Protected Introduction

So, I was thinking (wall of text incoming, you have been warned).

I had to take some kind of bullshit "social psychology 101" so I can get on with my degree, and one subject we went over gave me an idea regarding tabletop games.

See, there's this thing called the "cognitive miser" theory. Basically, the human brain hates wasting computational effort so whenever possible and unless it has a very good reason not to, it will attempt to "cut corners" and employ heuristics whenever it can to avoid this. One of the most significant consequences of this is the power of first impressions. Turns out that actually evaluating the merits of something (person, idea, situation, etc.) is hard work, so it will try to do this only once. It takes less computational effort to interpret any newly discovered inconsistencies in accordance with the first impression then it is to re-evaluate something, so unless something truly exceptional happens, it's simply going to stick (e.g. if your first meeting with someone has convinced you they're a jerk, then even if in your next meeting they'll treat you nicely it's liklier you'll interpret their behavior as "sleazy" then figure out one encounter is a too small sample size to go by).

This took me back to some of my gaming experiences as a player rather than a GM (I'm one of those people who like to alternate regularly, so I get to see both sides of the screen).

(rant continues next post)

I have unnaturally shitty luck when it comes to dice rolls. Like, amazingly, you-have-no-idea shitty luck. "Roll all 1's on a 20+ dice pool three times in a row, no amount of minmaxing that doesn't involve automatic successes will help" shitty luck. Normally, I just deal with it because in the end of the day it's just a game and all, but every so often I get one of those terrible streaks when on my first session with a new group. That's when you can see the "power of first impressions" at work.

You've built a character. You put effort into this, both mechanically and fluffwise. You've written them a background, you've allocated all your points, you've spent time. In all likelyhood, you envision them as some kind of badass. Could be a badass warrior, badass hacker, badass whatever. They're supposed to be good at SOMETHING. You don't want to dominate the table but you do want for them to be able to contribute in those one or two things you've made sure they could. You want the rest of the party to know "this character is here with us because we need an X, and they make a good X".

Then the dice start rolling and everything falls apart. Everyone's first impression of your badass warrior is of them being utterly humiliated by a bunch of goblins. The first thing they see your badass hacker doing is electrocuting themselves trying to tap into the phoneline of some nameless NPC. Your assassin's intro is slipping and falling on their face trying to climb in through the window.

(rant continues next post)

And from my experience (I don't know, maybe I've just had the bad luck of playing with shitheads), from that point on, your character concept basically went down the toilet. Forget about playing a badass: insofar as everyone is concerned, you are comic relief. It doesn't matter how statistically imrobable that streak of failures was, your character is in their eyes a fucking loser. If they're going to keep him around it's because he's an amusing loser. He's a fighter who can't fight, a thief who can't pick locks or a pilot who can't fly. If you DO succeed later on, it'll be interpreted as a fluke, not the other way around. It breaks my heart whenever I try to make a character that's actually compelling, then after three sessions in a row of nothing but impossible critical failures they, like, fail to convince someone of something and the other players go "well, I guess it was to be expected, I mean, he IS an idiot", and I just look down onto the maxed out INT and CHA on my character sheet and realize the character's concept once again got completely missed out.

If you think about it, it works like this in movies, too. The first important thing you see someone doing is generally (barring some kind of twist) how you first characterize them. Obviously, there's some nuance here: nobody cares that the first thing you see of a "badass hacker" is them getting beaten up because fighting isn't their shtick. But you DO want their first hacking attempt to work, because that's just how you show someone is a badass hacker. If their first several attempts are a series of abject failures, then you peg them down as "the deluded loser who THINKS they're a badass hacker", or at the very most as "someone who might at some point GROW into one" (which is fine for some kinds of RPGs, where the idea is everyone starts off very unskilled, but definitely not to the ones where you start off badass).

