Should time spent on system mechanics be based in interest or importance/risk?

[Blue]

So, if I have this right, you're describing the 3E/5E skill system as low-involvement, the 4E skill challenge system as medium-involvement, and the 3E/4E combat systems as high-involvement.

The first part would be more accurate as "the 3e/5e skill system where only a single roll is needed" as low system involvement. You can easily have a scene with plenty of skill rolls. I remember on attempt to get information from a captive that went through good cop/bad cop, bribes, interrogation, threats of torture and death. All were there own rolls or sets of rolls.

But even opening a chest can be more than low involvement.

Player 1: I check for traps. (skill roll)
2: I help. (help action, gives advantage)
DM: "You find a trap, there's a poison needle in the lock.
1: I attempt to disarm. (skill roll)
2: I help. (help action, gives advantage)
DM: "You failed but didn't set it off
3: I'm a dwarf, poison doesn't bother me much. Everyone get back and I'll open it. (racial resist to come soon)
DM: You find it's locked as well.
...

That's a lot of rolls and some tactical decisions (who should attempt to disarm vs. help, the dwarf stepping forward to tough it out, asking people to move back in case there's another trap that will act in an area they missed). That would be a high-system interaction, using the 5e skill system. (Replace help mechanic to make it a 3e example.)

But yeah, this is just me being overly precise for other readers, you've demonstrated you've got understanding.

In that case, I would want systems of interest to have higher involvement than systems of disinterest. That part should be obvious and straight-forward, I would think. I don't want to spend a lot of time doing stuff that isn't interesting, so just abstract that out to a single die roll.

In general, I feel like I should want important things (with dramatic outcomes) to have higher involvement than less-important things (where the outcome doesn't matter), but that's just because complex system skew closer toward the average and humans are naturally risk-averse. As a player, it kind of seems like cheating to suggest that important things are best-eleven-out-of-twenty instead of best-two-out-of-three because I want to win and I'm unlikely to attempt anything if the odds aren't in my favor. It feels more fair to say that importance is not a factor.

Agreed - the usual result is that interesting and more-important move in step (or close enough that there's not a big difference.) The question is about the bits that aren't what should the system do.

And I think you're right - it should be interest based. After all, as a game it's interest/enjoyment/fun that's the important part. If the players want to play out the a low-risk bar brawl, they should.

You know, I don't think I actually said why the difference is of such interest to me. I'll go and add that into the original post.

 

[Nagol]

I've been struggling to form a coherent reply. Part of that is I am unsure the right question is being asked.
Areas with risk/stakes are pretty much by definition of interest to the players. If they aren't of interest, the players don't think anything important is being at risk, after all.

Mechanics should cluster around (a) systems to determine stakes and consequence for player/PC manoeuvres, and (b) methods the PCs can use to engage the game world in genre-appropriate and expected ways.

Is it genre-appropriate for a PC to build specialised gadgets to deal with problems? Then there should be mechanics that allow that. Is it genre-appropriate that those gadgets could fail/misbehave/take too long to construct/require specialised components? Then there should be mechanics for that. Is it genre-appropriate that trauma can cause psychological damage that may take longer to heal than the physical suffering? Then there should be mechanics for that.

In the end, a game needs mechanics that reflect what the game is about. Teenagers from Outer Space needs combat mechanics, but almost no injury mechanics because there may be fist-fights and food-fights galore, there has no expectation for injury beyond a blackened eye at the school dance later that same day.

 

[Blue]

Discussing with [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] made me realize I never said why this difference was so important. When I originally was playing with this idea in design, I was picturing a mechanical risk/reward magnitude rating, which is at partially under player control in that the characters can often escalate or attempt to de-escalate. So that the complexity given also put boundaries on the magnitude of the outcome (either way). So a bar-brawl, archery contest, or selling low-worth (compared to you) items might be low magnitude - just a single or few rolls, but no big deal who wins - you got 20% more or less than expected, or you have bragging rights and a trophy.

This also means that I can run "easy" combats quickly (mechanically) and not take up a lot of session time, without inflicting more risk on the characters by "stealing" an opportunity for them to play out every move.

But if it should be interest based (which seems to be where more people are talking about, and in line with my own rethinking that spawned this thread), then I don't have that nice "this will be minor" through "this will be (socially/physically/etc.) lethal"

It also allows games that each table can determine what's the points they want to make the "everyone participates" - many editions of D&D have that locked in as combat, any many other pillars have diminishing returns for more characters able to do a task. You don't need five trackers often. But a game with a different focus could have combat done by "the one character good at it" while everyone is good at other facets and wants to be able to use the system to focus on it.

 

[Blue]

I've been struggling to form a coherent reply. Part of that is I am unsure the right question is being asked.
Areas with risk/stakes are pretty much by definition of interest to the players. If they aren't of interest, the players don't think anything important is being at risk, after all.

