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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8924214" data-attributes="member: 42582">Uncertainty suggests a cognitive state. What's the object of cognition?We can talk about uncertainty in the results of dice rolls, and D&D offers this - people get excited by their natural 1s and critical 20s.The analogue of these in Burning Wheel and Torchbearer is 6s that can be open-ended with a Fate point.There is also just the uncertainty of waiting to see what the result of the roll is: all dice-based RPGs have this, though in dice pool games there is the extra element that more dice have to be read and grouped together. I think BW/TB/Prince Valiant is my favourite here, because you roll the dice, then you have to work out what you're rolled, but you basically know whether or not your won! - unless you have to make a call on open-ending 6s, but that's another go at the gamble.MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has the "what did I roll" factor, but then you have to make optimisation decisions around total vs effect die, which are interesting but defuse the excitement a bit between the uncertainty of the roll and a sense of the outcome.But the other aspect of uncertainty in a RPG is uncertainty about what will happen next in the fiction. Some of the least certain play I've had has been in zero-prep one-shots of Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights, and to just a slightly less extent In A Wicked Age. In a Wuthering Height one-shot, for instance, we started with a mute, republican-but-anti-Communist cleric inspecting the "heretical" works on sale at a socialist bookshop with an occult section upstairs, where the other PC worked; and ended up with the cleric dead and his ghost possessing the other PC, who was broken-hearted from repeated romantic rejection, so that the bookshop was burned down with the PC in it. On the way through we had political meetings, manslaughter and a body thrown into the Thames, arrest, imprisonment, a prison riot and escape that turned into a minor political uprising, and a friendly defecting police officer.Our Torchbearer sessions are a bit less wild than that, in part because there are elements of prep that help anchor the fiction, but they are still pretty uncertain. Over the course of three sessions the NPC Megloss has moved from enemy to a de facto member of the party and hence ally to at least two of the PCs; his housekeeper Krystal has been turned into a gebbeth by a spiteful shadow that escaped from the heart of the Dreamwalker PC when she tried to cast a spell (the player failed the Arcansist check); the PCs have freed but (perhaps temporarily) driven off a demon of the Outer Dark, but only by placating it with an offer of Megloss as a sacrifice.In my experience there is nothing particularly distinctive about D&D compared to these other RPGs that means it produces more interesting uncertainty, either in respect of dice rolls or fiction. That's not a criticism of D&D - it's not under any duty to stand out! But I'm not persuaded that a special focus on D&D will yield particular insight into how uncertainty contributes to RPGing.</blockquote>

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