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Work in Progress – NotAmber

I’m running an Amber game for the household, and I’m using the following system. It’s a super rough writeup, but I wanted to get the draft version up somewhere.  There’s a very minor power system I’m not getting into right now, but the heart of it revolves around a iceless system where you roll dice after success to determine the position the success leaves you in.

Core Stats

The 4 stats[1] are:
Fire (Spades) – Covers actions relying on physical speed & nimbleness.

Air (Diamonds) – Covers actions relying on intellectual horsepower or pure perception.

Water (Hearts – Covers actions of personal presence or understanding what is known.

Earth (Clubs) – Covers actions of physical strength or toughness.

When taking an action, if it falls under one of these stats, the character gets the stat as a bonus. If two stats might apply in different ways (such as using clubs or spades to hit someone with a stick), use the one that aligns with the player’s description of the action. When two or more stats both seem applicable (such as spades and diamonds in a question of how quickly you notice something) use the lower of the two. 

Characters start with 2 points in each stat, and have 12 more points to spend. This number is the default for an Amber like game, but might be adjusted up or down. 

Descriptors

Characters have 3 descriptors. They’re freeform, so go nuts. If a descriptor is applicable to a situation, then you get a +3 in that action. If a second descriptor is applicable, the bonus drops by 1, so you get +5 (that is, +3 and +2). If all 3 are applicable, then it drops again, and it’s +6 (+3, +2 and +1).

NPCs

NPCs have descriptors, but very rarely have stats. However, they have another mechanic to give them a little variability – Tiers.

NPCs can have a tier from 1 to 5, and the tier represents:

  1. How many descriptors they can have
  2. How big their starting descriptor bonus is. 

So, a Tier 4 NPC might be a, I dunno, Brave, Bold, Knight, General, and in a fight he’s going to be running around with a value of 10 (4 + 3 + 2 +1) so he’s KIND of a badass. 

TierRepresents
0 Inexpensive furniture. Lunchmeat. Very small rocks.
1 The woefully inadequate. Children. Exceptionally fierce squirrels.
2 Most People
3 Heroes, adventurers, general badasses
4 Demigods, paragons, Isekai protagonists
5 Dragons, Gods, all that jazz.

As a double cheat, the GM is not obliged to sketch out all of an NPC’s descriptors, and they’re free to re-use them for simplicity. Which is to say, you don’t need to flesh out that Tier 3 Bandit. Just give him a 6 on banditing. That’s what he’s there for. IMPORTANT: This is just a trick for sketching out nameless characters. Anyone important enough to have a name merits a little more attention to detail, especially because for those characters, it can start mattering what descriptors they have or don’t have. 

Resolution

Higher number wins.

I mean, yes, sometimes there’s no an opposing number, in which case the number is “what kind of person could successfully do this?”, and then higher number wins. If you need guidelines, consider that a tier 2 human doing the thing they’re best at has a big old 3, so 3 is a pretty good default. 5 is good for something pretty hard. 9 is pretty much best in the world sort of stuff. 

Couple rules of thumb:

  • Set the difficulties as if they were for NPCs, and that allows the characters to benefit from their stats, which is what they’re for.
  • There’s a whole thing here about the role of narration in resolution. If players are clever or use tactics or find other ways to shift the situation, you can very reasonable make up a few points difference. This is, however, very subjective and that’s deliberate. If you don’t want it to be subjective, you probably want more numbers. 
  • Tools done provide bonuses, they just change the difficulty. A cliff might be really hard (5) to climb on its own, but much more doable (3) with rope. The same logic applies to things like taking time, having help and all the other ways that people tackle problems. 
  • For all that I’m committing page inches to them, static difficulties are largely boring. Even if players can’t immediately overcome such a challenge, a little extra effort will usually be enough, so try to assume success, and just fold in things like extra time.
  • Opposition, on the other hand, tends to be a little more interesting, at least it can be. 
  • MOST of the time, there’s no actual “resolution”. You know what the character’s numbers are, and you are going to stop to trigger the system when the logic of the narrative is obvious.

