Monthly Archives: March 2010

Arbiters and Oracles

Jonathan Tweet gave some very good advice in a game called Everway. When it came time for a GM to make a ruling on something there were three things to look at: numbers, drama and fortune. He used much more poetic terms than that, but I want to riff off the master, not replicate him, so stay with me here. The idea is that when you are faced with the need to make a ruling, each of these factors may suggest an outcome.

The numbers are the characters stats, descriptors or the like. If the character is a ranger (and this is represented on his sheet) and he wants to track something, then he can probably do it. A strong character can lift things. A smart character can study. Tweet’s specific approach was pushed through a lens of dicelessness, but the underlying idea is a solid one, and in many systems it speaks very strongly to when not to roll the dice.

Drama, or more appropriately, dramatic sensibilities are another of the GMs tools. When faced with a question of outcome, which way should things go? Which is more awesome[1]? This is implicitly a judgment call on the GMs part, but the better the GMs judgment, the more likely this would be a good decision.

Fortune, in the case of Everway, was a deck of tarot-like cards which did not reveal a clear success/fail, but rather suggested influences that might be at play, and those influences in turn might suggest an outcome. In other games, this job is handled ably, if a bit more simply, by the dice.

There is no right answer for how these three factors should be prioritized. Every GM strikes her own balance among these, and hopefully does so to great success. Naturally you will have cases where people favor some combination to the point of deriding others, but for the most part that is limited solely to arguments about dice fudging.

Now, I am not here to praise or bury dice fudging. From my perspective, the sanctity of the outcome of the dice is only one of the three pillars, and I will respect or ignore it based on a number of factors, not least of which is what game is being played.

It’s a boring argument that goes round and round, so I’ve decided to strip mine it for something useful. See, the one thing that the die-fudging argument does reveal to me that people have profoundly different relationships with their dice. Naturally, these relationships are intensely idiosyncratic, but I have seen two roles that people assign to their dice: arbiter or oracle.

Arbiter dice are not to be fudged. This is not some simple desire that dice be obeyed, but rather a well thought out approach that combines a respect for the system being used and a desire to introduce the unexpected into play. This is not just about making sure all outcomes are interesting, admirable as that is, but it is also about providing a challenge for the players AND the GM. Because the dice are neutral, absolute, and unpredictable, the GM may find herself having to scramble to keep the game going in the face of a bad (or good) run of dice. A lot of GMs thrive on that sort of challenge.

Arbiter dice work best when the outcomes of die rolls have a concrete mechanical impact which is either binary or directly measurable (such as to hit and damage, respectively). Making alterations to these sorts of die rolls is just a roundabout way of changing outcomes, which invites a certain amount of unintended consequences. More, these systems are usually tuned to handle the full range of outcomes that the dice might provide.

One key point you can look for in these systems is how robustly they can handle a single bad roll. One of the things that classically called for fudging was “Save or Die” situations in the vein of Old School D&D. When a single roll could remove a character from play (especially when that removal was drastically in contrast to the rules of drama) that was sufficiently unfun to demand a little cheating on the GMs part. One of the hallmarks of more modern systems is that things very rarely come down to a single roll – instead they are the aggregate of many rolls over the course of play. The removal of that problem removes the need for fudging, or rather, it does if that was the sole reason to play fast and loose with the dice.

Oracle dice serve a somewhat different purpose. There’s an idea in Spirit of the Century called “Testing the Breeze” that reflects on this a bit. When the GM already knows the likely outcome (as determined by numbers or drama) he may still call for a roll of the dice to see how to color the outcome. A GM who buys into this idea may apply it to most of the rolls made in play. These rolls are looked at as ways to color or inform on play, rather than being true decision makers.

Oracle dice work best in games where the outcome of rolls is strongly subjective, as in simple games like Risus. Because there is not much hingeing on precisely what value is rolled, there’s not a lot of impact in taking things lightly.

In the strictest sense, oracle dice aren’t fudged because the GM has already made all the necessary adjustments before the dice are rolled. This is a subtle enough distinction that I prefer to describe oracle style dice rolling as fudging – the alternative is to open the phrase ot such semantic manipulation as to make it meaningless.[2]

See, the most obvious solution to this divide is to suggest just keeping these two modes clear and distinct and you won’t have any problems. Except that’s not quite true. If a game is running late and needs to wrap up, an arbiter-oriented game might start bending the rules in favor of pacing. In an oracle oriented game, there might come a tiem when the greatest drama _is_ in pure fortune, an open roll with a lot hanging on it. As much as a given GM and a given game might lean in a certain direction, a specific situation may muddy the waters.

