The Most Challenging Thing

Goal: To understand the purposes served by including challenges in LIS10, and how to distinguish which ones we would personally prefer to prioritise.

This time we're getting into something more overtly actionable for your LIS10, designing and measuring challenges!

This is perhaps the most obvious staple of LIS10 and TTRPGs, other than the storytelling itself, is the moment of challenge, an opportunity for something to succeed or fail. 

But before we start throwing numbers around and creating systems, let's try to understand what problems these challenges exist to solve. That way we can determine whether or not they're the best solution for our purposes.

Why Do We Need Challenges?

Typically in LIS10, one person is the storyteller, the final word of what is or is not actually happening in the story. It is up to this person to listen to whatever information, requests, or prompts are thrown their way, and to then respond with a certainty - the best possible outcome assembled from all of those suggestions.

You've probably already spotted the issue, "best" is a tricky word in anything collaborative. Is it the most entertaining, the most logical, the most consistent, the most marketable, or just the most recent? What's best in one circumstance won't necessarily be the case anywhere else.

What if there's a disagreement on what is "best", or one of the collaborators feel that their ideas are never fairly considered? Or what if everyone can agree... that there is no best answer?

The Impartial Decider

That is what can be provided by challenges, whether there's no consensus, or no preference, through a challenge we can find, and agree upon, a direction.

But what form should this challenge take, and how do we conceive of something fair, a solution that's acceptable to everyone involved? 

Let's look at the requirements.

At the most basic abstracted level, a challenge is a fork in the road, a dilemma, does the door open or stay closed. As a programmer would say, it's a boolean, 1 or 0, true or false. But as storytellers, we can just say "success" or "failure".

So what are your suggestions? How would you impartially solve for a success or failure?

Steeped in Bias

As simple as that question might sound, we're already beyond the realm of pure mathematics and probability. Whatever solution we pick will be imparting so much more than the "success"/"failure" result itself.

What impression, what feeling does it impart? How transparent are its inner workings? Are those two outcomes equally likely? How much agency do the collaborators feel they have over the process? How familiar, alien, or time consuming are the steps involved?

It's easy to ignore these questions and just flip a coin, but by giving some consideration here we can identify a far more appealing and appropriate solution bespoke to our needs.

Considering The Standards

Rock Paper Scissors decides success or failure and doesn't even require any props! But what else does it bring along? How does Rock Paper Scissors make you feel? Depending on the culture you're from it may be considered childish or deadly serious, but I think we can all agree there's an undeniable adversarial element. 

So it's somewhat ideal for contested decisions, if there's a disagreement between two people, Rock Paper Scissors grants a sense of ownership over your (fair) success or failure.

But it can take a bit long, and become somewhat complicated with a no-win state, so what else?

The Coin Flip, an icon of fairness, it's reliable, improvisational, and a little light-hearted. As Rock Paper Scissors can feel quite childish, a coin flip can be interpreted as somewhat dismissive or reductive of the importance behind whatever decision it represents. And even for the one flipping the coin, there is no sense of ownership, their fate has left their hands. 

However it is very quick, very easy to understand, and as transparent in its fairness as we could ever hope a challenge to be. But where can we still improve?

Well, a coin flip doesn't scale well if we want to make something other than a 50% chance of success. We can add more coins but we soon lose our advantage of speed and simplicity. And just because coins are abundant doesn't mean they're suitable or thematic to your use-case, your project. 

The Six-Sided Die, what a tabletop player would call a D6, recognised everywhere from classrooms to casinos as a fair challenge with 6 equally likely outcomes. I think there's something less dismissive about a dice roll than a coin flip, but perhaps that's just my own bias. Exactly what rolling dice conveys to an individual varies wildly, it could put a bad taste in someones mouth, or really appeal to them and evoke an excitement at the mere thought of watching them slow and anticipating, willing, the number they want to appear.

As with Rock Paper Scissors, the Six-Sided Die return the sense of agency into the hands of the one rolling the dice. And like a coin flip, the result is immediate, it's transparently fair and always resolves, and even better - rolling more dice takes no extra time, so we can scale this up and down much more easily than with the coin flip.

Polyhedral Dice Sets are simply dice with a more varied number of sides, typically a 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 20. By most metrics these dice are identical in pros and cons to the Six-Sided Die, however our bias drifts significantly between the two. Six-Sided dice are more widely known, understood, and interpreted as an icon of math or gambling. Polyhedral Dice nearly exclusively denote gaming, with a bit of a particular tilt towards medieval fantasy tabletop games.

