Rethinking Randomness

[SrGrvsaLot]

Randomness, in the form of die rolls, is an essential element of many games, but is it necessary? Can it be eliminated? Can a game be fun and exciting without the influence of chance? What sort of non-random systems have you seen or created?

I had an idea for a system where all the dice were rolled at the begining of the session, and anytime the character had to resolve a task they could select one of their rolls, the upshot being that a certain degree of strategy involved in choosing high or low dice.

[Mark Johnson]

Have you looked into using cards (either playing cards or specialized gaming cards)?  What you are basically describing is a resource management system which can probably be more easily regulated through cards than a long list.  

A card system need not be random.  For example each player could have there own deck of cards which would only be refreshed once all the cards have been played.

Note that your system does not eliminate randomness, it just changes when the randomness is allocated.  In a low roll = bad system, it would still be possible for a player to roll nothing but 1s.   That could be potentially a problem since if a player knows that he has nothing but crap to choose from, he might be less invested in that session

System such as yours have been brought up here before, so you might do a bit of searching or wait for one of the regulars to post some links so you have an idea what others have done.

[talysman]

I'm trying to remember the name of RPG magazine devoted to rules lite gaming that existed a couple years ago (and may still exist...) I remember seeing exactly this proposal: if you used mainly d6s in your play, everyone would simply write the numbers 1 -6 multiple times on a sheet of paper at the beginning of the session. if you have to roll 3d6, you simply select which three numbers you want to have as your "die roll result" and cross them off. no actual die rolling at all.

[M. J. Young]

I was thinking of cards as resource management also, in which the players get to decide which cards to use.

The board game Stratego may be informative in this regard. Each player's pieces are in specific places--I can't suddenly decide that my eight is a two so that I can take your three--but unless a player does something to identify the other player's pieces, he doesn't know what he's up against (the reason for scouts--you will lose them whenever you play them, but they will tell you what you're up against). A karma system (have you read System Does Matter in the articles section) in which no one knows the strengths of the adversaries can be very effective, as long as these strengths are well distributed for the game's objectives.

There have been a lot of potential systems proposed over the years here. One highly unusual drama system I suggested once had the two opposing players (one of whom might or might not be the referee) each describe a desired outcome, and then have the other players vote on which of those outcomes they thought made for a better story. I've yet to see it implemented, but I think that ideas like this help significantly in getting us to see possibilities.

--M. J. Young

[Ben Lehman]

Hi.

If you are interested in pursuing randomless system design, you should run, not walk, to your gaming store and purchase the following two games:
Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game
Nobilis

I'm not going to claim that these systems are necessarily good, but they are two very popular and widely-played diceless RPGs, and it will give you a great jumping off point for your own thoughts.

yrs--
--Ben

[Domhnall]

I think it's accurate to say that everyone believes in not rolling all of the time.  (We don't roll to see if our characters can walk across a field, or drink their ale properly!)  So, the question is one of the boundary for rolling VS not.  Over the past few years, my boundary has moved mildly  towards less rolling.  E.G., in a footrace between two characters with a huge skill gap between them, it's not as if the slow guy has a chance in hell of beating the fast guy.  So, (comparing the skill levels) the fast guy de facto wins (with no roll).  Now, I will give the chance that anyone can fall if the terrain is hazardous for a sprint, but would not roll if the terrain is easy.  If 2 characters' skills are close, however, rolling is involved.

[pete_darby]

Just to add another recommendation or two for diceless designs: The most recent Marvel RPG (Marvel Universe) used a resource management system similar to Nobilis, and Everway was, IIRC, the first game to explicitly allow task resolution by Drama (GM fiat), Karma (simple comparison of relative advantage) or Fate (GM interpretation of the turn of a card).

The system you describe sounds very similar to the effects you'd get from playing with a hand of cards, such as the system in the TSR SAGA games (Dragonlance: fifth age & Marvel Saga), and is in fact very close to a system I wanted to try out on the White Wolf Storyteller system. The problem I couldn't quite solve was how big to make the initial pool from which the results could be selected, and how, in that system, to increase the frequency of botching (I likes my dramatic fumbles, me!).

