[RPGs] Randomness, Risk, and Resolution in RPGs
So we're running a Star Wars "Edge of the Empire" campaign. There's a pod-racing scenario on an illegal racing circuit, and in a twist of fate, it's taking place on Endor -- BEFORE the construction of the second Death Star. There are, of course, really big trees, and nobody's going to be sensible enough to fly OVER them (or it wouldn't be an exciting race, now would it?), plus a number of Ewoks ticked off at the screaming vehicle buzzing through their trees -- so cue the occasional dropped net and strung cable "clotheslining" unwary racers, with the routine background percussion of racer "extras" smacking dead-on into trees left and right, resulting in spectacular (and gratuitous) explosions.
And, one of the PCs is IN this race. At each leg of the race, there are choices to be made: Hold back and play it safe? Play the middle and try to keep your current position without taking any extreme risks, but at least not falling behind? Or throw all caution to the wind and take risky maneuvers in a gamble to move forward in the match, or else to put more distance between you and the competition if you're already in the lead? But whether the risk factor is high or low, there's at least some chance that the check is going to come up as a FAILURE. And what exactly does that failure mean?
Well, most of the time, it's just not clear. For the Extras, it probably means crashing into a tree and going up in a huge fireball. And if there's an "Advantage" on the die, then the unlucky racer manages to bail out first, but is otherwise out of the action, say. If it's a Fail AND a Triumph (good grief, but I hate these sorts of results), then ... uh ... he crashes into a tree, but at least he takes one of his opponents with him? But this same standard isn't going to work all that well for the PCs.
Particularly not if I DO say, "Yeah, you just ran head-on into a tree," and then we look at the mechanics for HEAD-ON COLLISIONS, and discover that this does not a whit of damage to the vehicle, but just calls for a Critical Hit roll, and the result is "for the remainder of this round, you can't push yourself to take an additional action," or some sort of milquetoast result like that.
(Seriously, we've had stuff like that with head-on collisions. NPCs are vapor. PCs are mildly inconvenienced. I'm bracing myself for the moment when they realize that their best strategy is just to engage in HEAD-ON COLLISIONS with enemy vehicles rather than wasting time trying to shoot at them.)
Now, I've made a terrible mistake. I have been struggling with resolution of the Star Wars rules, and sometimes I have made these laments in the presence of my players. That's a really dumb idea. (Posting such complaints on an LJ on here that my players, in theory, could locate and read, is only slightly less dumb. This further demonstrates how little self-restraint I have. Pity me.)
Digital_Rampage's thought was along the lines of, "Well, what do you want? For it all to come down to one piloting skill check roll to avoid an asteroid, and if he fails, the PCs are vaporized?" No. Certainly not for a "scripted" encounter. If anything, we'd fast-forward to the heroes crash-landing on an interesting new planet in a crippled starship or in an escape pod; there'd have to be "consequences" for failure, but where possible, it would mean NEW ADVENTURES, not NEW CHARACTERS.
But it certainly got me to thinking about the whole matter of how skill resolution is handled in games so differently across systems.
Old School: Purely random. You might be in a situation where you're exposed to a spell effect or poison and you have to make a "Saving Throw vs. Death." You roll dice. There's a chance you live or you die. Pray that you're not forced into this situation often, or even if you pass the first time, EVENTUALLY your number is going to be up. Your only recourse is either to take it like a pro and "die well" and come up with some really cool "last words" and a neat new character concept ... or else do a good job at minimizing risks, staying away from the death-poison, and hoping you aren't still killed off by stupid luck of the dice. In the example system (D&D, etc.), MOST threats are represented in terms of "hit point" damage, and instant death effects (that require an all-or-nothing saving throw) are typically very rare and only encountered at higher level when the heroes have access to magic that makes "death" a minor inconvenience and embarrassment.
Boosted Chance: If this roll is "really important," then BEFORE you make the roll, you can spend a force point to double your dice (West End Games), or you can spend a light side token to boost your skill dice by one step (Edge of Empire). You have a limited pool, and no guarantee you'll make it even with the boost (so choose wisely), so risk-management is still critical. This is a nice little compromise, as at least there's SOME way players can mitigate risk on the fly, but it seems to work best when there's very little real risk to the heroes anyway. (The trouble is that if the campaign is depending upon the ILLUSION of risk to make the threats seem compelling, eventually the illusion is going to wear thin.) One NICE point about the "Edge of Empire" game is that choice to use the tokens means that you're giving the GM "dark side" tokens in exchange -- which could come back to burn you. But ... for all you know, the GM could make things tougher on you ANYWAY, without even resorting to the dark side tokens. How are you to know?
