Not as dry as the subject line sounds.

What I want to look at is the question of players being able to discern the probabilties of their characters chances of accomplishing things.

Often the idea is bandied about that a good system gives the player a very good idea of what his chances to succeed are. For example, percentile rolls are often cited as good in this manner becuse a player only has to reference his skill percentage or whatever, and he has a very good idea of the odds. Whereas in many dice pool systems the chance of a player being able to figure out his odds that precisely are slim.

The question is to what extent is it actually good for a player to be able to calculate these things with precision?

I think the pro-probablity-transparency side would mostly argue that if a player doesn't know the chances of his character succeeding, he can't make reasonable decisions for the character. And I'd agree with this, toan extent. However, I would also argue that an approximate knowledge of the chance of success is just as good. That is, the player should have some idea of the odds, but not only is it not necessary to know the precise odds, it's not particularly realistic. The character almost certainly has less knowledge of his actual ability than the player does (what's my Dex? I have no idea, 10?), and in a given circumstance evaluating a particular task, he almost certainly will be estimating his chances.

As such, I think that knowing that more dice in your pool is a good thing, and more dice in the opponents pool is a bad thing is usually enough data. People know intuitively that the same number of dice means the same chance of success, and that the more lopsided the difference the greater the chances. Is more than that amount of feedback necessary?

I was thinking about it, and at first I was considering the idea that different GNS modes were more suitable to more of less probablity knowledge. But looking at it closer, I see that for instance a Gamist might prefer to have to esitmate to know his chances of winning. I can remember playing D&D and figuring out fom expected values how long it would take with particular tactics to eliminate some beastie. Wouldn't it be better if it was too hard to calculate, and I just had to use my experience to estimate? And I can see Narrativist designs where it might make sense to have the player with an exact knowledge of the odds.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that this one seems to be very much preference driven, and I doubt that we can come to an easy consensus on what's "best".

Any thoughts?

Mike

Now that's my kinda myth:

Mike Holmes wrote: a good system gives the player a very good idea of what his chances to succeed are

Le Joueur wrote:
p. s. But why didn't you bother to call it a "Standard Rant?"

I think you do need to be able to plan constructively. A system with a wide result range is anathema to the habitual ambusher. I think that you should be able to understand the odds well enough to make a plan that you have reasonable confidance in. But I don't think that every decision needs to be explicit because it is not normally that obvious to us.

Sorry, gotta agree Mike.

I fail to see a case where exact knowlege is a great deal better than reasonable aproximate knowledge.

A system that required one to only use experiance (Say a black box you put all the factors into and it gave success/failure) would be fairly difficult for players to use, as they don't have the depth of experiance their charachter does. The charachter might know I'm good at X, but the player just knows that they have a score of X(z).
It might be fun in an explorationist kinda way (What can I do....?)

I think some players need a good degree of certainity about the odds their character faces; somewhere in the order of the probabilities in a horse race or similar. For example, the odd for one horse in a race might be 20:1 or about 5%, while another horse is the favourite at 1.2:1.

I've got a regular player in my group who played the traditional RPGs (AD&D, Rolemasters) games in a "defeatist" or negative-sum manner -- always looking forward to the defeat of the character! It was only after several sessions of playing my Swift system in a heroic fantasy setting, where the odds are deliberately in favour of the players, that his behaviour changed to match the heroic setting. I can only attribute this to knowing the odds better and making failure as optional. Swift has Success and Not Success Yet, as outcomes. I hadn't come across Fortune in the Middle at the time, and was experimenting with a faster version of S with no opposed opponent rolls.

I also think that for modern and SF settings exact probabilities for skills, attributes and health have the right colour (I think that's the word) for the setting, do seem realistic and so it's nice to use a percentile-like system for those settings, other things being equal.

For fantasy and other times, exact percentiles have the wrong colour for the game setting. It's disturbing to me and other players in our group for a player to state as their character, "I've got 75% percent skill (or 4 dots or 12 picks) in lockpicking, so I'd better pick the lock." It makes the character seem insane! I prefer to merge the PC and player together, so using Fudge terms, the player states, "I'm Great at lockpicking, so I'd better pick the lock." and it looks like the character spoke those words, not the player. This makes it easier for other PCs to react appropriately, rather than consider the first PC a little touched in the head.

I don't want to disagree here, just offer an alternative take on "why" knowing the approximate chances are good.