BUT WHAT IF IT’S INTERESTING?

When it’s interesting, or there are uncertainties, the GM can call for a roll. Critically, you only call for a roll when the character is going to succeed. If not, stick to narration and description. But when success is certain, but other questions are open, that’s the time to call for a roll. Possibilities include:

  • Going into town to ask around about a person
  • Crossing swords with a notable opponent
  • Breaking into a well guarded villa
  • Relying on magic for…well, most things.

The purpose of the roll is to see how the situation unfolded – has it revealed new opportunities, or has it sprung unforseen complications?

A roll is made with 2df, so the potential results range from -2 to +2, and the results are interpreted as follows:

RollMeans
+2Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse. A happy coincidence introduces a major opportunity.
+1A lucky break. Things go well, and a minor opportunity is revealed.
0Business as usual. The scene plays out by the numbers.
-1Bad Break. Minor complication
-2Oh @$^%! Major complication.

OPPORTUNITIES & COMPLICATIONS

Opportunities & complications are both elements that move the scene forward – they either introduce a question that the player must answer (like: The building is on fire, what do you do?) or an opportunity for action that had not previously been available (like: You spot a secret door, do you want to go through it?). 

Opportunities are generally easier to adjudicate. A minor opportunity might take the form of a little bit of extra information, a friendlier reception, a nice tip or the like. A major opportunity is a full on lucky break – run across a friend, discover a significant piece of information or generally be in the right place at the right time. 

Complications are trickier. They can suck, but it’s important that they not negate the underlying success. If the complication offers a choice, the choices should not include (effectively) retroactively failing.

As an example, the character sneaks into a castle to steal the Maltese Frankfurter. They have the skills to succeed, but there are a lot of variables in this, so the GM calls for a roll, and the player gets a -2. 

The GM’s first instinct is “You grab the Frankfurter, but then every alarm in the place goes off. You have only moments to flee ahead of the guards”.

Now, that might be a fun scene, but it raises the question of what the player was trying to accomplish. If their goal was GETTING the Frankenfurter, this is probably fine. But if their goal was passing undetected, this pretty much flips the bird to that. For that character, the twist emerging after they get out might be more appropriate. 

A minor complication sours the result a bit. You succeeded, but…perhaps you took a minor injury, or the prize had a catch, or you didn’t end up right where you hoped. A minor complication tends to not be about a choice but is instead just a little extra badness that was outside of the character’s control.

A major complication take one of two forms. First, they might be a consequence – an injury, a loss of resource or some other complication they need to proceed in the face of. These are fine, and if you can think of a good one, they’re cool. Otherwise though, consider a force: the complication create a situation the character must respond to, such as an imminent threat, and asks “What now?”

Options:

  • Roll for all the good stuff – If a scene is particularly cool, such as a duel with a nemesis, the outcome might be sure to be failure, but it might be fun to allow them to throw in a die roll to see where it goes. 
  • Bad Stuff – If using this rule, characters are allowed to take one more descriptor (though they can still only use 3 of them on a given action). This descriptor is flagged as “Bad stuff”, and in any situation where the character actively uses it, a roll is appropriate, and if the roll take a bad turn, the bad stuff descriptor is almost always the problem.

Anaway, as I said, it’s a work in progress, but I want to capture the bones of it here.

1 – I could not tell you how many variants on these 4 stats I have used throughout the years.

GM Cues

I’m always intrigued by the idea of mechanizing language, but I usually think about it from the player side, where certain phrases are designed to trigger mechanical effects. Things like aspects and moves, yes, but it also is a big part of games that require a lot of learning to engage – “I cast magic missile” is a sentence that is absolutely dripping with mechanical hooks. “Cast” is an action which engages mechanics. “Magic Missile” is a specific set of effects laid out in the rules. Once you understand those things, then the sentence feels natural and organic, and the volume of rules kind of fade from view. It’s a good trick, and one worth deliberately pursuing.

Last night I ended up thinking about this from the GM side. Now, the GM has somewhat different responsibilities in her language. Yes, the rules mechanics are also in play, but the GM is also the proxy for the characters sense of the world. She is their eyes and ears, so to speak, and the decisions related to how to communicate the world are incredibly important.