Fate Points: You have a limited pool of "points" that can be spent to "get out of death free" (negate all damage taken that round -- Advanced HeroQuest), or "auto-succeed" on a single roll (AHQ, again). While this grants a certain degree of CERTITUDE ... well, that's exactly the problem, too. Once you get far enough in the system to accumulate more Fate Points, you end up with heroes who are exceedingly bold and willing to take on any threat, even against enemies theoretically capable of squashing them with a single blow ... until their "juice" runs out (Fate Points depleted!) and suddenly they're packing up and going home. Risk management involves making wild guesses about how your Fate Point pool measures against the anticipated length of the adventure and drain rate, and whether you're likely to hold out.
Fate Chips / Bennies: Deadlands and Savage Worlds, of course. You can earn, through roleplay and accomplishment of goals, tokens that can be spent to boost a die roll outcome AFTER the fact -- either adding on a randomized boost, or just allowing you a reroll chance in the hopes of getting something better. This helps greatly to blunt the incidence of "critical failures" when used in moderation (while still keeping the faint threat that you MIGHT have a really bad luck streak that still dooms you despite the Bennies), or allows for really over-the-top risk-taking and crazy success when you're GENEROUS with the benny/fate chip flow. This seems to work well in "over-the-top" pulpy adventures where players are encouraged to be involved, because making in-character wisecracks and wild descriptions tends to earn you Bennies, which allow you more freedom in taking crazy risks ... but not so much for when you want the stakes to be (or at least SEEM) high. (When you are stingy with the Bennies, then often they're hoarded for Soak rolls or countering "botches" -- since there's no telling whether these Bennies are going to last through the entire session, and the risk factor may vary wildly from session to session without warning.)
But then, I've heard talk of some systems that emphasize "heroics" where failure is not even an option -- at least, not really. You aren't rolling to see whether you succeed or fail, but rather HOW WELL you succeed ... or, "You succeed, BUT--" Such as, you succeed with your attack, BUT your weapon breaks, or you run out of ammo, or you managed to knock over a torch stand and now there's a fire spreading, etc. In other words, instead of "failure," we have a "complication." There are certainly cases where that feels appropriate, but having a system where the heroes can "never fail" seems a bit over the top. (Maybe "never fail except when they're outside of their realm of expertise, under certain conditions.")
Aaaaand ... once again, I spend forever trying to build up to a "point" that doesn't exist. That's why this is just a journal post, and I'm not pretending this is some highfalutin "blog" read by any more than 2 or 3 people at most. ;)
I want there to be an element of risk. I want there to be a PERCEPTION of risk. I want there to be some level of excitement, and something for the heroes to care about. I want there to occasionally be a sense of loss or setback, just so that the heroes know that there CAN BE loss or setback in this setting, and that the risks, while perhaps overblown, are still at least nominally there. But I don't want a bit of freak randomness ruining everybody's day. In a perfect world, the dice would somehow be magically respectful of the attempts at drama and storytelling in our silly games, and therefore NOT have random out-of-the-blue pointless death to ruin a "heroic" epic, yet still have enough balance of success/failure that the numbers balance out. But I'm not going to have that (not without CHEATING somehow).
Star Wars Edge of Empire goes too far in one direction, I think, by setting examples where the NPCs are getting vaporized with one wrong turn in a canyon or an asteroid field, and then when the heroes experience "catastrophic failure" ... it turns out to be a laughably mild inconvenience. Sure, the GM could make the ship crash-land by narrative fiat, but that's only barely tolerable when it's part of a WRITTEN pre-fabricated adventure module ("Can't you tell I'm reading this straight out of the book? It's not like I'm just trying to be mean to the PCs!"), and even less so when the GM is just arbitrarily choosing* to subject the heroes to "automatic failure" for the sake of a plot.
(* Yes, I know that's technically redundant.)
How do I want to handle risk and the chance of success/failure?
1) I've already been toying with this, but sometimes I tell the heroes outright that there's no way this test can be "failed." The heroes are in between missions, back at base, with all their resources. This "mechanics" roll to soup up the heroes' ship is not about "will it work, or will you blow up the ship?" Rather, it's to see HOW WELL you succeed. Upon a "failure," there's some baseline, minimum-expectation outcome: You get the upgrades, but it'll take X time because you found you had to order some spare parts you didn't already have, etc. Only upon the super-rare "Critical Failure" or "Despair" might there be some hidden drawback -- like, the repairs work, but at some future (plot-appropriate) time, I'll have an excuse for a bolt to work its way out, etc., and the slightly botched repair job gives me my narrative excuse as to WHY the heroes have to "stop for repairs" on the random Adventure Planet of the Week.
