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A reply to ‘The Three C’s of Challenges’ by Idle Cartulary

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Go read ‘The Three C’s of Challenges’ by Idle Cartulary. It’s great!

Over there, Cartulary lays out a method GMs can use to ensure challenges in TTRPGs are open to player solutions. By prepping a combat, communication and cunning solution for each challenge, the GM guards themselves against accidentally forcing players into actions that ought to be choices.

This method should be standard GM advice, included in all TTRPG rulebooks. Also, I think the three Cs become more useful as a prep tool, if they are used to break down the grand question of prep “What do I need to know to make this good?” into smaller chunks. The three Cs then become a prompt for information, not solution.

So what information does each C suggest that the GM have?

Combat of course insists that the GM know their NPCs’ stats and damage-dice, or their game-equivalents. However, it also requires that the GM know why it would be hard for the players to win the fight in-fiction for reasons beyond NPC stats, such as time pressure or environmental barriers.

Communication requires that the GM know what outcome the challenge seeks and why they pursue it, so that they can be bargained or debated with.

Cunning is the hardest to apply, because it requires that the players know the rules of the world well enough to be confident the tools they need are present and accessible in their locale. The GM therefore needs to know what those rules are, and also have a way to guarantee the players know them too.

(I have an intuition inherited from other media that the GM should present this information a session or two before the challenge emerges, and that this information should re-enter play through players remembering it exists, not GM reminders. I am uncertain as to whether this intuition is realistic when applied to role-play.)

And how does this change the prep tool?

Cartulary’s tool is table listing the three Cs. The GM fills in the table by assigning each C a solution and a location.

Alternatively, GMs could prep by writing out and answering these three questions:

  1. Why is the source of this challenge hard to incapacitate/kill?

  2. What is the intended outcome of this challenge, and why is this outcome desired by the source?

  3. What do the players already know about how the world works, and do they need to know more?

I will report back with examples of answers, when I feel I have good ones.