What I like in gaming randomizers

[zdashamber]

Been thinking about dice lately. For the first years of my gaming career, I played only Amber and Paranoia, the first of which is fully diceless, and the second of which I don't remember any dice in. There were a couple games of GURPS in there that I don't think had any dice attached, either... Oh, there was a session of HoL where we made characters using dice and tables! How else could we have all ended up with God's Wallet? Oh, and Macho Women with Guns... Did it have dice? Hm. Oh, and In Nomine. It comes back.

What doesn't come back, though, is any place where I picked up an impression that dice are at all necessary for gaming. They were merely an odd feature of a couple of the games we played.

So I come from a rather unusual background wrt gaming.

Given that dice are unnecessary to gaming, why should they be included? The first game I actually remember dice in was Aeon/Trinity... In which I played a jack-of-all-trades psychometer who got a couple of brilliantly good rolls: "I have seen that a guy who looks like (this) planted a bomb under that seat which has three seconds left before it blows our ship in half" and "you know how the two good-at-shooting characters are temporarily blinded and it's only us two mediocre shooters left to defend the party from that gang of bikers coming over the distant horizon? Well, it's too goddamn bad about the blindness because now they'll just have to imagine how I shot one right in the face..."

Years ago, that shit, and I still remember. I remember other shining moments from that campaign, too (like when one of the other PCs casually gave mine a share of an enormous fortune), but what dice did there was allow for more moments of shining greatness.

Now, there's a downside even to the best diced system: diced games seem to involve fussy-ass rules and the attitude that the fussy-ass rules mean something. Again with the Aeon/Trinity game, there was a spat about whether a gunshot through a hydraulic column holding a car up in a repair shop would create a laser stream of hydraulic fluid that would damage the shooter. (I was right.) I've often seen a diced game freeze as people argue about whether dice apply to the situation, and if so what thing should be rolled. And perhaps most importantly, I don't think I've ever seen a diced system that didn't sometimes give results that would require a game-world lobotomy to explain.

The other fun things about dice are the gambling aspects (Oo! I hope it will come up X number!) and the tactile joy of the things. For both of those, many dice are better than one. (And d12s are better than anything else. Unlike the d4, they roll well. Unlike the d20, they stop well. This is merely scratching the surface of the d12's magnificence.)

Even the best diced system has downsides diceless lacks, but the worst diced systems are shit, and in every way inferior to gaming without. To some degree, I imagine, the way you like your randomness is as individualistic as the way you like your gaming. What I like is for my characters to generally succeed, with occasional setbacks, and to have a pretty reliable knowledge of their own abilities... And as mentioned above, I like the shining random moments of glory.

What this means is that systems like Everway or Fudge or Feng Shui are pointless and dreary so far as I'm concerned. When you have a 50% chance of sucking every time the randomizers come into play, I'd rather they didn't come into play at all. Feng Shui (where you roll a positive d6 and a negative d6 and total the bonus/drawback, rerolling any sixes and adding) has a leg up over the others because it offers exploding dice, which mean that sometimes you get a shining moment of glory and sometimes the universe gives you a swift kick to the balls... Fun stuff. Alas, the ball-kicking happens exactly as often as the glory. Which isn't a dealbreaker, but it's not perfect.

Systems like Buffy or (I imagine) the d20 stuff don't have shining moments of glory... You just gamble on whether or not you're getting a number that beats some other number, and your odds are even. The linear progression is either so steep you can never tell from one moment to the next how good your character is at something, or it's kind of boring.

The ideal systems from my point of view are Deadlands and White Wolf. You generally get a bell curve centered on "you do something well", occasionally you get glorious successes, less often you get interesting failures. (Deadlands wins because it's got every type of dice and playing cards and airships and screaming rocks and silly western accents and...) Systems like those, yeah, there's a reason for dice. A small pile of dice that explode? In my experience that has balanced the occasional whack-ass result and the time/mental energy drag that any randomizing incurs. Otherwise? Not justified, so far as I can see.

Comments

[jamused.livejournal.com]

Whereas for me, randomizers are a crucial aspect of rpgs. I game for the uncertainty of "am I going to pull this off?", and uncertainty over whether I can persuade the GM to let me get away with it is a poor substitute. And systems where I can simply declare whether I succeed or not for anything within my authority (perhaps after negotiating whether the narration is currently within my authority) are pointless; I feel that if I want to be writing fiction, I might as well write fiction.

I agree there are really crappy diced systems, for pretty much the reason you note: the random component swamping the character's alleged ability, too-common catastrophic failure (5% chance of crash every time you drive to the grocery store, 1 out of every hundred archers in a line breaking his bow each time they loose a flight of arrows, etc.), too small a random component meaning that most of the time you could have gotten the exact same result without the extra time rolling and counting. On the other hand, it also really sucks to have the high score in War and be unable to pin the lowest scorer in a wrestling match for minutes at a time because the wimp keeps describing how wriggly he is and the GM keeps buying it.

