Dice & Diceless?

[DevP]

Active Exploits is another one of those that uses the same mechancics (same Skill / Ability framework) but can be played diceless. Actually, the dice-enabled version has skill being the most important factor. A skill will give you 15-30 points towards the task rating, while the dice can offer you a few d6's more (rarely more than 3) towwards a task. There is randomness, but it seems overdetermined by Skill differences and other conditions. (So basically, it's doable and done by a few systems here and there.)

One idea is to make the choice between dice/diceless have an impact on the game. The choice of risk versus self-determination is somewhat key. Realistic adventures may work best with a strict representation of diceless rules; heroic adventures may work with some risk and chance involved, and adventures that are more heroic than this may be diceless again, but with more points to spend and perhaps more rules-slack, depending on the narrative itself.

[Daniel Solis]

One idea is to make the choice between dice/diceless have an impact on the game.

Shoot me if I'm mentioning this old project too often, but in the Matrix RPG, I gave rebel characters the option of using either the dice or freedom mechanic. Since using dice is effectively giving up self-determination, every success in the dice system reduced a rebel's freedom rating. Again, it created a gamist reason to raise one's freedom rating so that they would less frequently have to resort to dice mechanics. It also created tension since having high freedom is what raises the attention of the System's personal defenses, i.e. the Agents.

So you've just broken into a nuclear power plant in an effort to free the minds of a whole city. A very ambitious goal that required several sessions of planning. After the success of the mission, every rebel involved has the "glow" of freedom all around them, just screaming for Agents to come destroy the aberrations. Despite the high freedom rewards for the mission, your rebel character is just at the cusp of gaining the next rank in permanent freedom.

If she leaves the matrix entirely, she'll graduallly lose her temporary freedom points and will have to do another mission of equal risk to gain them all back. She chooses to stay in the matrix to look after the results of the mission. Instead of resource-use, she rolls dice for her actions and for every success on a diced action, her temporary freedom is reduced. Even so, it's not as much as just completely laying low in the real world. Plus, a successful act of rebellion, even if diced, still results in temporary freedom rewards which could raise her permanent freedom trait to the next highest rank.

To me, the choice between dice and dicefree is a matter of internal or external locus of control. Randomness is appealing because there are chances of high successes and failures aren't really your fault. The fates just weren't in your favor. That's life. The drawback of randomness is that there are chances for extreme failures as well. Resource-management has the appeal of almost assured success, however mild. But when you do fail, it really is your fault. You just didn't try hard enough.

I don't really know how successfully the dichotomous system can be implemented where these themes are not a core component of the setting itself.

[Hunter Logan]

Shreyas wrote,

In response to this all:
So clearly, if you're going to choose a mechanism that allows you to choose dice or diceless as the situation demands it, you are compelled to make it clear what this means. Are you going to give your action to the winds of chance, or are you going to take responsibility and control over your action? This could be an interesting thematic issue...

Emphatically yes, this definitely goes along with what I'm saying!

As for taking 10... in DnD3.0 you don't get to vary your result, you get to take 10. Maybe there's some variant where this resource pool happens, but baseline didn't have such a thing. Perhaps you're thinnking of some other branch that does.

Okay. My ignorance is showing. Um, I swear someone wrote something about the solution I described. I went looking for the quote and didn't find it. So credit to whoever posted the original presentation, apologies for my slack documentation. In any case, that solution still strikes me as a really good way to make D&D diceless.

Sorry, Gobi. Shooting you is out of the question. Your Matrix game is a homebrew, yes. It sounds interesting. Is it posted somewhere?

[M. J. Young]

MJ made an interesting point when he said that the "diced version (of a game) provides an essentially unlimited number of points but limits use to the number rolled." As a broad statement, it's wrong; but it's true within the constraints of a game session. The statement is wrong because, when dice are rolled enough times to accurately generate a statistical distribution, the average of all the results always migrates to the middle of the range. The point pool is effectively limited. This is the whole basis for spending resources: Though the numbers always average, the player can limit the occurence of really unpleasant results and choose the moments when his character will look really cool.