(rant STILL continues next post)

Conversely, if the first thing you see of a character is them doing really good at their thing, then it doesn't matter how many times afterwards they're going to fail at it - you'll attribute their failures to bad luck, or the challenge being hard, or something. You'd still remember them as "good".

Which brings me to my suggestion and the point of this rumbling, whiny rant:

What do you think about the idea of "insuring" players' character concepts against abominably bad luck by not allowing them to fail during their first meaningful encounter using their shtick? Obviously, not automatically, and in moderation, and not if they start building their strategies around taking advantage of this, but, you know, behind the scenes. Fudge the dice a little, ignore the results if you have to. They don't have to succeed spectacularly - just don't let them FAIL. Or if they absolutely have to fail, at least make sure your description of their failure emphasizes the odds they went against (even if objectively they were meaningless) rather than their own incompetence. Let the fighter show off a little bit even if the dice say they should be defeated. Let the sneaky shithead talk their way out of trouble even if they completely borked their Persuasion check.

You only have to do it the first time. After that, all bets are off. You'e established them as good at something, so it's okay for them to fail at it later on. Just don't let the dice flush down their whole concept in the eyes of the party.

What do you say? Is this good advice? A good practice? Am I just talking as the unluckiest player in the universe and my experiences have no bearing on anyone else'?

This is an interesting thesis. I don't play games so I can't really weigh in though

Shit.

A game must be challenging to be fun. If world 1-1 of Mario was just moving right and jump without enemies or bottomless pit no one would play 1-2.

You can tweak the adventure so it works, and make players roll behind your screen, but most of the fun is improvising when plans don't go right.

See the intro mission of (almost) every 007 movie: he's a badass but the mission doesn't go how he wanted and because of that we see how badass he is when in need of improvising to survive.

No, no, a thousand times no. The players can say what they'd like to do and the GM can react to that, but if the dice say they fail, they fail. You can balance the first session to have lower skill/combat requirements (fighting street thugs instead of a dragon, or fixing cars instead of defusing time bombs) and having a smaller penalty for failure (losing some money or wasted effort instead of straight-up death), but the players must always have a possibility of failure. There's no inherent problem with the fighter wanting to show off a little bit, but if he doesn't succeed his acrobatic check, he trips. That's a basic concept common to all RPGs. If you don't like the chance of failure due to shitty rolls, use a diceless system.

I have shitty luck with dice, but I survive nonetheless without any (known) fudging because I play with relatively low stakes and don't make plans that rely too heavily on random chance.

If I understand correctly, OPs problem isn't with surviving and more with the impression his characters make on the other players. So he is able to dredge along but roleplaying is difficult since he's always relegated to the role of "incompetent comic relief" by his luck. I'm always GM so it's hard for me to empathize, but I can imagine how that might be frustrating, especially if everyone else around the table has normal luck and doesn't fail at everything.

It seems hard for me to imagine that someone could have such bad luck all the time, but I suppose it's statistically possible. In that case, though, it depends on the system. He mentions dice pools so I'm guessing WoD, which does have the mechanical quirk of always being able to fail. No matter how low the difficulty is or how many dice you're rolling, you could still not get any successes. If you're using a roll over/roll under system, things get easier since with a sufficiently big pile of bonuses (from playing smart/picking easy targets) you COULD guarantee not failing.

>If I understand correctly, OPs problem isn't with surviving and more with the impression his characters make on the other players. So he is able to dredge along but roleplaying is difficult since he's always relegated to the role of "incompetent comic relief" by his luck.