My current favorite technique (used in my home-brew) is based on a combination of CORPS and a dice rolling technique that John Kim came up with. From CORPS is the notion that all rolls are positive, so your skill score represents the level of difficulty that is routine for you and requires no roll. From John comes a positive-only die roll, skewed towards making the lower numbers more common: roll two dice (of whatever size, depending on the range of result you want). The lower die is your score. A roll of doubles is a score of zero. Since then I've added a couple fillips, mostly because players seem to expect it and, like you, really groove on the moments of shining success: double sixes is a critical success (you could easily make this exploding), double ones is a threat of a botch (roll one more die and if it's a one, you've botched and some interesting failure happens).

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

And systems where I can simply declare whether I succeed or not for anything within my authority (perhaps after negotiating whether the narration is currently within my authority) are pointless; I feel that if I want to be writing fiction, I might as well write fiction.

I agree with you 100% there. In small doses, saying things like, "I hire a bloodhound and track the blood trail the fleeing villian left" are fine; if I can't do things like bring a bloodhound-for-hire service into the game world on a whim, I feel straitjacketed by the GM's world. But unless it's a negotiation between people (if the GM can't say "Man, that's silly") the game gets dull.

As for "the dice as a lotto ticket towards the possibility of doing stuff without convincing the GM"... Yeah, that's a good point, it is something dice do better than diceless. (It's why Fudge is better than Everway: in Fudge, the player could roll dice; in Everway, only the GM ever got to draw cards.) It's not cut-and-dry, though; the GM can still say "No, your pick locks skill does not apply here" or "Yeah, go ahead and roll something (you need eight successes!)" or most obviously, "Yeah, you scale the wall, only to see... Another wall!"

But I see what you're saying. (Wrestling is based on Strength. ;) )

Your homebrew sounds interesting, and I'd certainly like to try it out sometime.

[jamused.livejournal.com]

You're right that it's not cut-and-dried--there's lots of room for the GM to make things difficult. I try to mitigate that a bit by giving clear-cut examples of task difficulty and sticking to them, rather than winging it every time, and being sparing with situational modifiers, but there's never anything except social contract to stop "behind the wall is...another wall!"

Maybe next time I'm in town visiting John and Liz I can run a one-shot of either my Weird West or my Buffy-esque modern-day settings.

[(Anonymous)]

This is Mike.

The way to enjoy a Buffy or D20-like system is to not look at any particular roll in the microscopic view, but rather your character's performance in the aggregate. For example, in the Spelljammer game, there were rounds in which my character (the fighter) missed with his bow and your character (the rogue) hit with her bow. But when you looked at the entire fight, my character definitely killed more shit overall.

The benefit of a relatively simple die convention like "roll one die and add it to a pre-calculated number" is supposed to be that you can find that macroscopic view -- that you don't get so bogged down in a single roll that you lose sight of the forest for the trees. A Deadlands-like system trades off the macroscopic view for a certain amount of intrinsic interest in the process of a single-action resolution (via the lots of dice, and the exploding dice, and the cards, and whatnot).

It follows, then, that good GMing technique is if you're playing Buffy or D20 or whatnot it to prevent the game from dragging down and focusing on the outcome of a single roll. In Buffy, one should be able to quickly get through two rounds of combat, in which the Slayer does "punch, takedown, kick" (pause) "grab, headbutt, dodge," and get the six rolls in there, so that you see her aggregate badassness even if she screws up the headbutt or the kick.

(This, by the way, is one of the many reasons I don't like D&D's fairly common "make a saving throw or something awful happens to you" mechanic -- it puts too much emphasis on a single roll in a game system that's not suited for a single roll.)

Similarly, a good player approach to those games is to think of your actions in terms of incremental progress towards a goal, rather than all-in-one whacks at things. They're like Chinese martial arts movies where the hero throws ten punches and eight of them are blocked, rather than Japanese samurai flicks where the hero makes a single cut and disembowels his opponent.

The other trick that Buffy brings to the table is that sometimes the question isn't, "Can I roll a 7 or higher on a d10," it's, "Do I want to spend a DP and guarantee success or roll and risk failure?" This again requires a somewhat light touch -- situations in which the only way to succeed is to spend DP's like they're going out of style aren't dramatic or interesting, they're just exhausting. But the DP mechanic somewhat obviates the problem of the single roll that the otherwise simple system creates.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Hum. Seems, then, that the single die joy comes from striking a balance between too few rolls, where the chance of sucking is non-negligible, and too many rolls, where you're just at skill + 6 for a d10 and might as well write a number on your sheet.