Specifically, because the GM cannot convey every piece of information about what’s going on, she must be able to shorthand it efficiently. Consider a scene where our bold adventurers enter a room – the GM describes it in a quick sketch (“About 30×3, with bare walls and a door on the opposite wall”) but then goes into great detail about a specific piece of furniture, let’s say a desk. The GM has just signaled to the players that the desk is important and would be interesting or useful to engage with.

Or so we hope.

This is one of those areas where the history of adventure design has worked against us. In older, more competitive games, that sort of thing would be viewed as cheating, or the GM giving hints, which was bad sportsmanship. That lead to two specific patterns that have kind of dirtied the water.

First, adventure designers and GMs started deliberately subverting this expectation by applying loving detail to things that were distractions or ultimately hazardous. This, in turn, made players very wary of anything the GM drew attention to as a probable threat, which in turn inspired GMs and Designers to make things worse. Not a great scene. Hopefully, newer players don’t have as much of this baggage, but this is one of those areas where a new player can be quickly scarred and taught not to trust the GM, so its worth being mindful of it.

Second, it lead to an idea that descriptions needed to be “neutral”, with no cues from the GM. This is not super practical because it requires that the GM either go into excruciating detail, or that the players must ask questions about every single thing until they happen to hit upon the right thing, in a weird variation on one of those computer puzzle games where you need to get the mouse on exactly the right pixel to solve the problem. Not fun for anyone.

The solution to this was to move it to the dice. Early perception skills were mostly a way to skip this process and answer the question “Do you find the cool thing?”. Obviously, the topic of perception skills has evolved a lot since then, but I hold it up as what is ultimately a pretty convoluted way to avoid a fairly simple mode of communication.

I’m not necessarily saying that you should forgo perception checks in favor of GM cues, but I’m definitely suggesting that you COULD.

The Gygaxian No

A d20 iconRandom aside: One design ethic that I do not particularly enjoy in D&D is what I would describe as the “Gygaxian No” – that is, the players have legitimately earned certain abilities and spells, and adventure designers explicitly negate them for simplicity or effect.

Two most common examples being higher level adventures that take away mobility effects (like flight), and effects which explicitly pierce immunities.

I 100% understand why adventures remove mobility, I just find it lazy and sloppy in almost every situation, especially because it’s almost never “This is harder”, but rather “This is FORBIDDEN”

And I just find the immunity thing a jerk move. Player immunities are reasonably rare in D&D, and are often against rarely-encountered things like disease, and the result is often the only time disease shows up is when it ignores immunity, and that’s just crappy.

What’s most curious to me is that this is not actually a problem with D&D – it’s not a thing the rules require! It is 100% bad habits in adventure and encounter design, passed down by tradition.

and to unpack a little, the immunity thing is actually a bit worse than a jerk move, it’s explicitly a violation of the social contract. As soon as players realize that the game may randomly negate choices, they are well served to change how they choose in more “safe” directions

Which is to say, just taking stuff that works well in a fight. If you’re wondering why your players are min/maxing all the time, make sure to consider the lessons they learned when they tried something else.

(From a Twitter Thread)

Dang

Ok, so I knew I had not written here for a while, but firing this up this morning reveals that my last post was in November, and that’s a bit mortifying. Clearly, the clever answer is to dash off a brilliant post right now in an explosion of good intentions, but I know that’s a losing proposition, so I’ll beg a little more patience. I am in the midst of changing a bit of my situation in hopes of re-enabling a bit of writing time, because I deeply and genuinely miss it.

Wish me luck.

It’s All In The Cards

Apologies for the repost. I originally posted this right after the game, but then we lost it in the server migration. I meant to repost immediately, but then I started actually writing up the rules for this and was going to release both, but those are taking a bit longer than planned, so rather than keep waiting, I’m just reposting this now and will get to the rest of it later.