Basically it's about (in my opinion) making the game feel like real life. In real life I usually approximately know my chances, right? So the game goes insane if in the game world, for no reason at all, the results are totally unpredicable.

"What do you mean I don't know if I can make the jump of 4 meters? What about 3 meters? I don't know that either? You mean I could fail jumping 1 meter? What the heck?!"

We take for granted that we know approximately our chances with most things unless they have a lot of random input. We do things and slowly we form an opinion of how we perform which in turn can be compared with how others perfom and so on.

When we talk about unpredictable systems we're actually talking about systems with a whole lot of randomness in them. Because if there is not much variation in the system, then we could make an action a few times, like jumping or whatever and then we'd know that using that obfuscating mechanics I still usually jump 5 meters if I have Dex 13.

However, many systems lets you vary from 1 to 10 meters with the same stat, so it takes a long time to figure out the average. In addition, knowing the average does not help much due to the wide distribution of results. The fact that the results are wildly and for no good reason) contradictory to the distribution that you would observer in real life makes your observations worthless for applying to other situations.

In real life we think that if Bob can lift x pounds and Roger only can lift a tenth of that, then Bob is stronger than Roger, and in matters of strength Bob will always have an incredible edge. However, this is rarely true in RPGS

We all marvel when we see things contradictory to such observations, like when a small judo guy can toss people twice his size around. However, those are very special situations and we accept them as such. Unfortunately in RPG these are usually the rule rather than the exception.

Thus we can't rely on our habit in real life to evaluate by similarity. That makes things a lot more unpredictable and chancey in feeling than they need to be. If our instincts worked in RPGs then we would not need many hints to evaluate a situation.

Mike, I agree with everything you've said regarding the players. But what about the GM? Does he have to know the probabilities to some extent?

If Jimbo is rolling dice pools, 7 D6s, and needs 4s, what successes required will make the roll easy, or hard? You can write down 2 means easy, 3 is average etc, but these things can go funny very quickly.

A system with simple probabilities allows the GM to assess the player's chances very easily, even if the player only knows it is 'a well made lock'. By being able to know the probabilities, the GM can make a more reasonable difficulty numer.

Does the GM need more knowledge, and thus need easily defined values? I'm really thinking along the lines of campaigns I've been in with a lot of 'improbable' events, because of a GM have little grasp of the probabilities. Has anybody else had such experience?

Jeremy

Palefire,

I think there's a difference between not knowing the exact probability and a completely random event. The actual randomness of an event is based on the variability of fortune compared to the variability of task difficulty and skill ability. Your complaint seems geared towards games with high randomness, not games with complex probabilities.

Here, the question is, given the fortune, task and skill as set, is it good to know the exact probability?

Jeremy

Mike,

Good topic. Over here in the chicken and egg thread, as you are well aware, we have rumble who is promoting a case for FitB (fortune in the beginning - or very aggressive FitM with fortune very near the beginning).

This is an example of why knowing exact probabilities might be a good thing.

If you know that your character can't possibly dodge the incoming sword stroke from a bloodthirsty orc - then fortune might be dispensed with entirely, and the player can be granted the rights to narrate how/where the orc strikes him.

If you know that your character can't leap across a 20ft chasm to chase after a bad guy who is getting away, he just won't try the leap. It may open up other possibilities - like you know that your character can take the fleeing bad guy out with a gun, but can't chase him. Instant moral delemia (depending on the character).

In essence, knowing, with a degree of certainty, what the character's odds are comes close to being a FitB mechanic.

Just a thought.

Cheers,

Jason

I happen to be generally opposed to the idea of the player being able to calculate the odds to any degree of precision...although given a simple enough system this is generally unavoidable. One reason I like die pools with some tweaks (like rerolls and such) that make it difficult to calculate even if you try.

Why? One, because like Mike said people (for the most part) don't think in terms of precise percentages. We generally rate "the odds" fairly abstractly: "I can do that no problem", "Should be pretty easy", "I'll give it a shot but don't hold your breath". That sort of thing. Just how many percentage points is "don't hold your breath" worth anyway?

Players should understand the dice system to know when a particular roll will be in their favor or not and be able to guage by how much...on a scale measures in "slightly" to "alot". That knowledge will give all that a player needs to know to make realistic tactical decisions. No soldier on a field of battle knows he has exactly a 57.2% chance of makeing the shot. No cop in a high speed chase knows there is a 2 in 7 chance of wiping out if he doesn't slow down going around a corner. He'll know that the chance of wipeing out is non trivial, but he won't know with the kind of precision that a player rolling dice with clear statistical probabilities would know.

