Binary Success vs Multiple Levels of Success

[Gorgon Zee]

That narration, for every roll either makes, is exhausting for whoever does it.

I think you may have missed the fact that it's not required that you narrate each special success. You can always pick a canned option like "more damage". My players are about 50-50 in whether they'll narrate stuff or just cause more damage. It really isn't a burden.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

What do you think? Do you prefer binary success or multiple levels of success? Why? Do you agree with the author's idea that you can make binary success more interesting by making checks more complex?

For most things I find a binary success mechanic to be perfectly adequate. Either you pick the lock open, or you don't. You find the hidden compartment when searching the desk or you don't. Your assessment as to whether the border guard is open to a bribe is either correct or it isn't. Your jump over a chasm either makes it or falls short.

The described details of the success or failure can be left to GM or player description, without that description having mechanical effect - those details are below the level of abstraction of the mechanics, even when the mechanics are crunchy ones. (And often those details can be left out, as falling below the level of abstraction wanted even for description. "No, Darvi, we don't want to spend time listening about the style and panache you showed in picking that lock.")

For some things I do want a degree-of-success mechanic, mostly for when one character's actions set a target number for a second character to overcome. Other cases are a small (if important) minority of situations. How long do you have to work on a lock in order to pick it? What happens if you fail a climb - do you get part way up and then fall, or are you able to give up the attempt to climb as being too hard?

On the far side of this, I dislike "critical successes" - and I hate "fumbles" with a blazing burning passion. I'll blanket-ban any fumble mechanics and even auto-misses in anything I run, and I'll grudgingly tolerate auto-hits and criticals only if the players really want them and I'm trying to limit the volume of my house rules.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

I do have a strong preference for systems that are either strongly narrative or strongly gamist. In a strongly narrative system, you don't make as many rolls, so it makes more sense for the rolls to take more thought to adjudicate and to work out the outcome. In a gamist system you are often making many rolls and the mental effort to imagine is high, so I do like the default to be pretty much defined outcomes, with narration the exception.

One game that does the latter well for me is 13th Age. It's basically a gamist 3E/4E style game where the designers have removed a lot of the cruft of those systems. Skills are strongly narrative, but combat is gamist ... unless you deliberately pick powers that require narration. They are called out in their descriptions and so one player might jump at taking a power that allows you to "narrate something cool you do with the terrain" and another will emphatically reject it.

For me, PbtA doesn't work well because in my play experience, you do make a lot of rolls, and a lot of narration is needed, so repetition and loss of imagination is an issue. It's also frankly annoying when you are asking someone a simple question and end up with so good a success you have to invent new questions you don't really care about. I wish I liked the system more, and I've had fun playing in some games, but it is relentless in its desire to force narration in a way that Fate and AGON have not been when I've been in extended campaigns with them.

I get the point of view espoused in the article quoted by the OP. Too much require imagination is a burden, but I don't think only using binary outcomes has any effect on that aspect of a game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think you may have missed the fact that it's not required that you narrate each special success. You can always pick a canned option like "more damage". My players are about 50-50 in whether they'll narrate stuff or just cause more damage. It really isn't a burden.

I'm glad it works out for your table. IME, however, it is a pretty common complaint, such that a lot of digital ink and airtime has been spent addressing the issue.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I do have a strong preference for systems that are either strongly narrative or strongly gamist. In a strongly narrative system, you don't make as many rolls, so it makes more sense for the rolls to take more thought to adjudicate and to work out the outcome. In a gamist system you are often making many rolls and the mental effort to imagine is high, so I do like the default to be pretty much defined outcomes, with narration the exception.

One game that does the latter well for me is 13th Age. It's basically a gamist 3E/4E style game where the designers have removed a lot of the cruft of those systems. Skills are strongly narrative, but combat is gamist ... unless you deliberately pick powers that require narration. They are called out in their descriptions and so one player might jump at taking a power that allows you to "narrate something cool you do with the terrain" and another will emphatically reject it.

For me, PbtA doesn't work well because in my play experience, you do make a lot of rolls, and a lot of narration is needed, so repetition and loss of imagination is an issue. It's also frankly annoying when you are asking someone a simple question and end up with so good a success you have to invent new questions you don't really care about. I wish I liked the system more, and I've had fun playing in some games, but it is relentless in its desire to force narration in a way that Fate and AGON have not been when I've been in extended campaigns with them.

I get the point of view espoused in the article quoted by the OP. Too much require imagination is a burden, but I don't think only using binary outcomes has any effect on that aspect of a game.

My strong inclination is simulationist, and any mechanics from anywhere on the Narrativist-Gamist spectrum can potentially be acceptable to me if they first serve that goal.

 

[rmcoen]

Why they don't have the bonuses as one precalculated number?

