How many "steps" is too many?

[Tonguez]

I like FATES system where combat is roll Attack - roll Defence = Harm -> take stress or consequences
Adding complexity is voluntary via invoking aspects but you're only adding 1's or +2's so its relatively simple.

I have been thinking about turning DnD combats in to cinematic Skill challenges where successes impose consequences/scene aspects and failures result in lair actions (that potentially cause HP damage). Its certainly useful in mass combat scenarios, need to see if its more fun for personal combats too

 

[Morrus]

4 steps is about the limit of tolerance for most people I've met.

I rarely ask people I meet how many steps is their limit of tolerance.

 

[Faolyn]

In Daggerheart, the process is similar but has a couple extra steps: roll to hit, compare to difficulty/evasion, check for hope vs fear, roll damage, check threshold, potentially apply armor, reduce HP. Not terribly complex, but deffinitely more steps.

Does checking for Hope and Fear really count as being a separate step from rolling to hit? You're supposed to have two obviously different dice, so it'll be immediately obvious which one is which while you're adding those two dice up. You'd be saying "15 with Hope" or things like that.

Only PCs apply armor, and only when hit, so that's taken out of the process. Some adversaries have traits that let them reduce damage, but not many.

It would go: Roll dice, count total and note Hope/Fear, check against adversary's Difficulty. The GM then checks the threshold and marks HP. Three steps for the player, two for the GM. When attacked, the PC checks the number against their Evasion, possibly marks armor, marks HP. That's 2-3 steps.

 

[SteveC]

For me, the biggest issues are how many processing, choice, or evaluation steps there are. When I'm playing 5E, for instance, there are the options of the Guidance spell and the Aid action for each Skill Check. In our group, we just roll those checks as if that happens every time. It did take us a while to figure out that you could apply them to pretty much every check you make, so it was a point of decision ... until it was automated.

5E really seems to make a lot of checks, so you get that issue a lot.

When I'm looking at Daggerheart, there are fewer checks and they feel more impactful. I don't mind having to consider if I should spend Hope for a check when the result isn't "okay, you were quiet for that specific action, now make another check."

 

[Emberashh]

Go on, then.

The fundamental question is, is whatever mechanic we're devising actually fun.

And you can address that in a lot of ways, but I like to drill down to the fundamentals. Repetitive actions should be inherently fun on their own, even when stripped of their narrative context.

Rolling dice, on its own, is inherently fun as a tactile experience, and getting the numbers you want, based on which ones the game defines as valuable, is part and parcel to that.

But just rolling is pretty simplistic, and doesn't provide any depth, so then we start layering aesthetics and secondary mechanics, in order to create a more dynamic mechanic. And thats where we want to be when we're discussing if a mechanic is actually fun, as opposed to worrying about step counts.

Rolling to hit is ostensibly fun, as there's an inherent excitement from dice rolling when you hit the target number. In practice, however, only certain kinds of games actually maintain that fun in the context of their aesthetics, and RPGs are generally not one of them. While rolling a hit can be fun, and regularly is, we have to weigh that against how often it isn't fun to miss, and what the game does to mitigate that issue.

Thats when we start running up against ideas like failing forward or even simply removing to-hit mechanics.

But, I personally think those arent satisfactory either, as they both still rely on target numbers which are what I think is the unfun element in that experience. PBTA style moves ostensibly remove them in how they work, but in practice, the aesthetics of success versus failure still produces that unfun feeling, especially if as is common in those games, missing TNs just leads to a lot of genre-straining drama rather than a narrative intuitive outcome.

Removing TNs entirely, and retooling the aesthetics of the results, would fully remove the unfun element. That doesn't mean what then gets implemented is automatically fun, but thats why game design isn't easy and takes a lot of iteration, testing, and analysis.

 

[Deset Gled]

Unless I missed it, there's a major factor that hasn't been discussed yet: how many actions it takes to resolve the total encounter.

If an encounter is decided by just one or two major actions, I expect those actions to have significant complexity. And each action should have steps that include options for tactical decisions, resource usage, etc. Each action and outcome is inherently dramatic, and therefore complexity is expected.

OTOH, if an encounter is composed of many actions (e.g. two foes swinging swords at each other dozens of times), then I expect each individual action to be resolved swiftly and easily. Also, factors like resources and tactics are generally resolved as the aggregate effect of multiple actions, rather that steps that need to be taken as part of resolving an individual action. In this case an individual action is much less complex than the whole.

 

[Reynard]

None of those are circumstance modifiers by definition. They're spells and abilities. We can exclude spells and abilities sure, but if a system insists on checking for actual circumstance modifiers on every attack, that is a step/check.

The Basics :: d20srd.org

Emphasis mine.

5E has only one that isn't Advantage/Disadvantage - Cover. It's a needless and onerous or at least clunky addition that usually gets ignored.

While I don't disagree with your assessment of cover, I don't think it is particularly useful to hang on to a pedantic definition of "circumstance modifier" for the purpose of the discussion.

 

[nevin]

Spinning this out of the Daggerheart thread and making it more general.

When considering a particular process in play, how many steps is too many.

For example, in D&D, the process of attacking is: roll to hit, compare to AC, roll damage, apply damage.

In Daggerheart, the process is similar but has a couple extra steps: roll to hit, compare to difficulty/evasion, check for hope vs fear, roll damage, check threshold, potentially apply armor, reduce HP. Not terribly complex, but deffinitely more steps.

Other games might have similar processes for casting spells (maybe there is a table or miscast chance) or have a wide band of potential outcomes you have to check against.

So, at what point do you personally feel like a process of play has to many steps? Does it matter if it is a commonly used process versus a rarer one? Is there a particular kind of process where too many steps really bugs you, or a process where you want more granular steps than is typically called for?

after trying several simple dnd to more complicated one's over the years I'm a fan of simple. Most things that go beyond roll, compare , roll damage, apply damage don't really add more than they take away.

 

[SteveC]

One element that I really hope more games work to deal with, and especially the next time we see an edition of D&D, is making sure rolling the dice always changes the situation. The discussion of "can you roll again?" really applies in situations where you make a check and fail, but nothing changes. So many games, like Daggerheart, do this. You move things forward and introduce new consequences or whole new story beats on a failed result. This isn't exactly new stuff, since I can recall it being a part of Burning Wheel, and that was a long time ago.

 

[Reynard]

One element that I really hope more games work to deal with, and especially the next time we see an edition of D&D, is making sure rolling the dice always changes the situation. The discussion of "can you roll again?" really applies in situations where you make a check and fail, but nothing changes. So many games, like Daggerheart, do this. You move things forward and introduce new consequences or whole new story beats on a failed result. This isn't exactly new stuff, since I can recall it being a part of Burning Wheel, and that was a long time ago.

To be fair, the 2024 DM guidelines at least talk about this. But people are so entrenched in how they run D&D they barely read the DMG.