D&D General Hot Take: Uncertainty Makes D&D Better

[bloodtide]

It would be helpful to know which "'story' games" and "cinematic type storytelling games" are being described here.

When I think of "story games", or non-trad-type games, I think of Prince Valiant, Cthulhu Dark, Wuthering Heights, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer, Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic, Agon, In A Wicked Age . . . and none of them (at least in my experience) remotely fits these descriptions.

I think this is borne out by my actual play posts.

I'm not talking about any named game. I'm talking about a Set Play St lye. A way the game is played, beyond the rules.

Like I said, it's when the DM or one or many or all the players wish to play out a set story. So they will alter the game reality to make that happen.

 

[overgeeked]

This is getting into weird semantics so I am guessing some of my group’s games would not be alien to you. But then again who knows?

If you don’t even consider levels and challenges—-ever—-plunking a low level character in a super high level module will have consequences.

If you consider level of party and challenges, you are putting your finger on the scales and it’s probably in the favor of characters. If not, I have not tried that experiment.

I run sandboxes, not modules. I prep the area and whatever random stuff is there is what’s there. If they encounter a wandering dragon, then that’s what happens. If they think they should run or bargain or fight, that’s up to them. I place dungeons in the sandbox and if the players end up there, that’s up to them. The world is not level appropriate to the characters. In my last game the 1st-level characters encountered the following wandering monsters: an orc warband, a T-Rex, a zombie horde, and a group of Tucker’s kobolds. How they responded was 100% up to them. They hid, watched from afar, ran, and tried to fight before being lured into a trap…then ran.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'm not talking about any named game. I'm talking about a Set Play St lye. A way the game is played, beyond the rules.

Google finds precisely zero hits for "Set Play St lye". Could you explain further please?

Like I said, it's when the DM or one or many or all the players wish to play out a set story. So they will alter the game reality to make that happen.

In my experience this is always the DM claiming that because they are the DM (or, far more commonly by proportion The Storyteller) and the rulebook gives them the right they should fudge andm use deus ex machina. I've never seen a player do this.

 

[Lanefan]

This is getting into weird semantics so I am guessing some of my group’s games would not be alien to you. But then again who knows?

If you don’t even consider levels and challenges—-ever—-plunking a low level character in a super high level module will have consequences.

If you consider level of party and challenges, you are putting your finger on the scales and it’s probably in the favor of characters. If not, I have not tried that experiment.

While I get what you're saying, it isn't always so cut-and-dried.

Sometimes a (let's say mid-level) party might inquire as to what adventuring possibilities exist in the region and get three or four answers, maybe something like:

"A while ago some villagers up north asked for help in finding some vanished people, a group of adventurers who went up in response have now disappeared as well"
"Strange lights have recently been reported around Belekka Ruins" (the ruins are a well-known landmark some days west of town)
"There's a skull-shaped castle on the north coast that's always had a well-earned foul reputation, someone ought to go in and clear it out"
"It's springtime, which inevitably means Orcs are raiding out of the Andalusian Hills again"

Now I-as-DM know what's behind each of these and which one is vaguely suited for what level of party, but the players/PCs don't; and if they just pick one and go without making any inquiries (or even paying attention to the minor clues contained in those write-ups!) they could soon find themselves wading through something trivially easy, or stuck in something way above their pay grade, or dealing with something more or less suited to them.

But if they make some inquiries and-or pay attention they could quickly realize that raiding Orcs might be something best left for lower-level adventurers to deal with, the skull-shaped castle has its reputation because over many years nobody - includng some pretty powerful people - has been able to clear it out (in other words, it's way above the PCs' pay grade), the missing adventurers were a slightly smaller and lower-level crew than the PC party, and nobody knows anything about the lights at Belekka other than they first appeared about three weeks ago.

End result: they still have a viable choice as to whether to investigate goings-on at Belekka or try to find the missing people-plus-party (or to go elsewhere and do something completely different; or to try and do both in sequence); and I'll have an adventure in hand for each option in full knowledge some of them might not see play.

 

[Lanefan]

Google finds precisely zero hits for "Set Play St lye". Could you explain further please?

My guess is that it's an auto-correct mangling of "set playstyle".

Did I mention that autocorrect is evil incarnate?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

D&D (as was mentioned earlier in the thread) massively mitigates the swinginess thanks to things like hit points and being an action resolution rather than task resolution system, meaning that you need multiple rolls to succeed. Oh, and that spells basically always succeed unless they are trying to affect a foe. I wouldn't say it does farce very well; I'd far rather use something actually swingy like Cortex Plus or something Forged in the Dark.