Regardless of whether that implication is appealing for your purposes, there's a more noteworthy takeaway from Polyhedral Dice. The presentation of Polyhedral Dice as a set, not as a single one-fits-all solution, presents a physicalised, visualised, comparison of likelihoods. This adds a clear distinction that gives weight to which one is selected to serve for a specific challenge. 

Random Number Generators may sound the most boring or abstract, but presentation is everything. The not-at-all-secret secret of every video game you've ever played is... all those cool mechanics are just random number generators being applied and presented in interesting ways. Obviously creating a Random Number Generator system is more complicated than buying some dice, but it offers the most flexibility, where we can tailor the number of outcomes, finesse the weighting behind their likelihood, and present it in an instantaneous experience designed specific to our use-case.

For audiences and collaborators who don't like gaming, are repelled by tabletop, or simply view physical solutions as outdated and uninteresting, digital RNG systems are the most reasonable answer.

But there are trade-offs, anything presented digitally has a much more difficult time recreating a sense of power and agency over one's input. And unlike all the previous options, we've lost absolute transparency, even if the challenge claims to be honest... there will always be a question in the back of our minds. But these are concerns we can manage with design, with presentation, as is the focus of any good game developer.

Everything Else Is Framing!

That was lot, but now we're here talking about Random Number Generators and dressing them up in a more interesting way. We can look back on all our previous examples and see that they're exactly that already! Rock Paper Scissors, Coins, Dice, all have a unique design language that conveys a specific impression of bias, fairness, transparency, and agency. 

They're all just Random Number Systems that we're interpreting in some way to simplify down to a success or failure.  

And that personal impact, that feeling of satisfaction, ownership, or fairness, it hits us all differently based upon our own cultural, social, and personal biases.

And THAT is the most important consideration when constructing a challenge for our projects.

Our goal can't simply be to determine the best result, or to fairly weigh probabilities.

Collaboration itself is a social game, and must be tailored to the collaborators.

If you want people to play a game with you, or you want to pitch a project to someone above you, you want your team to come together with enthusiasm, or you're just making a mobile game for strangers... Align yourself with what they're seeing!

And we can focus this vision through the lenses of Fairness, Transparency, Agency, and Bias.

Fairness vs Transparency

These two may seem a little similar and confusing at first, so let's clear that up.
When considering Fairness we're looking at the honest statistical chance of what is happening. A coin flip is claiming to be equally likely to land on heads as it is on tails, and that's factually mechanically true. After 1000 flips we'd expect around 500 heads and 500 tails, they're equally weighted, so that's a measure of Fairness. 
Students of probability would call this "unbiasedness", it's the actual math, the probability behind the challenge.

Transparency is how well that Fairness is understood and accepted by an observer.
If I flip a coin in-front of you, I think you, and any reasonable person, would believe that that my coin flipping is as fair as it claims to be. I haven't given you any reason with the circumstance, my behaviour, or the results of the coin flip to doubt the fairness.
So we can say it's completely Transparent.

But what if I'm holding a little black box and I only tell you it randomly picks head or tails when I press a button.
What is its Fairness? You'd probably assume equally likely, 50:50, same as the real coin flip. Though I never directly claimed that was how it worked.
What about Transparency? Well, if you don't know the Fairness how can you judge the Transparency?

Let's say I press the button a few times:
Heads, Tails, Tails, Tails, Heads, Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails, Tails

It tracks pretty well with the 50:50 result you're expecting, so... does that make it Transparent?

The thing is, Transparency isn't a grade you need to chase an A+ 100% score for, we don't need absolutely high Transparency. It is simply one of the lenses we need to be aware of, and can tune to our interests. I'll press the button 10 times, but... I'll ask you to call them first!

Let's say this is what you called:
Tails, Tails, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Tails, Tails, Heads

Now I'll press the button 10 times to see how well you did:
Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Tails, Heads

You're expecting some 50:50 coin flipping excitement, and the results seem to track that... perfectly actually… 5 Heads and 5 Tails!
So you may just think you guessed well and leave pretty satisfied with 7 correct calls, and only 3 misses!

But what was really happening was a 2:1 chance of success, 67:33 weighting in your favour.
I just fogged up that presentation a little, reduced the Transparency, so you couldn't tell!

