THE DODGE OBSESSION

Are current day video game developers obsessed with dodging, parrying, and player defenses? If so, what does it say about our current hobby as tabletop gamers? Is there a connection? You bet there is! Let's deep dive this loaded question, Mainframe style.

Yeah, I DoorDash'd a PS5 when the scalping crisis was at its worst. It was the only way! Ok, that confession aside, I 've always been a console gamer, since the Pong days. My 4 recent completes are Elden Ring, Wukong, Khazan, and Expedition 33. If you're not familiar with these games, let me spare you some research and reveal their core play tenet: THE PLAYER MUST CONSTANTLY DODGE.

I don't need to overdo a recap of how these games overuse the block/dodge aspect of play. In Khazan:First Berzerker the amount of defensive play required made me think "they should've titled this game Can'tzan: The First Blocker!" Expedition 33 is an incredible visual and story experience, but every battle basically comes down to dodge/parry timing. In Wukong? So much dodging your elbows hurt! Sure, there are some aspects of ability-builds, getting good gear, but they are mere window dressing compared to skillful defense.

Khazan is portrayed as a total badass, impossible to kill, driven by revenge.

In reality, he has to block and dodge 90% of the time, then poke foes with caution.

So what? Well, I'll argue below that this is a generational habit in gaming, not just an odd outlier, and it tells us something about how our psychology is starting to 'fold inward' in gaming. Spoiler: folding inward is bad!

1: DHFS: Dead Hero Fantasy Syndrome

I don't need to say much to get agreement, dear reader, that there is an odd fantasy of many game designs, game masters, YouTube channels, and memes that player characters will be killed in action. In the so-called OSR, it is worn as a badge of honor that characters have little chance of survival. It makes a strange boast that "most of my characters were dead by level three!" TPK memes are all too ubiquitous. Endless GM advice videos describe new ways to shred characters. Some games even revel in 'funnels' in which dozens of low level characters are hilariously slaughtered to begin a campaign.

Any amount of ponderance here leads the thinker to an easy conclusion: it isn't about death, it's about danger. Danger is exciting, and worth boasting about. More danger leads to more frequent deaths, and so on. I would handily rebutt this extension, though, with a call to Tolkien. In the Lord of the Rings, danger is all-too-intense, and constant. Hero death, though, is mercifully rare and emotionally powerful. So why in gaming does the bridge between danger and death get so hastily crossed, or even boasted about?

I would argue the answer is our thesis, so let's do a bit more thinking before get there.

This iconic image from DUNGEON CRAWL CLASSICS is widely known to essentialize the

funnel concept: farmers and cooks are killed by the dozen against mere skeletons.

It may be hilarious, but does it create real narrative gravity?

2: Do Players Want to Die?

This question may seem silly at first, but consider it a moment. Players, like me, love a challenge. It's exciting to think "dang, this beast is hitting crazy hard, do I have the grit to take it down?" I think we can agree that generally NO, players do not want to lose their characters, especially in a game with solid narrative tissue and emotional content. Good characters are beloved! So once again, players may be teasing the idea of losing characters, taunting the GM for TPKs, or being obliterated in combat, but I think it is cloaked language for 'bring it on' or 'I like it spicy.'

Before we jump to our thesis, let's put this one to rest as shield-banging. The player has a duty to dare the game to kill them (or almost kill them, more likely) without flinching. This is intrinsic role-play thinking: "the scarier the better! I've seen things you men wouldn't believe! To hell's heart we go!" The player bangs their shield, asking for challenge, but to think this equates to a craving for death is missing the point.

Fine, Hankerin, so get to that point, please!

3: Decades of Data

Let's just pick 1980 as a start point for simplicity, and 2025 as an end point. I'd like to make some generalizations based on living through those eras in gaming, and hopefully they're easy to agree with.

• Early games were all but binary in success or failure (Pong, Breakout, Pitfall)

• In the 90s, games were brimming with new looks and new player groups, exploring myriads of complex paths to completion and enjoyment

• By the 2010s, technology and design improvements started to slow

• In the present day, games and gamers are self-aware

• The internet has existentially changed the experience of gaming

In Pitfall on the Intellivision system, you either lived or died. If things got hard, though,

you had no options, no tutorials, no internet. Death was all the gam eneeded to thrill us.

