Target Numbers, or the last bastion of GM fiat

[Mikael]

Another composite reply:

Thanks, Dave. Those two threads were mighty interesting reading. I knew I could not have been the first to grind this particular axe, but the search function is just next to useless when trying to locate relevant threads. And thanks to Callan for the behind-the-scenes support - oops, sorry, now it´s public... :-)

Greg, your Robin Hood and 12 NPC knights example was a good one. It made me realize that this whole issue is a lot different depending on which kind of game you like to run. If you like your games to be consistent and realistic (in-game) overall, then figuring out the consistent and realistic target numbers/NPC stats is obviously a mandatory part of reaching that goal. From that point of view, the target numbers in your example archery context need to be carefully set so that they can be seen as an interesting test of the Robin character´s capabilities - and luck.

However, if we have a more narrativistic CA, the example would more likely be a single conflict where the player´s goal might be "Rise out of anonymity and be noticed by the fair maiden", and the GM´s "Robin realizes that he is a country boy, no match to professionals, but earns the respect and even friendship of his future arch-nemesis." In this case, the target number(s) might not easily derive from in-game constraints, but from the player´s and the GM´s story priorities. If I were the GM, either outcome would be interesting, and I would personally appreciate the help of the dice pool to set the number(s). And, if I used the pool to set any NPC stats during this conflict, I would definitely record those and use them in the future as well. Thus the pool system is a sort of crutch for me: I need a number, I do not have one defined, I do not want to go through the dubious process of justifying a certain number, thus I just pick one from the pool.

Simon, I´m afraid I cannot accept your statement that the proposed system "really sucks badly", when at least two of our group´s GMs and all the players have no problem with it.

I think that there is a difference in perspective at work here. Let´s see if I can put it into words.

Point #1: In your procedural example, the GM knows, in the first step, what the number should be. Now, if the GM is both happy and capable of determining that number, you are quite correct in that the GM does not need this system at all.

Point #2: More significantly, you are talking about what the target number should be. From this perspective, the pool can indeed be seen as restricting access to the full range of numbers. However, if the numbers are instead seen as a set of GM´s story priorities, then the pool is just a convenient way of reasonably spreading the priorities across the full spectrum, and for the GM to stay relatively "honest", not setting everything "high priority." The difference between the approaches is clear: if you can happily determine what the target numbers should be, there is no need for such a distribution; rather, the distribution is determined "online" by the game events and by the perceived difficulty of the challenges the players choose to get involved in.

Thanks for the constructive criticism. I think I fell into the trap of trying to make the initial problem statement too broad, i.e. I did not clearly define which sorts of games and situations I am interested in. If we are still not on the same page here, I think this is getting close to the point where we just have to agree to disagree.

While writing the above, I realized that I had overlooked the option of having a fixed pool, a set of numbers that gets used over and over again. While that would surely cover the same function as the randomized version, I do prefer the feel of rolling the dice and the ease of just removing the used values.

Thanks again for your input,
+ Mikael

[Jason Lee]

I had this light bulb thing happen in my head after this Monday's game session, in relation to my early post in this thread and Difficulty/Success Needed as it relates to GM Fiat.

I'm going to quote a couple things (emphasis mine).

My personal tastes make me dislike GM fiat: maybe it's just that I'm normally the GM/referee/whatever that runs the game, but in my experience it just leads to stories that don't make me, the GM, satisfied (when I'm going for Narr). I have too much control over what will happen to actually make what happens interesting or surprising.

See, hypothetically, the GM will come up with "reasonable" difficulties. We've all seen the "rulers" as I like to think of them, with the "Climbing Wet Slippery Rocks" tables and such. But, as a GM for the past three years (college student: lots of opprutunity to run lots of games), I haven't ever done used them like that. I've never opened up the books suddenly and gone, "Man, did it rain the night before? Is the roof a little slippery? I wonder if there's moss or something?"