As has been said, the difference between a hand of cards and a pool of dice is that cards have a fixed set of values (if there are four aces in a deck, no hand can contain more than four aces no matter how many cards it contains) while the value of the individual dice is independent of the values of the other dice in your pool.

MJ: To an extent, the "voted outcome" system is present in Universalis (and Pantheon, for that matter), though both systems make the players "buy votes" with limited resources, and in Universalis the votes bias the diced outcome without settling them.

[Jonathan Walton]

Nobilis

I'm not going to claim that these systems are necessarily good...

I will.  Nobilis is the bomb-diggity.  I've played it regularly for several years, and the diceless resource-management system it uses is delightful.  It's basically roll-over-target-number done in a diceless fashion, where players "push" their attributes with points from a resource pool in order to accomplish actions that would normally be too difficult.  Simple, elegant, and easy to learn.

There are plenty of diceless and Fortuneless (without random elements at all, including cards and such) games out there, as long as you know where to look.  While you're at it, you might want to read Erick Wujick's article on diceless play in the "Articles" section of the Forge.

[SrGrvsaLot]

Note that your system does not eliminate randomness, it just changes when the randomness is allocated.

That's not quite right. It doesn't eliminate randomness, but it does change how it affects the game. In a traditional random system, there is an element of uncertainty each and every time you attempt a task. In this system, that uncertainty vanishes. You will always know beforehand whether you succeed or fail. The uncertainty lies in whether you will have a lucky or unlucky session.

That said, I think the card idea is a better one overall, though using the dice would open up some intriguing avenues for supplementary mechanics. Like spending an experience point to guarantee one of the dice turns up at it's maximum, using different types of dice to represent different qualities of the character (someone with an "unlucky" flaw could use a smaller die), or being able to convert high dice to low ones at the begining of the session in return for some character benefit.

[simon_hibbs]

Randomness, in the form of die rolls, is an essential element of many games, but is it necessary? Can it be eliminated? Can a game be fun and exciting without the influence of chance? What sort of non-random systems have you seen or created?

And then you go on to talk about how you used random dice in a game once, which doesn't strike me as being very relevent to your question above.

Plenty of non-roleplayign games exist that are non-random. Chess is the classic example, but there are many others from noughts and crosses to Go, etc. These are perfectly deterministic games, where everything is out in the open, there are no hidden choices or factors. I'm not aware of any roleplayign game that uses a system like this.

Games Workshop used to publish a board game called Apocalypse that used a non-random mechanic. When attacking you chose a number of armies to attack with from 1 to 6 (limited by the number of armies in your stack), indicated on a hidden die. If your opponent guessed correctly you lost that many armies, if they guessed wrong they lost an army. One classic 'non-random' game mechanic for roleplaying is the rock-paper-scissors game employed in many freeform/LARP systems. Both these kinds of system are based on guessing games where one or both sides make hidden choices that are revealed to determine the outcome. It's fairly easy to come up with novel forms of this kind of system, but rock-scissors-paper is so widely known and easy to use that it predominates. It ios also easily modified, such as by giving characters special abilities that alter the normal rules, like "If you and your oponnent both choose rock, you win". Some might argue that these systems are actualy a form of random system, just using the human brain as a randomiser, but tell that to my brother who gave up playing Apocalypse with me because I _always_ beat the crap out of him. It's a fact that some people are better at these games than others, so it's not just down to randomness.

The next best known example is the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, which around here is refered to as having a karma based system. Advantage is determined by your abilities - the character with the higher ability will win if all other factors are equal, but narrative manipulation of the situation can change that in a very freeform way - basicaly all other factors are never equal and the referee gets to decide how things actualy work out based on what the characters do. This is a afirly simple system, but a lot of people don't like the idea of just leaving all the final decissions in the hands of the referee. The big advantage of this system is that it's very quick and unobtrusive in play.

