Does it? I've played a lot of D&D, and a lot of Rolemaster which is close to D&D in the way it presents its characters. And I've never thought of adventurer as a career. It's an idea that I've heard of, because I gather it's a thing in the Forgotten Realms.
D&D General Hot Take: Uncertainty Makes D&D Better
I'm thinking of Gygax's AD&D. There are charts in the DMG combat section - base morale is a function of HD, and their are mods to the roll based on circumstances. There are results for morale failure based on degree of failure, but I can't recall if they give the GM discretion or not.
Edgar Ironpelt
Adventurer
I'm for a happy medium on this point. Some uncertainty is good, and both too much and too little can be bad.
There's temptation in both directions. "If some uncertainty is good, then lots and lots of uncertainty must be better!" and "If limiting uncertainty is good then eliminating uncertainty must be better!"
Now finding the right amount of uncertainty is an art, and different groups will like to see different levels. The PCs need to be able to deal with the uncertainty on offer; they need to be flexible and to have reserves (and be allowed to be flexible and have reserves). If the PCs are too brittle, or if they operate too close to the edge, they'll frequently and routinely get wiped out, and this is a Problem. (Unless you're playing a game where the PCs are expected to routinely get wiped out. It's a possible play style but not my cuppa. Not at all. Not at all.)
There's temptation in both directions. "If some uncertainty is good, then lots and lots of uncertainty must be better!" and "If limiting uncertainty is good then eliminating uncertainty must be better!"
Now finding the right amount of uncertainty is an art, and different groups will like to see different levels. The PCs need to be able to deal with the uncertainty on offer; they need to be flexible and to have reserves (and be allowed to be flexible and have reserves). If the PCs are too brittle, or if they operate too close to the edge, they'll frequently and routinely get wiped out, and this is a Problem. (Unless you're playing a game where the PCs are expected to routinely get wiped out. It's a possible play style but not my cuppa. Not at all. Not at all.)
Edgar Ironpelt
Adventurer
<Raises hand> This old USENET post isn't by me, but I unreservedly endorse it.
RPGs and video games differ from most ordinary board games in that
there doesn't have to be a loser. I think it's reasonable that they
attract mindsets which aren't very interested in losing; and a lot
of RPG groups successfully cater to this.
If I enter into playing, say, chess with the expectation I will never
lose, I'm being an idiot and I'm bound to be disappointed. Not even
the World Champion gets that. But if I enter into _Heroes of Might
and Magic IV_ (which is what I'm currently playing) with the
expectation that I won't lose, I'm not hurting anyone, and it's not
unreasonable that I may get what I want. (Especially if I turn the
difficulty down--and I may yet do that, because the losses are really
more annoying than challenging.)
Whether the player still wants it when she gets it is another question,
but for at least some players in some situations the answer is "yes."
I don't think I would still be playing Heroes if I lost even 1/3
of the time. In a board game, I know I have to give my opponent
a fair shot, but here there's no such obligation; the only thing
against winning all the time is that it may detract from the challenge,
and for me, right now, I'd rather win than have a really strong
challenge.
If this is a personality flaw it's an awfully common one; I think
it's better just regarded as a preference.
A common problem with such games is that they are entertaining for
the players but not for the GM. I get tired of having my NPCs
wiped out time and again; I spoiled a campaign recently by engineering
a TPK in the attempt to make things "a bit more challenging." Clearly
I overshot, but by game contract I shouldn't even have been trying.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
I don't know about "better" or "worse," "good" or "bad," but I can say this much: I have more fun when the game is more random. (And I say this as the DM.)
I want random encounters, random treasure tables, random weather, roll your stats, roll your hit points, roll your damage, all of it. The dice are there for a reason and I want to use them.
I want random encounters, random treasure tables, random weather, roll your stats, roll your hit points, roll your damage, all of it. The dice are there for a reason and I want to use them.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
Extreme results occur in D&D all the time, it's just that the rules of D&D only interpret 5% of them as extreme outcomes, and only in the context of an attack roll. You keep conflating results and outcomes, and it doesn't strengthen your case. As you yourself have pointed out, unlike in PbtA, most D&D outcomes are known, and assigned to an uncertain result.