The statement is true because the number of times a player will roll is usually much too small to guarantee that the die rolls themselves will (as a group) conform to expected statistical distribution. In this case, the player really can't control what comes up when, or even necessarily predict the likelihood of certain results within the game session.  So, we're left with a high degree of risk and the possibility that the numbers a player actually rolls would be impossible to achieve using the rules for a point-based resource. In other words, Roll a d6 1000 times, and the average result will be 3.5; but let a player roll that d6-cube 8 times in a session, and he could conceivably roll eight "1's" or eight "6's" in a row.

I was unclear.

Let's suppose that in a resource allocation system you have thirty points going into the session, and the cap is six points expenditure on any one confrontation. Obviously, if you have only five confrontations, you can spend the full amount on every one; just as obviously, there's no resource allocation problem in that case. It's because you'll probably have more than five, and you don't know how many you will have, that resource allocation becomes problematic. Thus when the character is facing his first conflict, and the player must make a point expenditure decision, he has to take into account the fact that his pool is limited--he can run out of points before he reaches the final problem.

The dice system is unlimited in the sense that it doesn't matter how many confrontations you have, you've always got at least one point to spend on each, possibly as many as the full six. The fact that the dice will produce average results over the long term doesn't change this, any more than the fact that you can't roll greater than 6 on a d6. Your number of points in any particular instance is limited, but the number of confrontations you can face is irrelevant.

This does suggest another idea to my mind, though. Nothing thus far has been said about the replenishment of the resources. What if this is randomly replenished? That is, we could have a three-option system, players choosing which of the three to use:[list=1][*]At each confrontation, the player rolls a d6 to determine how many points are added to his base; he has no control over it, and no resource pool.[*]At each confrontation, the player decides how many points to spend from his resource pool; he may spend up to six, and must spend at least one. After the conflict is resolved, the player rolls d6, and adds that many points to his resource pool.[*]At each confrontation, the player decides how many points to spend from his resource pool; again, he must spend at least one, and not more than six. After the conflict is resolved, his pool increases by 3.5 points.[/list:o]This provides a basically dice-based system, a fully karma resource allocation system, and a resource allocation system with a randomized element in resource availability.

It also answers the problem of resource points being used up early. If the players each start with six points, they will be able to spend an average of 3.5 points on any confrontation regardless of which system they use--after each expenditure, they add an average of 3.5 points to their resource pool, so if they overspend the pool they will not have six points for the next conflict, but if they budget they can build up a reserve.

--M. J. Young

[Hunter Logan]

Hi MJ,

I see what you're saying. My practice with the resource-based diceless mechanic is that the player always spends negative points to replenish the pool. This is the same as getting low rolls, though I expect the player would never suffer negative extremes unless he actively wanted the character to fail. As indicated in my original example, I like die rolls that are recurved to generate negative numbers (such as -5 to +5). I like rolling 2 dice because this naturally pushes results to the middle. If I wanted to use raw numbers, I could still use 2d6 for my die roll, though that makes the mental arithmetic a little clumsier. Of course, the 2d6 roll generates range 2 to 12 with a preference for results 6-8. If I were to making a diceless system based on this, I would give the player an unmodified base number = 7 + an Ability modifier. The resource pool could start with 5 points, though I would opt to make the point pool into a purchased attribute, so some players would start with more points than others. Whatever the case, in that system, the player may spend up to 5 points on any action. Then the player's result becomes Ability mod + 7 + resource (which falls in a -5 to +5 range). The spending of negative points replenishes the pool.

Example: Player John wants his thief to steal the shiny bauble. The GM informs John that the bauble will be really hard to steal. John decides to case the place before making a move. He hopes this will make the job easier. The GM agrees that this will indeed make the job a little easier, but it's still no cakewalk. John decides it's time. His thief is good at stealing stuff, so his Ability base is 8. He gets another +7 representing the average of the range, and decides to spend the full 5 points on the effort. So, John has 20. Of course, this is clumsier than just adding 8 + 5 = 13, which is why I like to recurve my die rolls.