Ah, so many times have we asked that question! We have even provided character sheets for him where the data is already calculated. For every possible weapon he might use. Now, finally, on VTTs, the character sheet does it for him, and things have speeded up... unless we're in person. (But, he's our friend, so we accept him as he is and are happy we get to play at all! )

 

[Reynard]

Ah, so many times have we asked that question! We have even provided character sheets for him where the data is already calculated. For every possible weapon he might use. Now, finally, on VTTs, the character sheet does it for him, and things have speeded up... unless we're in person. (But, he's our friend, so we accept him as he is and are happy we get to play at all! )

I used to play regularly with a guy like that (we're still friends but don't play as often together). It is just the way some people are. Some people like to count their bonuses because it feels good. Some people are bad at arithmetic. Sometimes, they are the same people.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I used to play regularly with a guy like that (we're still friends but don't play as often together). It is just the way some people are. Some people like to count their bonuses because it feels good. Some people are bad at arithmetic. Sometimes, they are the same people.

This hits home.

 

[Staffan]

Ah, so many times have we asked that question! We have even provided character sheets for him where the data is already calculated. For every possible weapon he might use.

I wonder if that might be part of the problem. I remember back in the days when we were playing Pathfinder 1, and one of my more rules-savvy players "helped" some of the others build their characters (basically built the characters for them). The problem was that as a result, the players didn't really know how their characters worked, so he basically had to co-pilot the characters as well. I remember an exhange that went something like this:
Helper: "You could move over here, for example."
Me (GM): "That'll trigger an AoO."
Helper: "But because you have Panther Style, you get to attack the one who's doing an AoO."
Player: "OK..."
Helper: "And because you have Panther Parry, you get to do it before they attack you, and if you hit they get a penalty. Oh, and you also get +4 AC versus AoOs for Mobility."
Player: "Oh. Neat!"

But the player didn't internalize the info so next time we played a similar thing happened again.

 

[zakael19]

I do have a strong preference for systems that are either strongly narrative or strongly gamist. In a strongly narrative system, you don't make as many rolls, so it makes more sense for the rolls to take more thought to adjudicate and to work out the outcome. In a gamist system you are often making many rolls and the mental effort to imagine is high, so I do like the default to be pretty much defined outcomes, with narration the exception.

One game that does the latter well for me is 13th Age. It's basically a gamist 3E/4E style game where the designers have removed a lot of the cruft of those systems. Skills are strongly narrative, but combat is gamist ... unless you deliberately pick powers that require narration. They are called out in their descriptions and so one player might jump at taking a power that allows you to "narrate something cool you do with the terrain" and another will emphatically reject it.

For me, PbtA doesn't work well because in my play experience, you do make a lot of rolls, and a lot of narration is needed, so repetition and loss of imagination is an issue. It's also frankly annoying when you are asking someone a simple question and end up with so good a success you have to invent new questions you don't really care about. I wish I liked the system more, and I've had fun playing in some games, but it is relentless in its desire to force narration in a way that Fate and AGON have not been when I've been in extended campaigns with them.

I get the point of view espoused in the article quoted by the OP. Too much require imagination is a burden, but I don't think only using binary outcomes has any effect on that aspect of a game.

This might be a "different brains work in different ways" thing, but to me because the Moves in the PBTAs I play are generally invoked by fiction, the narration for the entire failure/success with X/full success continuum is almost always very clear. There's a single move in the game I run the most that causes a lot of difficulty for people (Defy Danger or adjacent in the Dungeon World & etc games), and I struggled at first with it as well. The specific version I run already reframes things a bit (There's a lesser success, cost, consequence, and maybe the GM presents a choice between them); and John Harper's recent Threat Roll design helped me mentally adjust even further.

Essentially, the clearer you are with the stakes of a Badness that you're tackling (the downside of the Conflict; many intentionally designed games move from beat by beat task resolution to a larger scale conflict resolution with obvious and up front consequences to failure), the easier it is to kinda dial it back. Like, if the character is attempting to dodge out of the way of a giant-like creature's massive tree-like club; the clear stake is "does it smack you for a ton of pain" and so depending on what they say in the fiction an easy step back can be "ok you dodge the worst of the swing but it clips you just enough to send you flying and you land winded with the terrible snapping together of your teeth - go ahead and mark dazed, as you try and pull yourself together...character 2, you see...." & etc.

I used to struggle a lot when we hit Failure in D&D especially. People are always like "well wait, can I try instead?" or "well what happens now" and not having a system nudge of "ok go ahead and inflict what you've already established" meant I would often flail around.

Plus I was always having to kinda pull the players forward, right? The direction of conversation tends to be players -> GM, GM states something, players think and confer maybe and then -> GM again. That was fatiguing (and worse because I was always running a module, which meant a plot, which meant having to kinda help steer people onwards or try and dangle objectives etc). In PBTAs, the questions tend to be inverted GM -> Player. You state a grabby situation, ask "What do you do?" or other similar things, because if a player is asking a question beyond something very surface you're often triggering that Read a Sitch or equivalent move which immediately plays back into the levels of success (on a 6-, you provoke a bad situation; on a 7-9 they get 1 Question; on a 10+ a handful) and then gives concrete avenues forward.

Edit: the best way I've seen "levels of success" work in a d20 system is 4e's Skill Challenges, when run as an open ended fail-forward situation.