Here's what the button actually was doing:
Success, Success, Fail, Fail, Success, Success, Success, Fail, Success, Success

That might seem a weird thing to do, after all why would we want to make it unfair? The whole point of designing a challenge was to find an impartial decider. And you're right, however LIS10 is foremost a collaborate process, and we want to push and pull to keep people feeling happy, enthusiastic, and satisfied.

While we could use this manipulation to keep things unfair and opaque like a casino game might, we could just as easily push our design in the other direction to maintain fairness, whilst increasing the perceived weight in everyone's individual favour. Where the challenge remains fair, but everyone feels at an advantage, and believes they have a real personal control over the outcome.

Agency

This sense of control and ownership is the lens of Agency we need to consider.

When rolling multiple dice together, perhaps unexpectedly, people feel more empowered, more in control of their result and more likely to succeed. Despite whatever real Fairness is lurking within that fogged up Transparency.
Most people have terrible instincts for probability, if you flip 8 heads on a fairly weighted coin good luck getting everyone to agree that the chance of the next flip also being heads is still 50:50.

Consider these scenarios:

If I give someone a 12-sided die and say "I want you to roll at least a 7."
Or if I give them three 12-sided dice and say "I want you to roll a total of at least 20."
Or better yet, I say "Roll the same three 12-sided dice, AND I'll let you reroll any 1s, but I want a total of at least 21!"

Those each feel quite different to the person doing the rolling. Each scenario has a huge step up in Agency, and the sense of possibility.
Though the Fairness remains very close to a coin flip's 1:1 in each example, we've managed to lower the Transparency in a way that made the result feel not only likely, but within the grasp and control of the person rolling the dice.

These simple techniques, adding more dice, the feeling of choice, re-rolling lower values, choosing the higher of two rolls... they all increase Agency, they feel like they are adding input and control, but it's still just dressing up math and Random Number Generators with a more engaging facade.

Bias

And that facade we've dressed up our challenge in is what triggers our Biases as we discussed with the examples of coin flips and dice rolling.
Biases are so individual and specific that you must tailor them to your project, to your audience.

If you want to play a TTRPG but your friends are affronted by the entire concept, right down to the vibe of rolling dice - that's their bias right there, you can't change that.

Instead, ask yourself, what would appeal to them?

Actionable Advice

1. Target The Bias!

What's the setting of your LIS10? Modern Crime Syndicates?

Why not use playing cards then, instead of d6 you can use an Ace through 6.

If that's still too old fashioned, drop the tabletop, instead make two little text videos that randomly play to show "Success" or "Failure" on your phone when tapped.

Or if you're using LIS10 in a writer's room, maybe you want to take silent votes on ideas to steer the direction. Everyone can choose to be AGAINST [-1], FOR [+1], or also select PASSIONATE [*2] to double their contribution.

Then the result is communicated in words...

"Abject Failure" [<-5] "Barely Failed" [<=0] "Mild Success" [<=5] "Smashed It" [>5]

...that you as the storyteller can build upon.

This sort of system has two valuable elements that the writers value, the level of response chosen by each contributor, and the degrees of failure and success. When used together this sort of approach ensures everyone feels the nuance of their input, their Agency, reflected in the outcome. 

2. Unfair is Fair

Offering the chance to put your finger on the scales, to double your influence as in the example above, or to add an additional dice to your roll once every hour, is an important source of Agency and social management in collaborative situations. You might see this as an unnecessary additional mechanic that's adding complications, and just put it off for later, which is fair. 

I just want you to starting viewing challenges, mechanics, through these lenses so you can appreciate when and where Fairness and Transparency are being toyed with, and then question why. This gentle consideration will enable you to naturally assemble the perspective and tools necessary to elevate your collaborators sense of personal control, Agency, and enjoyment from your designs.

3. Get Weird

A trend in boardgame design for deciding which player gets to go first is to ask an unusual, disconnected, sometimes absurd question.

"The player who was most recently on an airplane."
"The player with the most vowels in their name."
"The player most likely to spill their drink."
"The player who burnt the most calories this week."
"The player who draws the ugliest alien in 30 seconds."

These are great examples of how creative and inventive challenges can become when placed under constraints, in this case it's the absence of any props.

Look around you right now, what challenge could you create? Those are the challenges immediately relevant and understandable to you.
But if you're targeting your project to someone specific, or to an audience of some type, you need to consider how well your surroundings and perspective match theirs. Is your audience economically in the position to travel by plane frequently, do they really all have English names?

Get weird and creative, but always from the seat of your collaborators and audience, not your own.