Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

Which comes first: the action statement or the die roll?

I'm finding myself more and more frustrated with games which encourage players to make outrageous anticipatory statements, but then take all the wind out of the player's sails when they fail their skill check. Feng Shui is the particular offender that comes to mind.

I understand Elfs has a creative way around this, but even then, you still make the action statement(s) first, followed by the die roll.

Wouldn't it make more sense to make (or rather, can we make sense of making) the die roll first, and then base the action statement off the result? Or does this defeat the "excitement," the "gameness" of RPGs? Does this devolve into "structured narrative" rather than an actual game?

Imagine --

GM: An enraged, bloodthirsty orc leaps out of the shadows at you. What do you do?

Player: I stwike him wuffwy with my dagger! (Rolls dice to insufficient result) Oh, man, I missed! I guess I just stand there and take it like a halfwit.

GM: You're all by yourself, armed with only a dagger. The orc, having wounded you grievously, comes around for another lunge. What are you going to do?

Player: I run away! I can't take this kind of punishment. (Rolls dice to fantastic result) Dang! If I'd only attacked... I could have killed the orc with this roll!

GM: OK. A temporary surge of adrenaline puts you out of the orcs reach across a pit. You limp off, injured and winded.

Me: Ugh.

Now try this --

GM: An enraged, bloodthirsty orc leaps out of the shadows at you. What do you do?

Player: (rolls dice to insufficient result) Aaiiieee! I frantically duck out of the way, and while I'm scrabbling for my dagger, he whacks me a good one.

GM: You're all by yourself, armed with only a dagger. The orc, having wounded you grievously, comes around for another lunge. What are you going to do?

Player: (rolls dice to fantastic result) Cool. I launch myself like a bowling ball at the unsuspecting orc's legs, and bury my dagger in his back as he collapses.

GM: The orc wheezes a couple of times, and finally stops, a pool of blood spreading on his back.

Me: Yay!?

Now, granted, for a mechanism like this to work, I think you've got to have a sufficient range (or categories of ranges) of actions worked out and mapped to the die rolls. Plus, it'd probably be a good idea to have effects ("damage") as well as actions ("to hit") determined by a single roll.

The question is, has this mechanic devolved into Once Upon a Time, or is it still valid as an RPG?

Hey,

1) Welcome to The Forge

2) If you're interested in mining old threads for discussions about game mechanics like what you suggest, the relevant terms to search for are "whiff syndrome" and "fortune in the middle." A good starting point might be my post here.

Paul

Rumble,

I just want to give you a good example about how descriptive statements before the dice fall can work. I've used this a lot in my games, and love doing it:

GM: A huge crocodile leaps from the rushes, its jaws snapping at you.

Player: Alright! I'm going to leap on it, trying to clamp its jaws shut with my hands.

(The dice indicate a failure.)

GM: You land on it, but its thrashing, and breaks free of your grip on its snout. It's starting to roll over, trying to crush you.

Player: I elbow that fucker between the eyes! I'm going to try to knock it out.

(Dice indicate failure again.)

GM: Your blow lands square, but this thing's primordial skull is thick. It's rolling anyway.

-----

As a more extreme example, I used this in a game:

GM: You see a bandit running at your friend, axe in hand.

Player: I draw back my bow and waste him.

(Dice indicate failure.)

GM: You draw back the bow, but see another bandit on the roof of a building out of the corner of your eye, about to leap on your friend. You swing up and hit him in the chest, dropping him to his death.

In this example, I never planned a second bandit, and he never has an in-game representation: he's just color to make the character look good when he fails a roll.

In my to-be-released-soon-I-promise game, actions are explicitly handled this way:

Player Intent - Player announces Character intention
Group Discuss - Anyone can offer help, suggestions, etc, but Player has veto power
Character Intent - Character begins the action
Dice Rolled - Dice are rolled, successes & failures are determined
Group Discuss - GM announces the result, and gives the chance for anyone to offer help, suggestions, etc. GM has veto power.
Effect - GM narrates result.

I've found that, during play, this has all sorts of benefits, from getting the goriest outcomes (it's a horror rpg), to supporting creative input from all involved, to helping out a quieter Player with neat ideas.

rumble wrote: Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

rumble wrote: Which comes first: the action statement or the die roll?