In any case, your described replenishment methods seem like they could be pretty entertaining. Maybe you can play around with those as part of a little game. Finally, I now see what you were originally saying now about die rolls vs. spent resources. I just wasn't looking at it quite the same way because of my insufficiently stated assumptions about replenishment.

Thanks for the reply.

-Hunter

[Daniel Solis]

Your Matrix game is a homebrew, yes. It sounds interesting. Is it posted somewhere?

It's incomplete, but here's what I had written up after sitting down for a few hours six months ago. The most glaring hole is the lack of a combat system in a setting with such combat-intensive source material. Anyway, I'm kinda veering off here. ::ducks out::

[M. J. Young]

My practice with the resource-based diceless mechanic is that the player always spends negative points to replenish the pool. This is the same as getting low rolls, though I expect the player would never suffer negative extremes unless he actively wanted the character to fail.

Mostly for my curiosity, Hunter, how do you rein in players who undertake a lot of meaningless and low-risk challenges on which they do a lot of negative point expenditures to build up a point pool? I can think of hundreds of challenging but safe things I could do. I'll string a rope across a swimming pool and try to walk across it; oops--I fell in the water? Oh well, at least I get the five points, since I spent -5 points on trying to do that. I'll try to jump over the bed. Oh, did I land on it? Gee, at least I get the points. Give me a day's worth of free time, and I'll generate a hundred points for use when it counts.

If you can only get the points "when it counts", that means either the player has to make it count, but not that much, or you require players to take risks when they shouldn't.

So I'm interested in the fix.

--M. J. Young

[Hunter Logan]

Hi MJ,

You're right, there's always the possibility for abuse. The best solution is as you say: Only count points when it really matters. Then, you define those conditions in the social contract and enforce them in play. I would hope that players will not do the things you describe, but I have seen players do similar things. Then, my fix is to make the outcome more brutal. I don't like it, and I haven't had to it very often; but it usually only takes one demonstration to put the house in order.

From your example: The player has his character swing across the swimming pool, but the character is goofing off. So the -5 penalty means that the character falls in the water. It also means that the character bashes his head on the side of the pool, and really hurts hiumself. If no one helps him, he could drown. It's a really ugly outcome, especially if the character drowns; but it wouldn't even be a particularly vindictive act on the GM's part. In a game where an ability rated at 3 or 4 indicates trained competence, that -5 penalty produces a disastrous outcome. So, unless the character is some kind of expert at rope-swinging or acrobatic jumping, the player won't do too much of that. Still, it's far better to work it all out in the social contract at the start of play than to screw the players during play. Hope that helps.

-Hunter

[Shreyas Sampat]

Well, to tie that back to what's been discussed earlier: Going diceless is a clear statement "I take responsibility for my action."  Therefore, rolling poorly should mean that the character is personally, directly responsible for something bad.  If all it means is minor embarrassment, then it's defeating the thematic purpose of the mechanic.

[Jonathan Walton]

To add a differing opinion to the mix here, I really think people tend to overstate the difference between Fortune-based and Fortune-less systems.  Many, many folks go with what seems intuitive, that Fortune-based games tend to give you "random, unexpected" results, while Fortune-less games give you "calculated, deterministic" results.  Honestly, having played both types of games extensively, I really haven't found this to be the case.  It totally depends on how the game is designed.

Fudge, for instance, is totally Fortune-based, but has such a bell-shaped Fortune curve that you hardly ever get things that are completely surprising.  On the other hand, systems like In Nomine, which sports an extra "degree die" that determines the overall effectiveness of the roll, make unexpected results happen all the time ("The giant, killer demon rolled an effectiveness of 1?").

Likewise, in diceless games, the amount of "randomness" can vary between systems.  Nobilis can seem very random, simply because a player can decide, all of a sudden, to eat the sun, without warning and without thinking twice about it.  This has nothing to do with dice/dicelessness.  A game like the new Marvel Universe, on the other hand, is very predictable, while still being Fortuneless.

