Why Blades in the Dark feels less swingy than d20 – and why the bell curve (and variance) aren't the main reason

Artamo said:

This is the crux of my issue with the system. Depending on the GM’s interpretation, that success with complications can feel either like a minor success or it can feel like a failure. In other words, the minor success can feel more punishing than if the player chose not to take the action at all. That all depends upon the GM, though. Two different GMs may have a different complication, and I think that’s why some people walk away from the game feel good about it and others kinda bummed.

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Huh. Yeah, I can see that.

Although I wonder if "some people walk away from the game" specifically because the partial successes feel like a lie, or because more generally the vaguely-defined interpretations of dice rolls...of which those non-successes are an example...are just too loosey-goosey for people used to more deterministic games.

Which I suggest because that absolutely describes my experience with BitD. (And even PbyA.). I love the idea of those games, but when I actually play them so much just seems so...arbitrary. Again, it's not specifically that my partial successes feel like failures, but that...god it's hard to put my finger on it.

Here's a theory:

• In more traditional, D&D-like games the rules tell you what happens, which you can then embellish with narration, but no narration is required. It's optional color.
• In BitD (and, again to a lesser extent, PbtA) some of the rules require some kind of narration. If the GM can't think of a complication, there's no basic mechanic ("You lose one Luck point") to fall back upon.

Not only can the latter be exhausting, but in many cases what the GM comes up with is just not going to "feel right" to the players.

It totally makes sense for me that it's not going to be everybody's cup o' tea.

Bill Zebub said:

Huh. Yeah, I can see that.

Although I wonder if "some people walk away from the game" specifically because the partial successes feel like a lie, or because more generally the vaguely-defined interpretations of dice rolls...of which those non-successes are an example...are just too loosey-goosey for people used to more deterministic games.

Which I suggest because that absolutely describes my experience with BitD. (And even PbyA.). I love the idea of those games, but when I actually play them so much just seems so...arbitrary. Again, it's not specifically that my partial successes feel like failures, but that...god it's hard to put my finger on it.

Here's a theory:

• In more traditional, D&D-like games the rules tell you what happens, which you can then embellish with narration, but no narration is required. It's optional color.
• In BitD (and, again to a lesser extent, PbtA) some of the rules require some kind of narration. If the GM can't think of a complication, there's no basic mechanic ("You lose one Luck point") to fall back upon.

Not only can the latter be exhausting, but in many cases what the GM comes up with is just not going to "feel right" to the players.

It totally makes sense for me that it's not going to be everybody's cup o' tea.

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Yes, you definitely hit on the same takeaway feeling I had.

At the end of the mini campaign when we were going over the “what worked/what didn’t” of the system, the arbitrariness was something that I was having trouble articulating but that’s exactly what I felt. I described it as feeling like we were stumbling towards success and if we’re not for the GM’s narration, there were few clear moments where it felt like we actually succeeded because we were good at things. Maybe that’s partly our not fully grasping all the rules as players. We probably could’ve pushed ourselves by taking on more stress for instance.

Well, sometimes I think people have trouble separating “success at what was at stake” with “but there’s some escalation.”

Simplistic example: “I want to bash the Bluecoat with my sword so he’s out of the fight and we can get out of here.” What’s at stake? The Bluecoat being out of the fight. Full success - you do the thing and suffer no consequence. Partial - obvious risk is he gets something in on you and you take some harm (or choose to Resist and burn Stress). But either way, the Bluecoat is out of the fight - you succeed at your goal.

Where I think things get really iffy are the “reduced impact” options. Those start to slide the goal / outcome, and IME/IMO can be a fine line between negating success and not (and often feel like it either way to some players).

Not to harp on it too much, but this is also what the Threat Roll option helps manage. The prior to dice statements are very explicit: “ok, you’ll get X but the threat is Y and Z.” In this frame we know and accept the worst case prior to any dice hitting the table (we don’t escalate past the Threat), and that on a 4/5, the outcome is still “I get X, and I take some lesser of Y and Z.”

franz101 said:

This suggests d20 is not inherently swingier than dice pools when looking at extreme outcomes. The bell curve / variance explanation therefore doesn't hold up as the primary reason.

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Dice pool tells you nothing. Dice pools work differently in different game. Burning Wheel is a dice pool game and works entirely differently. Some systems require you to get at least a success, others ask you to get several successes, some play with the number of dice, some with the threshold that your dice must hit to be a success. Blades in the Dark speaks for Blades in the Dark and not for dice pools in general.

Also, in both cases, it depends on how you calculate success.

I think when people say that D20 is more swingy than Dice pool systems, they often take as a base the general idea that extreme results are as likely than moderate result on a D20, it's not the case in dice pools as you evidently see in your numbers. As soon as the number of dices increase, your chances of failure drop drastically. It's a common complaint in D&D that a "competent" character will still have 25% chance to fail something they're supposedly great at, where it's much lower in the dice pool systems I have experience with.