Uh-huh.

And that's an extremely ineffective and badly-designed form of mitigation. At lower levels, HP aren't sufficient in any edition except 4E to truly meaningfully mitigate the issues the swinginess creates. The action resolution vs task resolution point is largely meaningless as the same is true of many less swingy systems. Spells always succeeding causes far more problems than it solves. Indeed, it's absolutely at the core of literally everything that's wrong with D&D.

I didn't say it did farce well - instead it just pushes everything towards farce by produce a high volume of silly results, like combat rounds where literally everyone misses, dumpstat characters often rolling highest on checks and so on.

Also Cortex Prime is definitely not swingier than D&D. That'd be a wild thing to say. Maybe Plus was though? I loathe FitD so can't speak to that, but PtbA designs are typically less swingy than D&D.

 

[bloodtide]

Google finds precisely zero hits for "Set Play St lye". Could you explain further please?

In my experience this is always the DM claiming that because they are the DM (or, far more commonly by proportion The Storyteller) and the rulebook gives them the right they should fudge andm use deus ex machina. I've never seen a player do this.

Ok, the easy one for you to understand is the Internet myth Railroad DM. The DM has written a RPG Novel, and the players will play through the novel exactly the way the DM wants. The players "have no agency".

The next one is where the Players TELL the DM to do this: you see this quite often with Adventure Paths or Official Modules. The players want to not just "win" the adventure, but they want to "win" it in the best way possible. So, no matter what goofy slapstick stuff the players do, things in the game will always work out for them 100%. And even if the players ignore all the clues, randomly do things and really don't play the game at all...all the characters will live and they will finish the adventure perfectly.

Next is the individual player ones. The player has written a backstory how their spacial character is the secret son of the king of the world, then they TELL the DM what the story plot will be. Often like "my character will effortlessly just be come king of the world". Then the DM will make sure that happens: no character death, no character problems, the kingdom is always sitting there perfectly waiting for the character to rule it.

So the DM or the Players, in many ways, have a Set Play Style to make a story happen.

Take the example of the kidnapped princess. So the story is the characters must track down and find the princess. Rescue her. Then get her safety back to her kingdom. This is a standard classic adventure.

In The Set Play Style, the above will automatically happen: you only "play" the game to see how it will automatically happen. In the uncertain style.....anything can happen.

So the characters have the princess and are almost back to her kingdom...and get attacked by trolls and goblins. Arrows fly all over the area. In the Set Play Style the princess will NEVER be hit and KILLED by an arrow: The characters will bring her home save and sound no matter what. In the uncertain game...THUNK..arrows (might) hit the princess and she dies. BOOM. Major story movement...NOW what happens?

 

[Neonchameleon]

Uh-huh.

And that's an extremely ineffective and badly-designed form of mitigation. At lower levels, HP aren't sufficient in any edition except 4E to truly meaningfully mitigate the issues the swinginess creates. The action resolution vs task resolution point is largely meaningless as the same is true of many less swingy systems. Spells always succeeding causes far more problems than it solves. Indeed, it's absolutely at the core of literally everything that's wrong with D&D.

I didn't say it did farce well - instead it just pushes everything towards farce by produce a high volume of silly results, like combat rounds where literally everyone misses, dumpstat characters often rolling highest on checks and so on.

Also Cortex Prime is definitely not swingier than D&D. That'd be a wild thing to say. Maybe Plus was though? I loathe FitD so can't speak to that, but PtbA designs are typically less swingy than D&D.

It depends what you mean by "swingy". D&D rolls are almost all on a pass-fail scale with no real escalating network of consequences. Anything PbtA, by contrast, has actual swings from any roll and something happens on a miss. The range of possible outcomes in PbtA is vastly greater than D&D ever gives. And I haven't played Cortex Prime or even delved into it but the hitch and botch system.

Basically if you need a 7 or higher to pass in D&D there's no difference between a 1 and a 6 on the dice or between a 7 and a 19 (and generally not between a 7 and a 20). There are only two possible outcomes and they're both pretty basic.

 

[Reynard]

Ok, the easy one for you to understand is the Internet myth Railroad DM. The DM has written a RPG Novel, and the players will play through the novel exactly the way the DM wants. The players "have no agency".

The next one is where the Players TELL the DM to do this: you see this quite often with Adventure Paths or Official Modules. The players want to not just "win" the adventure, but they want to "win" it in the best way possible. So, no matter what goofy slapstick stuff the players do, things in the game will always work out for them 100%. And even if the players ignore all the clues, randomly do things and really don't play the game at all...all the characters will live and they will finish the adventure perfectly.