A roll of 1 or 20 on a 1d20 is extreme. A roll of 1 or 4 on a 1d4 is extreme. The result of a coin flip is always extreme. That's what extreme means -- "at the ends." The fact that D&D doesn't allow for the interpretation of extreme results as outcomes in its rules is a case against uncertainty being beneficial to D&D, not for it. A system that makes good use of uncertainty is designed to do so.
You seem to understand this when you talk about PbtA, where the 2d6 curve and trinary core mechanic do make slightly better use of uncertainty, but then you say things like, "Failing to land a solid attack against a foe defending themselves is not an extreme result," and "D&D is sooo slooooow by comparison."
Do you understand why D&D5 is slow? It's because the to-hit math hasn't functionally changed since 1989 while hit point totals have substantially increased. The game was designed for trained combatants to miss (or be parried) all the time, because taking hit point damage at all was the 'extreme outcome.' The very fact that a D&D5 crit "isn't that extreme" is evidence that D&D5 does not make good use of uncertainty.
As a bunch of folks in the thread have tried to point out, uncertainty doesn't make vanilla D&D better by the numbers. There's a case to be made that risk is fun in any context, or that the rules of D&D could or should be adapted to make better use of uncertainty in defining outcomes, but no one seems content to make these cases.
Yeah, took a page right out of your book, didn't they?
Remathilis
Legend
Ironically, it's this style of play that could benefit greatly from AI. Randomly procedurally created dungeons, randomly generated content, monsters that run on simple logic systems and scripts, a DM who can assess nontraditional actions and can track things a human DM might find difficult. The more randomness you include, the greater the advantage automation and AI have.
Uncertainty suggests a cognitive state. What's the object of cognition?
We can talk about uncertainty in the results of dice rolls, and D&D offers this - people get excited by their natural 1s and critical 20s.
The analogue of these in Burning Wheel and Torchbearer is 6s that can be open-ended with a Fate point.
There is also just the uncertainty of waiting to see what the result of the roll is: all dice-based RPGs have this, though in dice pool games there is the extra element that more dice have to be read and grouped together. I think BW/TB/Prince Valiant is my favourite here, because you roll the dice, then you have to work out what you're rolled, but you basically know whether or not your won! - unless you have to make a call on open-ending 6s, but that's another go at the gamble.
MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has the "what did I roll" factor, but then you have to make optimisation decisions around total vs effect die, which are interesting but defuse the excitement a bit between the uncertainty of the roll and a sense of the outcome.
But the other aspect of uncertainty in a RPG is uncertainty about what will happen next in the fiction. Some of the least certain play I've had has been in zero-prep one-shots of Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights, and to just a slightly less extent In A Wicked Age. In a Wuthering Height one-shot, for instance, we started with a mute, republican-but-anti-Communist cleric inspecting the "heretical" works on sale at a socialist bookshop with an occult section upstairs, where the other PC worked; and ended up with the cleric dead and his ghost possessing the other PC, who was broken-hearted from repeated romantic rejection, so that the bookshop was burned down with the PC in it. On the way through we had political meetings, manslaughter and a body thrown into the Thames, arrest, imprisonment, a prison riot and escape that turned into a minor political uprising, and a friendly defecting police officer.
Our Torchbearer sessions are a bit less wild than that, in part because there are elements of prep that help anchor the fiction, but they are still pretty uncertain. Over the course of three sessions the NPC Megloss has moved from enemy to a de facto member of the party and hence ally to at least two of the PCs; his housekeeper Krystal has been turned into a gebbeth by a spiteful shadow that escaped from the heart of the Dreamwalker PC when she tried to cast a spell (the player failed the Arcansist check); the PCs have freed but (perhaps temporarily) driven off a demon of the Outer Dark, but only by placating it with an offer of Megloss as a sacrifice.
