the balance of power - brainstorming

[spawky]

Hello,

With regards to assigning difficulties, as a GM, I hate the traditional GM task procedure of first having to assign a difficulty value for a given task/foe, then deciding how bad the effects are and then how long they'll last afterward. And in the middle, I'm second guessing and riding herd on the dice to make sure it doesn't break the game. This is a balance of power that, to me, translates down into: by virtue of my traits and skills, the GM says that I win or lose. So, like the original poster, I've been seeking alternatives to the one-sided balance of power. Many alternatives are unusable given my particular group's preferences. I can't stray too far from traditional gaming, though there are a wealth of things that could be tried.

So I'm going to try the option presented in SteveD's There is No Spoon (and also There is No Try, There is No Yellow Spandex, etc) where the diff is the pc's relevant stat. (aka the roll-under option.) With apologies to those who've already seen it...In a nutshell, if you want to make a perception check to pick out the north star, you just roll vs your perc stat (with no bonuses or penalties.)

(There's no penalty for thick clouds and no bonus for clear skies. If you can't see it or you wouldn't know which one it was, there's no point rolling.) To resolve a roll, you look at the kinds of successes indicated by the dice; which tells the strength of result and you narrate according to social contract expectations, genre, etc. Any opposed rolls each have their success levels compared and likes cancel. One side will have more successes of some kind than the other and you narrate a flurry of action and then the final result.

The point to all that was that the diff is built right into the trait in the first place. A 3 trait on a d6 is a 50-50 outcome. So your trait IS your balance of power in that area. If your GM is undeservedly throwing foes at you who are consistently (say) twice your ability level, then you'll know it. There's no need for a meta-mechanic to keep things on a certain budget or within a certain genre/expectation besides discussion and agreement (aside: nothing wrong meta's...my group just doesn't like that sort of mechanic.)

Caveat: Seems like it'll work good for us but I have yet to playtest it. I haven't heard anything bad from anyone who's tried the original system...(insert evil laugh) but of course, I have adapted it a bit from SteveD's original.

Spawky

[Larry L.]

That is crap. It's crap for all the reasons Matt is discussing in this thread. The real conflict present is between Mr. Puma and the merchant, and should be rolled in that fashion. At most the tree should be an augmenter for one or the other. I blame the resurgence of RuneQuest grognard influence in the development of HeroQuest, which I think did serious damage to the clarity of the text and the game itself.

Ron,

Thanks. Okay, I understand the mechanical difference here, then. I think I'm getting lost where the value judgment comes in. I'm seeing two schools of (accidental?) thought. There is apparently some subtlety, perhaps happening "above the rules," that I'm not seeing.

So the "HeroQuest" approach necessarily leads to the dysfunctional "Crap, I hosed the players," situation Matt describes, whereas the "Hero Wars" way results in satisfying gameplay? Always/usually/sometimes? I would like to be able to chalk this up to "Ron et al. have got X amount of actual play experience that validates this, so it must be right," but I don't think that will be useful to developing this interesting piece of theory that's emerging.

Terminology might be good, so it doesn't look like we're bashing on HeroQuest specifically, and simplify phrases like, "In TMW, Trollbabe, and PTA..."


"Spawky,"

I'm with you that setting difficulty ratings for task resolution systems is my least favorite GM-task. Sick to no end of games that include a handy full-page table of common situations so you can grind the game to a standstill while you try to figure out the "appropriate" level.

I am unclear as to whether the distinction established in this thread exists solely within these slick recent conflict res systems, or if it holds true for "old-fashioned" task resolution as well.

[John Harper]

For Danger Patrol, I'm doing three things to address this issue:

1) What's done is done. Conflicts are settled by the system. No one player can force another to test again and again until they fail.

2) Pre-made characters. All of the heroes and villains for the current series are made cooperatively by the group before play begins. So all those "difficulty numbers" are set at that time.

3) Random characters. Before each chapter in the series, the heroes and villains go into a pile and everyone draws blind for a character. The hero your villain hosed last chapter just might be your character now.

Imagine a game of Dogs without a formal GM where the group as a whole sits down and makes the town, the townspeople, and the Dogs, draws to see who plays what, and then goes to it. That's kind of what I'm after. I think it sidesteps the issue of "too much responsibilty" when being a GM.

[M. J. Young]

We appear to be offering examples of systems that determine how difficult the referee is allowed to make a situation, so let me toss Multiverser's General Effects Rolls into the mix.

The primary use of these rolls is to guide the referee in understanding outcomes where resolved actions don't necessarily answer that question. A popular example is a character who on encountering a local population fires a gun into the air, hoping that the loud noise will have some desired effect. Given the game's task-based resolution mechanic for character actions, I can resolve whether in fact he can fire the gun into the air; but how do I know the reaction of the natives?  I roll a GE roll.  At the one end, the outcome is stated to be far better than anything the character could have hoped; at the other end, it's far worse than he might have feared. Along the range between we find varying degrees including a neutral point. Based on that roll, I as referee determine what happens based on my perception of what the player through his character wishes would happen.

The same process is frequently used in scenarios. In a game situation yesterday, it had been established that armed soldiers were searching the countryside for the player character, and that one of them had come to the door of the house where he was staying. When he decided he wanted to dive into this as a battle rather than try to escape, I used a general effects roll to determine how many soldiers were going to hear the gunfire of the fight and respond, knowing that he wants it to be enough that it will be a wild battle but not so many that he's guaranteed to lose.