Next is the individual player ones. The player has written a backstory how their spacial character is the secret son of the king of the world, then they TELL the DM what the story plot will be. Often like "my character will effortlessly just be come king of the world". Then the DM will make sure that happens: no character death, no character problems, the kingdom is always sitting there perfectly waiting for the character to rule it.

So the DM or the Players, in many ways, have a Set Play Style to make a story happen.

Take the example of the kidnapped princess. So the story is the characters must track down and find the princess. Rescue her. Then get her safety back to her kingdom. This is a standard classic adventure.

In The Set Play Style, the above will automatically happen: you only "play" the game to see how it will automatically happen. In the uncertain style.....anything can happen.

So the characters have the princess and are almost back to her kingdom...and get attacked by trolls and goblins. Arrows fly all over the area. In the Set Play Style the princess will NEVER be hit and KILLED by an arrow: The characters will bring her home save and sound no matter what. In the uncertain game...THUNK..arrows (might) hit the princess and she dies. BOOM. Major story movement...NOW what happens?

^^^This.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

While I get what you're saying, it isn't always so cut-and-dried.

Sometimes a (let's say mid-level) party might inquire as to what adventuring possibilities exist in the region and get three or four answers, maybe something like:

"A while ago some villagers up north asked for help in finding some vanished people, a group of adventurers who went up in response have now disappeared as well"
"Strange lights have recently been reported around Belekka Ruins" (the ruins are a well-known landmark some days west of town)
"There's a skull-shaped castle on the north coast that's always had a well-earned foul reputation, someone ought to go in and clear it out"
"It's springtime, which inevitably means Orcs are raiding out of the Andalusian Hills again"

Now I-as-DM know what's behind each of these and which one is vaguely suited for what level of party, but the players/PCs don't; and if they just pick one and go without making any inquiries (or even paying attention to the minor clues contained in those write-ups!) they could soon find themselves wading through something trivially easy, or stuck in something way above their pay grade, or dealing with something more or less suited to them.

But if they make some inquiries and-or pay attention they could quickly realize that raiding Orcs might be something best left for lower-level adventurers to deal with, the skull-shaped castle has its reputation because over many years nobody - includng some pretty powerful people - has been able to clear it out (in other words, it's way above the PCs' pay grade), the missing adventurers were a slightly smaller and lower-level crew than the PC party, and nobody knows anything about the lights at Belekka other than they first appeared about three weeks ago.

End result: they still have a viable choice as to whether to investigate goings-on at Belekka or try to find the missing people-plus-party (or to go elsewhere and do something completely different; or to try and do both in sequence); and I'll have an adventure in hand for each option in full knowledge some of them might not see play.

Sure…not always cut and dried. We play with risk: you can die. You can interact with foes that you can’t beat.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It depends what you mean by "swingy". D&D rolls are almost all on a pass-fail scale with no real escalating network of consequences. Anything PbtA, by contrast, has actual swings from any roll and something happens on a miss. The range of possible outcomes in PbtA is vastly greater than D&D ever gives. And I haven't played Cortex Prime or even delved into it but the hitch and botch system.

Basically if you need a 7 or higher to pass in D&D there's no difference between a 1 and a 6 on the dice or between a 7 and a 19 (and generally not between a 7 and a 20). There are only two possible outcomes and they're both pretty basic.

It seems like you're defining swingy pretty weirdly from my perspective.

I would define it as any system where the rolls have both a very flat distribution and a sizeable chance of outright failure. D&D having a purely pass/fail system magnifies the swinginess, as does it using a d20. It's got nothing to do with the "range of outcomes" (or rather I don't see how it could). You can have an absolutely vast range of outcomes without being at all swingy, if there's a large chance of the main outcome and the outlier ones are progressively further away from that instead of abruptly dropping off. Something happening on a miss doesn't increase the swing factor.

If we define it the way you seem to be doing, that seems to be at odds with the OP's suggestion that D&D is swingy, which is weird to me, because D&D (and relatives) is the game I most often see really wacky/silly results coming up in, purely due to dice rolls. It's also the game with the most wasted-feeling and empty-feeling rolls, many of which simply serve to nullify other effects.

I don't know what the hitch and botch system is - it's not present in Cortex Prime, or not called that.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Specifically, uncertainty in potential results. Swinginess. Random happenings because the dice get a mind of their own. That sort of thing.