In my experience there is nothing particularly distinctive about D&D compared to these other RPGs that means it produces more interesting uncertainty, either in respect of dice rolls or fiction. That's not a criticism of D&D - it's not under any duty to stand out! But I'm not persuaded that a special focus on D&D will yield particular insight into how uncertainty contributes to RPGing.
We can talk about uncertainty in the results of dice rolls, and D&D offers this - people get excited by their natural 1s and critical 20s.
The analogue of these in Burning Wheel and Torchbearer is 6s that can be open-ended with a Fate point.
There is also just the uncertainty of waiting to see what the result of the roll is: all dice-based RPGs have this, though in dice pool games there is the extra element that more dice have to be read and grouped together. I think BW/TB/Prince Valiant is my favourite here, because you roll the dice, then you have to work out what you're rolled, but you basically know whether or not your won! - unless you have to make a call on open-ending 6s, but that's another go at the gamble.
MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has the "what did I roll" factor, but then you have to make optimisation decisions around total vs effect die, which are interesting but defuse the excitement a bit between the uncertainty of the roll and a sense of the outcome.
But the other aspect of uncertainty in a RPG is uncertainty about what will happen next in the fiction. Some of the least certain play I've had has been in zero-prep one-shots of Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights, and to just a slightly less extent In A Wicked Age. In a Wuthering Height one-shot, for instance, we started with a mute, republican-but-anti-Communist cleric inspecting the "heretical" works on sale at a socialist bookshop with an occult section upstairs, where the other PC worked; and ended up with the cleric dead and his ghost possessing the other PC, who was broken-hearted from repeated romantic rejection, so that the bookshop was burned down with the PC in it. On the way through we had political meetings, manslaughter and a body thrown into the Thames, arrest, imprisonment, a prison riot and escape that turned into a minor political uprising, and a friendly defecting police officer.
Our Torchbearer sessions are a bit less wild than that, in part because there are elements of prep that help anchor the fiction, but they are still pretty uncertain. Over the course of three sessions the NPC Megloss has moved from enemy to a de facto member of the party and hence ally to at least two of the PCs; his housekeeper Krystal has been turned into a gebbeth by a spiteful shadow that escaped from the heart of the Dreamwalker PC when she tried to cast a spell (the player failed the Arcansist check); the PCs have freed but (perhaps temporarily) driven off a demon of the Outer Dark, but only by placating it with an offer of Megloss as a sacrifice.
In my experience there is nothing particularly distinctive about D&D compared to these other RPGs that means it produces more interesting uncertainty, either in respect of dice rolls or fiction. That's not a criticism of D&D - it's not under any duty to stand out! But I'm not persuaded that a special focus on D&D will yield particular insight into how uncertainty contributes to RPGing.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
Well, until AI catches up with me, I have some pretty robust spreadsheets that I use when writing/running adventures. I got pretty familiar with pivot tables, pulldown menus, VLOOKUP, and Boolean expressions in engineering school, and I have built some really spiffy generators in Excel. Some of them have been set up to display Roll20 macros which I can then copy/paste into the chat window (usually for dice rolls and descriptions.)
With the click of a button I can generate an entire shop inventory, roll up a random encounter, fill out a treasure hoard, describe a potion, or create an NPC out of thin air. Sure, there are lots of online generators that I could use as well, but they never quite fit my campaign or the PCs...they are usually SRD Only, or Everything From Everywhere, and I usually end up doing multiple iterations until I find something I can use. (Not to mention having to juggle dozens of bookmarks to different websites.) Building my own generator does take some time up-front (about an hour), but saves me a lot more time in the long run because all of my generators are in once place, and all of the options and math have all been tailored to fit my own game.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
Oh man do I love random generators. Especially Excel generators. Press a button and it spits out 100 random NPCs. Press a button and it spits out 100 random hexes. Pure unadulterated yum.
Similar Threads
