With my system I sometimes make playing sessions playing the game in backward.
In that sense sometimes I ask to roll for causes and not for effects of actions.
Has anyone done this before? Has someone already explored this design pattern?
Rob

Hi Rob,

There's a backwards version of the Pool called Snowball, where the fictions starts at the end scene and the players work themselves backwards through what happened.
http://www.twistedconfessions.com/snowball.php

If you are talking about jumping back in fictional time to check for influence to the game's current situation, then quite a few games have that as a feature. Both Burning Wheel/Empires and Sorcerer for example used linked rolls where you can transfer bonuses to later relevant rolls.

Thanks for links. I'll have a look. :)

If you are talking about jumping back in fictional time to check for influence to the game's current situation, then quite a few games have that as a feature. Both Burning Wheel/Empires and Sorcerer for example used linked rolls where you can transfer bonuses to later relevant rolls.

Rob,

This seems kind of similar to the "roll for opportunity" paradigm I'm working on in Uncanny Underground.  I posted a thread about it here not too long ago; is it the sort of thing you're talking about, or are you talking about something completely different?

I'm going to have a look at your post.
An example of what I ask to my players to do is something like...
[Begin of the session]
"Right. The dragon has been slayed. And you're the best adventurers 'round here. Now let's play all in backward mode and tell me all the causes of your action, why you're here and how you've arrived here..."
And the players start
"I killed the dragon with a stab in his heart..."
(Me) Mmm... "Roll over 12 over a 3d6".
He Rolls. Fail.
"Looks like we've to find another way how the dragon has been killed.
And so on.

Rob

Okay, wow, that's far more extreme than "roll for opportunity."  But highly interesting.

My aim for "roll for opportunity" is not so much backward, now that I think of it, as it is synchronous; you don't even know for sure what the exact effect will be, you just state a general goal ("Avoid the barrage of gunfire" "Get past the guards" "Kill the traitorous bastard") then roll to see which of your abilities you have the Opportunity to use, then figure out how the ability/abilities were used to accomplish the goal.  There's not really a linear cause-effect thing, either forward or backward.

Rob,

At a convention in January, I played a game called Contract Work by Russell Collins.  In it, I was a hit man who had just told my employer that I'd successfully carried out a hit.  We then worked back from how I killed him, to how I got close enough to kill him, to how I got into his compound, etc.  The GM was my employer, inspecting my story to see if he believed me, and also to assess whether I'd done anything he didn't like during the course of the hit.  The resolution system dictated the truth of what I'd done, so if I was determined to have failed something in the past, my boss was considered to be catching me in a lie right now. 

I asked Russell if he had anything about his game on the internet and he said "coming soon".  I can share more details if you want, but I'm not sure yet where this is or isn't relevant to your own goals.

David wrote:
I asked Russell if he had anything about his game on the internet and he said "coming soon".  I can share more details if you want, but I'm not sure yet where this is or isn't relevant to your own goals.