What is Fun?

labmouse42

This thread is about the discussion of what makes a module fun. I've been working with the foundry for 2 weeks now, and have ran dozens of different foundry missions now to review them. As such, I've been figuring out what can be 'fun' in foundry missions, and wanted to bounce my ideas off the community.

If you have other ideas as to what makes for fun missions, please let me know!

Killing Monsters
This is pretty self explanatory. However, you can increase the fun of monster killing by building pathing mobs so you need to pull group X while group Y is not there. You can also make it more fun by allowing pulls of partial groups.
You can also make monster killing more fun by ramping up the difficulty.
You can make monster killing more fun by adding to the environment. Lots of traps and monsters is downright scary, where otherwise traps are just an inconvenience.


Dialogue
You can make some fun dialogue options. Dialogue should be there to enhance your mission and I've seen some examples of great dialogue. One particular one was an alchemist who was discussion magical theory on a physics level. Another was me gathering items for someone who was holding back a door -- every time I brought items I got entertaining dialogue.
Dialogue can also be used to provide backstory. You can use that for your own quests backstory or the backstory of the entire forgotten realms world.
Dialogue can also be used to build relationships/romantic encounters. There is a reason you see romance in every Bioware title -- its fun! Its fairly easy to add those dialogue steps and they can bring a lot to your campaign.


Movement
You have the movement keys that you can use to make people have fun. Its fun to run around a town, or down a spooky trail. This aspect of fun, however can tire quickly. Running 20-30 seconds down a spooky path is fun. Running 60 seconds is boring.
This is also why its a good idea to have a dungeon exit by your last fight. We all learned from Skyrim that -- while unrealistic -- it adds a lot of fun gameplay if the exit is right by the end of the dungeon so your not walking back for 60-120 seconds again.


Movement - Platform Jumping
Tomb raider/Assassin's Creed is popular for a reason. There is something fun about platform jumping and figuring out which is the next best platform to go past. In one persons dungeon I reviewed, I thought it was a platform challenge and hopped behind his terrain! While I was getting back there I was thinking "This is tricky, I love how he designed it!"


Movement - Mazes
Mazes can be a lot of fun to traverse. Its highly dependent on the player on the difficulty level. Some people love a challenge. Others need lots of landmarks to traverse it.


Gathering Items
One mission I played had me searching through various rooms with multiple interactables to find the item I needed. That was a lot of fun.


Atmosphere/Depth
In the Saltwater dungeon, the ambiance is amazing. Your running down a path to a old house, with lighting flashing overhead. Its simply amazing.

In another dungeon, I was in a inn and I could talk to every NPC there. There was nobody just standing around, everyone there was interacting with other NPCs. That makes something immersive -- which adds more fun.


Puzzles
Having players figure things out is fun. The challenge is finding the people who like the puzzles and not punishing people who don't like them.


When fun ends
As DMs, the challenge we face is finding when fun ends.
Killing mobs is fun for few minutes, but if I spend 10 minutes doing nothing but killing mobs, it gets old.
Running around gathering items is fun, but doing it for 3 minutes gets old.
In both of those examples the 'fun' ends after a short time. So to make a really entertaining quest you can break up the elements with another fun element. When your hacking through kobolds in a cave, why not have a prisoner to talk to? This makes the fun go back to the starting point when you go back to killing the rest of the kobolds.


If you have ideas for other 'fun' things, please post them!

kamaliicious

I don't know what is fun, but I do know what is best in life...

chili1179

What is fun?

Subjective.

labmouse42

chili1179 wrote: »

What is fun?

Subjective.

LOL

Seriously. You can quantify 'fun'. I worked for Electronic Arts for 2 years, and 'fun' was often a thing discussed in game development. There was more than one game in development that was described as 'cool' but not really 'fun'

While your right, some people will grind through mobs for hours on end and call that 'fun', but those people are few and far between. Even those die hard old EQ/DaoC players who grinded mobs were actually socializing while doing so and that was the 'fun' for them.

Take world of warcraft. There is a reason they moved to a 'quest oriented' leveling system and other games have emulated it. That is tremendously effective.

Thats why thinking of what's 'fun' for players is a good thing to do. If more people can have 'fun' in your dungeons, more people will play them, etc...

zovya

Fun? I would say it could be all of these, or none of these. It depends on the implementation of these features.

zogvarnoka

Fun is subjective. Just because gaming companies try to quantify something doesn't mean it is quantifiable. And the "player" you describe at the end of the OP has ADHD to be finding something "not fun" after a minute or three. You cannot tell others what they will find fun. All your OP is doing is trying to appeal to the largest possible audience which can often lead to a quest feeling unfocused and disjointed.

I'll make my quest for my target audience how I want, thank you very much. That audience being folks who play like I do. So don't even try to tell me what I think is fun, because its probably not fun for you.

mosby1

I think you hit the key aspects pretty well. On a meta level, there are often trade-offs to maintain a "fun" balance of:

Variety vs cohesiveness: Variety is critical, as you noted. But it all should fit together; just throwing in a puzzle or maze or something probably won't be fun unless it fits in. And not just in your content, but you want some variety in your pace, too. Build up to mini-bosses, instead of having encounter after encounter of the same standard-difficulty mobs.

Challenge vs ease of success: It's fun once you complete the challenge, but can be frustrating it it's too hard (and infuriating if you can't do it). Easy combat can be fun -- overpowering lots of mobs can be a rush, but gets boring quickly.

Unexpected vs familiarity: Plot twists and surprises are great, if you don't overdo them. And they need to be reasonable. It's also fun when you fore-shadow things -- players who figure it out in advance get the "I knew it!" feeling; most enjoy the "oh of course!" feeling when you resolve it.

Immersion: I think anything which enhances immersion is good (music, lighting, details, etc). But sometimes some humorous dialogue is more fun. I have a riff on a Monty Python script in Weird of the Weather-witch. It's not immersive, but I'm sure MP fans will enjoy it. I also break the "fourth wall" sometimes. There's a "DM" NPC at the end of my quest, who will give you more story information if you want, and congratulate you on any hidden items you found while exploring. It's not much of a "reward", but I think people find it fun.

- Realism vs practicality: Should the fire on the ground burn you? Maybe. Sometimes that heightens the effect, other times it's irritating. Kind of like the exit at the end of the dungeon. Maybe not realistic, but very practical.