I don't really see much joy gained from that middle range to offset the trouble, though. I guess one benefit of dice that I left off is adding some outside authority to combat adjucation, but that's got downsides in channeling the combat into familiar routines.

[(Anonymous)]

Still Mike.

Yeah, I think that you're right that what you want in any die system is a controlled amount of uncertainty -- where there's enough chance of the unexpected result that people stay on their toes, but not so much a chance of an unexpected result that success and failure feel arbitrary.

I think that the big benefit to dice is in things like a really close combat. They're silly if you're (D&D example) a 10th level fighter killing standard goblins or whatever -- rolling the dice is just a minor distraction to sayiung, "You win." But where dice come in handy is in the case of things like, say, (Civil Blood example) Deirdre versus Khrim. They were both at 9 in their respective specialties and 5 Strength at the end of the game, so it's clear that it won't just be a matter of "You win." But if someone is going to win, who should that be, and just how badly should it cost them?

If that fight had come about in CB, I'd have mocked up dice by information-less choices for the player: so, I say, "She's attacking you. You can't tell if it's a feint or not," (I decide that it's not). "Do you want to parry it or not?" If he chooses right, the fight edges in his direction, if he chooses wrong, it edges in hers. Do that several times, and it works out... But I could see wanting to do that without the indirection.

[(Anonymous)]

Bernie here. Paranoia, GURPS, Macho Women With Guns, In Nomine -- they've all got dice by default. Now it could be you've played them without dice and I'm not going to say it was badwrongfun. I will however object to the idea that diced games are inherently inferior to diceless ones. Different, yes, not to your taste, okay, but I don't see how "the dice sometimes make completely nonsensical things happen" is significantly removed from "the GM sometimes makes completely nonsensical things happen".
I've argued with people who hold an opposite view, who refuse to believe that diceless can be fun. Their point of view is that you have no protection from a GM who decides to screw you (which is true in most games with dice as well, I've tried to point out), but they can't imagine gaming working without rules that you can read which will give you an understanding of what will happen when your character tries something. Without dice, the GM can fiat anything, and what's the fun in that? Furthermore, the arguments that break out about what their character can and cannot do are at least as intense as the craziest not-covered-by-the-fussy-ass-rules situations.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that you think I said anything about "inherently inferior."

You're right that there's not a lot of difference between diced and diceless nonsensical happenings: both are, basically, the responsibility of the GM. But dice tend to hide this. Remember Jeff's story of the kobold with the Rod of Lightning that killed the entire party? If the GM there had said, "Oh, well, bummer about those rolls, guys, hope it goes better when you roll up new characters" it wouldn't have been immediately obvious that he was being a dick, because there's an expectation that you go by the rules. In diceless, it's a lot easier to see whether you and the GM have similar ideas about what's kosher.

[(Anonymous)]

Bernie again. When you say "even the best diced system has downsides diceless lacks, but the worst diced systems are shit...", that sounds to me like "best diced system < diceless, worst diced system << diceless, therefore diceless is best". For you, at any rate. Maybe I'm misreading.
I dunno, it seems to me that "kill the whole party" can be a valid result of a game, and many people do play games and even campaigns where this is deemed acceptable rather than the GM being a dick. Aren't we in fact discussing playing in a campaign where a total party kill is understood to be possible?
If the GM killing the whole party is undesired, then that's a "GM being a dick" problem (or maybe a "GM having insufficient skill" or "GM not having understood what the players want" problem), and I don't find it hard to reach this conclusion, dice or no dice.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

For you, at any rate

Ah, now you're beginning to grasp the post. You have only to consider that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and you will be all the way there.

One thing I forgot to mention in the earlier response is that there is a direct correlation of incidences of nonsense to dice. Any GM will have the occasional ridiculous situation in their game, but dice add ridiculous situations independent of the GM, and even the best GM can't filter them all out.

[imnotandrei.livejournal.com]

Have you worked with the Falkenstein card randomizer? I've found I quite like it, because while it is strictly linear, it's purely additive, and it allows for a certain amount of player-drama control due to the way suits are arranged; someone with a hand full of hearts (for emotional/romantic interaction) or diamonds (intellectual) will play a scene much differently than someone with a hand full of clubs (for physical interaction), even if the character may be inclined in one direction or another. It's a different layer of "how are you feeling" on a particular day, and allows for some really spectacular successes, while insulating you against the worst of possible failures, most of the time.

(p.s. I am another Oakland gamer, who's come across you after a pointer from badgerbag in discussing a game I'm starting to work on.)