Since the question your posing seems to be very much on the order of how the referee fills in the unwritten parts of the scenario, that would be how Multiverser would handle it. It would be entirely different if the player decided to free a comrade from prison, and I had already determined how many guards were at the prison and how they were organized.  In that case, GE rolls might impact enemy organization and response time, but not numbers and abilities.

Does that fit your thoughts?

--M. J. Young

[John Harper]

Interesting, MJ. I used to do something similar when I ran Godlike to represent the factor known as "friction" in special forces speak.

How is a GE roll made? Is it an unmodified die roll? If there are modifiers that skew the result one way or the other, who is responsible for applying those modifiers? Are there any system checks on the person applying the modifiers or when a GE roll can be made? Is scale part of the system (as in, how "big" the effect of a GE roll is -- one person or a whole tribe)?

Sorry for the rapid-fire questions, but I'm curious.

[M. J. Young]

How is a GE roll made? Is it an unmodified die roll? If there are modifiers that skew the result one way or the other, who is responsible for applying those modifiers? Are there any system checks on the person applying the modifiers or when a GE roll can be made? Is scale part of the system (as in, how "big" the effect of a GE roll is -- one person or a whole tribe)?

O.K., let me see if I can parse these questions and answer them.

How is a GE roll made?

It's three ten-sided dice added together. This creates a stiff bell curve in which the extremes are one in a thousand but there's fair variation within the middle of the range.

There's an alternate scale for 3d6, but it eliminates a lot of the results, particularly the end points.

It's compared to a chart that has verbal descriptions of what it means, with such things as "barely good enough" and "not desired but generally favorable result" and "as bad as expected". It doesn't matter who rolls the dice. Usually the referee interprets the roll into game events, although 1) sometimes he will question the player to help figure out what the character really did want and 2) on extreme rolls (particularly at the good end) he'll use a lot of player input to figure out what happened.

Is it an unmodified die roll?

Yes and no.

Before the roll, the referee has the right to remove one die from it and replace it with a fixed number--usually 1, 5, or 10. This is done if the referee thinks that the situation is such that only the good side or the bad side should be available (e.g., a general effects roll to determine the king's gratitude after you've rescued his daughter, or one to determine whether there's anything to grab when you're sliding down the face of the bottomless canyon or something), or for what's called a "safe" roll that eliminates the extremes (I can't remember using this). That's entirely at the discretion of the referee, but so is whether to call for a roll at all.

In the main, though, the modification is made in the interpretation. That is, if I roll "not thwarting but generally unfavorable result" as referee I have to figure out what that means in the context of the character's current situation. If he's trying to pick the lock to the safe, it probably means that the security guard has just been heard coming down the hall. If he's hanging from a limb over a ravine, it probably means that he just heard the limb crack. If he's in a plane that's already plummeting toward the water below, he probably didn't find a parachute.

If there are modifiers that skew the result one way or the other, who is responsible for applying those modifiers?

The referee decides what kind of roll is required, and what it means.

Are there any system checks on the person applying the modifiers or when a GE roll can be made?

No, but in the nature of the game it's hard to imagine any way that the referee could abuse his power. Remember, if you kill the player characters they just keep going in another world, so most of them aren't really afraid of death.

Generally, a GE roll can be made only when there's a question the referee has to answer for which the answer is not at all certain and will have an impact on the player's situation. They're used for all sorts of things, such as whether anything happens during the night while you're asleep, how quickly events move around you, what kind of mood a non-player character happens to be in at the moment, and just about anything else for which there's no obvious roll (attribute and skill checks) but an answer is needed.

Is scale part of the system (as in, how "big" the effect of a GE roll is -- one person or a whole tribe)?

Interestingly, when we changed the title of the game from its original working title to Multiverser, we realized that we had discovered something very central to the game: it is always about the player character, and revolves around the player character completely. Thus the GE roll is always about what he wants to have happen that is outside his control, but that can be anything.

For a large-scale example, I have a player currently in Ruritania. That's a fictional Germanic province that appears in several nineteenth century short stories, including a Sherlock Holmes piece and the famous Prisoner of Zenda. He was in the Zenda story, saved the kingdom, and is now a member of the local nobility in 1899. Of course, he, being a verser from the twentieth century and a history buff, knows that by the early twentieth century Otto Von Bismarck's efforts managed to force all of these little Germanic states into one unified Germany. That means it must have happened to Ruritania--but because Ruritania is fictional, no one knows when it happened. He began preparing Ruritania's defenses to withstand Germany's inevitable assault. I rolled a GE roll to determine how much time he had before Ruritania became the next target. So in that sense, it was about international affairs--but only because these international affairs would have an impact on the player character.

It is possible for a couple of really bad GE rolls following a magic botch to mean that an entire universe has just exploded and been completely obliterated. I've never seen it happen, but the odds are about one in a million and I'm waiting.

On the other hand, a lot of my GE rolls are really about little things, like whether the store has the item you want at a good price, or do you find a dry place to camp.

Of course, it's always connected to what that character wants and fears, so even when it impacts the entire universe it does so through that connection.

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young