I chose these bullets to show a sweeping view of how games have made a long, slow journey from binary innocence to complex self-awareness. Pong players, who were also first edition D&D folks, were innocently thrilled to be playing at all... in many cases content these games existed in any form, and ready to face live-or-die outcomes again and again. There was no substantive way to look deeper, research emergent approaches, or ask questions. When I got my first RPG books, I had no idea what they were, and there was no one to ask!

Fast forward to 2025, and things couldn't be more opposite: players have decades of context, vast resources of comparative and practical analysis at their fingertips, and complex expectations of what a game needs to be satisfying.

The designer or GM in the modern era is faced with this vast array of context and resources. They face an exponentially more complicated player psychology. In the searing light of this challenge, the natural response is to escalate the challenge, obfuscate the paths to completion (Elden Ring's focal challenge), exaggerate foe-to-hero power scales, or endlessly assault the player with attacks.

What if the game is more comfortable for casuals or beginners in all this (the most common critique of D&D's latest editions)? Then puff your chest, verbally exaggerate danger, meme-ify wipeouts, and make calls to 'the good ol' days' to keep player fear at maximum. Games need to thrill, so focus on death! And so on.

In short, it was easy to thrill us in the beginning, it's harder now. Sure, we could say "Just go back to the old timey ways! Hide poison darts in doorknobs! Give heroes 4 hit points! If they miss one dodge, they die!" But this flippant response ignores decades of growth and change... so how do we break the 'folding in' of player complexity and offer danger without a fixation on death? Thesis time! Everyone put on your party hats.

Thesis: Inescapable Acumen

Put Bluntly: The only way out of this mess is to overcome lazy thinking.

Tolkien isn't the only one who established plenty of visceral danger without a massive body count. Star Wars, Marvel, and many others accomplish similar effects with their stories. Characters die, but not with flippant whims, in opening scenes, or by trivial means.

Simply put, the hard work of narrative depth

is the soil in which the-thrill-of-danger grows,

not simplistic threats of death, excessive enemy aggression,

or lopsided odds.

To me, the trend of glorifying character death is a sign of avoiding this hard work. In role playing, pundits blame systems for being too deadly or not deadly enough. In video games, developers over-emphasize player defenses. In novels, swaths of characters are killed off to induce a sense of dread. All these behaviors avoid the burden on writers and designers to own the lack of narrative gravity.

• No RPG system can be blamed for lack of excitement or deadliness. The GM and players are SOLELY responsible for it.

• No video game need make me dodge 10,000 times to deliver fear and excitement. The narrtive framing of the moment, if masterful, will do far more work to that end.

• A great story need only 'kill off' a single character to evoke deep response in the reader, but this only works with excellent control of reader investment and realism.

The three bullets above share one key aspect: to achieve what they posit takes skill, hard work, attention to detail, narrative talent, and an endless return-to-form. To avoid the death fantasy in gaming, a flippant version of far deeper frontiers, requires this 'inescapable acumen.' To be quite frank, this hard work is too often foregone, bypassed, shrugged off or left undone. In short: lazy thinking.

There is only one important death in Fellowship of the Ring.

This is so powerful poignant because Boromir was struggling with the corruption of the ring,

but found redemption in his final deeds. This is mastercraft storytelling.

To conclude, I want to dispel the frequent call we hear these days to 'efficient game prep.' GMs boast "I don't even do prep any more... I just play from tables and characters die in terrible ways every week!" To the nine hells with efficient prep, lack of deep thinking, narrative bypasses, flippant deaths, cheesey traps, pointless meat grinders, and death-as-excitement. This is lazy thinking.

I challenge you, my stalwart reader, to greater heights! Aspire to the Tolkien nuances! Let your masterful story content be enjoyed by players, building deep narrative connections and emotions. Death may come, but revel not in the threat of it. Allow players to be heroic, not forever creeping corner to corner like frightened rats. Give them time to live in the world, build friendships and history, not slap them to pulp every session.

This challenge I make with open eyes that the psychology of today is complex. Players can be hard to thrill. Join me in considering nobler thrills, though, than the Pit and the Pendulum.

Good luck, this is no easy standard to press.

-B