Pretty much. Wouldn't be the worst thing if the world if we'd been playing mostly D&D or something, but when you're playing Shadowrun or World of Darkness and the premise basically involves everyone being at least competent at SOMETHING, it really hurts for the dice alone to constantly condemn you to the role of a joke (or worse, a burden on the rest of the group that they only put up with because of the metagame consideration of not wanting you as a player to not have anything to do). With people who aren't apparently cursed with the worst luck in the world, the solution is to build mechanically overpowered characters and pick very easy tasks but I'm afraid my bad luck transcends that. There were literally multiple instances where I took on something with like difficulty 1, rolled 25 dice, had 6 Edge, SPENT Edge, and still managed to glitch. When that happens every once in a while in the middle of a long campaign, it's funny. When that's your character's fifth roll (and the first four were failures), it pretty much cements the idea that your character is a complete fool. You know you might as well leave a group when there's a half hour argument about why the hell their Shadowrunners would even want to bring this idiot along in-universe where all he's ever shown them is he's incapable of accomplishing the simplest actions.

If your situation really is that severe, then I guess your only solution is to either stick to resource management based systems (where there are no random elements) or at least to roll-over ones.

Avoid dice pool based systems like the plague, they're statistically wonky in that sense. You could roll a thousand dice and not get a single 6.

With roll-over, you can generally secure yourself some level of success by piling on an insane amount of bonuses against a low enough DC. Unless you literally physically can not roll anything but 1's, this should solve your problem.

Doesn't 007's missions go wrong because of outside elements, not because he failed horrifically?

I've been in the same position in games like Dark Heresy and Shadowrun, where if I don't play a mindlessly cheerful, "I love everyone in the player party!" fool that doesn't maintain, at least on first appearance, something like caution, even suspicion if it is warranted, the character is immediately labeled an asshole now and forever, no matter how good a guy they are after everyone has shown who they are or what they do for the party, up to and including saving everyone's live, repeatedly, up to the cost of his own life.

In the case of dice rolls, a poor roll need not mean the pc failed, but that circumstances came about that bollocked them.
It's all about your interpretation.

Which OP did mention over in his wall of text:

>They don't have to succeed spectacularly - just don't let them FAIL. Or if they absolutely have to fail, at least make sure your description of their failure emphasizes the odds they went against (even if objectively they were meaningless) rather than their own incompetence.

Honestly, I think it's more a matter of GMing style then "rules" (although Veeky Forums does have a tendency to confuse "GM advice" with "rules" if it means they get an excuse to become angrier at something).

Typically, people roll for their own skill and descriptions are more often the "your character failed" type rather than "XYZ happened and prevented you from doing it", especially for normal, non-critical failures. Same with successes, characters more often succeed on their own thanks to their skill rather than always relying on serendipity.

Oh shit, bro.
>>Spent a fuckton of time, preparing my character for shadowrun campaign
>>Lore put in place so nice, that it fits world like a glove
>>chaos mage
>>former member of Triad
>>when we finish small talk with GM about preparations, he just goes straight to one-on-one RP.
>>I'm sitting in almost empty backstreet bar, two chinks blabber about me.
>>Hear *clack*
>>They stand up.
>>Kill one of them with two lightning bolts, get cover.
>>Second chink misses
>>And all this shit goes down the drain.
>>My rolls are going full insanity mod
>>literally hour of RP about me dancing around fucking chink and failing almost all the fucking rolls.
>>dead.
I've heard about other people, our Face got 18 dices in social shit and our street sam got optimised by GM and has around 17 dices with rifles. My 12 spellcasting looks like useless shit, really.

True, but that's why you're playing in a game ran by an intelligent human being rather than a computer. As GM, part of your job is making sure stupid bullshit like doesn't happen just because one of your players had the audacity to be unlucky. Even if they fail, you have the choice of at least describing their failure in a way that would salvage some dignity for their character in the eyes of the party.

The term is "failing forward", where the obstacle doesn't act as a roadblock to the story progressing, but instead acts as an additional challenge to overcome.

>usual method:
>"I try to break the door down!"
>OK roll Strength check
>[roll fails]
>You can't break down the door.
>"...I try again?"
>You can't try again, you already tried and failed.
>"Is there any other way out of here?"
>No.