The second reason I dislike it is because it promotes statistical thinking. [sweeping generalization alert] When the player knows the odds with precision he tends to play his character as if the character knew the odds with precision. He starts to think more in terms of dice roll probabilities and less in terms of action and reaction. I like games where people DO things. An over emphasis on statistical precision tends to paralyze the doing with too much thinking about doing.[/sweeping generalization]

I realise that some people get a great deal of enjoyment out of fiddling with the dice probabilities in play. I would guess a fairly sizeable subset of Gamist players do. I don't. Even when I feel like being gamist, abstract odds are enough for me.

nipfipgip...dip wrote: I think there's a difference between not knowing the exact probability and a completely random event. The actual randomness of an event is based on the variability of fortune compared to the variability of task difficulty and skill ability. Your complaint seems geared towards games with high randomness, not games with complex probabilities.
Here, the question is, given the fortune, task and skill as set, is it good to know the exact probability?

Pale Fire wrote:
I think that the question "is it good to know the exact probability" is kind of besides the point.

Mike Holmes wrote:
What I want to look at is the question of players being able to discern the probabilties of their characters chances of accomplishing things.

The question is to what extent is it actually good for a player to be able to calculate these things with precision?

Even in a game that gives an apparently precise accounting of a character's skill level there is no way to accurately weigh the odds of success unless the player has decent knowledge of the enemy or obstacle being opposed.

Much depends on how individual mechanics function. Telling me that my warrior has an 80% chance to hit with his saber means little if I don't also know about the protection an opponents armor gives, if the opponent has a chance to parry, advantages or disadvantages due to terrain, and any other of the vast number of factors that could effect the chance of success that vary from system to system.

It has always seemed much easier to me to calculate the odds by examining my opponent. Dragon or peasant? Placid lake or raging river? Crumbling stone wall or slime covered marble? I find that examination of the obstacle along with any metagame concerns, like how likely is it based on what I know of the gamemaster that this obstacle is meant to be deadly or unpassable, often serve as better indicators of my chance of success than anything on my character sheet.

Since many games are based on an endless arms race between characters and the obstacles they face, a la D&D, obstacles and enemies usually escalate in difficulty along with the characters proficiency. The progression from level to level is only there to give a player a sense of accomplishment, it doesn't usually have that much effect on character ability to overcome obstacles since the difficulty increases along with the character advance in skill.

Personally I prefer to only have a loose idea of the odds. When I'm truly enjoying myself my chance of success at an action has little bearing on whether I attempt it or not. For the most part, I prefer long odds anyway. I want to have to work for victory. And If I fail, well, it will be that much sweeter when I do finally succeed. As long as failure doesn't consist of simply whiffing but is used creatively to enhance the situation then it's all good.

That only applies to games though, I prefer a little easier time of it in real life.

-Chris

nipfipgip...dip wrote: Palefire,
Your complaint seems geared towards games with high randomness, not games with complex probabilities.

Because in the end the dice results would be fairly predictable.

A few thoughts on the topic:

1. I generally favor the player having a good idea of their capabilities and leave the uncertanty up to resistance/unknown factors (I see a man simply dressed with a sword--I know I'm good, how good is he?)

Although *I* don't know how far I can jump exactly, an olympic high jumper knows to the inch. My mechanic is really good at estimating how long it will take to fix a known problem, etc. I.e. your odds of knowing how well you do something improve with your ability in it.

2. Dice Pools just make it harder for some players to make the odds calculation than other players. And if a player demands time to figure out what the character is gonna do, it's hard to deny them that.

(I was told by a player--a pretty dedicated player: "I don't know what the hell to do yet--but my character's been in scrapes before and he already knows exactly what to do." It was true for the character--and I found it hard to argue with that logic. [argument about GM moving game along ignored for purposes of this example])

3. I think it's more important to have a strong success curve than to know exact probabilities. If I'm really good at climbing, an 80% on a D100 isn't good enough (1 x in 5 the character will fall if the rules say "make a climbing roll or fall ... if the rules don't truncate the fall based on how much/badly it was missed by, it might be a fall and die). On the other hand, 80% is a pretty good number to bet on in a cassino so it's a matter of perspective.