Hell no. Normally, I say some arbitrary number. It's almost random sometimes. Most of the time it's pathetically easy to average, unless it's something I don't want them to do or doesn't fit the assumed genre, in which case it's rather hard.

However, if we have a more narrativistic CA, the example would more likely be a single conflict where the player´s goal might be "Rise out of anonymity and be noticed by the fair maiden", and the GM´s "Robin realizes that he is a country boy, no match to professionals, but earns the respect and even friendship of his future arch-nemesis." In this case, the target number(s) might not easily derive from in-game constraints, but from the player´s and the GM´s story priorities. If I were the GM, either outcome would be interesting, and I would personally appreciate the help of the dice pool to set the number(s). And, if I used the pool to set any NPC stats during this conflict, I would definitely record those and use them in the future as well. Thus the pool system is a sort of crutch for me: I need a number, I do not have one defined, I do not want to go through the dubious process of justifying a certain number, thus I just pick one from the pool.

...

Point #2: More significantly, you are talking about what the target number should be. From this perspective, the pool can indeed be seen as restricting access to the full range of numbers. However, if the numbers are instead seen as a set of GM´s story priorities, then the pool is just a convenient way of reasonably spreading the priorities across the full spectrum, and for the GM to stay relatively "honest", not setting everything "high priority." The difference between the approaches is clear: if you can happily determine what the target numbers should be, there is no need for such a distribution; rather, the distribution is determined "online" by the game events and by the perceived difficulty of the challenges the players choose to get involved in.

I realize I'm pulling a few sentences out of different threads.  If they are not meant to say what I think they say, then cry out in displeasure.  I think they are very telling.  I see a pattern.

I play with two people with the same problem - the same people who can't grok how I choose difficulty numbers.  It finally hit me why.  Assigning NPC stats and environmental difficulties is opaque to them, because they concern themselves with what effect it'll have if the character succeeds/fails.  All that thinking about probabilities and stressing over an "appropriate" difficulty comes from trying to guess the end result.  The difficulty number is them infusing their desire for a specific result into the conflict.  No surprise then that they have trouble assigning difficulties.  To do so you have to decide how much you want something to happen, how much within that want the players will let you get away with, whether or not that want is fair, what the likely result is of their roll given their trait and the dice probabilities... geez, complicated.

From where I stand, correct difficulty simply comes from consistency.  If you go breaking it you end up breaking the integrity of characters and you no longer have a story.  You can trip yourself up on this if the scale of tasks are not consistent within a scene; which can cause apparent difficulty of the task and the strength of the opposition to disconnect.  Using a small range of difficulty values, as Gelasma suggested, significantly increases the chance that your vision of what is consistent will coincide with everyone else's at the table.  The heroic advantage of a protagonist comes from player control mechanics (FitM, hero points, etc).  The probabilities of the dice are irrelevant to assigning difficulties in play (even with unopposed rolls if they have a chart) - the range, standard deviation, and all that jazz impact the feel (favoring luck, skill, etc) the game creates, but should not impact character effectiveness within that feel.  If I don't invest in the results, I only have to worry about playing my setting and NPCs.

The question this makes me ask is, "What's wrong with GM fiat in this case?".  I mean, the GM created the NPC or the cliff, what's the issue with him assigning their stats or difficulty?  Do the players, or the GM, not trust the GM?  Will he cheat if you let him stat out his own creations?

Well anyway, up to you if this applies.  Just food for thought.  Are you trying to engineer a mechanic to faciliate story, or trying to engineer a mechanic that allows people to trust the GM?

[Andrew Norris]

Jason, I think I do pretty much what you do.

I set difficulty based on the importance of the desired outcome and the effectiveness of the opposition. But I explicitly disconnect resolving the outcome from the narration of the player's action. Say you're in a swordfight, and the outcome at stake is "Do I beat this guy". Both characters are expert swordsmen. The difficulty will be high -- but that's the difficulty to beat him, injure him, or whatever. The dice will say nothing about how well they fight, just the outcome.