Rumble seems to be looking for something else, something other than Fortune in the Middle. In fact, it looks like he's trying to reject the FitM model to me.

What he wants to do is let the player roll the dice, see whether it's a success or a failure, and then let him decide how the character uses that success or failure. That is:
Orc is charging.
Player rolls success.
Player chooses to use success to attack orc.
Orc is clearly hit, because success has already been rolled.
vs.
Orc is charging.
Player rolls failure.
Player chooses to use failure to attempt escape.
Character does not escape, and so is hit by orc.

It's an interesting idea, but it leads to a stack of questions.

First, does the referee use the same technique for the NPC's? That is, can the orc also choose to use his successes to attack, and his failures to attempt some other action the outcome of which is of less consequence?

Second, it would seem that for this to work, either all actions (including all attacks on any target) would have to have the same probability of success, or the system would have to be grainy enough that the player could quickly identify whether that would be a success or failure. That is, if the player and referee are looking at the dice, are they saying, "Would that be a successful attack on the orc? Would it be a successful dodge? Would it be a successful escape?" or is it just a matter of pass/fail no matter what the action (from "I'm going to hold my sword in his path and hope he runs into it" to "I'm going to rapidly scale this thirty foot cliff to that ledge above to escape"). You could do it if you had something as grainy as Fudge, such that you could quickly see that you would be able to do, say, difficult actions but not extraordinary actions based on that roll. But even with a d20 system, knowing whether a 14 is success or failure on a broad range of possible actions is just too much to try to guess.

Third, I'm not sure where this "Fortune in the Front" gets us. What we've got here is now, "According to the dice, whatever action you attempt is going to fail; so what are you going to attempt?" I'm tempted to say there's no point in trying anything if you know up front that it failed. Maybe it works for an extremely narrativist game, in which you're in essence using the dice for a direction of the story guide--that is, the next thing that happens will be good/bad for the character, what is it? Certainly that's still viable as a role playing game mechanic; but it's going to have a rough ride outside narrativism, and even within narrativism it might not be extremely well received.

But I like the idea; I just don't know yet how to get the bugs out of it.

--M. J. Young

Le Joueur wrote:

rumble wrote: Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

Well, if you define what a chicken is very narrowly and believe in evolution, the correct answer is 'the egg.' At some point a creature that misses being a chicken by a razor thin margin lays a mutant egg; it hatches into a chicken. Ergo, egg comes first.
Fang Langford

rumble wrote:
Wouldn't it make more sense to make (or rather, can we make sense of making) the die roll first, and then base the action statement off the result? Or does this defeat the "excitement," the "gameness" of RPGs? Does this devolve into "structured narrative" rather than an actual game?

Simon,

An example, what is he doing? Fighting, use the fight skill. The mods are whatever effects his fighting performance, but nothing for specific acts (sweeps etc). Roll your attack vs opponent attack, then explain the outcome.

It actually gives the player power to decide how and why his character is performing as he is, allows him to narrate his characters efforts. It avoids the old 'critical fumble and you act like an idiot' routine, and replaces it with critical fumble and something bad happens, thought not necessarily of the characters doing.

What you're moving away from is 'this is what I attempt, the only variable therefore is if my character performs at the required level, whiff as the attack goes wide'.

But, Fang, MJ and associated experts, why isn't Rumble's system FitM?

More to come...

As an aside, the chicken and egg thing can be argued as object vs action. Physically, its a chicken because it has all the organs, and its an egg because its a shell with a chicken in it. But in terms of effect on the world, its only a chicken when it lays an eggs, when it does the chicken thing, and its only an egg when it hatches a chicken, does the egg thing.

Chickens lay eggs, eggs hatch chickens. Neither comes first as neither exist until the other is created. There is an egg, but its not a chicken egg until it hatches a chicken. What came first, the game designer or the game. He wasn't a designer until he made the game. There wasn't a game until the game designer made it so.

Jeremy

Hello,

All right, moderation time: nix the chicken/egg discussion now.

Rumble, you're talking about some stuff that we can all help you with. The first issues, as Paul provided links for, are:

1) Whiffing, which is exactly what you describe regarding Feng Shui.