-Marco

Mike, I like the idea of not having an exact take on probability. From a Sim point of view, most of us are very aware of only a few of our abilities, and only at using them in a routine fashion.

Yes, an olympic jumper knows exactly how far they can jump, because they do it all day. They know only after having had the experience and recorded the results, not before they've trained. Second, they only know how well they jump in a gym, with the proper equipment, not say, jumping over a brick wall in the rain. All of us know about how well we drive, not too many know how well we drive in car chases.

From a gamist point of view, part of the fun is trying to measure the odds but never knowing exactly how it's going to turn out. For example, in Poker, I know what kind of hand I have, but I have no clue as to what the other folks have. I have to watch them and see what they bet and use my knowledge of experience as to their habits to make a guess. Gamism gains a great deal from doing the best you can with limited resources, including limited knowledge.

One of my biggest pet peeves with games is that there is very few games that call for a judgement check before you do something. For example, if I'm about to climb a cliff face, I'd take a minute to check out how tough its going to be, and what the best route would be. If I had bad judgement, I may overestimate or underestimate the challenge by a lot. With good judgement, I'd know exactly how tough it would be.

As far as actually knowing the probabilities, I think the designer should know as much as possible, but if you've designed a good game, the guidelines you give the GM and players should be sufficient, even if they can't work out the actual statistics.

Also, I read this philosophy about a videogame that I think may apply"....Instead of the character getting better, we wanted the player to get better. As you play, you see your skill grow, and you have a feeling of accomplishment. You don't have to rely on levels or power ups to be good."

Great question Mike, I'd be very interested to see how you'd handle a game with fuzzy odds.

Chris

I think knowing the odds has a lot to do with the price of failure, based on the style of game in play. If failure is Old Skool death and dismemberment, then I'm a little more wary. If failure is Sorcerer and Sword-style complications, then who cares? Either result is as fun as hell.

[Hopefully Relevant Story]

In college, I was the tech head for the college drama group. They did their plays in the chapel (it was a very small school--this was the first one I attended). Before the play, maintenance hung a bar from the ceiling, and gave me a tall stepladder. Up I went, and began running my wires and lights where I wanted them. Then I made a wrong move, the ladder fell, and I was left hanging from the bar.

Well, others who happened to be there started to panic, running around trying to figure out what to do. Move the ladder, I told them. I can drop from here, but I don't want to land on the ladder. Once they did that, it was simple to fall the distance.

[/Hopefully Relevant Story]

Now, I could not tell you then or now what that distance was; I can tell you that hanging from that bar, I had a lot of information about how far it appeared to be, how hard the carpeted floor was, how far I had fallen in the past. Near twenty years of life experience went into that assessment, and I concluded that this was a drop I could make.

If I'm playing a character, I lose all of that. I have no connection to his experience, and don't know what he's successfully done before or how well he can land. I can't see the distance, really; I can only know the numbers. I don't know how hard the ground is unless I've already asked that, and even then, my estimate of the impact is based on an extremely subjective concept of hard at that point.

I replace that with game numbers. I build an idea of what my character can and cannot do from the mechanics of the game.

It would be more realistic if I could play the character 24/7 and learn who he is, watch him grow up, experience falling out of trees and leaping off rooftops and all the things I did as a kid that taught me what I could manage and how to do it. But I can't. Even as a dedicated role player, I would always have this distance, this failure of connection to the character, that I can't completely cross. In a pick-up game, that's amplified abundantly.

That said, in Multiverser we make the point that the character never knows his exact chance of success. The system is simple enough--percentile based for skill checks, which are a major resolution mechanic in the game. The referee knows (if he cares to check--the point is made that you can speed play by approximating, and only getting an exact number if the roll is "close" to what you expect), and knows in some detail how his modifiers impact the chance of success and the relative outcome; but there are, as someone observed, always factors unknown to the player. Even in the case of that fall, where the player knows the distance and the nature of the landing surface, there are factors he can only estimate (World Bias is always involved and never precisely revealed). Thus even with a mechanic that easily provides an exact probability of success, the player doesn't have that.

I don't much care for dice pools as a player because they aren't particularly intuitive in terms of estimating my chance of success; in a sense, you need experience with them to begin to know to what degree you are likely to succeed or fail (just like I needed experience to know whether it was a reasonable idea to drop from that bar). As a referee, I like them less, because it's a lot tougher for me to get my head around how much change I'm making in the difficulty of something--too many dials. Is it easier on five dice to roll three eights or two nines? Do the odds change appreciably if it's on seven dice, and which way? No matter what I'm running, I'm always going to come to that moment when I need to have the player roll against something for which the rules are not clear, and I'm going to have to create a roll that "fits the system" and at the same time creates a likelihood of success that accords with "reasonable expectations".

