One thing that really impressed me with our running RPG of the year, Esoteric Ebb, is how it handles failure and save scumming, the practice of abusing a game’s save/load feature just to get your desired result at every turn—we all do it, at least sometimes, and we all feel guilty about it.
Save scumming risks ruining the stakes of a story and making me feel invincible—or at least like I’m bowling with bumpers—but sometimes I’ll just feel railroaded into having no other option in a dice rolling RPG like this. Other times, I’ll get a one-in-a-million failure rolling a skill I’ve put a ton of points into, and that just feels terrible.
Esoteric Ebb does a genuinely good job of showing its players interesting, cool things when they fail, scenes that I wanted to remain part of my story, and not erased via metagaming intervention. What’s more, there’s an in-game resource to reroll failed checks (“Shards of Jor”), and using it is much faster than trying to reload a save. I asked Esoteric Ebb’s designer, Christoffer Bodegård, for his thoughts on this design problem when we spoke after Esoteric Ebb’s launch.
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Bodegård said that he thinks in terms of the player being able to “design their own experience.” What if they’re a “bad designer” who flees from consequence at every turn? “I usually go with, ‘Just let them go wild,'” Bodegård told me, saying that, if they’re having fun, it’s not a problem. He’s not there to be offended as your dungeon master, after all, and if a DM is dealing with a rowdy table who won’t play by the rules, “maybe that’s not the table’s fault, necessarily.”
So we’re not passing any judgement on the lumpen scummer, but Bodegård still wants to offer a well-paced, well-structured experience, no matter how players might react to it. That’s where clever design that makes it feel like it’s OK to fail comes in. Bodegård cited two major early encounters as examples of how he approaches the design challenge.
In the second room of Esoteric Ebb, there’s a mysterious character who presents as your benefactor, but clearly also has their own agenda. You can make a difficulty class (DC) 33 Wisdom check—practically impossible—to deduce their whole deal. If you fail, no sweat, you can retry it with a Shard of Jor, while your investigation and other story revelations will lower the DC.
Succeeding at the check leads to a major sidequest, but there are other ways to get on the trail, too. “It’s a tutorial on how to play the game,” said Bodegård. “Which is: Don’t save scum, just let it happen, and you will be taken care of. I am your DM, trust me. I don’t always succeed perfectly, but I do it enough that you should be able to trust me.”
The other early game roadblock Bodegård dove into was accessing the magically sealed tea shop crime scene at the center of Esoteric Ebb’s mystery. “You’re not going to succeed the first time, that’s OK,” Bodegård said. “You’re going to make it into the tea shop later. This [Strength check] is going to be lowered. You can find Knock, you can find Grease, and make the planks easier to rip apart.
“You’re going to find a back way in. You can find the password from the Coinlord. You can convince him to give you the password without swearing an oath. You can have a low Intelligence and guess the password. It’s a bunch of different stuff stolen from Fallout, obviously, like all good things.”
Bodegård said that these considerations come together “to build an illusion of agency” within the confines of the story he’s put together. “The player feels like they can actually do whatever they want,” said Bodegård. “I try my best to not break that illusion.”
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