So even a badly blown roll on the player's part won't result in "You whiff". There'll probably be a flurry of thrusts, parries, and ripostes, but no actual hits. We know he's a great fighter, and the description of the action is true to that, even though the outcome is failure.

The benefit of decoupling outcome from description is that if you do get some difficulties wrong, it doesn't show the character as having inconsistent abilities. I think that's what you're saying with "the range, standard deviation, and all that jazz impact the feel (favoring luck, skill, etc) the game creates, but should not impact character effectiveness within that feel." Is that about right?

[Jason Lee]

Jason, I think I do pretty much what you do.

I set difficulty based on the importance of the desired outcome and the effectiveness of the opposition. But I explicitly disconnect resolving the outcome from the narration of the player's action. Say you're in a swordfight, and the outcome at stake is "Do I beat this guy". Both characters are expert swordsmen. The difficulty will be high -- but that's the difficulty to beat him, injure him, or whatever. The dice will say nothing about how well they fight, just the outcome.

So even a badly blown roll on the player's part won't result in "You whiff". There'll probably be a flurry of thrusts, parries, and ripostes, but no actual hits. We know he's a great fighter, and the description of the action is true to that, even though the outcome is failure.

The benefit of decoupling outcome from description is that if you do get some difficulties wrong, it doesn't show the character as having inconsistent abilities. I think that's what you're saying with "the range, standard deviation, and all that jazz impact the feel (favoring luck, skill, etc) the game creates, but should not impact character effectiveness within that feel." Is that about right?

In part, yes.  Divorcing the narration from the outcome is part of what I was driving at here:

The heroic advantage of a protagonist comes from player control mechanics (FitM, hero points, etc).

The probabilities of the dice are irrelevant to assigning difficulties in play (even with unopposed rolls if they have a chart) - the range, standard deviation, and all that jazz impact the feel (favoring luck, skill, etc) the game creates, but should not impact character effectiveness within that feel.

What I was trying to get across with the above quote is that choosing target numbers by gauging probabilities is altering the feel that has been encoded into the game's design - changing the game in the middle of play.  Say you have a system that is roll a trait rated 1 - 5 and add 1d20 against your opponents trait x 10.  Now, in this hypothetical system you'll almost always fail and character effectiveness is all pretty much the same - creating a feeling of useless, un-unique characters.  If you as GM consider the high randomness and take steps to reduce it then you are altering the feel of the game.  If you make probability judgments every time a roll is called for then you are constantly shifting the feel of the game.  Players don't know what to expect, because certain qualities of their characters that are established by the probabilities are in never-ending flux.

I was also saying that I remove the importance of the tasks from assigning difficulty.  Whether its a mook or an arch-villian doesn't matter in anyway except for how that might impact their traits.  I'm finding that when a task seems too important my first inclination is to bump up the difficulty, but its the scale of the task that's the problem and not the difficulty.  For example, let's say you have a scene where 5 PCs are fighting pirates.  They resolve each swing and defense.  Then one of the PCs decides she wants to talk the pirate captain out of fighting.  Seems like it should be pretty hard, probably harder than the pirate's resist score, because it ends the conflict.  But letting it end the conflict would be shifting the scale - shifting from action resolution to scene resolution.  If you stick to action resolution, you can have a verbal exchange (a number of rolls, possibly with social "damage") and leave the difficulty as it should be for the pirate.

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It just seems like the point here is actually to find a mechanism for enabling and justifying GM force, not reducing it.  To create a simple and mechanically reinforced way for the GM to let his priorities influence the outcome of resolution.  More GM fiat, not less.  Nothing really wrong with that, but I could go for some clarification on how this is intended to affect power balance.

[Callan S.]

However, if we have a more narrativistic CA, the example would more likely be a single conflict where the player´s goal might be "Rise out of anonymity and be noticed by the fair maiden", and the GM´s "Robin realizes that he is a country boy, no match to professionals, but earns the respect and even friendship of his future arch-nemesis." In this case, the target number(s) might not easily derive from in-game constraints, but from the player´s and the GM´s story priorities.

