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

[doctorbadwolf]

So... my position is this:

Randomness is good for a game and a story... within reason.

Some stuff -should- be foregone conclusions. If 3 level 3 fighters are teaming up to beat up 1 basic goblin armed with only a dead rat and an unearned level of self confidence no amount of randomness should wind up in a TPK.

There's a time for randomness and there's also a time for "Yeah, you take a couple minutes searching the inn room and find X, Y, and Z."

And that's where passive checks keep characters from feeling utterly incompetent for no reason other than "d20 says so"

This.

But also, I really enjoy when the system gives players a limited resource to spend on forcing an action to go their way, especially when there are also other uses for that resource that are valuable and proactive.

So, in Quest for Chevar I have given the PCs 1 to 5 Attribute Points in each Attribute, and then everything that costs a limited resource costs Attribute points. Add to that, that spending an AP to push a check only pushes it one step up the success ladder, so if you get a total failure, the best outcome you can squeeze out of that is a mitigated failure (you don't get what you want, but you can set someone else up for a move later in the scene, they gain 1 die forward), and then accepting a complication or trauma in order to get some small part of what you wanted.

I've considered allowing spending more AP to push the check multiple steps, but I like that there isn't any way to bump a failure all the way to total success, and it allows the Athlete archetype to be special for being able to push harder on physical checks. I've thought about giving Warlocks the ability to put themselves at greater risk to so, but idk.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes,let's interpret things is the least reasonable way possible just so we can argue on the internet.

That wasn't my intent. I genuinely couldn't make sense of the seeming contradiction.

What I said was that I liked a wide range and a lot of uncertainty in die roll results IN ORDER TO create interesting results from those die rolls. I did not say anything about defining "interesting" there. I might define it by my whim, based on just how wackily out of average the result is. I might consult the Book Book of Crits and Fumbles.

Why are you trying to corner the discussion into a thing you can argue against instead of just approaching it on its own terms?

Because I'm not doing that. I genuinely don't understand how you get only defining interesting results and actually swingy results. For there to be unrestricted "swing," as I understand the term, there must be an extremely wide latitude--including plenty of results I (and many others) consider to be terrifically uninteresting.

As I said in my other post, randomness is almost always unsatisfying in the long run. It's much like (for example) AI efforts at mimicking classical music. They can almost always create interesting, even beautiful passages, sections that do something clever or unusual...and these lumps float in a soup of random garbage. The more you emphasize the randomness and "swing," the more unsatisfying and unintelligible the product becomes (the same applies to basically all "generative" AIs; Google Deep Dream shows what happens when you uncap the randomness and let the AI see whatever it "wants" to see, for instance.) You always have to apply restrictions to the probability to create something which gives the kind of satisfactory results most players seek today: either by cleaving out possibilities that could happen but which wouldn't be interesting, or by restricting the "swing" so that uninteresting things couldn't actually happen.

The two ultimately cash out exactly the same way. Analogically, one says, "Sure, the dice said X should happen, but I don't like X, so X didn't actually happen." The other says, "Since I don't want X to happen, X isn't even something the dice are allowed to produce." Both things eliminate X as an option. The only differences between the two have nothing to do with whether they permit unrestricted "swing" (because neither does), but rather whether they give the impression thereof. As I have been quite clear in many places, I oppose the former because of the false impressions it gives, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether they permit unrestricted "swing" or not.

Hence: How do you preserve unrestricted "swing" while narrowing things only to "interesting results"? Randomness unconstrained produces white noise.

 

[pemerton]

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 dread the cinematic type storytelling game: Where everyone knows what will happen and it will happen just like everyone thinks. The ending is set in stone and can not be changed.

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.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So even though mechanically it's a binary pass-fail, narratively I can dress it up some to make it appear more linear.

Frankly, this comes across like lipstick on a pig--sure, you can do the dress-up, but that's all it is, empty window-dressing. If the player has to roll for the same kind of action twice in a session, and rolls poorly one time but extremely well the second, you may even have caught yourself in a bind.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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

Indeed. It sounds rather a lot like a boogeyman--the terrible specter of storygames!!!--without any actual referent. Just vague gesticulation at Bad Games Doing Bad Things, as opposed to the Good Games that do Good Things.

 

[Lanefan]

I am around a lot of games with the younger folks in D&D Club, and they play pretty much like the game has always been played.

That may well be because you-as-DM are setting an older-school tone to proceedings and they're going along with it - ?

 

[Lanefan]

Frankly, this comes across like lipstick on a pig--sure, you can do the dress-up, but that's all it is, empty window-dressing. If the player has to roll for the same kind of action twice in a session, and rolls poorly one time but extremely well the second, you may even have caught yourself in a bind.

How so?

Player rolls poorly to pick a lock and I narrate it as a lock that has the character stumped. Next lock, player rolls really well and the narration points out how easy that lock was.

No bind, no contradiction. Why? Because obviously those two locks weren't the same design or manufacture; and that too is trivially easy to narrate.

And in cases where multiple locks ARE the same, e.g. a bunch of cookie-cutter dungeon cells, the results on trying to open the first one will apply a bonus or penalty on attempts at subsequent ones; as in "You got the last one with ease and this looks like the same lock again, so it shouldn't be much of a challenge - you still need to roll but you're getting a mighty bonus", or "This is the same as the lock that just completely floored you; if you want to try picking it go ahead but your odds won't be great". A second roll in line with the first probably means auto-success or auto-fail on the rest of 'em.

 

[Aldarc]

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).

Hot Take: Having played some "story games" and "trad games," I find your criticism of them lacking much substance or evidence so it comes across more as a shallow, drive-by-attack that does not say anything meaningful about how "story" games work. I suspect that your argument would have been much better if you had chosen not to include this part that takes veiled shots at other games but instead focused more on defining "uncertainty" in the games you like.

 

[pemerton]

Player rolls poorly to pick a lock and I narrate it as a lock that has the character stumped. Next lock, player rolls really well and the narration points out how easy that lock was.

No bind, no contradiction. Why? Because obviously those two locks weren't the same design or manufacture; and that too is trivially easy to narrate.

I'm surprised you're advocating for Schroedinger's lock manufacture.

 

[Staffan]

I like it when the basic task resolution method has a fair amount of randomness in it, but there are ways to mitigate that randomness via resource expenditure. For example, in TORG Eternity you have both Possibilities that give a bonus to your roll and cards that can either give a bonus, allow rerolls, or any of a number of other effects.

But I think the clearest example of what I'm thinking of is actually a card game with some RPG elements: Arkham Horror (the card game, not the board game). There, you have a hand of cards which you can either use for their main effect, or you can discard cards with matching symbols on them to aid in various skill tests. So if you need to pass a particular test, you might be able to spend cards from your hand to improve your odds, but it's never a sure thing (because one of the random elements is an autofail). But doing so depletes your hand, both as a whole and of the individual cards you use for this purpose.