Needed to run a game for an interesting mix of folks today, and for a variety of reasons I decided to dust off some Amber-derived ideas I’ve had and take them for a spin. Final result was, while not flawless, REALLY interesting, and I certainly had fun. It was also deeply arts & crafts heavy, so it might be of interest to some.

So, we started from a blank slate at the table, and I introduced Proteus. Proteus is, as the name suggests, a shapeshifter, and they are very old and very powerful. They have a tower at the center of several cities in several worlds, and this is their place of power. Proteus also has a number of children, each of which is a power in their own right. They are…

So, at this point I had 7 cards with names on them (Meredith, Finn, Indigo, Keller, Sparrow, Cassia, and Bowie), and I dealt out the top 6 in a circle, setting aside the 7th.

For the next prompt, I pulled out another 7 card deck and said “Let’s flesh them out a bit” and I handed the player to my left a card. Now, this deck was 7 archetypes (The Prince, The Warrior, The Lost, The Wanderer, The Scholar, The Seer, & The Hunter) and I asked players to associate each one with a name, and again I set aside the 7th card.
We repeated this with the next deck of 7 “domains” (more or less arenas of power or similar) – Warden of the Tower, Keeper of the Flame, The Watcher, Nature’s Hand, The Shaper, Walker of Secret Ways, Guardian of the Void, once again letting players assign them. This is where it started getting interesting, since there was some interest in pairings making sense or seeming at odds. When we were done, we had:

  • Finn, The Warrior and Walker of Secret Ways
  • Meredith, The Lost and Keeper of the Flame
  • Sparrow, the Wanderer and Guardian of the Void
  • Indigo, the Hunter and Nature’s Hand
  • Keller, The Scholar and Watcher
  • Cassia, The Seer and Warden of the Tower

(And I had privately set aside Bowie, The Prince and Shaper as a potential future NPC)

So, this was a solid start. I had icons associated with the roles and domains, and at this point we had the skeleton of a setting, so I unpacked a little bit more, and explained that these characters we had just created were the parents of the characters we would play. These characters would be slightly superhuman, heel quickly and be able to travel through dimensions due to the blood of Proteus. They had also been favored by Proteus sufficiently to have lodgings in the tower, which effectively has many floors of well staffed hotel rooms (Proteus has odd ideas about family). As we discussed this, I threw out questions about setting elements, like the cities surrounding the tower, as well as interesting things to be found in the tower. Unsurprisingly, the player contributions did great things to flesh out the setting.

So, at this point we had enough foundation to start diving into actually making characters, so we started with parents and names. I had a list of names for each of the elders, and when players picked a parent, they were urged to pick a name from the list. They had the option not to (representing their name coming from their other parent or some other source) but no one took that option, so we ended up with:

  • Lucas, son of Finn
  • Kaspar, son of Indigo
  • Doris, daughter of Meredith
  • Edda, daughter of Meredith

With another quick round of dice, we used some of the other names to come up with NPC siblings, alive and dead. And now the real show began.

So, for a bit of context, I was using a simple four stat system (Might, Wits, Grace & Resolve), so for each elder I put out 5 cards – one labeled by the secret of their domain and four of them had the name of a stat on them. The stats were not evenly distributed – Finn, the Warrior has three Mights and one Resolve, for example, while Keller, the Scholar, had two Wits, one Grace and one Resolve. I’d set these distributions up in advance based on the roles, and because one role was missing, the distribution was slightly asymmetric. I also added two extra cards, once for Proteus themself and one labeled “Forbidden Secrets”.

I also gave each player a sheet with the list of elders and a few blank spots, and two tracks for the relationship, one which measured support, one which measured respect.

The mechanical part of this was very straightforward – the players went around picking up these cards. If they picked up a stat card, they got a point in that stat. If they picked up a secret, they got some sort of power, trick or item. In each case their relationship with whichever elder’s card it was, and they got a “talent”, which was effectively a skill keyword.

Where the rubber hit the road was that when a card was pulled, that was a prompt for a question (often a series of questions) about that elder, the character and what the story was behind this. When possible (especially with secrets), the player was offered a choice – ideally one which was pointed at other players at the table. Exactly how this played out could impact how the elder relationships would shake out, and it would be used to select the talent for that round.