TheAlkaizer said:

Dice pool tells you nothing. Dice pools work differently in different game. Burning Wheel is a dice pool game and works entirely differently. Some systems require you to get at least a success, others ask you to get several successes, some play with the number of dice, some with the threshold that your dice must hit to be a success. Blades in the Dark speaks for Blades in the Dark and not for dice pools in general.

Also, in both cases, it depends on how you calculate success.

I think when people say that D20 is more swingy than Dice pool systems, they often take as a base the general idea that extreme results are as likely than moderate result on a D20, it's not the case in dice pools as you evidently see in your numbers. As soon as the number of dices increase, your chances of failure drop drastically. It's a common complaint in D&D that a "competent" character will still have 25% chance to fail something they're supposedly great at, where it's much lower in the dice pool systems I have experience with.

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Thanks for the reply – I think we're actually closer than it might seem.You're absolutely right that dice pools are not a monolith. Burning Wheel, Shadowrun, Year Zero, Blades, etc. all work very differently, so blanket statements like „dice pools are less swingy“ are oversimplified and often misleading. My analysis was specifically about Blades in the Dark (as a popular representative), not dice pools in general.

That said, I believe the numbers in my table support exactly the intuition you mention:

• Extreme outcomes (pure failure and critical success) become much rarer as dice count increases (6–13 % at 3–4d6, vs. 5 % crit ranges in typical PF2e rolls).
• This alone already makes competent characters feel more reliable, because the „catastrophic“ or „godlike“ ends of the spectrum are pushed way out.

But there's a second layer that hits even harder in Blades: the rightward shift of outcome labels via Position & Effect.

• What would be a critical miss in PF2e/D&D often becomes just a normal failure in Blades (still bad, but rarely catastrophic).
• What would be a normal miss in PF2e/D&D often becomes a partial success (net progress with cost).
• This creates three positively-named outcomes (Partial, Success, Critical) and only one negative one (Failure).

So not only are extreme negative results a) rarer mathematically, they are also b) mechanically less punishing because of the label shift.

In short: The feeling of reliability in Blades comes from both the compression of the bad tail and the systematic re-labeling of what counts as „success“.I agree this is very specific to Blades/FitD and doesn't apply to every dice pool system – that's why I tried to keep the comparison focused on these two concrete examples.What do you think – does that match your experience with Blades, or do you see the label shift playing out differently at your table?

Artamo said:

Yes, you definitely hit on the same takeaway feeling I had.

At the end of the mini campaign when we were going over the “what worked/what didn’t” of the system, the arbitrariness was something that I was having trouble articulating but that’s exactly what I felt. I described it as feeling like we were stumbling towards success and if we’re not for the GM’s narration, there were few clear moments where it felt like we actually succeeded because we were good at things. Maybe that’s partly our not fully grasping all the rules as players. We probably could’ve pushed ourselves by taking on more stress for instance.

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And I want to clarify that I'm all in on the "GM fiat" aspect of OSR: players describe their actions and I often just rule on whether or not it works. They don't get to roll dice just because they have a checkbox next to "Persuade" on their character sheet.

What trips me up with BitD/PbtA is not that the outcomes are up to the GM instead of defined by rules, but the necessity of improvising meaningful complications/consequences on the fly.

Bill Zebub said:

What trips me up with BitD/PbtA is not that the outcomes are up to the GM instead of defined by rules, but the necessity of improvising meaningful complications/consequences on the fly.

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Yep, and it’s something that I’m sure gets better with experience but it can be a tricky and very subtle learning curve.

Bill Zebub said:

What trips me up with BitD/PbtA is not that the outcomes are up to the GM instead of defined by rules, but the necessity of improvising meaningful complications/consequences on the fly.

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What do you mean by the first part here? The outcome is defined by the dice roll, and the players can manage both Position and Effect by a wide variety of hard mechanics once the initial statement is made by the GM, before any rolls happen.

zakael19 said:

What do you mean by the first part here? The outcome is defined by the dice roll, and the players can manage both Position and Effect by a wide variety of hard mechanics once the initial statement is made by the GM, before any rolls happen.

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Oh, yeah, fair. I've only played a little bit so forgot as I was writing that in BitD the stakes are negotiated, not imposed.

But in my mind it's a similar thing: there's a lot of subjectivity to the meaning of the dice rolls.

Bill Zebub said:

People might also have different interpretations of "swingy".

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good point. Swingy is for me that you are less certain on a certain outcome. I think thats why people say 3d6 are less swingy because you have a higher chance of the result being in the middle of the bellcurve. For a linear distribution everything is possible every outcome has the same chance. So more swingy in that sense.