But for success or astounding success, either the repair costs go down, or the repair time goes down, or the system is doing SO well that whoever uses it will get a one-time boost to some future skill roll that can be "cashed in" later -- and maybe the person doing the repair roll can CHOOSE which of these benefits is gained.
On the one hand, sometimes I just say, "No need to roll. You've got this handled." But some players seem to WANT to roll their dice, and get the experience of triumphantly blowing past the goal. (Like, it isn't "real," or it wasn't "your" success unless you have that physical symbolic participation in the form of grabbing those little dice and rolling them.)
However, I don't want to make this the all-the-time rule. I've heard of games where the heroes are supposed to be SUCH heroes that (unless the plot calls for it) they "never fail." I don't want to go to that extreme. While a "never fail (only complicate)" hero could make for "awesome storytelling exercises," it only fits for CERTAIN types of stories. I prefer more of the Indiana Jones / Han Solo level of hero where the hero has a certain level of extreme competence, but even then he has his limits (and those temporary setbacks can open up new story possibilities).
2) I like the idea of having some sort of resource in my hands: Bennies and Fate Chips give the player a certain amount of control. Are you going to settle for this failure and see where it takes you? Or are you going to spend your precious "plot-altering resource" in the hopes of squeaking by with a success? The trouble is that so often this is a very uninformed decision. In a typical firefight against ordinary thugs, a PC is just wasting Bennies if he insists on turning a missed gunshot into a success, when he's behind cover, the odds are that he'll survive this round and get another chance to roll NEXT round anyway, AND there are several thugs, so ONE success/failure isn't going to decisively clinch the battle. But all the time, there are cases where there's the Persuasion check that fails against a bad guy, or a Notice check to spot an ambush. If you voluntarily fail, are you going to get a sigh from the GM as you then discover the party is doomed due to your stinginess? Or are you going to pointlessly blow your "plot resource" forcing success when there was this INTERESTING encounter planned if only you hadn't succeeded?
Star Wars (Edge of the Empire) provides an interesting twist on this by making it a "squishier" sort of resource. There's a "pool" of light side and dark side points. If PCs spend a light side point, it flips over and becomes a dark side point. If the GM spends a dark side point, it flips over and joins the light side point pool. If the PCs spend it, the GM COULD spend it right back later on to make things more difficult. If the PCs spend a lot, it makes it all the more tempting for the GM to pile on the dark side points at a later challenging situation. But ... if the GM goes spending those points, it also means the PCs would get more light side points to spend. It means that there's a certain amount of buffer that could be used if it MUST be ... but the potential cost helps to manage it.
(The downside is that since this is a group POOL, you COULD have one player who selfishly blows light side points at every opportunity in order to excel, knowing that the cost is going to be likely borne across the whole group, and then it's not available when the others need it. I'm grateful that we don't have that dynamic going on right now, but I had something similar happen in classic Deadlands games.)
2b) If not "fate points," per se, there are times when I feel like there needs to be a better chance for player reaction rather than just roll your dice and you're committed to the outcome. Sometimes I will rush into something, and then I realize, partway through, that I'm really not ready for this. It is going to cost me something to withdraw, and perhaps it's my moment's hesitation that really causes the problem, but sometimes I really CAN turn back around and back out rather than fully committing myself to catastrophic failure.
When everything is resolved in a single die roll, the players don't necessarily have the benefit of that. Sometimes, I try to mitigate things on my side, by providing a player with a number of different choices in risk-taking: Here are the odds (or at least the dice and target numbers and known modifiers -- and you'll have to calculate the ODDS yourself), and here are a few trade-offs if you want to go the route of "high risk / high reward" or "play it safe / break even" or somewhere in between. But sometimes you can never really know the "risk" until you roll those dice and you're staring catastrophic failure in the face. Sometimes I wish it could be something where we reveal one die at a time, and I ask, "Are you still sticking with this?" and you have to decide how good or bad it's looking, and what the odds are that the next die I reveal is going to clinch your success or failure -- and maybe it only takes revealing TWO dice out of six to know that this is already a lost cause, and it's time to hit the "eject" button so you'll at least live to fight another day.