Secret cards were put back after they were used (Largely because I hadn’t printed multiples), but the stats got used up as we went. This had a very fun effect of forcing players to develop relationships with Elders they normally would not have picked, and since the Elders had gotten steadily fleshed out as we went, these choices felt toothy.
For example, Kaspar’s first draw was to learn Indigo’s secret (Hand of Nature). I asked how old Kaspar was when Indigo took him on his first hunt, and Kaspar’s player’s answer was “Three!”. I couldn’t pass up that opportunity, so as it turns out Kaspar spent ages 3-5 as a hound in Indigo’s pack. Next round, he picked up one of Indigo’s Resolve card, and the story was even less kind. While Kaspar’s player was enjoying it, everyone else at the table pretty much concluded that they did not want to learn anything from Indigo if they could avoid it.

The other two cards were a bit wild cards. The Proteus card called for a die roll which would provide a random boon, though the character also got to spend time doing something useful for Proteus. Only one character went that route and ended up getting turned into a knife and being used to sacrifice a unicorn, so there’s that.

The Forbidden Secrets deck had a set of cards for other powers and groups in the multiverse, and drawing that meant that I drew one of those and offered them something delicious but terrible. One player immediately drew that, got a fun item out of it, and then discovered she was in a horrible position as a result, and was gun shy after that. However, the deck still showed up occasionally when I needed inspiration for an outside force. A few of the factions on that deck ended up getting added to the blank spots in the relationship sheets, usually as enemies.

So, there were 8 rounds of this, and it was pretty marvelous. As often happens in this sort of thing, players ended up with characters that were not quite what they expected them to be at the outset, but in ways the players really ended up enjoying. The downside of this is that we spent long enough on charges that we did not actually get to start play. However, the players are conspiring to play on Discord or similar, so I take it as a good sign.

All in all, definitely a good experiment. A few takeaways:

  • 8 rounds was probably too many. Went a bit slow.
  • About halfway through I switched from players drawing one at a time to everyone drawing at once, then doing resolution. It sped things up and made it easier to thread these things together.
  • I had intended to pre-load the questions to the draws, but ran out of time, so I was improvising them. Worked out ok, but prepared questions would have sped things up.
  • The relationship sliders were really satisfying, but I think I should have leaned on them a little more. Most of the changes were positive, which doesn’t quite align with the tone I imagine – should have had a little more tension in that space.
  • I ended up improvising some of the interactions between the secrets. As designed, they were effectively three tier powers, but I hadn’t really considered how they might synergize.
  • The deck of threats was a last minute addition, but may have been my single favorite deck. Partly because it was the wildest, but also because what drove me to create it was remembering that putting a bunch of demigods in the middle of reality is only interesting if you can give them something to push against.
  • I did not have enough explicit lateral connection and questioning. Added plenty will well-made questions, but if I add another deck, it will be for player to player relations.

So, successful test. The Proteus setting is one I’m absolutely going to use again – it’s my current personal Amber alternative. This particular variation on card-driven chargen – probably the most complicated I’ve tried so far – still holds up.

The Benefits of Caring

Quick thought over coffee.

Almost every mechanical problem becomes easy to solve if you know what a player cares about, because once the player cares you have the tools to offer meaningful choices with real costs.

Unfortunately, as useful as that information would be at design time, it isn’t. It comes up at the table. This is one of those reasons I tend to rate GMing over design in the priority stack, but that’s a whole other thing.

So the designer has two options: first, she may assume the player has only self interest and design mechanics that put consequences into the character. This is pretty shallow, and a way to hack it involves putting more things onto the character sheet. It’s not a bad hack, but it’s got some awkward edges to it, and when it breaks it is not graceful.

The other option is to presume that players are invested in something the designer values and just sort of hope the game finds the audience for which that is true. It may well do so, since that design decision is a flag for those players, so it may be fruitfully self fulfilling.

