Challenge and Risk

My last post about Risk versus Reward started a couple interesting conversations both here and offline. Those conversations brought a couple of interesting points to light.

The main thing I have discovered is that most players and game devs tend to jam the concepts of challenge and risk together and call that “risk”. If an encounter is hard, a player is likely to die and they want to avoid dying and so that constitutes a high degree of risk. I think challenge and risk are two separate concepts that might be coupled, but are certainly not the same. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to define these terms like this:

Challenge = The chance you have to fail at a task or encounter. This could mean dying, party wiping, not meeting your goals or quest requirements depending on the situation.

Risk = The consequences you suffer as a result of failing at a task or encounter. This might be item loss, having to make a corpse run, a loss of experience or the accrual of “debt”.

These two ideas aren’t the same. I could design an encounter in which a boss NPC takes only 10% of the damage dealt to him and two-shots most players and this would be a challenging encounter. However, if there are no consequences for failure, then there is no risk. If you lose, you just get back up and try again, or head off and do something else. Likewise, I could have a creature that was fairly easy to defeat (let’s say 90% of all groups that encounter this creature can beat it with no losses), but if he did manage to kill a group member, that player’s items would be sucked into the void and lost forever. This encounter is very low challenge, but has a pretty terrible risk associated with it.

I think it is interesting to note that there are times when the concepts of challenge and risk are coupled. For instance, in the extreme case of an encounter where you simply cannot die (let’s say you have managed to gain full resistance to the creature’s elemental attacks), then it does not matter what the death penalty in your game is, the chance of failure is zero and so the risk is zero.

Similarly, if we crank the risk in an encounter to zero, we see that the challenge of that encounter approaches zero. I think a good example of this would be Champions Online where some of the boss battles are tough (the boss is a bag of hit points that can two shot many characters), but because the only risk is being sent back to the respawn point, the battle devolves into a “graveyard zerg” and the challenge drops considerably.

Another interesting dynamic is that risk affects our behavior and thus, affects the level of challenge in our encounters. In games with no risk, there is no incentive to hold back any resources that could help you win a fight. So in World of Warcraft, you always bring your best gear to a battle because there is no chance of losing it. If dying in WoW meant a risk of item loss, players would be forced to decide how much they were willing to bet on the success of the mission. Generally, this would mean they would bring gear they were willing to lose — presumably a less valuable set. Consequently, this would make them less powerful and thus increase the challenge of the encounter.

One last thing I noticed is that in my small sample of people with which I discussed this topic, those most averse to the risk of loss almost always mentioned how they would hate to have to grind to get their lost stuff (items, experience) back. I got the impression that for these players, MMOs were not about “doing cool stuff”, but were about “getting cool stuff.”  New items, new powers and unlocking new areas were the main point of the game… in some cases even at the expense of enjoying the game play. A couple of my CoX buddies are like this. They don’t mind if a particular mission is boring; they will farm it as long as it is easy xp or drops.

In any case, I am working on a post about adding risk back into the themepark equation and I thought I would post to clear up confusion with the two terms. Happy Hunting!