It's Always A Design Problem

content/post/always-as-a-design-problem.md

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+title = "It's always a design problem"
+description = "Why you can't blame the player for making your game unfun"
+tags = [
+	"game-design",
+	"fonts-of-power"
+]
+date = 2021-03-30 #TODO: Update date
+author = "Alice I. Cecile & Rose Peck"
+draft = true
++++
+
+As a designer, watching players actually experience your game (or application!) for the first time can be an excruciating experience.
+They'll miss the "obvious" approach to a task, use bizarre workarounds, skip all of your attempts to teach them and then complain that nothing works!
+
+Faced with this, it's tempting to blame the foolish players for failing to grasp your vision: calling them lazy or dense and exclaiming that no, it's the kids who are wrong!
+
+But, not only is this morally questionable, it's a useless dead-end.
+Think like this and you'll often miss both important design flaws and clues from players about how to fix them.
+Try as you might, you will not be able to build a better gamer.
+You can curate your audience to some degree, but, by-and-large you're stuck with them.
+
+Instead, understand that it's **always a design problem**.
+Once you accept this bitter truth, you can start to make games that players understand naturally.
+At its heart: make it so **the easy thing to do is the right one**.
+
+## The Consumables Problem
+
+Let's make this a little more concrete by talking about a common case and how we solved it in our RPG, *Fonts of Power*.
+**Consumables** are a staple of the RPG genre, and see widespread use outside of that.
+In almost every game that they're used however, you see the same pattern play out again and again:
+Most players (especially casual players) will horde consumables until the end of time, never using them even when faced with a serious challenge.
+At best, you may see them used all at once, completely trivializing a plot-critical climatic boss battle as they guzzle potions and drown the charismatic but creepy vampire in holy water.
+
+As mentioned, it's tempting (and often quite common!) to blame this pattern on the players.
+To say that they are too risk-averse, too stingy, or too afraid of a fair fight.
+However this misses the core problem that your players are responding to.
+Most consumable systems **fail to communicate their design** to the players.
+Players are left wondering:
+
+- What challenges they'll face, and how hard this particular challenge is
+- How much a given consumable will affect the outcome of a fight
+- When they'll be able to get more consumables
+- How many consumables they can sustainably use each fight
+- Whether this is the best time to use a particular consumable
+
+Players don't have interesting or meaningful choices, and so they become overly conservative or act randomly.
+
+It's not the player's fault that the game didn't balance and communicate what the trade-offs are for using a consumable.
+As we said, it's always a design problem.
+
+In this case, the core problem is the game's inability to facilitate rational planning.
+And if we'd stopped at "those damn players, not using their potions like they're supposed to", we never would have found it.
+Now that we've recognized the true design problem at the heart of consumables, we can actually solve the underlying issue.
+
+## Solving Consumables
+
+Realizing that there's a design problem at play, it can be tempting to toss on a band-aid solution: disincentivizing the pathological behavior directly.
+You see this play out in tabletop RPGs, where the Game Master (GM) plays a dual-role as a game designer.
+Out-of-character, the GM begs, exhorts and bribes to get players to drink their damn healing potions when they're at 2hp, promising that they'll discover more soon.
+Or worse, they implement a last-second nerf to the players cunning hording strategies under the guise of "realism": explaining how the seven potions they just drank reacted in the wizard's stomach, causing them to take 6d6 poison damage and salvaging the tension of the epic boss battle.
+
+Obviously, last-minute band-aid solutions are suboptimal and often rob the player of meaningful choice in a similar way to the original problem: the players still don't have sufficient information or agency to reason and strategize around the consumable system.
+
+So, what's required to do this right?
+There are several successful methods that we've seen, and all of them answer the core problem by providing the following things:
+
+1. Consumables are more effective when used regularly (over long time scales), rather than used all at once.
+2. There's clear ways to get more consumables, and transparent pacing for how frequently that should occur.
+3. 1 and 2 combine to give the players have a sense of how frequently they should be used.
+4. The system makes clear how effective a consumable will be in a given situation.
+5. The system clearly communicates relative scale of threats and challenges.
+
+### Slay the Spire: Potion Belts and Enemy Telegraphing
+
+TODO: add.
+
+### Darkest Dungeon: Inventory Limits, Purchasing, and Predictable Dungeons
+
+TODO: add.
+
+### Fonts of Power: Essence Overload and Generous Crafting
+
+TODO: add.
+
+### Speedrunning: Optimizing Consumable Routing with Perfect Information
+
+TODO: add.
+
+## General Strategies
+
+TODO: add
+
+- understanding motivations and patterns of users
+- incentives and optimal behavior
+- friction and discoverability
+
+## Conclusion
+
+TODO: flesh out
+
+Much more productive to view as problem that can be solved.
+Not only one solution: "it's always a design problem" is about accurately defining the problem to solve
+it also puts the problem into a space that you, the designer, have control over
+Don't take this as gospel: sometimes players *are* just being dumb. Look at numbers, try to attract an audience with opinionated design and marketing that communicates your vision.
+
+Thanks!
+mild call to action: [GMTK](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8), and let us know if you see other things like the consumable problem