Now, if the system models our reality with great precision and the setting is described in such detail that the players can "almost see it", players don't need to know probability at all; they can use their experience. But my need to know the probabilities always kicks into high gear when
1) I can't really see the situation well enough to assess it (how far is that fall, really?)
2) My character is doing something with which I have insufficient experience (how good is that armor in blocking my attacks?)
3) I'm still feeling my way through the quirks of the world and the system and don't know what really works and doesn't work here.

So I favor a system in which probabilities are clear, but not giving all the factors to the players.

--M. J. Young

Marco & Bankuei,

Its all good and well for the player, but what about the GM?

The GM has a man with a sword, and the players knows he spent half his character creation skills on swordplay. The dice sets are very complex, so have difficult to determine probabilities. I know how good I am, how good is he? Unfortunately, the GM couldn't tell either and he hacks you to pieces, or impales himself before you reach him.

The same mystery can be achieved with a simple probability system, and just not telling the players the probability. Which now becomes my question, why have hard probabilities? This makes it harder for the GM and adds nothing to the play experience of players (they can just be told he looks tough, not he has level 4 swordplay).

Jeremy

I'm not arguing for complex systems, nor against them. The designer is responsible for giving the players and GM sufficient information to run their game correctly. What I am saying is that some systems lend themselves to giving the players too much information from a Sim or Gamist view.

You are quite correct that what the players don't know can only be learned through experience, but the other factor to bring in is that since we don't live in our character's body, as M.J. brought up, we need some means of communicating information that our character would know or recognize.

Going back to my example, each person would have a different level of judgement and experience in rock climbing, and would see the cliff face, and its difficulty differently. In your example, different characters would think the swordsman is a ruthless murderer, a pushover with a skinny blade, or a left handed duelist who favors thrusting and quick strikes depending on their own understanding and awareness.

In all cases, we come back to Mike's query: How do we adjucate character self assessment, judgement, discernment, or common sense? If you want to compare what a difference judgement makes, look at the difference between Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction, and many characters out of a Guy Richie movie. How much accurate information is available to the character? To the player? How does that affect in game decisions? Is it a benefit or detriment to the style of play you're trying to create?

Not quite going as far as a myth, but a standard is that players know everything that their character is capable of doing. One of the uses of questioning it, is that few people have done so, and said, "What can we do otherwise? What other doors open?"

My only point is that none of us really know how far we can push ourselves until we do it. Knowing the odds changes gameplay decisions a lot, and that information is freely handed out, often without questioning its effect on the style of game people are trying to produce.

Chris

So nice I posted twice, sorry.

Jeremy

The thread is questioning the assumption that a system should produce obvious probabilities, following the logic that it is not always good for players to know the exact chance of success. I'm saying is no.

Stating that players not knowing the exact probability is a good thing is not the same thing as hard to determine probabilities.

A hard to determine probability makes it a bugger for the GM to set the right level challenge. Further, any exact probabilities can be held back from the players, just don't tell them the exact tgt number. If you have clear probabilities, and hold information back from players, you have the best of both worlds.

So, is it good for a system to have clear probabilities? I can't see why not.

Jeremy

nipfipgip...dip wrote: Marco & Bankuei,

Its all good and well for the player, but what about the GM?

The GM has a man with a sword, and the players knows he spent half his character creation skills on swordplay. The dice sets are very complex, so have difficult to determine probabilities. I know how good I am, how good is he? Unfortunately, the GM couldn't tell either and he hacks you to pieces, or impales himself before you reach him.
Jeremy

Bankuei wrote: ...the other factor to bring in is that since we don't live in our character's body, as M.J. brought up, we need some means of communicating information that our character would know or recognize.

Going back to my example, each person would have a different level of judgment and experience in rock climbing, and would see the cliff face, and its difficulty differently. In your example, different characters would think the swordsman is a ruthless murderer, a pushover with a skinny blade, or a left-handed duelist who favors thrusting and quick strikes depending on their own understanding and awareness.

In all cases, we come back to Mike's query: How do we adjucate character self-assessment, judgment, discernment, or common sense?