2) Fortune-in-the-middle, which is to say, a method of role-playing in which there are two action statements/descriptions, not one. The first is fairly general ("I'm getting away," or "I'm tryna killim"), then one rolls, and the second statement actually describes the whole scene from the beginning.

You can find a beginning version of the concept in my review of Hero Wars, which is probably one of the finest examples of the idea ever, and probably some good threads via the link Paul provided.

A common misunderstanding concerns who is doing the narrating of the second roll, which is irrelevant to the concept. That would depend on the given game.

Rumble, before we go on with this thread, have you checked these concepts out? Making sense, not making sense? Any questions?

The second issue, and this is for everyone, is that personal preference is not the point of this discussion. It doesn't matter what any of us "like" or "don't like." What matters is that Rumble is coping with an issue that we have sensible terms for, and we can help.

The third set of issues concern the details about Fortune-in-the-middle mechanics.

a) How much in the middle? Toward the beginning, as M.J. perceives and is (I think) rightly dubious about? Fairly far toward the end, so that the dice have "resolved" a fair amount to work with, as in Sorcerer? Or what? Game systems will vary a lot in this regard; The Pool has Fortune more toward the beginning, Hero Wars puts it smack dab in the middle, and Sorcerer has it more toward the end. None of these games uses the traditional Fortune-at-the-end, which is where the Whiff comes from.

b) Some people prefer Fortune-at-the-end, and I suggest that this preference is strongly linked to Simulationist preferences, at least those associated with many well-established games. (Feng Shui, for instance, has identifiable roots in later-edition Champions, Rolemaster, and BRP).

Most people who prefer the kind of in-game causality (announce, then figure modifiers, then roll to provide the "end") have come to terms with the possibility of Whiffing and don't mind it - their priority is the causal "sense" of the sequences and avoiding any kind of "time loop" in the process of play. Simon, let me know if this is describing your outlook fairly.

c) Avoiding failure is not the issue. A failed roll is still a failed roll; what Fortune-in-the-middle permits is for a character to fail without looking like a plumb idiot.

Contrast: (i) "I slice at the orc's neck!" Roll, fail. "You sliced exactly as you describe but you missed." (ii) "I'm killing the orc with my sword!" Roll, fail. "You don't get close enough - he stands you off with his spear." See? In (i), you're a goof; in (ii), you didn't hurt the orc, but at least it's not because you swung and missed.

Again, this is only an issue to a person with specific preferences, not an overriding issue of role-playing in general. It matters a lot to Paul; it matters very little to Simon.

d) Some Fortune-in-the-middle systems permit modifying the dice outcome with a metagame mechanic, like "bumping" up a rolled success level in Hero Wars by spending a Hero Point. Others don't, like Sorcerer.

Hope all this was helpful!

Best,
Ron

I think the term used last time we discussed this was Fortune in the Beginning (FitB). A search on that may reveal some treads discussing it theoretically and some designs in various states like this one:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=948

I think that any order is potentially functional, but that certain ones will definitely be preferred by different sorts of gamers.

Mike

nipfipgip...dip wrote: Simon,

An example, what is he doing? Fighting, use the fight skill. The mods are whatever effects his fighting performance, but nothing for specific acts (sweeps etc). Roll your attack vs opponent attack, then explain the outcome.

Ron Edwards wrote: Most people who prefer the kind of in-game causality (announce, then figure modifiers, then roll to provide the "end") have come to terms with the possibility of Whiffing and don't mind it - their priority is the causal "sense" of the sequences and avoiding any kind of "time loop" in the process of play. Simon, let me know if this is describing your outlook fairly.

Contrast: (i) "I slice at the orc's neck!" Roll, fail. "You sliced exactly as you describe but you missed." (ii) "I'm killing the orc with my sword!" Roll, fail. "You don't get close enough - he stands you off with his spear." See? In (i), you're a goof; in (ii), you didn't hurt the orc, but at least it's not because you swung and missed.

Again, this is only an issue to a person with specific preferences, not an overriding issue of role-playing in general. It matters a lot to Paul; it matters very little to Simon.

d) Some Fortune-in-the-middle systems permit modifying the dice outcome with a metagame mechanic, like "bumping" up a rolled success level in Hero Wars by spending a Hero Point. Others don't, like Sorcerer.

