Hat of d02

"my hate of d02 know no limit" - a silent wail

There are two poles in game design. On the one end is simulation; on the other end is resolution. The more detail is provided, the more involved the mechanics and the process, the more is being simulated. However, resolution becomes slower and slower. On the other hand, resolution can be accerlated, but at the expense of simulation, including aspects of verisimilutde, genre emulation, game balance, and all the rest. Simulation can be roughly defined as "the extent to which it matters how a result is achieved." Resolution can be defined as "the consequences of an action."

One hypothetical game, Real Life: The Role-Playing Game, would portray a person in a realistic situation with as much realism as possible. Entire chapters could be taken up summarizing a hundred years of research on intelligence testing as a preface to describing what attributes are used in a game. Entries on the "longsword" might describe what lengths, styles and materials were used throughout history. No meaningful difference would go unexplored. Obviously, this game would be impossible to write, and if it were written, it would take an infinite amount of time to play.

Consider its opposite, the d02-based game, Stuff Happens: The Dealing With. It covers any genre, any style of conflict, in any style. Any time a player has a question about whether a given action succeeds, the GM simply flips a coin. If the player wins the call, they succeed. For instance, your intrepid vacuum cleaner salesman attempts to shoot the god Odin in the eye with a laser pistol. Flip a coin.

Stuff Happens is actually the hidden core of a great many role-playing games. For instance, the classic Marvel Super Heroes was notable for the extent to which the game stayed out of the way. It had some handy charts and tables, but the percentages were mostly arbitrary. Did Spider-Man have a 85% chance of dodging any particular attack? Do one fifth of all thugs hit Captain America when they shoot? Who cares? The point was to generate a result, any sensible result, and continue. Since it was theoretically possible Aunt May to slug the Green Goblin, if that's what happened, you just went with it.

Some games have deliberately embraced this ethos. For instance, the astoundingly elegant Dying Earth: The Roleplaying Game basically reduces challenges to a series of d02 determinations. There are complications, such as gaining extra tries or trumps, but that's the heart of it. This is completely consistent with the source material, in which fortunes could change in a moment and the point was never whether our hero would succeed, but rather, what strange and ironic adventures would our hero have to contend with. The Story Engine works similarly; dispensing with simulation and "realism," it deliberately invokes a fantasy world that is storytelling, while also demonstrating how such a loose framework can be used with virtually any story, if you are willing to follow the roll of the die.

But d02 crops up in surprising places. Look at Mutants & Masterminds. While suitably complex, it is very "swingy" in terms of the possible results and opponents can have widely varying abilities. The true currency in M&M is hero points. Combat tends to boil down to, "Roll some dice and accept some nearly chance result, then spend hero points to swing things in the direction you want them to go." Tactics do play a part, but far less than resource management and pure dumb luck.

Consider D&D 4e's unified attack and defense bonuses. At any particular level, in any particular situation, characters are presumed to have a certain percentage chance to strike an opponent. Substituting X percentage for even money, we discover that under the hood, D&D 4e is basically d02. Can I flip, trip, slide, damage, charm, whatever, my opponent? Flip a coin.

This is in marked contrast to something like GURPS, where a low character point sumotori could conceivably rip the head off a powerful but physically unformidable wizard. Luke Skywalker could be smoked by a lucky roll in any second when you are playing GURPS Star Wars.

Which is better? Either extreme results in a host of problems. Extreme simulation leads to compromises in game play and even conflicts in different simulation goals. For instance, am I running a game of Star Wars that plays like a movie, or a game in which events happened exactly as they would if they took place in the universe of Star Wars?

Extreme resolution leads to a futile game design. Everybody wins, everybody gets prizes.

To me, the ideal game balances these goals. On the one hand, games should be fast, fun, and enjoyable. On the other hand, it should really matter why one result occurs instead of another. While I have touched on meaningful choices in other discussions of RPGs, in this post I would like to make a nod to meaningful fortunes.

With that in mind, I will state, without saying which game is better written and developed, that D&D 3e is a better game than either AD&D or D&D 4e. AD&D bog down in too many arbitrary restrictions for my tastes, and includes a lot of detail in some areas while leaving little framework for handling other situations. D&D 4e has the potential to be a game of futility; assuming basically good tactical play and balanced encounters, the PCs will predictably win time and again with the expenditure of certain resources which will steadily regenerate. All classes have, under the hood, basically the same capabilities, down to the exact spread of at-will and daily abilities. I can argue also that the Basic D&D and its expansions was also a great design. While limited in what it did, it did those things well, and left you plenty of tools to improvise new things. AD&D and D&D 4e are not barren in this regard. Plenty of AD&D supplements and adventures were sprinkled with phrases like, "There is a 15% chance of this occuring," and leaving it at that. Similarly, 4e devolves to a fairly transparent d20 check system when needed. With AD&D, the risk is anticlimax, when a character "should" die as a consequence of an action with unforseeable consequences (such as, there is a green slime in that box, if you incautiously open it, you are likely to die). In 4e, there is a huge risk of futility; as a 3rd level adventurer, you enter the orc camp and break into a lockbox with X difficulty, then as a 23rd level adventurer, you break into a devil lord's palace and break into a chest with X difficulty, where X is based on your level.

The most egregious example of a futile game I can think of is one of the Dragon Warrior video game sequels, in which you gain levels and power... but your opponents arbitrarily level up at the same speed. What's the point? You might as well play the game at 1st level the whole way.

What saves 4e as a game is that at level 21, there are different ways for things to happen. I am a demigod, you are a shoeless, sexy god of war. I slide people, you cause them to bleed round after round. But the core is heavily tilted toward efficient resolution.