(An alternate version of this is to make it the player’s problem to care, and just throw up your hands if they don’t. That has an appeal, but is not quite my jam,)

Looking at those two-and-a-half options, I admit I’m wondering if there’s a third. So much of the judgement about care needs to happen at a personal level, I wonder if there are explicit tools to offer the GM to work with this. Some of the “put it on the sheet” mechanics feel like they might be usable in this fashion, but it’s going to take some thought.

A Thought on Crunch

Cover of the book “Thinking Fast And Slow”Ok, I have a new theory of crunch.

Kahneman & Tversky did a whole lot of super smart writing about how we think, and one of the takeaways is that we have two main modes of thinking, system 1 and system 2. There’s a great book on this (Thinking Fast And Slow) that sold a ton of copies, and some Nobel prizes floating around, so this is a pretty commonly known model, not some weird fringe thing, so bear with me a moment.

System 1 is Fast, automatic and intuitive. It’s what we use most of the time to just function in the world to walk, talk and generally interact. System 2 is slower and used for reason and analytics. Our thinking is generally dominated by system 1, but we engage system 2 when we’re forced to by circumstances, such as high stakes situations or problems that we lack heuristics for.

The part that is weird about this is that system 1 is really capable. It’s easy to imagine it as just sort of dumb autonomic stuff, but the reality is that it can do a LOT, and it’s super good at creating narratives to make everything around you make sense. System 2 is what we tend to think of as thinking, but it kicks in less often than we think.

Lots of implications to this and stuff that’s way smarter than anything I have to say, but I was thinking about it recently and considering the prospect that a lot of the System 1 stuff sounds similar to what some people enjoy about gaming (flow, creating narrative and so on) and that when they talk about the game just “getting out of the way” that seem consistent with the game being a system 1 operation. On the other hand, there are plenty of games and players where the enjoyment seems to be explicitly in engaging system 2 (for complicated problem solving and so on).

And I think that has given me a new handle to think about what “crunch” means – it’s system 2 play.

This feels very satisfying to me because it embraces the fact that there is no bright line distinguishing crunch from the alternative – rather, it is a function of comfort and familiarity. If you learn a system well enough for it to require less thought (allowing System 1 to do the lifting) then you stop needing system 2 for it, and it stops being crunchy.

It also makes it make a little bit more sense, because some people enjoy system 1 play, but not system 2. Some enjoy system 2 but not system 1. Some enjoy both. That maps to my experience of how people end up enjoying games (and how they end up complaining about crunch or about other things).

Now, there are some odd gaps to this. Some of the other things that can trigger system 2 are emotional, and I’m not sure how the intersection of that and FEELINGS larps works into the model, but I also don’t have a good model for those in general, so I just flag it and move on.

Anyway, I’m not sure if this is a useful perspective, but I definitely intend to try it out for a while and see how it goes.

The Size of Success

Action result table from Talislantia 4e

It is impossible to overstate how much modern game design rests on ripping off John Harper, Clinton Dreisbach and Jared Sorensen

The most basic resolution is binary: Success/Failure.

Ok, that may be a lie. The most basic resolution is NULL/Success, which is to say either it succeeds or it never happens in the first place. Consider how conflicts are “resolved” in chess – it just happens. The only way for it not to happen is for the move to not be made.1 For the moment though, let’s start with the binary.

Now, we play games of the imagination, so binary outcomes are a bit of a ham-fisted tool. There is a natural gravity towards some larger number of options, but also a limiter imposed by complexity. It is fairly trivial to generate an arbitrary number of outcomes (a d20 can have 20 outcomes, after all) but it is much harder for them to be genuinely meaningful.

So game designs seek to thread that needle, and pick a path between those options. Or in some cases, outside of them. The first expansion on this was a 4 step model – Critical Failure, Failure, Success and Critical Success. This covers a decent range of options, but its assumption that critical are outliers makes it less flexible than it might otherwise be. That is, if critical happen enough to be part of regular usage, then they don’t feel like criticals.