Simon,

It is a matter of preference, yes. That's also why there's no need to defend your position in this thread. We are not talking about "good" vs. "bad" ways to play.

Your post is going to be very difficult to deal with due to its line-by-line format, but I think you're not perceiving my example (for instance) very clearly. At this point, I also don't think it's a good time to pick apart what-I-said and what-you-said in detail, which usually degenerates.

My concern is with Rumble, and I ask you to consider how you are helping him. You're presenting an alternate view: yes, that helps, and perhaps he can see that certain game designs will be favored by other players besides himself. But insisting on and defending your preference, as if it were under some sort of attack, doesn't help him at all. Please try to see his inquiry on this thread as it is - a good opportunity to clarify how diverse role-playing announcement/resolution is, and to see how the diversity corresponds to specific goals of play.

Best,
Ron

Simon,

You are right that a narrator can theoretically do the sort of Narration that's being suggested in any system. But in effect, and to an extent, you are just advocating a sort of FitM. Let's say I declare that I try to cut off someone's head. Most systems then have me roll, and the system says, that a failed die roll is a miss. Look at the text of GURPS. That's exactly what it says. If you don't roll high enough, you miss. Now, I can interperet that through narration to mean something particular that is more exciting than just "You miss". But I cannot in GURPS say, for example, "Your furious swing so intimidates the opponent that he jumps back out of the way." Because that would indicate a dodge on the other characters part, and there are mechanics for that (in fact what I described would be a dodge giving ground for +3). Nope, the dice indicated that the character just missed.

IOW, such a system does limit your response in some ways. And to that extent, such systems tend to discourage the use of creative ways to describe things.

When you use FitM, you find that nobody has a problem expanding out into all sorts of creativity as far as description. Because they aren't worried that they are violating any rules. The rules specifically say that they should. FitB would just go further in this direction.

Now your other objection has more teeth to it in a way. A FitB system would limit you from a Tactical POV to choosing a generic Combat skill or whatever for each turn. But there are ways around this as well. One can have the mechanical results of the roll be such that the player is provided with options. Take for example Zenobia which is similar to what's being proposed here. After you roll successes, you decide whether or not the result is taken as an attempt to wound, or as jockying for position. If you jocky, the successes can be rolled into later attempts to wound (assuming the other player doesn't get successes in the meanwhile). Anyhow, this leaves you with some interesting tactical choices, after the roll.

And in any case, you get to describe the action your character actually takes in terms of how he executes his successes. In a way, BTW, this is very realistic. Combat veterans don't describe their actions in terms so much of deciding to do things and then succeeding or failing, they find openings and exploit them. The openings are created randomly as a result of micro-choices by the combatants employing their skills (nothing anyone is interested in Simming out ("I step slightly to the left, and my eyes shift right while I raise my sword three inches..."). As such, the only question is to what advantage does the player take these openings. And that's what the player is deciding post-roll in a FitB ("Fortune in the Middle, but very near the Beginnig") or FitM system.

I could even see a system that randomized which skill was used. "I wanted to talk to the foe, but we bumped into each other in the dense brush, and just began fighting." One of the uses of success could then be to change the venue of the conflict. "So I got the upper hand and pushed him away giving him a look that he knew meant that I wanted to parlay."

That would be pretty cool. Check out this thread for a system that was headed in this sort of direction:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1600

In general, though, my preference too is to allow a player control the nature of his character's efforts for the most part. It would be interesting to see a system in which occasionally the skill chosen was random, or otherwise determined, however. I can also see a system in which a general skill was rolled and gave you successes that would be used to activate more specific skills which would then be rolled.

Lot's of possibilities.

Mike

In reviewing this thread, I realized that Rumble didn't suggest what kind of die mechanic would be used to determine success or failure; and Mike's comments about numbers of successes put me in mind of a dice pool mechanic.

It would have more dials/switches than I like, but I could imagine something like this working. If the number of dice rolled was based on the character's ability, and the target number was based on the opponent's ability, there could then be a fixed number of successes based on kinds of action--X for blocking (which in this scheme should be limited to reducing damage, not eliminating it, or you wind up with one of those perpetual miss schemes), Y for escaping (depending on how your initiative scheme works, this would end combat), Z for attacking. Thus as soon as the dice hit the table, everyone knows what action you can perform successfully, and you choose from among those at which you would be successful--unless of course you fail entirely, in which case you would do nothing that round.

