Challenge your players: Give them the mundane!

December 29, 2023

A classic struggle in tabletop games is keeping player interest. Combat is straightforward enough; the dragon wants to eat you, fight it so you aren't eaten! The necromancer is trying to sacrifice the town, fight them so the townsfolk aren't killed! You can only do so much of that though, if your game is nothing but encounter and fight after encoutner and fight, things will quickly get predictable and monotonous. Worse yet, players might get bored! Not everyone just comes to roll dice after all, a lot of people come for the "roleplaying" part of "roleplaying" game. The obvious answer is to throw them deeper into the main story; the big bad's plan is one step closer to fruition, the heroes have to do something! The king has sent a summons, you must go to the important event!

While these sorts of story beats can work to get some interest, they suffer from a number of problems.

Let's talk about four.

First, they can be exhausting. Your players probably won't burn out from the game, but there's something exhausting about a game where the stakes are always sky high, every fight is always victory or apocalypse. You feel like you can't make a mistake or take a risk or do something silly, because if you do, then the world might end.

Second, it risks dehumanizing your characters. If all you're ever doing is saving the world, you turn into a caricature. Superman isn't an interesting character because of how powerful he is, he's an interesting character because of the juxtaposition of the meek Clark Kent with the all-powerful Kal-El, the way an alien relates with a world he loves in spite of how it forces him to hide himself, the relationships he forms with the people around him. If all Superman ever does is throw punches with Darkseid and General Zod, he loses all that and becomes a boring character who doesn't exist beyond punching bad guys. That's not a character, that's a spreadsheet of abilities. When all your characters do is save the world, the world they're saving loses its meaning in the narrative because they do nothing but save it. It's not a world they inhabit with people and relationships they care about, it's a task to be completed.

Third, it gets monotonous. When you always have the same stakes, your options as far as what story you tell become pretty limited. You exhaust the list of scenarios where the kingdom is at-stake pretty quickly. Once you start repeating your story, you're in trouble. That's a recipe for boring players.

Fourth, you can only escalate so far. This is, in my opinion, a problem that plagues a LOT of fiction, most prominently nowadays superhero movies. (That's a post for another day though) How many times can the fate of the universe be at-stake before it starts to get frustrating? We just finished saving you all, why can't you stay saved for five minutes? How high can the stakes really feel if the stakes are always this high? Can you ever really have a high-stakes situation if there's never a low-stakes situaiton to balance it out?

Jack-O asking a very valid question to Sol DMguy, who is regretting running sessions for her and Sin.

This is not to say that you can't, or even shouldn't, have high-stakes situations for your players. Far from it, those moments make great climaxes for very obvious reasons! But there needs to be a contrast. Unfortunately, a lot of people run into the wall of not knowing how to do that. What do you do to challenge players who can slay armies singlehandedly if not bigger armies and giant supernatural beasts?

My favorite answer I've found so far: The mundane. Give them something that's relatively unremarkable, but that they can't just punch their way out of.

To give a recent example from a game I play in: The party was returning to their starting city, no longer a group of armed vagabonds, but conquering heroes! They had slain bandit kings and freed the plains of violence and cruelty, and were back to receive their reward: Titles and deeds making them honest-to-goodness nobility, and bequeathing them actual land they could turn into their own realm! These were talented, formidable adventurers; giving them a challenge would require a serious escalation out of the blue. Moreover, they had just finished fighting through serious challenge after serious challenge. For two sessions in a row, a complete party wipe had been on the table and very nearly happened. Another high-stakes fight would start to feel exhausting.

Our GM's creative solution? Ask everyone what they were wearing to the ceremony. The swordsman and the arcanist were covered, both were from noble backgrounds and had formal attire. The monk was rough-and-tumble, but she was proud of her heritage and wore traditional clothes to honor it. But the sharpshooter? He was a gruff, lifelong sailor with little to no interest in the formal. He didn't even have his old dress blues anymore. Suddenly we had a very real problem of going to an official ceremony in front of all of our new noble friends, and our archer looks like the bandits we spent the last few months killing. Thus a frantic panic ensued; the swordsman ran to scour for a formal clothing store open at three in the morning, the mage had to use her crafting skills to try and make this rush job fit well enough for a ceremony, everyone was suddenly in a situation that was extremely meaningful and important to the characters: They had spent months and nearly died working towards this moment, and one unkempt dwarf was about to throw the whole thing off! But it was also a situation that they couldn't fight or intimidate or otherwise "statsheet" their way out of. Most importantly, it was a very human, "normal" moment. These weren't conquering heroes basking in their own glory, these were four friends desperately trying to avoid embarrassing themselves at a formal event. It let the party act not as mighty warriors, but as mostly-human people, relating to a living world in normal, relatable ways. It let us interact with the world as something other than protagonists, and let our characters exist as people with multiple aspects to themselves, be it wisecracking or panic or anything else. Even the sharpshooter who was the butt of the whole joke had a fantastic time with it!

Obviously, this depends on your group. Maybe your players just want to fight bigger and bigger challenges. Maybe your players wouldn't enjoy having one of them put into that "fish out of water" scenario that led to our panic. All things need to be adapted to your table.

But if you're struggling to come up with something fun and interesting for your players after they slay their sixth elder wyrm?

Try challenging them with something mundane.