And that leads to what I think is the most important point. Ultimately, what you do with the dice is far less important than understanding why you do it. If you do not have a clear understanding of what you expect from those dice when you pick them up, then you’re inviting trouble. The dice will eventually turn in ways you are not ready for, and in your scramble to adjust you are likely to leave things on the floor. When peopel talk about the problems of fudging, this mess is one of the big ones.

But I want to emphasize, that mess comes from a failure of understanding. If I pick up a die and know I’m going to go with what it shows, then all is good. f I pick up a die and know I will be using it purely as a suggestion or as a means to color the outcome that is going to happen, that’s fine too. But if I pick up a die and don’t know what I’m going to do with it until after it rolls, then the quality of my outcome is probably going to be as random as that die.


1 – For ‘more awesome’, feel free to substitute in ‘a better story’, ‘more satisfying’, ‘more appropriate’ or whatever floats your boat.

2- “I’m not fudging because I change target numbers, not die outcomes!”

Romancing the Kindle

My wife is an e-book convert. Or at least I think she is, to judge by how thoroughly she has stolen my kindle and, when the kindle is unavailable, my ipod touch with the kindle reader.

The conversion has a simple basis: she was looking for something to read one night, and I asked what author’s she was looking for. She rattled off a few, including Jude Devereaux and Julie Quinn[1], so I fired up the kindle, bought a book or two and handed it over. This lead to a discussion of exactly how many of these books were online, followed by a buying spree on Amazon that loaded my kindle down with romance novels. So I haven’t seen my kindle in a while, and am wondering if we need to become a two kindle household soon.

Anyway, this is all relevant because my wife also enjoys sharing these novels with me as she reads them. I know more about the characters of Dianne Gabaldon than I have any right to , and I keep myself sane by putting it all through a gaming filter as I listen. And what continually strikes me is that it is really, really gameable, but in a way I’m not sure any game can capture.

So there’s a generalization about genre fiction that it has poor characterization because the characters are there in service to the tropes of the genre. It’s not totally true, but there’s truth to it, and I feel like there’s an inverse rule applied to romance novels. They are so strongly about character and characterization that the plot, tropes and rules can all be askew in service of the character interaction. This character-centric perspective kind of screams out for gaming, and the simple plot formulas[2] would certainly be easy enough to pursue, but it also highlights where it’s hard to tie to a system.

I’ve got no objection to social mechanics in games, but they are ham-fisted tools at best.[3] Really bringing a cast of living, breathing characters to life is a GM skill, and not a trivial one, especially when looking to have interactions that are more sophisticated than the one-note dynamics that define so much genre fiction.[4] I know some GMs that could pull it off, and while they might do it better or worse in certain systems, the system would really matter almost not at all in this context.[5] So how do you package that?

I’ve got no easy answer for that, and in the absence of an answer it’s not even worth tackling things like the myriad ways romance makes gamers uncomfortable. Instead, I’m just going to pound my head against it for a while longer, and sooner or later something’s going to give.

I think I’m going to dust off my copy of Ken Hite’s Nightmare’s of Mine (a fantastic book on horror in RPGs) and look at it through this lens. It strikes me that good horror has many of the same problems as romance, and while its emphasis is on tone rather than character interaction, it still is far more art than craft to run good horror. Maybe there’s a lesson to steal there.

1 – Quinn’s ebooks were especially interesting because she’s done a very clever thing. She has written epilogues to many of her books, talking about what has happened to the characters, which she sells as $2 ebooks. This, to my mind, is freaking brilliant.

2 – By which I mean clear obstacles, some element of mystery and tidy resolution. I’m not even touching upon actual sex because, to be frank, it’s role in romance novels seems awfully varied.

3 – At worse they are barely removed from “I be social at him!” as a problem solving solution.

4 – As an example, games love using noir to highlight social situations. No sleight no noir, but the dynamics boil down to who is lying to who about what – it can make for a powerful _story_, but it does not tend to make for deeply fleshed out characters.

5 – Beyond the level of friction it represents, but that’s a function of player comfort, not the specific system. If everyone at the table is comfortable with GURPS, for these purposes it’s interchangeable with Risus or anything else. This is not an assertion that system doesn’t matter, only that in this situation system is pretty far down the stack of things that matter.

Creo Interest

This was an interesting weekend. I had Friday off because my parents were supposed to be visiting, but the storm up north put the kibosh on that, but it was just as well since I spent random parts of the weekend laid out by my sinuses. Net result is that it’s one of those weekends where my awareness of the internet, or really the world outside my door, was pretty minimal. This is ok. Such things make for good relaxation from time to time.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a bit about what makes people interesting. It’s a broad topic, I know, but I was thinking a bit about the people it might be interesting to meet, talk to or otherwise get to know. Some of this is random fandom sort of thinking, but more broadly it was inspired by thinking about conventions and the nature of meeting large numbers of people. When there are so many folks on hand, why are some people more interesting than others? It’s usually pretty easy to spot, since a certain amount of it is pure presentation and confidence, but that only goes so far. There’s more to it. And for me, one thing that I can come back to is that, by and large, the most interesting people are the ones who have created something.

