Another Way Dice Fail RPGs

[DeReel]

@Gustavo_Campanelli

Because it’s not only about strength, technique is also important.

That’s naturalization, a form of rationalization.
Are you in a position where you have to learn, teach or somehow “sell” the rules to the players, maybe ? Because the rules, they don’t need to be “logical” to be valid.

[Ben_M]

Bit late to this one, but the conversation is fascinating.

@DeReel

My experience is this : we roll for the duel, and see the result. Then someone can add a descriptive detail that explains why the winner won.

This has been the big, rather belated, revelation for me as a GM and amateur table-analyst. I come from a pretty simulationist background (Runequest and the like, back in the day), and the stats and then the dice roll determined straight success or fail. The reason for success/fail was always the character not being good enough (i.e. making a mistake) and it began to cause all sorts of disquiet in my pursuit of a satisfying, emerging narrative.

So when you take the perspective @DeReel describes here, the result of a die roll is just grist for the mill. It inspires us at the table to describe what actually happened (and I find this pleasingly analogous to me – as GM – rolling on a random table at the table to inspire myself).

[Rickard]

@jtreat3

If there are factors affecting the outcome of this match, what are they? If I’m finding an extra reserve of strength because your father beat my father in arm wrestling,

If I buy into your point, it’s also weird if you are playing with modifications. Like, if I beat your character with higher Str in arm wrestling, we could always explain the result away as if you were out on a bender the night before. But if you have a game system where you should also apply modifications before the roll, the bender should then have affected the numbers before the roll.

I’m not a huge fan of modifications because of this.

I would rather go with a system where a higher score always wins, unless you make something up that can turn the tide. Like drugging your opponent the day before. That will allow you do the Str 13 vs Str 14 roll. (That will also follow the heroe’s journey in some way, where you can’t beat your opponent until you level up.)

[RDUNeil]

@Ben_M

So when you take the perspective @DeReel describes here, the result of a die roll is just grist for the mill. It inspires us at the table to describe what actually happened (and I find this pleasingly analogous to me – as GM – rolling on a random table at the table to inspire myself).

I think dice rolls are always “grist for the mill” unless one has been taught that the only “interpretation” is what the book (the rules) defines… which to me is never the case. Ultimately that is where pure simulationism fails, is that the book/charts/rules can never cover every possible eventuality, thus interpretation always has to happen at some point.

The issue is if you remove all rule/mechanic adjudication and go pure interpretation, you are just story telling… and that is unsatisfying as well. It is the blend of adjudication (what do the rules say happens) and interpretation (description of what it looks and feels like and how it drives drama) that is necessary for good play. Too far in either direction and player/PC agency and investement are diminished.

Too much heavy rules simulation and the character becomes simply input into a coded scenario and the player just an observer about how random outcomes are intepreted by the code and play out.

Too much handwaivy interpretation, and the player is now just a describer of things without sufficient boundaries. Again, lacking agency and investment in the player making good decisions and pushing for a certain outcome.

The balance is key… mechanics adjudicate, players (including GM) interpret… in tandem.

i.e. scenario: I shoot the merc with my pistol!

1. Adjudication is “do I hit” based on the dice…
2. “what happens when I hit or miss” is the interpretation.

Simulationism tends to layer more mechanics in between these steps , with the misguided belief that enough rules will remove the need for interpretation… which is never the case.

But… a few more rules might be nice.

1. Do I hit? Yes
   1.a Where do I hit? Chest
   1.b How much damage do I do? 9 pts
   1.c Is the Chest armored? No
   1.d 9 points out of 15 is nearly 2/3s gone in one shot.

2. NOW I have some meat to play with on my interpretation. “You hit the merc dead center, the bullet punches all the way through, puncturing a lung on the way. He staggers to his knees, clutching his chest, badly wounded.”

or

1. Do I hit? Yes
   1.a Where do I hit? Chest
   1.b How much damage do I do? 9 pts
   1.c Is the Chest armored? YES
   1.d 10 pts armor soaks the 9 points completely.

2. “The bullet hits squarely in the chest plate of his Type IIIa combat vest. He snarls, “Pathetic,” and raises his assault rifle and fires!”

Both these interpretations are adding drama and emerging narrative flow to the outcome of a series of rules… but the rules help shape that interpretation.

[DeReel]

I agree with there being various approaches (more “simulation”, more “story”, etc.) such as you describe. Another important (bullet) point is this : if you’re going to play a shooting game, you need a mechanic for (or “tightly around the void form of”) shooting. Because that’s where the focus is. And you can’t focus on everything. I am going to ramble a bit on this.

You’ll always be “a describer of things without sufficient boundaries” when you focus a game on things it doesn’t want you to look at. So many players want “story” but don’t retroengineer what a story is : they remember the moment and the emotion when they were caught in a story, and try to jumpstart these emotions by mimicking what they associate with that moment. That’s cargo culting.

So if what one wants is the feel of a Noir crime story, a tool to determine if you hit the target by physical laws is simply off topic. You need to determine if the target is guilty. In such a world, it is guilt that determines the lethality of the shot. I’ll stop rambling when people stop asking from a shooting game to write them a Film Noir. But that’s pointless, I know.

