Challenge players to making their own challenge?

[Christian Liberg]

Hey everybody.

spurred on by a previous topic on tactics to avoid, ive come to think of this.

a way for player or character to create their own challenges. understood like this.

For way of clarifying this, lets talk some fantasy. The party in question know that they can take on a white dragon, and defeat it hands down. They would like their encounters to be a bit stronger, in order for them to use all the nifty tools and powers their character possesses.

Either they can try to say to the GM we would like more and stronger monsters, we want a harder challenge!!!

or.

They can invest. invest in any given encounter ( sort of players saying we want encounter to be 25 $ dollars worth.) now the GM tally up his encounters, and discovers that his planned encounter is actually only 23 $ worth, so he adds two dollars of worth in his encounter.

Now the real question is this...have this been done before? and if so could you point me to a game, that has it like that??? even if its a boardgame i would like to see how that is done?

Chris

[Adam Dray]

I toyed with similar ideas in Verge, allowing players to decide how many opposition dice they'd roll in a conflict. It was too abstract. Didn't work. The players didn't like defining their own opposition. Many claimed it was too immersion-busting in a game that was already too hard to immerse.

I think something could be made to work in a Gamist game, though. Let's take D&D and pretend that the Challenge Ratings (CRs) were consistent. It's still hard to match a party against the right CR. It's a sort of black art to get it right. So let the players do it. Let them decide what mix of CRs they want in their next game.

Maybe they have a highly optimized 5th level party. They ask for a CR 9 boss, plus mainly CR 7 encounters, and a couple of CR 5-6 for easy fun. They find the CR 9 boss too hard -- nearly a TPK -- so next game they crank that down to a CR 8.

Since XP rewards follow CRs in D&D, players get properly rewarded for their risks.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Chris,

I strongly recommend playing Beast Hunters to develop your ideas on this topic. I've never seen a game that tackles the issue more clearly and with more care.

The feature I'm thinking of that will be most interesting to do is that the spotlight-player (equivalent to "the group" in your vision) actually states how many points the challenger (equivalent to "the GM" in your vision) will be using, and the maximum of how much for each sub-challenge. It's a more direct, personal, and straightforward application of the Challenge Rating notion in D&D 3.0/3.5, and I think it maps better to the actual circumstances of play.

Best, Ron