Games with randomness before decisions

[Chris Knapp]

I study a fighting type of taijichuan here in china, and most frequently the IRL moves consist of a simultaneous attack and defend, of course as this is most capable of dealing with an unpredictable opponent. I’ve been trying to think of a way to implement this fighting style into my adventures for a while, and perhaps this that you describe could go some way towards it. That the players roll first, then choose how to spend the points between attack and defending rolls… still needs some work to factor in modifiers etc. but I think it could work.

I believe TSR's old Top Secret RPG handled hand-to-hand combat this way. You picked an attack and a defense, your opponent picked theirs and then you rolled and compared results and determined the damage/effects, if any.

 

[fba827]

i believe the upcoming WotC skirmisher game is the same (you draw cards and play from your hand, rather than a die roll to determine the outcome like you do in D&D).
However, I am saying this without being 100% certain that it is an accurate statement, just going off of something i vaguely recall hearing second-hand.

 

[FireLance]

I think it is possible to work a system to integrate randomness before decision-making even in a traditional role-playing game, if that is what you want, especially for systems where the randomization is mostly based on rolling a single type of die, such as D&D and other d20 systems.

Basically, at the start of each adventuring day, you roll the die (say) three times. Each time you are supposed to roll dice to determine an outcome, you add the result of that roll to your pre-rolled results, and you may choose to use any of the four. The result you used is discarded, leaving you with three potential die rolls again.

In game, you can keep track of this by noting the die roll results on your character sheet and erasing or scratching them off as they are used, or you can use a pack of ordinary playing cards, less the face cards, with hearts and diamonds being 1-10 and clubs and spades being 11-20. The latter approach does not precisely mimic the probability distribution of separate d20 rolls, but produces more "balanced" results in the sense that bad initial draws make it more likely that you will draw good cards subsequently, and vice-versa.

 

[Umbran]

In D&D, rolling initiative is one example of this.

Classic Deadlands, initiative is perhaps even more striking as an example. There's a die roll that gets you a number of cards from a deck. How many cards you get gives you the number of actions you get in a round, and the value of the cards tell you when in the round the action will be. There are abilities in the game that allow you to manipulate the cards - swap them between players, or discard and redraw. Decisions about what you do in the round are made after the initiative draw.