To summaries, yes it's perfectly possible to eliminate randomness in roleplaying games and it's been done many times.


Simon Hibbs

[orbsmatt]

I think I agree mostly with Domhnall here.  An easy way to not let randomness rule a game is to decide an outcome based on roleplaying rather than die-rolling.  However, when it comes down to it, sometimes we need a bit of randomness!  Although I don't really believe in luck in real life, a lot of things are random.

IMO it boils down to the point on how much randomness you want in a game.  I like to let the players sweat over a few necessary rolls, while always having the ability to fudge my own to make up for any fatal ones that I don't want to happen.  They think it's random (which it is most of the time), but the GM has ultimate control over a seemingly-random situation.

[Callan S.]

One thing about randomness is how it addresses premise.

For example, in a movie about fighting for what you love, for example, if someone just can't hit their foe in a gun fight, it's not because they rolled bad. Missing/failing the situation says something about how much that character cares about what they love. That's what its there for. You don't show people sitting on the toilet or anything else that doesn't address premise, like a meaningless gun fight.

But when you use a randomiser it says nothing about that. It just tells you an outcome. The randomness does not help address premise at all.

Of course, you can have systems like SA's that push the outcome more toward one that answers premise. But any random mechanic there just means its more about randomness than premise. As I said before, other media don't or try not to have redundant scenes. Redundant scenes are those that have an outcome to a conflict that doesn't address premise in the least. Random generators quite happily produce results that don't address the premise at all.

Of course, the difference in the two media explains this somewhat. In the book or film, the reader simply enjoys it. At roleplay, the players can not be passive readers/listeners. Otherwise why have everyone at the table, the GM can just write everything down and they can read it at their leasure.

So they need to contribute something. But the problem is, in the other media the author simply decides the outcome of the conflict, so it addresses premise. If he does so now, the players aren't contributing. On the flip side, if the players just decide the outcome of the conflict with nothing to channel thier creative focus, they could just as easily imagined such a thing by themselves (and perhaps written it down and handed it out). Why come to the table to do so? So again they are redundant.

But, if the resources the character had to answer premise were limmited and those limmits were determined by a random system, it's different (I think, anyway).

Okay, I'll admit I'm thinking this up as I go along. But currently most games 'resolve' tasks or situations. But really these resolutions have forward effects on other resources and whether they are there or not to use. In other words, a random system that sets up what resources are available for the player to address premise with. It's done arse backwards because its trying to resolve the situation itself, but this is there.

I'm probably way wrong, but I'll still get something out of being shot down no doubt. So I'll pause here and see if there is any responce to this.

[M. J. Young]

Simon's post brought back to mind a thread some months back in which we helped design a system for use in a LARP.

The system in essence gave each player/character a card with four edges, each of which was labeled with a letter value. There was a system established such that letters beat certain other letters but lost to different other letters. There were stronger and weaker letters, but no letter was invincible.

I can't find it at the moment; Mike Holmes contributed significantly to that discussion, and maybe he can remember something that will pull it up on the search function (I don't seem to be able to get it).

In any event, I think it was an excellent example of a non-random system for use in a game, and would be worth checking if we can find it.

--M. J. Young

[simon_hibbs]

However, when it comes down to it, sometimes we need a bit of randomness!  Although I don't really believe in luck in real life, a lot of things are random.

Just because a lot of things in real life are random, that doesn't mean that things in games should be random any more than they should in novels, films or plays. Can you imagine Shakespear rolling dice to see whether Hamlet survives the poison on Laertes' sword?

Randomness isn't necessery to create suspense. Uncertainty creates suspense and randomness is only one very crude way to make something uncertain.

Simon Hibbs

[orbsmatt]

True, but it is a good tool nonetheless.

And I think there is a difference between writing a novel and roleplaying, as the writer has complete control over his actors and what they think and do, whereas a GM has to give some freedom to the players for that.

But I do agree with your point that there are other ways to create suspense.