This is actually a great example of why the question needs to be asked - because of the cases where interest and risk don't overlap. I just put out more information, but basically it was that I was looking at the same mechanics for determining how involved the system needs to get with the magnitude of possible outcomes.

And that works fine if character risk/reward controls how detailed a granularity the system demands.

But fails if player interest controls it, since player interest or lack that falls outside the common aspect of moving hand-in-hand with risk/reward will have the system out-of-sync with player interests.

In other words, in the common situation, there's no difference. But in the uncommon situation it makes a world of difference.

 

[Nagol]

This is actually a great example of why the question needs to be asked - because of the cases where interest and risk don't overlap. I just put out more information, but basically it was that I was looking at the same mechanics for determining how involved the system needs to get with the magnitude of possible outcomes.

And that works fine if character risk/reward controls how detailed a granularity the system demands.

But fails if player interest controls it, since player interest or lack that falls outside the common aspect of moving hand-in-hand with risk/reward will have the system out-of-sync with player interests.

In other words, in the common situation, there's no difference. But in the uncommon situation it makes a world of difference.

The question then becomes how can mechanical weight be varied to conform to the table interest? D&D has already adopted a few streamlining efforts in this direction with average hp and average damage output to help speed things along when the DM wants.

I've seen games that offer two or more resolution systems for similar tasks, one for a heavy detailed resolution and others for lightweight situations. The biggest problem with them is usually making the result of the lightweight system appropriate and plausible in the more detailed system ie. given the same starting parameters, both systems should present similar expected results at similar cost. Typically, the lightweight system produces results that overly generous (incenting people to use it exclusively) or overly punishing (incenting the use of the detailed system exclusively save for those cases where the table simply doesn't care at all or expects a serious loss anyway).

For D&D, this can be seen in a variety of mass combat systems compared to fighting the battles individually, for example. I recall one 3.5 game that tried to adopt a simple system to handle "trash mob" fights that used per-round average damage. I pointed out the danger with such fights came not from the average or expected values, but from the outliers: it may be expected damage won't drop the party for 5 rounds, but the threat can take the party down in a single round if all the random factors line up. With multiple fights per day, the chance the party would wipe using the simple system was zero. The chance using the normal combat system was significantly higher.

It is entirely possible to build multiple systems to model the same endeavour; it would be relatively easy to adapt 4e's skill challenges to replace simple combats, for example. The difficulty is presenting similar risk and outcome without the result feeling particularly capricious.

 

[Blue]

The question then becomes how can mechanical weight be varied to conform to the table interest? D&D has already adopted a few streamlining efforts in this direction with average hp and average damage output to help speed things along when the DM wants.

I've seen games that offer two or more resolution systems for similar tasks, one for a heavy detailed resolution and others for lightweight situations. The biggest problem with them is usually making the result of the lightweight system appropriate and plausible in the more detailed system ie. given the same starting parameters, both systems should present similar expected results at similar cost.

This was one of the other benefits when I was tying it to risk/importance instead of interest. The magnitude of the results was inherently, expectedly, intentionally less for the lightweight system. That was part of the appeal of it - if this isn't a big deal, it's justa few rolls. And we show it's not a big deal mechanically by capping the magnitude of the results - it's not going to be too much either way on the low end, up through deaths and similar for the high end.

That also breaks down when it changes from risk/importance to player interest. The scaling/cap on the magnitude of results goes away, and therefore the resutls of low granularity and high granularity should be similar. But just the act of rolling more checks means that the more granular ones will end up being a lot closer to average.

 

[pemerton]

I've seen games that offer two or more resolution systems for similar tasks, one for a heavy detailed resolution and others for lightweight situations. The biggest problem with them is usually making the result of the lightweight system appropriate and plausible in the more detailed system ie. given the same starting parameters, both systems should present similar expected results at similar cost.

I think this is hard to do in mathematical terms! (I'm thinking your probably agree with that.)

To make it work, I think there need to be other paramaters in place that "buffer" or modulate the differences in outcome. "Fail forward" would be one, but not the only one.
[MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION]'s idea is another way of handling it - granularity tracks stakes, for some pre-set ranking of stakes. Blue, you seem to be giving up on this - but how does DitV handle it?

 

[Nagol]

I think this is hard to do in mathematical terms! (I'm thinking your probably agree with that.)

To make it work, I think there need to be other paramaters in place that "buffer" or modulate the differences in outcome. "Fail forward" would be one, but not the only one.

[MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION]'s idea is another way of handling it - granularity tracks stakes, for some pre-set ranking of stakes. Blue, you seem to be giving up on this - but how does DitV handle it?

The differing systems' maths are hard to match elegantly. It can be done, but it would involve inserting randomness into the simple system; I would be tempted to construct either a large table or a few cascading tables to roll on to adjust outcomes. That form of solution suffers from a few flaws: it starts to move the simple mechanic towards more complex mechanic, it is easily perceived as capricious, properly done it will invalidate stake-setting (i.e. a PC could die), and it will run afoul of many player's biases like "That would never happen in real play! The odds are astounding!".

