~TENSION~

Gameplay tension is creating a state where the player has multiple objectives and can't do them all at once. It's what makes the player feel like he or she has meaningful choices to make.

For example, I have two magic spells here:
Thunderbolt - Deals 80 lightning damage. Makes the enemy take double lightning damage next round.
Engulf - Gradually deals 150 fire damage over the next four rounds.

You can immediately see the ~tension~ there. The choice is between immediate damage and gradual damage. Further, the situation changes as the battle goes on - the equation is different on the first round of battle than it is when Engulf wears off while the enemy is inflicted with debuff from Thunderbolt. Your choice is going to depend on the enemy's HP, and on how badly you need to heal, and what the enemy's strategy is, and what your party members are doing, and, if the game is designed well, probably a few dozen other factors.

There are a few major types of ~tension~ that work well, and I think these are probably the two biggest ones:
Short term vs. long term objectives
Examples:
- Gradual damage vs. immediate damage
- Dealing damage vs. inflicting debuffs
- Casting protective buffs vs. healing after taking damage
- Choosing a stat that improves your performance vs. one that you will need to wear a certain piece of equipment later
- Killing an enemy vs. trying to steal from it
- Killing an enemy vs. gathering information (like elemental weaknesses)
- Winning fast vs. conserving items/MP/resources
- Upgrading equipment vs. saving money
- Using a class that has good abilities vs. using a class that can eventually learn great abilities

Offense vs. defense
Examples:
- Healing spells vs. damage spells
- Killing an enemy to keep it from dealing damage vs. healing the damage it deals
- Using crippling status effects vs. ignoring them
- Choosing characters, classes, equipment or spells to use in battle
- Choosing characters, classes, equipment or spells to hire/buy/learn in the first place

Of course, simply having two options listed in the menu for the player to choose between doesn't create much tension. At least not good tension. You have to make them both tempting. You have to make them both seem like good ideas, in their own way. You have to make the player feel like neither just is the obvious winner. And then you have to create situations where one is better, and situations where the other is better - even though it seemed, to some extent, like they were both good - so that the choice actually matters.

Of course, the player becomes trained over the course of the game (sometimes very quickly) to recognize the patterns in your design and what factors cause one option to work better than the other. This decreases the level of tension, so the stakes have to be increased or the gameplay has to change to get that lovely feeling of ~tension~ back into your game that makes the player feel like he's actually doing something.

I wonder if people have examples of sets of skills or systems that work in tandem to create tension that they think worked really well. Or systems that they think worked very poorly and failed to create tension, and want ideas of how to improve. For example, choices between an ensured outcome and a possible better outcome - like an attack with half hitrate but double damage - never seem to create any degree of tension that I care about. I'd call that entire methodology a failure at creating tension. Though I suppose compulsive gamblers might disagree with me, or even have insights of how to improve that kind of choice.

Yeah, ATB is garbage; I don't think anyone really wants their success or failure in a game to be based on how fast they can navigate a menu. It's also not the kind of tension I'm talking about, in any case.

What I am talking about isn't "a feeling of pressure", it's "having multiple options". It's not the player that's under tension, it's the choices themselves. They have tension against each-other in a way that makes them both feel legit.

Here is an example of two skills with zero tension:

Fire Blade: Deals 100 fire damage. Costs no MP.
Fire Blade II: Deals 300 fire damage. Costs no MP.

Obviously the first skill there is doing absolutely nothing to put tension on the second one. Nothing it does makes it seem like it might be the right choice. The result is that the player feels like he doesn't have a choice at all. He just has the second skill, effectively.

This example has slightly more tension:

Fire Blade: Deals 100 fire damage. Costs no MP.
Fire Blade II: Deals 300 fire damage. Costs 100 MP.

The addition of an MP cost for the second skill creates a level of tension, making the player feel like there are pros and cons to both choices. He must decide between two goals - deal damage or conserve MP. In a good game, the correct choice will vary based on the situation. In a game where MP restoration were extremely simple, though, the second choice would almost always be the best one; there'd still be no tension.

This example has even more tension:

Fire Blade: Deals 100 damage and has a 25% chance to inflict Def Down. Costs no MP.
Fire Blade II: Deals 300 damage. Costs 100 MP.

