Dec 24, 2023·edited Dec 24, 2023Liked by Zornhau Studios
Interesting breakdown, my first thought is I'm wondering how many games meaningfully exist with mixes of dynamics outside of the core groupings, and whether there's still big areas of unexplored design territory you could reach just by mixing the dynamics in unconventional ways.
My second came from talking this over with some friends, the split of Challenge-Based vs Character-Based was the most interesting to me because it's something I'd noticed and tried to define before myself with terms like 'strategic' vs 'narrative' which were worse. Talking about this split though, I felt like 'Character-Based' was still too loaded of a label to use for the opposed side: it became too difficult to talk about it without conflating it with the general 'character focused' stance that valued roleplaying and character development *without* being directly opposed to challenge-based game priorities.
You can play into a character's traits and motivations deeply but still be expected by the group and system to make the 'winning' decisions for the sake of the game, tracing all the way back to the classic rebuttal of 'if endangering the party is What Your Character Would Do, then you've brought an unfitting character to the game'. To the casual listener this is still 'character based' play, but I don't think it makes the game Character-Based in the sense you want the label to mean.
Suggesting a better alternative label is tricky, because I think the opposite of Challenge-based encompasses a few different motivations that are all about prioritising the story over 'winning' - being true to the character is a big one, but so is creating the most dramatic narrative (and this would come up a lot in a nondiagetic non-challenge-based game). Called it 'Story-based' feels a bit like arriving back at square one, but nothing that much better comes to mind. Theatric-based?
Part of me thinks that because the real dichotomy is about 'do you make decisions with the aim of winning the scenario or not', the other category is fundamentally defined as 'Everything That's Not Challenge-Based' and can't be put under a more precise label. Or maybe it should just be multiple categories rather than a dichotomy.
Stepping back a bit, I'd say in my experience the three categories that I've seen cause the most mismatched expectations when joining a new tabletop game are GM-Referee/GM-Conductor, Challenge-Based/Character-Based, and Player-Lead/GM-Lead, so they're the most important ones to really pin down. The answers to most of the others are obvious when you read through the system you're playing, but lots of systems are pretty lax about where they fall on those three because they're usually relegated more to GM style.
I'm inclined to use “Drama-based” instead of “Character-based”. A fairly extreme example of this sort of thing is the Smallville RPG, which goes so far as to make “what the characters can do” be secondary, almost add-on features, while the main focus of the character designs are their Drives: the values and relationships that motivate them, and how those change over the course of play.
The Character-Based vs Challenge-Based distinction for me is largely about the game's relationship to failure.
In an OSR game, the thing is very explicitly challenge based. You get XP for treasure recovered and monsters overcome. You are only rewarded if you succeed at these things. If you fail, you've just failed. Failure is a fail-state. An undesirable end, period.
Contrast this with something like The Burning Wheel, which is what I would argue is character-based. Burning Wheel doesn't reward you for killing the dragon or capturing the treasure or anything that external to the character. You're only rewarded for pursuing the character's beliefs, or embodying their instincts or traits.
You can have an identical situation and two different mechanically "correct" responses depending on the system in question:
You are Ser Vhord, the Honorable Knight. You catch your opponent unawares. Lets say we know for a fact you can't defeat him in a fair fight, but if you jump him now, you will win.
- In an OSR-game, a challenge-based game, the system only cares if you defeat the dude. If you fail to defeat the dude, you do not get XP for defeating him. It doesn't matter why you failed; failed is failed.
- In Burning Wheel, The Riddle of Steel, and similar character-based games the opposite is true. If your character had some kind of Honorable trait or belief or whatever, then the system doesn't care whether you defeat your opponent or not, it only cares whether or not you played to the character. The mechanically "Correct" move is to ~not~ jump the guy unawares, even if it means losing the fight. You are rewarded for simulating your character. Whether you won or lost the fight is irrelevant.
Naturally, there's some weird gap in between because there's always edge cases and in-betweens, especially in game like, say, modern D&D where the GM is awarding XP by fiat, or milestones or whatever, in which case the system doesn't seem to care what you do. Even worse when you have a Conductor-GM, in which case what you're probably being rewarded for is "follow the plot."
I see, now that you clarified I get that Challenge-based and Character-based are *both* still about 'optimal' play by that definition, just that the shape of optimal play is different.
I think there's a third style here that I've seen a handful of systems lean on: something maybe called 'Entertainment Based', where the social expectation is for players to occasionally make unoptimal or counterproductive moves, maybe for the sake of making the session more exciting, or maybe for the sake of being true to their character, without a codified fail-forward rule or metacurrency reward. What holds this together is the group's faith in the GM: that they would play GM-Conductor and improvise a fail-forward style and generally guide the story away from a disappointing final ending.
Compared to Challenge/Character Based, this style is more reliant on GM discretion than system mechanics, though I think some games like Genesys do essentially need to be run this way because the experience falters if you try to play the system purely to maximize rewards and benefits. (As a very common example, I think it's a lot of GMs also run D&D in this style so their players can focus less on trying to minmax their characters - the whole culture that discourages trying *too* hard to win.)
Though, going back to the first point I made: I think 'Character Based' is still a misleading name for what you're describing, because it's not clear that the distinction is about the focus of the rules, rather than just the intended focus of the game's plot.
To me, names more evocative of what you're describing would be something like 'Objective-Based Mechanics' and 'Persona-Based Mechanics', which are unwieldy and could still be improved, but I think the top priority is being able to clearly explain the concepts without people misassuming.