Now, the thing they have created doesn’t need to be that interesting in and of itself[1]. It’s the fact that they have gone through the steps and done the work to get this thing made that provides assurance that at least a certain amount of bullshit has been stripped away by the forces of necessity. It’s not a guarantee – some writers will still be jerks, and some people who look like they haven’t created are actually doing something interesting and worth knowing about, but when you’re dealing with large numbers of people, you need some sort of rubric, and I’m ok with this (at least for the sake of argument).

And the argument is this: very few RPG characters have created anything[2]. And I wonder if that makes them boring.

See, the other thing conventions got me thinking about was compelling pregens. Characters which, when handed out, would make players have a hard time choosing which is most awesome as opposed to least lame. How many pregens do you pick up and think “This person is interesting enough that I’d love to have lunch with them?”[3] That in turn lead to me thinking about how powerful a question it would be to ask what a character has created.

It’s a good question. Lots of powerful implications and secondary questions like “Why create that? What happened to it? How did people react to it? Is it your legacy?” Even if you ignore the rest of this post, consider adding that question to your bag of tricks when you’re looking for a way to jazz up a character. Still, It left me feeling like I was on the cusp of something.

Creation is one good, interesting activity, but it’s not the only thing we find interesting. We are intrigued by authority, secret knowledge, change and even destruction. There is similar mileage in asking “What do you have authority over (and responsibility for)?”, “What do you know about?”, “How have you changed the world?” and possibly by extension “What have you destroyed?”. That’s where it gets nerdy because those all end up lining up with, of all things, the verbs from Ars magica: Creo, Rego, Intelligo, Muto and Perdo.[4]

So now I have a neat little checklist of five things to ask about a character to try to bring him to life:


But that in turn suggests one more refinement. So far we’ve talked entirely about what the character has done: why not talk about what the character intends to do?


Adding a column for the future allows this to be a useful tool for the campaign as well as the character.

Now, in terms of actually using this, I think it might be interesting to fill in every line, but I think the result would feel overloaded and banal. A character with all of these things filled in is so thoroughly realized that it calls into question why he’s being played. Instead, I think it becomes interesting in terms of the spaces left blank. If a player is told to fill in, say, five of the lines rather than all ten, which ones he chooses may be as informative as what he actually writes down.

I’m aware this is a little bit gimmicky, and for some GMs there may be an instinctive sense that this is too much to ask, especially when you’re already getting things like beliefs and instincts, but I would argue against that. While I have not called it out explicitly, what is important about these five elements, as with things that make real people interesting, is that they tie the character to the world outside himself. Consider them to be complimentary to the benefits provided by more internal traits, like beliefs. One gives a better sense of what makes the character go and the other gives a better sense of their place in the world.

I consider this a big deal. One of the hardest things any person has to deal with is the gap between their internal landscape and how they’re seen by the world at large. We trip up on it a lot, especially in our community, and I sometimes worry that the worst elements of that can be reflected in play when a character’s design is entirely inward-facing. Mixing it up a little, introducing important ways that the character must interface with the world, is a very small step in the face of the larger issue, but it is at least a step in the right direction.

And if, as a result, it makes you a little more interesting? It’s a nice bonus.

1 – Obviously, everyone creates, so it may seem a bit arbitrary that I put a published author in one category and a prolific producer of fanfic in another. At first blush that may seem like some sort of snobbery about the quality of their material, but it’s more nuanced than that. Even if the book is terrible, the published author has done a LOT of work to get where she is – beyond simply writing the book, she has had to get an agent, get published and deal with the business and financial realities of authorship. The fanfic writer or self publisher faces few (if any) of these same challenges.

2 – Except magic items. But, to be frank, magic items in 3E and 4E are bland and disposable, so I categorize them as fanfic.

3 – There’s an argument that blandness is a good thing in pregens, since that makes it easier for a player to make them his own in play. I am less happy with that thought as I watch games though: it’s true, but it works because it does not challenge the players. Net result is you get a game that’s exactly as good as the table skills your group brings.

4 – For the unfamiliar, Ars Magica used at Verb + Noun system of magic, so Creo + Pyrem (Create + Fire) was used to, well, create fire, while Perdo + Pyrem (Destroy + fire) might be used to quench a fire. The verbs were Creo (Create), Intelligo (Understand), Muto (Change), Perdo (Destroy) and Rego (Command). (edit: Will sets me straight, fire is Ignem, not Pyrem)