Anyway, that might get you started.

As I say, I kind of like the idea of a mechanic that guides the action more than resolving successes, which this FitB seems to be. Multiverser uses something like it in General Effects Rolls, used when a situation is unclear to determine whether it favors or disfavors the character, and to what degree. You could create a fortune mechanic in which the die is rolled and announces not so much whether the character is successful, but whether what happens in the next round is going to be good or bad for the character (and to what degree--the Multiverser general effects table can be instructive for this, as it uses descriptives connected to numbers, such as "good enough" and "beyond hopes" and "not thwarting but generally unfavorable" which could easily be adopted to round-by-round combat). Then you'd have a system where you roll the dice, read how good or bad the outcome is from the player's perspective, and then create the narration of what happens in that round based on achieving that quality of outcome. It strikes me as much more story-driving than many fortune mechanics.

--M. J. Young

People who are spot on to my question:
M.J. Young, Simon Hibbs, nipfipgip...dip, Mike Holmes

People who are slightly off...
nearly everyone else :)

But thanks for the references to FitM. I did read them. It's not exactly what I was after, but it got me passingly familiar with the jargon, which is becoming overwhelming, to say the least. I guess I'm talking about FitB rather than FitM. Ugh. Sucks to be boxed in.

Here's another illustration, with a VERY primitive mechanic. I'm just trying to illustrate, not make an actual game here, so have mercy.

Pick a skill, any skill.
Under each skill, list each of the following mindsets: Fight (agressing), Feint (posturing), Freeze (assessing), Flight (evading)
Rate each of the mindsets to a total of +0. No mindset can be above +2 or below -2.

For example:

Combat: Fight (-2), Feint (+1), Freeze (-1), Flight (+2)
You can imagine this easily... a moderately intimidating bully who can't gauge his opponent or fight well, and has learned to weasel out of tough situations.

Herbalism: Fight (+1), Feint (-2), Freeze (+1), Flight (0)
It's a touch more difficult with non-combat skills, but just extend the concept of evasion from "get out of the way," to "... and let someone else handle it." This translates to access and development of a network of contacts. So here, we've got a Herbalist who analyzes and deals with problems unimpressively but effectively, with access to a reasonable set of assistants/contacts for more difficult problems.

Anyway, let's stick with the Combat "skill," and staying simple, I'll use a d8, with rolls of 5+ being gradually successful results, and 4- being gradually abysmal results.

You don't state an action before you roll. You choose AFTER you roll, based on the roll result, your character's mindsets with respect to the event under consideration, and your character's actual personality. You get to add your preferred mindset to the die roll after the roll. Under this system, it's not even practical to choose an action before you roll. Like backgammon, you need to see the roll before you decide what to do.

Let's go back to our feisty orc and the hapless adventurer.
=====
PC has: Combat: Fight (-2), Feint (+1), Freeze (-1), Flight (+2)

GM: An enraged, bloodthirsty orc leaps out of the shadows at you. What do you do?

Player: (rolls d8 = 2) Aaiiieee! I frantically duck out of the way, and while I'm scrabbling for my dagger, he whacks me a good one.
[Comment: The player actively chooses Flight instead of Feint, knowing that both options result in failure, but preparing his dagger for the next round, just in case. Bravado (Feint) will only gain him a more serious wound, and taking time to size up the orc (Freeze) or rabidly attack it (Fight) might be fatal.]

GM: You're all by yourself, armed with only a dagger. The orc, having wounded you grievously, comes around for another lunge. What are you going to do?

Player: (rolls d8 = 8) Cool. I launch myself like a bowling ball at the unsuspecting orc's legs, and bury my dagger in his back as he collapses.
[Comment: Here, the player chooses Fight, even though it's his weakest option, because it can succeed. Based on his previous Flight action, this now becomes a more viable scenario.]

GM: The orc wheezes a couple of times, and finally stops, a pool of blood spreading on his back.

Me: Yay!?
=====

Rather than have each monster have stats, per se, they would have mindset modifiers. I mean, go up against a scary troll, and your Fight may go down a notch, while fear lets some speed to your Flight.

