Does a GM need more dice than a d2?

[R_J_K75]

is there actually a significant difference in the GM's results if the GM just says: probably a hit, I should flip, or probably a miss?

I have done this as a DM on rare occasions, hit (with average or minimal damage) or missed players without rolling. Sometimes it's just to speed up a long combat, sometimes I just can't find my dice that are scattered on the table, or sometimes the narrative justifies it for dramatic effect. I'd never do it if a player(s) were close to death, and it's something that must be done extremely sparingly. Regardless the few times I've done it my players didn't even notice, and if they did, they didn't say anything, so no harm, no foul.

 

[CleverNickName]

Came here to mention Dread RPG, only to see that @Morrus beat me to the punch.

 

[GMMichael]

I know exactly two words about Dread: Jenga tower.

Please tell me that it's more complicated than: tower doesn't fall, tower falls. I'd find a d2 to be a little biased if the majority of its rolls were 1, eventually followed by a single, noisy 2.

 

[CleverNickName]

I know exactly two words about Dread: Jenga tower.

Please tell me that it's more complicated than: tower doesn't fall, tower falls. I'd find a d2 a little biased if the majority of its rolls were 1, eventually followed by a single, noisy 2.

It's more complicated than that, but only slightly.

Basically: the tower is a tension-building device. The premise is that the Tower will eventually collapse, ending the scene. If it collapses on your turn, that usually means the scene ends badly for your character. So the higher the tower, the higher the stakes, and therefore the higher the tension.

At the beginning of the scene, you set up the tower. The Narrator might pull one or two (or twenty) Jenga sticks out of the tower to "dial in" the speed of the next scene...the more sticks they pull out of it, the less stable it is when the scene starts, and therefore, the more quickly it will eventually collapse.

Then they begin narrating the scene. You take turns telling parts of the story, and when you eventually come to a "challenge," the Narrator will tell you how many sticks you need to pull out of the tower to succeed. For example, let's say that in this particular scene, someone is injured and you decide to apply first aid.

• If your character is a nurse, the Narrator probably won't even ask you to pull any sticks at all, because this is literally your job--the Narrator will just describe you saving the person's life, and then move on.
• If your character was once a Boy Scout a few years ago and had some basic first aid training back in the day, the Narrator might ask you to pull one stick out of the Tower.
• If your character is an accountant with absolutely no first aid training and faints at the sight of blood, the Narrator might ask you to pull two sticks from the Tower since this challenge is especially difficult for you.

If you successfully pull and place the stick(s), the scene continues. But if you cause the Tower to fall, something bad happens and the scene ends: maybe your character faints from the sight of blood, the injured person goes into shock, and the scene ends with your character being sent to the hospital with the injured person (and removed from the game). Then the Narrator resets the tower, and starts describing a new scene for the remaining players.

And so it goes, until the story reaches its scripted ending or everyone is eliminated.

A typical game has about a half-dozen scenes, and takes about 2-3 hours to play from start (character creation) to finish (the end of the final scene)...which makes it a pretty decent choice for a party game.

 

[R_J_K75]

Dread: Jenga tower

I know this is off topic but...Only time I ever played Jenga, wait it was poor man's Jenga called Bandu, was the night Jim Carrey hosted and Soundgarden was the musical guest on SNL. 95ish. Someone came over and karate chopped the Bandu construct, we all laughed and then ordered pizza and drank beer at 4AM. Good times

Just in case you never heard of Bandu

https://a.co/d/jlKQClx

 

[TheSword]

The game needs more randomness not less. I really enjoy WFRP and I realized it’s because you can go from fully standing to down on the ground from one unlucky hit from a goblin. It makes combat matter. It makes people be more strategic in combat because they can’t count on the metagaming.

In both games, down is not out. We shouldn’t be afraid widen the range of outcomes and include disastrous in there alongside success and failure.

 

[Reynard]

Obviously it depends on what you are going for, but in general I would say that binary potential results is suggestive of binary outcomes, which I don't like. I think it would be better to use a small dice pool (2d10, 3d6, whatever) and interpret the results based on the probability of the outcome, with one end of the distribution being "bad" and the other "good" as a tool to guide GMing. So if the players do a thing and the GM can't quite decide what happens, the GM rolls 3d6 and gets a 17 something really cool or beneficial results, while if they rolled a 3 the results would be disastrous.

 

[Umbran]

"Need" is such a strong word.

I think, when you are doing just one or two checks, it probably won't matter much. But, when you consider a campaign over longer timescales (and many more rolls) the difference between "Yes/No/50-50" and using a more nuanced approach to success and failure would become palpable.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

When it comes to a simple does-this-happen-or-not, the GM either knows or isn't sure. If the GM isn't sure, it's probably because the odds of one result or the other are very close to 50%. Why not just flip a coin to resolve it? Is more precision really necessary?

It depends. If it's really a simple binary and it's not critical to the game, a coin flip or something similar might be fine (I've rolled a d6 with 1 meaning it happens, which is not great but okay). If it's a player asking me about something when I'm running a game and I don't know, I'm a big fan of Vincent Baker's advice in Dogs in the Vineyard — say "yes" or roll the dice. If there's nothing at stake, then the answer's always "yes" to any question. If there's something at stake, either in terms of the fiction or in terms of some sort of game system, then we're always rolling. For minor questions where something may be at stake but it's not going to settle any questions at the table (for instance, during a combat, a player asks, "is there a chandelier in this room?"), I've used the Die of Fate from Burning Wheel previously, but I'm more and more inclined to say "yes" there, too. This is just a long way of saying that I'm often not inclined to bother with even a coin flip in a lot of circumstances. Saying "yes" can be a lot of fun.

My next question stems from combat, when the GM is supposed to do a more significant amount of dice rolling. Is there an important difference between the BBEG hitting* PC1 at a 30% rate, PC2 at a 55% rate, and PC3 at an 80% rate, or (almost) never hitting PC1, flipping a coin for PC2, and always hitting PC3?

I know that you're using these numbers for the sake of argument, but, if I found out my GM was rounding as you've suggested during combat, I'd be pretty annoyed — there's something at stake, for one, but slight chances of success or failure either way, particularly at critical points in the game, is where a lot of the fun is for me. It might bother me a little less in a one-shot, but it would take out a lot of my enjoyment in a campaign, especially if I had to roll dice in the same circumstances (e.g., I've got an 80% chance to hit the bad guy).

 

[Blue]

The granularity with d2 goes from Auto-Failure <--> 50% <--> Auto-Success. This allows no room for cleverness on players, no chance to shift the odds for 40% to 65% though intelligent play, consumable resources, etc. And that's a big part of this being a game. An integral part in what players enjoy.

So a game definitely needs more than d2.