[imnotandrei.livejournal.com]

(Only after plunging deeper into your LJ did I realize we'd already met at badgerbag's "Mirror Room" game. Good to get back in touch! ;) )

[jamused.livejournal.com]

Personally, I don't particularly care for systems that have the players thinking a lot about resources that have no correspondence at all to anything that the characters might be thinking. I also recall from playing Falkenstein briefly that the mechanic caused some pretty odd behaviors in the players (burning weak hands) and seemed to result in the major villains always having quite strong cards (since the GM got to turn over his hand frequently and had a lot of say when there was a confrontation with a major villain).

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard about it before this, though it sounds interesting. jamused covers well my concerns that it would seem artificial and restrictive in play. On the other hand, I do love playing cards, and I'd be interested to see how it works out to give stuff like social interactions real, conflict-winning weight. I think someone just this evening recommended it on RPG.net for a Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell game.

And I remember you well from the Mirror Room larp! You were great. I didn't know you were in Oakland. Cool! Are you going to KublaCon? I'll be there Saturday.

[ewilen.livejournal.com]

It'd be interesting to see your reaction to Theatrix. (Actually, it'd be interesting to see my reaction to Theatrix.)

There seems to be some sort of nexus of Theatrix, Everway, and Amber players, with maybe some OtE thrown in, who have figured out how to combined the best of dice and diceless for their needs.

About Everway, at least, I'd guess it depends a lot on how you use it. The GM doesn't have to use the cards at all, right? So you could work from a default of "whatever criteria the GM would use if running diceless" (i.e., a combo of the fixed stats and powers, plus common sense and, if desired, dramatic necessity), and only draw cards when feeling whimsical, indifferent, or simply at a loss for how to judge a situation.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I picked up Theatrix a couple months ago to see what it was, since from what I hear (aside from Puppetland?) it's the only other diceless game there is. I haven't had time to read through it yet, though.

I've never heard of anyone who's played Theatrix. For OtE, I've heard good things about OtE, but I've not heard of an Amber/OtE crossover... Though I'm quite interested.

The only people I have experience with who combined Amber with Everway did it so they'd be unburdened with the responsibilities of both rules and reason: they weren't willing to explain their calls as Amber demands, and they weren't willing to use a randomized system that gives any agency to the players as jamused points out is key. I figure if you're going to play Everway diceless, you might as well just play Amber where the stats are better-defined... Though I've seen the odd roll added to Amber to good effect, so perhaps some GMs might be able to do the same thing with cards. (But on the other hand, the rolls I've liked in Amber were for things that everyone agreed should be rare... There's a few people in Seattle who roll a d10 or d20 to see if you die on the Pattern with the express purpose of discouraging walking it, and in the most recent campaign I was in there were a couple rolls at the end to see if one of the PCs managed to build a functioning Pattern even though she didn't sacrifice herself to it.)

It ties to the idea going around awhile back about how you don't want to cover the most important things under the mechanics.

Random notes and references

[ewilen.livejournal.com]

Well, Neel K. had some nice things to say about Theatrix based on actual play over at Story Games. Lessee...link. Check out the flowchart in question and also (in the same blog) the link to "Unsere Regeln" (which is in English). In another post the dude goes into his group's background from Amber to Theatrix and then Everway.

Jim Henley and Ginger Stampley are some other people I've read talk about mixing Everway and Amber.

I'm not sure but I think that Nobilis is diceless.

The big OtE hackers that I think I've run across are Joshua Kronengold (mnemex) and drcpunk, who post to the gaming community labcats. Drcpunk mentioned also playing Everway, but not Amber, so I probably got confused.

Random notes and references

[ewilen.livejournal.com]

(Just to put names and handles together: drcpunk = Lisa Padol.)

Re: Random notes and references

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Whup, just noticed I hadn't replied to this. I know Jim Henley from years back on the Amberlist. He's a splendid fellow; I feel Holmesian about him, "The world of gaming lost a brilliant theorist when Jim focused on libertarian blogging..." Though of course his libertarian blogging is also quite good. :)

I gamed with Stampley.

The other folks I've mostly encountered in passing; they all seem interesting and fine...

[jimboboz.livejournal.com]

I find that players just like to roll dice. Lots of dice. Getting a whole fistful and tumbling them out there, not knowing what the result will be, whooping in alarm or cheering in triumph because of the result... lots of players love that.

My girlfriend roleplayed for a bit, and got bored in the descriptive parts. She hated the rules discussions and arguments about what to do next. But she _loved_ rolling the dice.

All this other stuff is abstract game design, and really isn't what it's like at the game table. Many players just like rolling dice. If there's nothing in-game for them to roll dice for at the moment, they'll sit there rolling them or spinning them or balancing them on top of each-other.