What I like in gaming randomizers
May. 23rd, 2006 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberBeen 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-23 01:53 pm (UTC)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).
no subject
Date: 2006-05-23 05:06 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-23 05:31 pm (UTC)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.