Maybe in an ideal system, there needs to be some sort of option to "back out" of a task at some point where there's a SLIGHT chance of success if you stay committed to it (for the folks who are big on high risks and are big enough to accept the possibility of catastrophic failure if the bet doesn't pay off), but you COULD pull out and suffer some partial loss for the wasted time/effort/resources.
Or, maybe I need to have a mechanism in place where we "negotiate failure." Like, if this was all a risk you took entirely upon yourself (you decided to take on DARTH VADER in solo combat, you loon!) then failure ought to be a real option, and the best you can hope for is that your death is couched in the terms of "heroic sacrifice so the others could get away" rather than "oops, got PWN3D by Vader!" If it was a "scripted" risk (going through an asteroid field is one of the scheduled obstacles on route to your mission), then random and unavoidable fiery death is no fun; there really ought to be a "Story B" (crash-landed on moon, meet interesting alien natives, chance to meet new allies or make new enemies), or else maybe there's some opportunity to turn failure into success if you make some sort of "sacrifice" (e.g., suffer a lasting scar/injury from an exploding control panel, or suffer some sort of "karma" debt that's going to be cashed in later and turn your next "triumph" into a "despair" at a plot-appropriate moment).
It really needs to be a MECHANISM that's written down in rules (or at least house rules), because it's no fair if the GM is dangling the threat of death in a blazing ball of glory, and then when the dice come up and it looks like it's going to actually happen, the GM hems and haws and says, "Oh, it was just a GLANCING BLOW, after all." ("But everyone knows TIE fighters are made of Pure Explodium(tm)! Is that even going to matter?") It's not like I want it to really happen unless it's one of THOSE kinds of adventures (horror, old-school dungeon, etc.) but the threat of peril is part of the excitement, and I'd prefer to have obscure mechanisms of risk-management (i.e., the odds really aren't as bad as they SEEM to the players) rather than things that blatantly fall apart as soon as someone calls my bluff.
I have been in games where I was so demoralized about the way things were going, and the way I'd played a character, that it would've actually been a RELIEF if my PC could have just died a heroic or tragic death. (There was one campaign in which it did happen, and though I use the manner of it to lampoon the game mechanics -- "My Rodian instantly died from a hit to the FOOT!" -- it still managed to underscore for the group that, yes, there WAS a real element of threat ... and my roleplay schtick with my lame "Rodian sock puppet with subtitle cards" was getting annoying and old anyway and not befitting the purported mood of the campaign, as I see in retrospect. Sometimes I realize that with the mood-breaking things I do as a player ... I'd HATE to have ME as a player in one of my games! Ack!)
So ... hmm. I'm not sure where to go with this. I'm soldiering on through the Star Wars campaign, though I have the sense that we're kind of winding down on it. (Though "winding down" could mean a few more MONTHS of game play. Funny how that happens when you're only playing once every 2 weeks, and sometimes longer when holidays and work schedules collide.) I've been trying to "adapt" to the mechanics, but the threat level really can't be taken that seriously.
Next, we may do a bit of d20, which has NO fate point system, but the hit points tend to mitigate threats, and I don't anticipate having any "make a save or DIE" situations, unless people do crazy stuff like "jump off a mile-high cliff into a pool of lava," in which case it'll a million-bazillion hit points of damage, and write up a new character, please ... unless you had feather-fall and fire protection, of course. I just need to find a suitably "old school" adventure I can adapt, using the "chibi" minis Digital_Rampage has on hand. (I figure that'll help to underscore that this whole thing is meant to be "tongue-in-cheek.")
And then ... Russian fairy-tales in Kisle-- I mean, KHADOR! (Warmachine / Iron Kingdoms.) Recent global events have dented my enthusiasm for things Russian as of late, but I still have ideas, and I've done some creative investment in the concept ... AND WolfTheNinja surprised me by donating a huge Warmachine case full of Cryx minis. (Good GRIEF! Even a KRAKEN!) I need to take a vacation just to get caught up on painting minis, or something. (That and yard work. And getting the truck fixed. And so many other things. When evenings are either for overtime, grocery-shopping, or for cooking dinner and then crashing after work, and weekends are for spending time with Gwendel, it's kind of hard to squeeze in all the other homeowner things.)
NO IDEA what I'll do next. At the pace I'm going, this probably represents 2-3 years of material anyway, and there's such a thing as too much planning, especially when it comes to hobbies.