Fundamentally, you don't want the maths to match. You want the output of each system to be plausible outcomes in the other without one system being noticeably better or worse with expected outcome. The purpose of the simpler system is to move the table through a conflict/challenge the table wants/needs to clear in the fiction to get back to the more interesting stuff. 4e has tools that could be used for this purpose like non-combat challenges and minions. Dungeon World is pretty much built to avoid the problem by always using a simple mechanic and providing hard moves like "use up resource" and strong fictional positioning/framing requirements to help the GM move through such challenges at speed.

For D&D, I will offer to either blue-book (a term coined by Aaron Allston in a Champions product for taking the situation out of session and handling it via writing or the equivalent) or negotiate plausible stakes attached to dice rolled in the open and narrate the result. "OK, what's the Heldon, the 10th level dwarf barbarian, going to do for these 3 days? Run to Safeton and look for the McGuffin! Safeton is three days by normal walk so you can make it in just over a day and the typical encounter is EL 3. I don't really want to run through the 4-6 encounters: how about I roll 3 sets of percentile, the first is the number of hp you lose, the second is the amount of treasure recovered, and the third is the amount of xp earned from the random encounters along the way?"

 

[Blue]

I think this is hard to do in mathematical terms! (I'm thinking your probably agree with that.)

To make it work, I think there need to be other paramaters in place that "buffer" or modulate the differences in outcome. "Fail forward" would be one, but not the only one.

@Blue's idea is another way of handling it - granularity tracks stakes, for some pre-set ranking of stakes. Blue, you seem to be giving up on this - but how does DitV handle it?

Not giving up at all, just disappointed that what I was originally taking as a clean & tight mechanical choice works out to be the wrong design choice for how people want to play. Which is a much better thing to discover at this early point.

Rating activity by risk/importance to determine both the granularity but also the stakes such that the outcome will be different and I don't need to try to shoot for the exact same outcome regardless of level of granularity worked well.

As for DitV, it was more of an inspiration then specific rules I'd use. I mentioned it for allowing character escalation with mechanical impact, it's not a representative of variable granularity.

(If you're not interested in the escalation, you can skip the rest.)

Basically, different arena of conflict get different resources. (Talking to someone uses different Stats, Relationships, Traits and Things then a fistfight which is different then a gunfight.) For a scene, you roll all of your dice for the current arena upfront, and then you're going back and forth in a pretty cool way, but long and tangental to the point. It's got nifty mechanics for who's responding, taking fallout, etc.

BUT if you don't have the dice to See, you can Give (give up the conflict) or escalate it. If you escalate, you AND your opponent get to roll any resources you haven't yet for the new arena of combat. For example, if you start trying to talk someone out of leaving, you roll your Acuity and Heart (as well as possible plenty of other things). If you start trying to restrain someoen, you would roll Body and Heart, plus others. If you started talking and now you're trying to restrain them, you'd roll Body, but you'd already rolled Heart so you wouldn't roll that again for this scene.

The Fallout that happens is based on the arena of conflict it happened in - higher dice for ones with more risk. Fallout can give short term, long term, long term requiring medical aid, and death.

Now, DitV has mechanical bits that were had a very different spin than other games when it came out, but also is a system highly tailored for the feel it wants - it's not a GURPS like generic nor even a good candidate to be customized for a host of other genres like d20 was. It has a limited set of arenas that covers what it needs to quite well, but I'd rather take inspiration from it rather then try to generalize it out.

 

[GMMichael]

The magnitude of the results was inherently, expectedly, intentionally less for the lightweight system. That was part of the appeal of it - if this isn't a big deal, it's justa few rolls. And we show it's not a big deal mechanically by capping the magnitude of the results - it's not going to be too much either way on the low end, up through deaths and similar for the high end.

I'm picturing an assassination sequence for this, but it seems that the scene would be just as intense (if not more) as a heavyweight scene if the GM narrated each high-stakes section and called for a roll whenever the player's response invited a roll. The final moments of the sequence might not need more than a few rolls, but player interest and risk might be pretty high.

Rolls:

• Choose a path that avoids the guard dogs
• Scale the outer wall
• Quietly use glass cutter to enter residence
• Move through hallway without making noise
• Stab the target while he's watching the Bachelor

That also breaks down when it changes from risk/importance to player interest. The scaling/cap on the magnitude of results goes away, and therefore the resutls of low granularity and high granularity should be similar. But just the act of rolling more checks means that the more granular ones will end up being a lot closer to average.

I'm not sure that closer to average is a problem here. As long as your target roll doesn't change, a roll that's way above average or several rolls that come very close to slightly above average are still a success if you're using a succeed/fail system.

Can you resolve the which-system-to-use problem by letting either the GM or players declare which system they want? The players call for the heavyweight system if they're interested, and the GM calls for the heavyweight system if he thinks the stakes are high?