I have played and like some "story" games, but one thing many of them lack is uncertainty. Their mechanics tend to favor participants being able to say things that become true in the fiction (even if they don't call it that).

I prefer when participants in D&D (and similar "trad" games) say what they would like to be the case, and then the dice decide how that turns out. That goes for the GM, too, btw -- the GM being subject to the same uncertainty is equally important in creating a truly surprising and novel experience.

This isn't to say that no participants should have certain choices. I think players should get to design their characters without having to deal with dice, and GMs should be able to build the initial conditions of play (the "situations") with as much or as little random information as they desire. But once play starts, I say roll those bones in the open and stick by what they say, whether it's a random encounter with an ancient wyrm (don't forget to roll reaction!) or the BBEG gets one shotted by the torch bearer.

There is nothing "hot" about this take. On display is the linear curve presented by the D20. Other games which use the D100 to resolve the outcome are on a similar linear curve.

Contrast that to a game premised on multiple dice being added together to produce a result, often d6s but sometimes other dies are used. In all cases, there we see the bell curve of random possible outcomes (which can vary in size/shape depending on the number of sides on the dice and the number of them so rolled), but this always has a curve to it that is higher and more pronounced in the middle than on the curve's edges.

Using a linear curve to determine success/failure has always been the hallmark of a more heroic game over a game premised on the bell curve. This has been so in RPGs since the mid-70s.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Ok, the easy one for you to understand is the Internet myth Railroad DM. The DM has written a RPG Novel, and the players will play through the novel exactly the way the DM wants. The players "have no agency".

Not an internet myth; I've played with two. In my experience far more common than the "Entitled player" by actual numbers, never mind by percentage. It was however much more common in the 90s and early 00s when a certain then-popular system literally called its GM the Storyteller and called players who used their products the way they were written "Rollplayers not roleplayers" rather than writing better rules.

The next one is where the Players TELL the DM to do this: you see this quite often with Adventure Paths or Official Modules. The players want to not just "win" the adventure, but they want to "win" it in the best way possible. So, no matter what goofy slapstick stuff the players do, things in the game will always work out for them 100%. And even if the players ignore all the clues, randomly do things and really don't play the game at all...all the characters will live and they will finish the adventure perfectly.

Next is the individual player ones. The player has written a backstory how their spacial character is the secret son of the king of the world, then they TELL the DM what the story plot will be. Often like "my character will effortlessly just be come king of the world". Then the DM will make sure that happens: no character death, no character problems, the kingdom is always sitting there perfectly waiting for the character to rule it.

Never seen either of these happen.

So the DM or the Players, in many ways, have a Set Play Style to make a story happen.

Take the example of the kidnapped princess. So the story is the characters must track down and find the princess. Rescue her. Then get her safety back to her kingdom. This is a standard classic adventure.

In The Set Play Style, the above will automatically happen: you only "play" the game to see how it will automatically happen. In the uncertain style.....anything can happen.

So the characters have the princess and are almost back to her kingdom...and get attacked by trolls and goblins. Arrows fly all over the area. In the Set Play Style the princess will NEVER be hit and KILLED by an arrow: The characters will bring her home save and sound no matter what. In the uncertain game...THUNK..arrows (might) hit the princess and she dies. BOOM. Major story movement...NOW what happens?

And this doesn't require extremes. It's basically the problem with all too many (arguably most) adventure paths. If you're going to be running multiple modules and kill an NPC in module one that is meant to be in module three what happens? Or you can play it safe with adventure paths and have them as rod of seven parts style seven isolated adventures with a light framing story.

 

[Reynard]

I would define it as any system where the rolls have both a very flat distribution and a sizeable chance of outright failure.

That's a strange definition of swingy from my perspective. Swingy means uncertain. The damage in Savage Worlds, for example, is swingy -- it has a theoretically unlimited range and no method of figuring out what is going to happen. We often described 3E damage as swingy too because crits were common and with things like power attack the numbers got WEIRD.

 

[bloodtide]

Not an internet myth; I've played with two. In my experience far more common than the "Entitled player" by actual numbers, never mind by percentage. It was however much more common in the 90s and early 00s when a certain then-popular system literally called its GM the Storyteller and called players who used their products the way they were written "Rollplayers not roleplayers" rather than writing better rules.

I did not mean it was not real.

Never seen either of these happen.

Ok, I have...hundreds of times.

And this doesn't require extremes. It's basically the problem with all too many (arguably most) adventure paths. If you're going to be running multiple modules and kill an NPC in module one that is meant to be in module three what happens? Or you can play it safe with adventure paths and have them as rod of seven parts style seven isolated adventures with a light framing story.