I kinda skipped over character personality and it's effect on the player's decision making, but that's because I'm not concerned with a governance/personality enforcement mechanic right now. Suffice it to say that you could act agressively even if you weren't good at it. Nothing says a player can't choose to have their character be a bumbler when they don't play to their strengths.

I think the gameness of RPGs is preserved with this FitB example, but is it still exciting to know how well you do before you choose what you're going to do? Addressing one particular concern, this example doesn't take control away from the player -- rather, it reduces uncertainty and risk.

Incidentally, this isn't the only way to do it, but it's as good as I could do off the cuff. I'm sure there are other ways, and more extreme methods as well. We could actually take the decision of what happens away from the player, and simply leave them with the task of description, but I'm not sure this is ultimately desirable.

Check out Otherkind.

hello...

long-time lurker, newbie poster (as the say on Usenet...)

M. J. Young wrote: In reviewing this thread, I realized that Rumble didn't suggest what kind of die mechanic would be used to determine success or failure; and Mike's comments about numbers of successes put me in mind of a dice pool mechanic.

It would have more dials/switches than I like, but I could imagine something like this working. If the number of dice rolled was based on the character's ability, and the target number was based on the opponent's ability, there could then be a fixed number of successes based on kinds of action--X for blocking (which in this scheme should be limited to reducing damage, not eliminating it, or you wind up with one of those perpetual miss schemes), Y for escaping (depending on how your initiative scheme works, this would end combat), Z for attacking. Thus as soon as the dice hit the table, everyone knows what action you can perform successfully, and you choose from among those at which you would be successful--unless of course you fail entirely, in which case you would do nothing that round.

--M. J. Young

That's pretty cool. I can't remember any system where a stat was used both to determine number of dice rolled, and target number. I like the tradeoffs it represents.

Mike

This does sound cool.

There's one potential problem with the Destiny number, which is that there will be, for any given die type, a pretty clear optimum Destiny to maximimze one's expected successes per roll.

But perhaps the player-character's Destiny score isn't a matter of player choice. If a gradual increase of the Destiny score (from an initial low value) is an inevitable progression during play, then this would become one of those long-term story arc mechanisms in which the system changes the nature of the character's protagonism over time. And a rather nifty one at that.

Talysman, welcome to the Forge!

(Will you taly me bananas? Daylight come, and... oh never mind.)

- Walt

thanks for the welcome, everyone!

wfreitag wrote: This does sound cool.

There's one potential problem with the Destiny number, which is that there will be, for any given die type, a pretty clear optimum Destiny to maximimze one's expected successes per roll.

wfreitag wrote:
But perhaps the player-character's Destiny score isn't a matter of player choice. If a gradual increase of the Destiny score (from an initial low value) is an inevitable progression during play, then this would become one of those long-term story arc mechanisms in which the system changes the nature of the character's protagonism over time. And a rather nifty one at that.

wfreitag wrote: There's one potential problem with the Destiny number, which is that there will be, for any given die type, a pretty clear optimum Destiny to maximimze one's expected successes per roll.

Mike Holmes wrote: ... there is the obvious choice of going high so that you'll have a wider range of success. Despite failing more often, some players would prefer to trade this for the possibility of stellar successes. In addition, there are the bonuses and penalties to the roll. Each of the positions takes advantage of these to some extent. (assuming that I am correct in my reading that the bonuses and penalties listed apply to the Destiny rolls).

That said, I think I like the random drift of destiny idea. Could lead to interesting pacing.

Random was an overstatement. I meant something more like drifting with the pace of the game, or something like that.

Anyhow, if you do not allow the bonuses to the Destiny die roll (and I can see why you woudn't want to), then I'd agree with Walt that the middle is looking pretty good. I think that few players would go with the very stable low end where you get one success almost always, and never more. Pretty boring.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Random was an overstatement. I meant something more like drifting with the pace of the game, or something like that.

Anyhow, if you do not allow the bonuses to the Destiny die roll (and I can see why you woudn't want to), then I'd agree with Walt that the middle is looking pretty good. I think that few players would go with the very stable low end where you get one success almost always, and never more. Pretty boring.