Why player failure is a quintessential building block of Lifeship game design

My last blog talked about character death and how Lifeship builds death into the game through cloning. Today, I'd like to focus on failures that are not necessarily death and why they are so important to game design. First off, let's establish what a player failure is. A player fails when an objective in the game is attempted but not achieved. This objective can be failed through both action, inaction, or even force majeure (IE Elements beyond the player's control.)

Any action that a player takes can result in failure. The most common example of this in Lifeship is attacking. When you attack an enemy in Lifeship, you must also pull a modifier card from your modifier deck. In the deck, there are 3 misses, and unlike Gloomhaven, they do NOT get reshuffled back into the deck. In fact, the deck is not reshuffled until you have gone through every card. So any attack action on a fresh deck has a 3/20 chance to fail, about 15%. The enemy deck operates the exact same way. We all intuitively understand this mechanism. It is used to represent the imperfect nature of combat. It works. When the card you pull could negate your action or increase it in the case of a crit, your risk/reward seeking brain lights up. I'd call this level the immediate reward level. Do an attack, hit the enemy, feel good.

Players failing to take an action, or failing through inaction, is a less obvious fail state. It is nebulous, and difficult to balance. Revisiting the attack example, let's talk about defenses. Defenses in Lifeship come from armor, your defense stat, and utilizing the terrain to avoid attacks. The game encourages you to extend, playing out your cards instead of holding them in reserve to defend yourself. So in a combat, you might play out your cards, believing that you are safe from harm, only to have the enemy card reveal a dangerous attack. In this way, the game punishes you for extending. This point of failure is predictable by the players, but the decision point happens in advance of the actual failure. In this instance, the tank character, who held armor and cards in hand is rewarded for their foresight while the others are punished. Once again, we activate that risk/reward part of the brain. This level is a little longer term, it rewards planning and future perspective.

For one final example, let's examine a failure where the decision point is far removed from the fail state. In Lifeship, you are responsible for providing 4 Commodities to the population: Water, Food, Morale, and Safety. Each month, your population will consume 1 of each of these for every 10,000 residents. The Super Team (The Players), make choices about what kinds of infrastructure to build, where to build them, and what the salvage you bring back should be spent on. When the people on the ship run out of any commodity, there are narrative consequences. So the fail state, running out of water, happens several months, (and more importantly) several play sessions, from the decision point where the team collectively prioritized Safety generation over Water generation. At this level, the risks and rewards serve to give the whole universe a sense of place, a sense of stakes. There is more to the world than whether a specific Pirate is dead. Because of the broad nature of this level, the rewards can feel underwhelming, a mere hygiene issue. If everything is going well, then you are doing a good job.

Finally, let's take a brief look at Force Majeure. Events, actions, and consequences that are entirely beyond the control of the players. It may feel intuitive to want to remove ALL instances of force majeure from the game, (After all, choice and control are foundational in Lifeship.) but putting the player in complete control of everything is a quick way to lose their investment, lose the stakes you've built up. Lots of video games fall prey to this, sometimes unavoidably, other times, very avoidably. What happens is the main character is the only active force in the game. NPCs literally do not exist unless in the presence of the protagonist. This means the player has complete control of the world. This can feel very empowering, but I would argue it is also very hollow. I want my worlds to feel alive. I want to believe that the other characters in the game are leading busy lives when I can't see them. Sometimes, Lifeship (and Life) are gonna throw things at you that you couldn't have known about. Designing these moments is critical. When done right, they make the universe feel REAL. They make the stakes feel important and they invest the players in the narrative. When done wrong, you end up with frustrated players, complaining about difficulty spikes and unfair game events.

"Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty..." -Theodore Roosevelt

I hope you enjoy the hard times in Lifeship along with the good ones, because the game is anything but easy.

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