It does not have to be a problem. You can just let anything happen.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It seems like you're defining swingy pretty weirdly from my perspective.

I would define it as any system where the rolls have both a very flat distribution and a sizeable chance of outright failure. D&D having a purely pass/fail system magnifies the swinginess, as does it using a d20.

I disagree here. The worst result you can get in D&D (absent house rules) is where you started with a turn wasted. Meanwhile what's the worst that can happen on a hard move in Apocalypse World? The mind boggles.

It's got nothing to do with the "range of outcomes" (or rather I don't see how it could). You can have an absolutely vast range of outcomes without being at all swingy, if there's a large chance of the main outcome and the outlier ones are progressively further away from that instead of abruptly dropping off.

You've never seen someone who couldn't roll above a 5 on a d20 for a couple of hours? When I'm thinking of swingy and random I'm thinking of what actually happens in the setting. A miss is a miss.

Meanwhile in Apocalypse World if someone has a stat of +1 they have a probability of 4/9 of a 7-9 result, and 5/18 of both a 10+ and a miss. By your definitions anything in the AW 0-2 stat range is far swingier than D&D could ever be; there are not two but three results with almost equal chances. And then there's the range of possible outcomes.

Something happening on a miss doesn't increase the swing factor.

If we define it the way you seem to be doing, that seems to be at odds with the OP's suggestion that D&D is swingy, which is weird to me, because D&D (and relatives) is the game I most often see really wacky/silly results coming up in, purely due to dice rolls.

Meanwhile I get far more weird or ridiculous stories per session out of PbtA games, out of FitD games, or out of Cortex Plus games than I ever have out of D&D

It's also the game with the most wasted-feeling and empty-feeling rolls, many of which simply serve to nullify other effects.

It's the game I currently play with the most empty feeling rolls. But that's because it's no longer the 80s. Spare me from the "roll to dodge/parry" of e.g. GURPS or WFRP (two games I have a lot of time for and experience with).

I don't know what the hitch and botch system is - it's not present in Cortex Prime, or not called that.

I tried to take the terms from the Cortex Prime reference (they're called different things in the different Cortex Plus games and vary slightly). It's the "You get a complication on a 1 on any dice in your dice pool" that's common to I think all the Cortex Plus and Cortex Prime games (but not in Cortex Classic, which is a very much more trad system).

 

[Krachek]

Dnd can be played with variable tone of randomness.
That is what we see here, people talking about how they manage randomness and certainty.

 

[Lanefan]

Uh-huh.

And that's an extremely ineffective and badly-designed form of mitigation. At lower levels, HP aren't sufficient in any edition except 4E to truly meaningfully mitigate the issues the swinginess creates.

Here, it seems "mitigate" is being used as a synonym for "prevent a loss condition".

The whole point of swinginess and randomness is to bring the potential of a loss condition (in this case, character death) into play. Which causes me to ask: if you can't lose, what's the point of playing?

Spells always succeeding causes far more problems than it solves.

With this I agree. A return to 1e-style interruptability along with a requirement to aim combat spells that aren't being cast on oneself would go (and IME do go, as I have both in my game) a long way toward sorting this.

I didn't say it did farce well - instead it just pushes everything towards farce by produce a high volume of silly results, like combat rounds where literally everyone misses, dumpstat characters often rolling highest on checks and so on.

Dumpstat characters rolling highest on checks reflects the real-world situation where sometimes it's the dumbest guy in the room who comes up with the bright idea. And everyone missing in a round - so what? Maybe next round everyone hits. Neither are farcical in my eyes.

 

[MichaelSomething]

In a mood for uncertainty? Then go check out the Roll for Sandwich Tik Tok account; where a guy uses dice to decide the sandwich he eats! TikTok

 

[Aldarc]

And I'm saying putting them in D&D makes the game better. What's the confusion?

Maybe it's an issue of framing the thesis. Some of the people giving you pushback, myself included, would potentially have jumped on board with a slightly different framing. For example: "Hot Take: Uncertainty Can Benefit/Improve D&D." From there, it can focus on things how elements of uncertainty and randomness - e.g., random tables, morale rolls, wandering monster checks, randomize maps, etc. - can enrich the gameplay of D&D. This could be done with respect to various versions of D&D or D&D-adjacent OSR clones. If this is a "lost art" in current strands of D&D, then how has gameplay suffered without this uncertainty and randomness?