescape: Torment, which train players that failure can have positive, interesting consequences, often in the form of juicy narrative divulgences. Ziets tells me that in his current role as CEO of Digimancy Entertainment, they're looking at systemic ways of rewarding player failure too. "In the case of the game we're currently working on, you actually get more XP for failing a skill check than for passing it. It forces the player to consider moving forward with the failure, even in those instances where we didn't have time to create a whole separate narrative branch for every failure."
Another way of rewarding players for failures is with belly laughs – the popular 'you sit on a chair that's so uncomfortable it causes you to have a heart attack and die' school of design. But this approach can't work for every game. "Failure can definitely be funny," Damian Martin says. "But I think if you're making a game like Citizen Sleeper, the idea of failure is maybe not even helpful because your characters are in a systemic struggle, and the entire environment is exposing them to risk constantly. You can't use failure as a punchline in that context. You're not a bungling idiot in Citizen Sleeper – you're a person who's trying to do the best they can with limited means."
For Bodegård, though, the priority isn't so much rewarding players as it is informing them. "It's all about agency," he says. "If, as a player, I know I have a 1 in 10 chance of dying when I make a choice, then dying can still be an 'oh shit' moment, but ultimately I knew the odds. Meanwhile, If I just die all of a sudden and there was absolutely no warning, I'm going to call bullshit."
In tabletop games, I am God. I can do literally anything. I can kill you at a moment's noticeIn real life we tend to have an intuitive understanding of risk, of how likely things are to go wrong and what kind of consequences we might face when they do. This understanding shapes our decision-making - you might dash into traffic to pull a loved one out of danger, but not to make it to Greggs before closing time. Bodegård argues that, when his players have this kind of informed understanding of the risks of their actions, they're more likely to accept their lumps when things go horribly wrong. "And I learned that specifically from tabletop games," he explains. "Because in tabletop games, I am God. I can do literally anything. I can kill you at a moment's notice. And we have to build up a social ruleset wherein the players know I am going to take care of them and I'm going to make sure that they are aware of the risks they take."
Damian Martin, meanwhile, advocates for a different kind of agency. "If you enable the player to put their own thumb on the scales in terms of which rolls they want to go right, then they are also more willing to accept when something goes wrong." In other words, some things are going to go wrong – that much is inevitable. But by allowing the player to exert influence over which of their actions end in catastrophe, Damian Martin makes your blunders easier to own and to swallow. Furthermore, there should be some things that are beyond the player's power to influence – hard limits to their agency. "It shouldn't be inherent to videogame RPGs that non-player characters have to be these manipulable objects. Look at a game like Mass Effect 2 – it has this sense that you're everyone's boss, but you can also go around the office asking for a date. That's an obvious problem in terms of the NPCs' sense of agency. So in my designs, I like to have moments where the NPCs use their agency in the game and you just have to respect that as the player."
Power is a word that comes up time and again during my conversations with Bodegård, Ziets, McComb, and Damian Martin. It makes sense that the types of power a player can wield – as well as the limits on that power – would shape the relatively powerless experience of watching your best laid plans go belly up. The other word that comes up repeatedly in these conversations is trust. As Bodegård puts it to me: "If the player trusts you enough, they are not going to savescum, right?"
"There's a really nice expression from tabletop games, which is that a GM should be a fan of the players," Gareth Damian Martin adds. "I do think that videogames can feel more like those old-fashioned Dungeons & Dragons DMs who are like: it's me versus you. I'm going to try to kill you just as hard as you're going to try and kill me. Some players like that, but I think for me, in my designs I really like this feeling that I'm setting up these trials for my players – I'm putting you through failure in order to give you something that I think you will enjoy. I try to earn that trust from the player."
When I sit down to a tabletop roleplaying session with my friends, trust is pretty easy to come by. I think the question for folks like me – members of the skittish, mistake averse, three-fingers-marking-pages-in-the-choose-your-own-adventure book, savescumming club – is whether we can learn to extend this trust over expanses of space and time. That, after all, is how Ziets describes the experience of sitting down at his PC and playing Planescape: Torment, "an asynchronous collaboration". Black Isle Studios may be long gone, but it's still possible to enter into a roleplaying collaboration with that team as it existed at that particular moment in time. "It's almost 30 years later and I can still have that experience," he says, with a kind of fond awe.
Maybe that means that I could stand to be a bit more collaborative when I'm sat at my own PC, that I might try harder to trust in the writers and designers that thoughtfully built the world I'm traipsing through, the decisions I'm making, and the consequences I'm so often dodging. And maybe it means that I might be able to tolerate absolutely beefing it, at least once in a while. I'm working on it.
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