The next step is to unpack that space between success and critical success, and the most common tool for that is some sort of margin of success system, where the amount that the effort succeeds by has a mechanical effect. This is nicely elegant – better rolls yield better results, which feels very intuitive. Unfortunately, it also tends to make scale a bit difficult to explain, since it often ends up a bit open ended (especially if the system has something like exploding dice). Saying 7 successes is what it takes to shoot a horsefly in a hurricane is great, but only if your system genuinely makes 7 successes that uncommon.

I note here that Green Robin’s AGE system struck a very nice balance here with a kind of light critical system where a better than average success gives currency to do cool things, but the effect is bounded.

The other possible approach is to expand the space between success and failure with a marginal or modified success. The idea is old, but I first encountered this in it’s explicit form in Talislantia 4e (coughJohnHarpercough) but nowadays it’s most easily recognized as the 7-9 result in Powered by the Apocalypse games. Of course, that can even be expanded to produce qualified successes and mitigated failures.

The thing is, we’re now up to a pretty wide spread of possible results on the dice:

  • Critical Failure
  • Failure
  • Mitigated Failure
  • Qualified Success
  • Success
  • Better success
  • Critical Success

There’s a pretty obvious linguistic spread here

  • Critical Failure (No, AND)
  • Failure (No)
  • Mitigated Failure (No, BUT)
  • Qualified Success (Yes, BUT)
  • Success (Yes)
  • Better success (Yes, AND)
  • Critical Success (WOO HOO!!!)

I’ll admit here, this would be more symmetrical without better success, or if I added a “worse failure” option, but I’m not sure how much fun there is in that. Critical failures can be fun as turns of dumb luck, and make for good stories, but worse-than-normal failures seem like they would be a punitive addition. On the flip side, having some space between success and critical success tends to allow a little more mechanical breathing room for cool tricks in system. As such, I’m ok with a little asymmetry.

But here comes the key question – the one I’m not 100% sure of the answer of. Is that too many outcomes? What is the right number of outcomes?

I don’t think there’s an answer for this, but I think there’s an interesting pointer to be found in thinking about it, because it reveals the question of how you’re going to use the outcomes.

That is, if you are providing these outcomes as guidelines for GM interpretation, then it’s probably close to the right number. It provides prompts that allow for most of the kinds of outcomes that make sense in fiction, so it’s just a matter of wrapping some guidelines around those tiers.

But if I was developing a more explicit system, one where the meaning of those outcomes all needed to be expressed as rules (think PBTA Moves), then this many result tiers could be cumbersome. I don’t want to have to write up that long a list for every single possible situation.

If I’m doing something in between – a system that MOSTLY resolves things one way, but has some explicit outcomes, then it gets a bit more subjective. For example, I might have a system that uses the same rules most of the time, but each skill has a different rule for critical success. In that case, it’s going to be much more of a judgement call.

So, there’s a perfectly reasonable case for fewer outcomes, but is there a case for more?

I admit, I used to think so. Ideally, I imagined outcomes as a subtle gradient between extremes, rich in nuance and interpretation. In practice, I have found that I simply do not have the creative juice to distinguish between every 7 and 8 on a d20 roll, and that I fall into roughly the distribution I outline above.

I’m not sure how useful any of this is, but it does reveal something to me about my tastes. See, that ladder of outcomes I like is VERY CLOSE to the ladder I internalized for diceless play from the Amber DRPG, which gave guidance in terms of running fights where the character was:

  • Vastly Outclassed
  • Outclassed
  • Moderately Outclassed
  • On Par
  • Slightly Superior
  • Superior
  • Vastly Superior

And in my heart of hearts, I think that is what I’m striving for. For a host of reasons, not the least of which being how strongly it centers characters.

But where this gets interesting, for me, is that if this diceless distribution is what I’m really looking for, then what are dice really bringing to the table?

I have an answer, but at this point, that’s probably another post. 🙂

  1. Curiously, this mode is quite applicable to RPGs, and resonates with the argument against the addition of skills to old school games (“no one fell off a horse until we added a riding skill”). Functionally, every game with any amount of GM interpretation leans on this resolution model for almost every point where the system is not engaged (aka Common Sense). This is a pretty rich topic on its own, but also tangential to the topic on hand. ↩︎