Mikael, do you actually want some sort of target number system which will let BOTH GM and player push their own story agenda. So your trying to undercut your own power as GM to a degree, so players are more able to push their own story lines more? Sort of like a friendly tug of war, your trying to get rid of the tractor you have on your side of the rope because that just means the story always goes your way and that's boring? But when they can pull most on the rope sometimes, it gets interesting for you (you wont know precisely where its all going to end up)?

PS: Your miss applying the term narrativist (as the forge defines it, anyway). I think your refering to giving players greater creative power during the game.

[David Bapst]

I've been reconsidering some of my motives behind the topic I made. I think reasons for my complaints are implicit in my long held bad GM habits... they become ready tools for illusionism. I graduated from the WW school of gaming, where the numbers of successes gained are used as a vague range for the GM to narrate the result without any idea of the real difficulty having existed in the first place.

I am adding this to this discussion as remarks have been drawn from my posts, and thus I feel it is important that they are interpretated correctly.

[John Harper]

If one person both establishes the situations and decides the likelihood of success/failure -- from moment to moment -- then that person is the author of the game. Period. It may be very subtle. It may still be loads of fun for everyone. But the authorship resides in one place only. The other players are being carried along on a wave of probability.

In this kind of play:
"We go in the room. What's there?"
"It's a warehouse full of wooden crates. As you enter, 6 ninjas leap from the shadows and attack! Since they're ninjas, they should be CR 12 and they get two attacks per round..."

That second person is authoring the game. If that isn't obvious, we're not going to have a very useful conversation on this topic. The input of the first person is simply to decide (sometimes) in what order things are authored.

If you care about authorship authority, you need to address this issue. PTA is probably the best example of a fix for this. Dogs in the Vineyard does it too, although using a much more traditional method (the "pre-made encounter").

[Callan S.]

John, that's hardly authorship...it's almost a bang (it's the same as 'a goon walks in the door, guns blazing' plot device). This is a better example of authorship:

GM "Six ninja's attack you! Their CR 12, their pretty tough!"
*Players look like they are going to attack*
GM "Err, CR 12 AND they have 3 levels each of ass kickery!"
*Players look worried but one of them might still lead the others to attack*
GM "And....they have vorpal swords!"
*Players declare that they run*
*GM is happy, flipping over his notes to the page entitled "When the PC's run, this happens..."*

Authorship/illusionism can come from adjusting the numbers to force just the right behaviour from the players, that the illusionist intended. However, being able to fully control numbers doesn't make someone 'the' author. It just makes it terribly easy for them to enter illusionism at any given moment.

[John Harper]

Yes, Callan, you're right. Control of difficulty gives the controller instant access to illusionist techniques when they want them. Add to that the likelihood of illusionism without intention (the GM doesn't even know he's doing it) and you get the "sole author" thing I was talking about.

[Jason Lee]

I've been reconsidering some of my motives behind the topic I made. I think reasons for my complaints are implicit in my long held bad GM habits... they become ready tools for illusionism. I graduated from the WW school of gaming, where the numbers of successes gained are used as a vague range for the GM to narrate the result without any idea of the real difficulty having existed in the first place.

I am adding this to this discussion as remarks have been drawn from my posts, and thus I feel it is important that they are interpretated correctly.

Thank you, David.  Illusionism (well, force in general) was the pattern I was seeing.

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A side note.  Consistency is, except in the case of secrets, a shared property.  If the system is sufficiently coarse to make consistency communication easy, then referencing it to determine something is similar to group consensus without the overt negotiation.

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If we wanted to adapt the proposed system so that players could also reinforce their story priorities then we could give the same pre-rolled dice pool to the players as well.  Then we'd have fortune in the begining, which I'm a raging fan of, and the power balance would shift back to something more even.