[RDUNeil]

@DeReel

if you’re going to play a shooting game,

… there are games that are NOT about shooting?

huh.

Seriously though, I get what you are saying… “What is the game about?” is a serious question… one that New Model/Fiction First tend to micro-focus on. I tend to balk at the equation of “ficton first” equals “slave to genre”… but I get that others are into that.

For example… Hearts of a Wu-Lin is a great game, and my one experience was amazing (great GM and players who all were well versed in wuxia, epic Chinese opera, Shaw Bros. films, etc). It hit all the “feel points” as you mentioned them. Honestly a great game.

But… my one “meh” bit was that combat lacked any heft. Duel’s are "jump right to the outcome and “feel moment” in regards to die roll says “You win, you win but you shouldn’t, or you lose” then describe how that played out. I get what this is doing and why… but it leaves me cold. If I “won but I shouldn’t have” I want that to show up in play… in a duel of 37 strikes and counters, I want every one played out, where it hit, or how it was blocked… how a Rising Thunder Punch flows into a Spinning Tornado Kick, only to be countered by Mountain Abides Stance… and only my use of the forbidden Hidden Viper Strike saved me from defeat… not because that was pre-determined by the dice, but because I, the player, made that decision in the moment of combat and the dice allowed it to happen, now the results on the story have to be dealt with.

In your example of a Noir game’s lethality being determined by “guilt of the villain”… I can see that is cute, but feels like it is trying too hard. If the villain is guilty as hell, and my strong-jawed detective Luthor Black takes a shot… I still want the dice and mechanics about shooting to determine whether I get him or not. If the villain is defeated ‘just because he should be’ that is utterly unsatisfying and there is no feeling of having “earned” that victory. It the dice are against me, Luthor Black loses, and now has to figure out how to redeem himself (after he gets out of the hospital) and go after the murderous merc again. Ot maybe Luthor Black meets a tragic end, where luck just wasn’t with him and the mechanics put him six feet under.

Games need both the naturalism simulation (to an extent) as well as the evocation of “feel points” to be complete. Individually they are either artless mechanics or bystanders to some platonic ideal of genre.

[Radmad]

so what I’m hearing is you don’t want to play a Noir crime game, you want to play an action crime game.

Noir is about flawed people struggling to find justice in an unjust world. I agree with @DeReel’s depiction quite heartily that in a Noir rpg, the level of guilt of any given character is what determines whether they live or die. I would go so far as to say a Noir game wouldn’t bother having stats for shooting guns, what Noir protagonist is bad at shooting guns? The drama is not whether or not they’re skilled enough to get the crook, the drama is whether or not the crook actually faces justice.

[RDUNeil]

@Radmad

the drama is whether or not the crook actually faces justice

is exactly what I’m getting at. I just prefer the mechanics of whether not my Noir protagonist was ‘good enough’ in the moment it counted to shape the drama rather than some perceived genre emulation.

Genre’s may have certain beats that should be hit, but how those beats play out aren’t singularly determined. They exist in a range of outcomes. The genre expectations can even shape the interpretation and PC reaction of whatever the dice indicate… but they don’t (or shouldn’t) pre-determine the outcome.

[Ben_M]

I’m not convinced that

Too much heavy rules simulation and the character becomes simply input into a coded scenario

is a given. The scenario need not be coded, it’s just that the action (that a player chose) has a strict method of evaluation.

The rules as written in RQ and other similar games worked for us back then and didn’t require us to interpret much. I’ve moved on since then - I want the drama without the hard fails nowadays.

[RDUNeil]

I never played Runequest (though I own three different versions… one a pretty looking box set, still shrink wrapped), but I get what you are saying. I was intending to provide examples of “if you take it to extremes…” … that is where it would head. Probably why I never played a game RAW very often, because there was always a rule that “felt wrong” and, IMO, you just dumped it or changed it to get what you wanted.

[RedMagus77]

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[DeReel]

Thank you for the gentle warning !
I apologize also for starting rambling, too. I’ll unpack a bit what I meant by : “It’s pointless (hoping that players make up their minds about drama or physics)”.
I meant it’s pointless because everyone has a right to ask even something of an ideal from a game. And for many people, what I find uncomfortable as a split (between drama and physics) IS what they want from a game. And asking that they don’t ask it is absurd.
So why do we keep reasserting what we like and don’t like? I guess, in this thread with many new faces, we’re trying to know each other, right ? Hence the feeling we’re a bit turning in circles, maybe stepping too close sometimes, and certainly drifting from OP.
I’ll open a new thread.

[Gustavo_Campanelli]

@DeReel

That’s naturalization, a form of rationalization.
Are you in a position where you have to learn, teach or somehow “sell” the rules to the players, maybe ? Because the rules, they don’t need to be “logical” to be valid.

You are right, they don’t need to be logical, but they can be logical. Anyway, that was a way to show how I would handle that dice roll as a D20 GM, but since I don’t do d20 anymore it was more an idea about modeling it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it, it’s not for everybody because we all play these games differently.