So, to state something that may seem obvious, I don't think it's really about whether you have Fortune or not.  It's about how you use it.  In this case, I would hope that Torchbearer's aesthetic would be the driving force behind either take on the system, so that playing with or without Fortune wouldn't really affect the play too much (though, of course, it would have some effect).  This way, it becomes more of a matter of personal preferences, which is what I guess Shreyas was probably intending.

[pete_darby]

To jump in on both meta0threads here before the inevitable split...

The general advice on non-diceless (diceful?) systems is that it's a GM judgement call whether an action requires a roll. The guidelines tend to be either "under stress" or "if there's a chance of failure." Both imply that the consequences of failed action are that player intent is foiled, and that the GM has weighed the intent to be sufficiently significant as to merit the test.

Pretty much all GM judgement then.

What diceless systems do is to put some power over this judgement into the hands of the player: they can decide the significance of the action, as well as the effort, skill, resource, etc that they put into it. The card based systems I've seen do a similar job, by giving the player more control over the resource management aspect of the game (though the resources are randomly allocated).

I seem to recall (though I can't think where) that some systems have, implicilty or explicitly, placed some of this attitude into standard RPG's, by saying that a player may elect to roll for a trivial action, but must stand by the consequences: the same attitude for the parrallel diceless system was explained earlier: by electing to use a negative bid on a diceless action, the player has agreed to let his character, or rather his intent, to suffer an appropriate level of consequence. They have declared the action to be significant.

Secondly, I think Jonathan Walton's comments feed into some of the stuff arising from Shannon Appelcline's and Greg Costikyan's analysis of board and card games, of randomness and chaos. Chess, for example, has no random element, yet, due to the geometric complexity of the possible moves, it has a fair degree of chaos in the mathematical sense. Similar openings may lead to vastly different endgames. This is even more true of Go.

To go to RPG's, chaos (as opposed to randomness) seems to be a function more of setting than system, as it arises from the available scope of character action: in Nobilis, as Jonathan noted, the scope is very wide to begin with (godlike powers), and tends to increase as a game progresses, as players find more creative uses for their domains, etc. Universalis, as a counter example of a non-conventional RPG, starts with very high chaos, which reduces as story elements are defined.

And, as with board games, a social dynamic emerges, which tends towards more players = higher chaos (eg Diplomacy, which should only be played with the full 7 players, has no random element beyond the brains of the players, and is very high chaos). However, I think with RPG's, this curve flattens out (or turns bell shaped, or possiby even begins to resemble the Julia set...)  as larger groups get dominated, or mob psychology starts to prevail. I'm sure most people will know the feeling that in an established group, the GM can reasonably well predict the reactions of the group, but side-shows with fewer players or one-to-ones tend to become less easy to plan...

[Shreyas Sampat]

To clarify, as usual Jonathan was dead on about my original intention: to create a game where Fortune or Fortuneless was a matter of whimsy, not meaning.  This hasn't led me very far, but hopefully the idea's benefited someone else.  I turned onto a slightly different path, which I'll be posting in Design when it's formatted.

As for the difference between highly random systems and highly ordered systems, and their relation to the Fortune switch, I think that's probably a daughter thread, as is the 'significant consequences' train of thought.

[Hunter Logan]

I think a decision like fortune or fortuneless pretty much has to be a matter of meaning because it's a deliberate decision that affects the way people play the game.

[pete_darby]

I think a decision like fortune or fortuneless pretty much has to be a matter of meaning because it's a deliberate decision that affects the way people play the game.

Andif that decision is placed in the hands of the players, not the designer, then the players explicitly make decisions about the theme of the game through their selection of mechanics.

[Hunter Logan]

Andif that decision is placed in the hands of the players, not the designer, then the players explicitly make decisions about the theme of the game through their selection of mechanics.

This is true. It's also true that a designer can give players the choice by supplying both options. Whether the decision is made in design or in play, the decision is still deliberate and has some meaning behind it. It's not whimsical or random.