Interesting breakdown, my first thought is I'm wondering how many games meaningfully exist with mixes of dynamics outside of the core groupings, and whether there's still big areas of unexplored design territory you could reach just by mixing the dynamics in unconventional ways.
My second came from talking this over with some friends, the split of Challenge-Based vs Character-Based was the most interesting to me because it's something I'd noticed and tried to define before myself with terms like 'strategic' vs 'narrative' which were worse. Talking about this split though, I felt like 'Character-Based' was still too loaded of a label to use for the opposed side: it became too difficult to talk about it without conflating it with the general 'character focused' stance that valued roleplaying and character development *without* being directly opposed to challenge-based game priorities.
You can play into a character's traits and motivations deeply but still be expected by the group and system to make the 'winning' decisions for the sake of the game, tracing all the way back to the classic rebuttal of 'if endangering the party is What Your Character Would Do, then you've brought an unfitting character to the game'. To the casual listener this is still 'character based' play, but I don't think it makes the game Character-Based in the sense you want the label to mean.
Suggesting a better alternative label is tricky, because I think the opposite of Challenge-based encompasses a few different motivations that are all about prioritising the story over 'winning' - being true to the character is a big one, but so is creating the most dramatic narrative (and this would come up a lot in a nondiagetic non-challenge-based game). Called it 'Story-based' feels a bit like arriving back at square one, but nothing that much better comes to mind. Theatric-based?
Part of me thinks that because the real dichotomy is about 'do you make decisions with the aim of winning the scenario or not', the other category is fundamentally defined as 'Everything That's Not Challenge-Based' and can't be put under a more precise label. Or maybe it should just be multiple categories rather than a dichotomy.
Stepping back a bit, I'd say in my experience the three categories that I've seen cause the most mismatched expectations when joining a new tabletop game are GM-Referee/GM-Conductor, Challenge-Based/Character-Based, and Player-Lead/GM-Lead, so they're the most important ones to really pin down. The answers to most of the others are obvious when you read through the system you're playing, but lots of systems are pretty lax about where they fall on those three because they're usually relegated more to GM style.
I'm inclined to use “Drama-based” instead of “Character-based”. A fairly extreme example of this sort of thing is the Smallville RPG, which goes so far as to make “what the characters can do” be secondary, almost add-on features, while the main focus of the character designs are their Drives: the values and relationships that motivate them, and how those change over the course of play.
The Character-Based vs Challenge-Based distinction for me is largely about the game's relationship to failure.
In an OSR game, the thing is very explicitly challenge based. You get XP for treasure recovered and monsters overcome. You are only rewarded if you succeed at these things. If you fail, you've just failed. Failure is a fail-state. An undesirable end, period.
Contrast this with something like The Burning Wheel, which is what I would argue is character-based. Burning Wheel doesn't reward you for killing the dragon or capturing the treasure or anything that external to the character. You're only rewarded for pursuing the character's beliefs, or embodying their instincts or traits.
You can have an identical situation and two different mechanically "correct" responses depending on the system in question:
You are Ser Vhord, the Honorable Knight. You catch your opponent unawares. Lets say we know for a fact you can't defeat him in a fair fight, but if you jump him now, you will win.
- In an OSR-game, a challenge-based game, the system only cares if you defeat the dude. If you fail to defeat the dude, you do not get XP for defeating him. It doesn't matter why you failed; failed is failed.
- In Burning Wheel, The Riddle of Steel, and similar character-based games the opposite is true. If your character had some kind of Honorable trait or belief or whatever, then the system doesn't care whether you defeat your opponent or not, it only cares whether or not you played to the character. The mechanically "Correct" move is to ~not~ jump the guy unawares, even if it means losing the fight. You are rewarded for simulating your character. Whether you won or lost the fight is irrelevant.
Naturally, there's some weird gap in between because there's always edge cases and in-betweens, especially in game like, say, modern D&D where the GM is awarding XP by fiat, or milestones or whatever, in which case the system doesn't seem to care what you do. Even worse when you have a Conductor-GM, in which case what you're probably being rewarded for is "follow the plot."
I see, now that you clarified I get that Challenge-based and Character-based are *both* still about 'optimal' play by that definition, just that the shape of optimal play is different.
I think there's a third style here that I've seen a handful of systems lean on: something maybe called 'Entertainment Based', where the social expectation is for players to occasionally make unoptimal or counterproductive moves, maybe for the sake of making the session more exciting, or maybe for the sake of being true to their character, without a codified fail-forward rule or metacurrency reward. What holds this together is the group's faith in the GM: that they would play GM-Conductor and improvise a fail-forward style and generally guide the story away from a disappointing final ending.
Compared to Challenge/Character Based, this style is more reliant on GM discretion than system mechanics, though I think some games like Genesys do essentially need to be run this way because the experience falters if you try to play the system purely to maximize rewards and benefits. (As a very common example, I think it's a lot of GMs also run D&D in this style so their players can focus less on trying to minmax their characters - the whole culture that discourages trying *too* hard to win.)
Though, going back to the first point I made: I think 'Character Based' is still a misleading name for what you're describing, because it's not clear that the distinction is about the focus of the rules, rather than just the intended focus of the game's plot.
To me, names more evocative of what you're describing would be something like 'Objective-Based Mechanics' and 'Persona-Based Mechanics', which are unwieldy and could still be improved, but I think the top priority is being able to clearly explain the concepts without people misassuming.