The Three C’s of Challenges

March 15, 2024

The Three C’s of Challenges

In a recent Dungeon Regular episode, Hirward’s Task, I found a neat framework for challenge design that I’ve never seen before. This post will be an exploration of whether or not it has legs.

Basically, and perhaps unintentionally, this module had three clear, built in solutions to its primary challenge, and they were clearly geared for different player characters:

A combat solution
A cunning solution
A communication solution

Let’s explicate this a little:

A combat solution is one where fighting an enemy will solve your problem without cunning or communication
A cunning solution is one where using the tools in your world and environment will solve your problem without combat or communication
A communication solution is one where talking to the people in your world will solve your problem without combat or cunning

So, in this case, there was an air elemental loose in a laboratory, after a foolish wizard activated a cursed censer of air elemental summoning. The player characters obvious solutions are:

Fight the air elemental
Use the rod of negation in a nearby lab to destroy the censer of air elemental summoning
Talk to the air elemental, recognise that it actually hates it here and is held here by magical wards, and help free it

Now, it’s obvious and intuitive after reading those three solutions, that there are probably more than three solutions to this particular challenge. But that’s not actually my business as a designer. I’m using this as a shortcut to Arnold K’s OSR Style Challenges. Arnold’s advice is sound, but how do I personally make challenges that meet these criteria. It’s easier said than done.

You do it by using the three C’s. Then, you’ve opened your challenge up to a wide range of possibilities, and that means that even more possibilities will present itself. There is one corollary to using the 3 C’s though: You need to place the solutions in reasonable proximity to the challenge. That’s not necessarily the entirety of the solution — a clue that points you to the solution in another castle, or to talk to a sage somewhere is perfectly valid as well. When I’m designing challenges, then, I’d simply design them as a table, and make sure that every part of the table is checked off when I’m writing up my challenge.

Here are some examples.

Jack o’ the Lanterns is loose in the village

Challenge Grid	Solution	Location
Combat	Defeat Jack	Town square
Cunning	Extinguish his lanterns	Thirteen make up a magical sigil around the town; Nana Bubu knows this
Communication	Persuade Nancy, the teen who conjured Jack, to unsummon him	Nancy is trapped in the barn, being threatened by bullies

The door to the wandering mausoleum is closed

Challenge Grid	Solution	Location
Combat	Kill the mausoleum	The mausoleum
Cunning	Fly into the mausoleum from above	A hot air balloon can be found with an artificer in Gnometown
Communication	Answer the door guardian’s riddle	The answer to the riddle is found at the site of a defeated mausoleum a county away

The treasure horde has been enchanted and is floating away on a brisk breeze

Challenge Grid	Solution	Location
Combat	Defeat the wizard who is enchanting it	In a wizard tower, looking through a scrying globe
Cunning	Use the wand of breezes to control the breeze yourself	Found in the same wizard’s tower, in a storeroom
Communication	Negotiate with the wizard for a cut of the treasure	In a wizard tower, looking through a scrying globe

Anyway, there you have it. An easy way to pull together some challenges with multiple solutions that suit a range of approaches and skill levels.

Idle Cartulary

Techniques

challenges

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Idle Cartulary

2 responses to “The Three C’s of Challenges”

Anonymous

March 21, 2024 at 2:23 pm
Thanks for sharing! I’m going to ramble densely, because this is making me think deeply of simple things. The model you present here is a way to ensure that combats actually have multiple solutions with distinct kinds of party able to approach them, and your presentation of it prompted me to think about an underlying question: Why do we want that?

Here’s my answer: If a problem in an RPG is only solvable in one way, and there’s the possibility of a player being ill-equipped for it, the result of the story isn’t really being determined in that moment. More importantly, it isn’t transparent to the player (much less their character) that this is the case, so there’s no opportunity for dramatic irony, weird quasi-bleed, or any of the other player-to-character relationships that make this tragic hero narrative interesting.

As you hint at, the strength of this model is that this is an abstract solution that can apply whether you’re making a dragon or a floating treasure hoard; in my eyes the weakness is that it requires you to chew your food before dinner. The Blorb mindset talks about not waiting until your players have thrown rock to respond with paper, and I wonder if there are times when making sure there is an off switch to every encounter is analogous to letting their rock tear your paper anyway if they win a subgame. You know the solution, and the more you ensure that there’s nuance to it the more you’ve *thought* about it, and the more overhead and GMing skill it would take to prep an encounter without preordaining it.

But then, what else can we do? Here’s all I could come up with:
- Arbitrary mechanical solutions. Make rules that somehow logically always allow players to “fill out this table” in play. Promising, but risks having the same problems except they also elide everything you care about. Also, the only examples I can think of are FATE-style “object-oriented” games, which always read better than they play to me.
- Strong verbs. Treat “running from combat” as a complete and respectable Cunning solution, or make “call someone who can fill Communication” into a very powerful move. When I put it that way, this is the promise of PbtA, so that’s promising, too. But it requires you to make very powerful verbs, which requires making them take fewer details from the fiction to work, and oops we’ve rediscovered why “social combat” qua making all interactions isomorphic to “I hit the guy with the sword” only elides the part of the game we want to enjoy. And even after all that, our “running from combat” permission only works in… combats you can run from.
- Lucky viristicism. Have faith in the fiction. Give the table a nuanced understanding of the diagesis, and hope that the open-endedness of real life ports to the open-endedness of the system. Promising as well, but now there’s a player skill component to fictional processing, since it’s on them to chew their food and figure out the weakness of a wizard you just made up. To me it’s anathema to reify “critical thinking” as a player skill, and talking about every tiny detail in the fiction takes forever. Also, life ain’t fair, and the art that imitates it needn’t be either– there could be, unwaveringly in the fiction, a dragon that just eats you if you can’t fight it, and since we’ve put our chips all in on the fiction there are social consequences to rebuying or asking for a re-deal.
- Acceptance. Accept that chewing our food before dinner or single-solution problems aren’t all that bad, or reject that our model is chewing food before dinner at all, or gird ourselves to make other concessions to have our cake and eat it too.
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1. Idle Cartulary
  
  March 21, 2024 at 2:57 pm
  
  This should be a blog post itself!
  
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Tortles of the Purple Sage – Dungeon Regular

Dungeon Regular is a show about modules, adventures and dungeons. I’m Nova, also known as Idle Cartulary and I’m reading through Dungeon magazine, one module at a time, picking a few favourite things in that adventure module, and talking about them. On this episode I talk about Tortles of the Purple Sage by Merle and Jackie Rasmussen, in Issue #6, July 1987! You can find my famous Bathtub Reviews at my blog, https://playfulvoid.game.blog/, you can buy my supplements for elfgames and Mothership at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/, check out my game Advanced Fantasy Dungeons at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/advanced-fantasy-dungeons and you can support Dungeon Regular on Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/idlecartulary.

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