Now there are two layers of tension. The first skill accomplishes two goals while the second only accomplishes one, so they are much closer to both feeling useful. In some situations, the player might care more about both MP conservation and long-term damage than about short-term damage, making the first skill the better choice. Or in other situations the player might only care about the first skill because it does both things - once he inflicts Def Down he'll be more likely to switch to the second skill. In still other situations he'll just use the second skill regardless. The skills pull at each-other, making neither one obviously better, and thus giving the player an actual choice of how to proceed.

Another way to describe "tension" is "balance". But it's a specific kind of balance.

@Trihan:
Hmm. Letting the player micro-customize their options is more difficult than giving them a set of options - you have to weigh each one very carefully. It can be very effective, but at least to me it's also easier to mess up. You have less leeway in making choices with extreme results, because it's far harder to ensure that there's a big enough downside to make up for the super high damage or awesome status effect or whatever. The player can pick his own downside from a list of choices, and then can try to adjust his other skills (or even other aspects of the same skill) to make that downside not matter.

Effectively, what you've created is a system where the player never has to choose between two objectives and two different objectives. He only chooses between one objective and one different objective. This gives them a feeling of freedom and control that a lot of players like, for sure, but the cost is that their choices will feel less important. Because choosing one thing is just inherently less important than choosing two at once.

That's not to say it can't be done extremely effectively. The freedom of building their own choices sounds like it's very important to your game, so I certainly wouldn't scrap this idea. Just keep its weaknesses in mind and try to find ways to overcome them.

Well, it's a specific kind of balance. I didn't have a better word for it.

There are plenty of other types of balance, so just saying balance by itself didn't really get the point across. When you have different elements of attacks that are useful against different enemies in a Final Fantasy kind of way, making the elements do the same damage and be useful about as often as each-other is certainly a kind of balance, but it doesn't create any tension, because there's always a best element. The idea with what I'm talking about is to make situations where the player's action is a legitimate choice where both options feel like things you equally want to do, instead of one of the options being the thing you're supposed to do next and thus being your inevitable next action.


Example of tensionless balance:
- You have a single target attack skill, an area attack skill, and a stun skill. You get mastery points based on which skills you use, so it's important that they all be useful about equally.
- Battles are evenly split up between single enemies and groups of enemies, and about one third of all enemies use powerful attacks that they warn you about one round before using them, so you can stun them and stop the attack. This makes all three skills get used as often as each-other.
- However, there's always a clear best skill to use. If there's one enemy that's not charging up a powerful attack, you're going to use the single target attack every time.

Example of balance through tension:
- You have a self-buff that makes you do triple damage next round, a single-target attack, and a stun skill. You get mastery points based on which skills you use, so it's important that they all be useful about equally.
- About one third of all enemies use powerful attacks that they warn you about one round before using them, so you can stun them and stop the attack.
- But if they start charging up for a powerful attack right after you buffed yourself, your next move isn't so clear. If you decide to stun them, you'll waste your triple damage buff. If you go ahead and attack, you'll take a major hit. Your next action is a real decision, instead of an inevitability.


It can exist outside of battle too!

Example of tensionless balance:
- Your main character has four possible party members he can bring with him. Each one uses attacks of a different element: fire, ice, holy, and dark.
- In order to make the characters equally useful, you make a fire dungeon, an ice dungeon, a holy dungeon and a dark dungeon, so each character has a dungeon that they're best in.
- However, there's still no reason not to use the character who's best at the time. You'll inevitably use the ice character in the fire dungeon.

Example of balance through tension:
- Your main character has four possible party members he can bring with him. Each one has a special skill that gets you stuff: lockpicking, mining, blue magic, and monster taming.
- Every dungeon has opportunities to use all four of these things. Therefore, you'll miss out on different types of rewards based on who you leave behind.
- This PULLS AT YOUR HEART because there's no right choice. Every option is worth doing, which means every option involves sacrificing the other options. But you can't do them all.


As is probably obvious from the fact that I made this thread, I think the balance through tension is way more fun. It feels like I'm playing the game instead of just pressing the buttons that the screen prompts me to press. It's the difference between gameplay that could be done exactly as well by a very simple AI and gameplay that requires a player.


Also:

author=bulgingbriefs
I spend literally less than a second deciding on an ability once I figure out an enemy weakness. Spam the strongest ability and use the weaker one after it runs out.

Man, the fact that you've never played a game that has any tension doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And it certainly doesn't mean it isn't a good idea. There are games out there that do this really well. The Dragon Age games on nightmare difficulty, the Etrian Odyssey games, and World of Warcraft all do pretty good jobs at this.