>failing forward method:
>"I try to break the door down!"
>OK roll Strength check
>[roll fails]
>Well you hit the door hard enough to get it slightly open. You can probably force it open with another few minutes' work, but the sound has attracted 2d12 enraged goblins!

>The term is "failing forward", where the obstacle doesn't act as a roadblock to the story progressing, but instead acts as an additional challenge to overcome.

It's more nuanced than that. "Failing forward" should be applied in almost all cases either way. It's less about the consequences of failure and more about how failure is described and how it reflects on the PC. If someone built a fighter, fluffed him as a veteran warrior, and wants their shtick to be that they're a veteran warrior, and then the dice say they should get one-hitted by a pair of lucky goblins I think it's perfectly reasonable of the GM to make up a motherfucking horde of ambushing goblins leap out of the shadows and describe the PC valiantly holding them off before being overwhelmed or something. The result is the same either way, but one description paints the PC as incompetent (and if the player previously tried to roleplay them as a veteran warrior, a deluded moron as well) and the other lets them keep their dignity.

I'm all for this, but I don't think I represent the general population of Veeky Forums about that. I actually play WITH my players with the intention of creating the most entertaining stories and measure success by how much fun everyone had rather than adherence to the Gospel of Gygax, so if we bother to roll dice at all, that kind of thing's a given. Unless you're playing Fiasco, nobody put time and effort into coming up with a character just to see them humiliated. If the almighty dice "dictate" that they should look like losers where I could make them look like winners, fuck the dice. Personally, I wouldn't even bother rolling for stuff that a character should logically or thematically be good at (up to and including defeating reasonably large numbers of mooks, if that stuff happens to be "fighting"). IF failure happens, it should happen when it's dramatic for it to happen and ONLY IF that failure would genuinely make the story more interesting. Having to drag a battle another round because someone keeps missing isn't a meaningful consequence, it's boring.

Basically, if it's something really minor, I don't roll because I don't think it matters enough. If it's something really major, I don't roll because in that case it matters too much to let the dice dictate (I'm not even talking about "PCs miss a vital clue/fail to catch a suspect/are instantly killed by a trap, and the adventure is immediately over" kinda bullshit, which should never even potentially happen around the table of any remotely competent GM). Rolling is squarely for whatever fits inbetween those.

>I've heard about other people, our Face got 18 dices in social shit and our street sam got optimised by GM and has around 17 dices with rifles. My 12 spellcasting looks like useless shit, really.

This is really a problem of having differently optimized characters. Before the game even starts, you guys need to talk about what sort of game it will be, and what sort of characters everyone will have. In SR talking about appropriate dicepools for your key ability and your ancillary abilities is important.

Shadowrun is one of those games where there's a lot of 'player skill' and 'splatbooks' in making a character which can result in widely varying power levels. Just talk to the GM and ask if you can retweak the character or just make a new one to better fit the party.

That's exactly it, though. The GM specifically told me the party needed a Sammy, so I made a Sammy. I pulled out all the supplements and made him the best Sammy to have ever Sammied this side of dubiously ethical rule exploits. He wasn't good for much other than Sammying but if you needed anyone beaten, cut up, shot up, or blown up, he was your guy.

Or at least, he was SUPPOSED to be. In practice, when Mr. Johnson (and the GM, of course) introduced me to the party full of mages and deckers as "the muscle" that would be joining them on the mission ahead, I played my part of the badass, steel cold killer... then the dice actually started rolling and, in rapid order, I failed to sneak up on a minor gangster (despite wearing full Chameleon Gear, mind you), missed him with two full bursts of automatic fire, missed AGAIN with my katana, then took a single punch to the face that very nearly killed me. I was eventually "saved" by the party's shaman, who, not having such shitty luck, one-shotted the gangster with his holdout pistol then actually asked the GM, out of play, what justification his character might possibly have not to leave my obviously incompetent ass right there on the floor.

You make some good points, and are very observant on the nature of people to pigeonhole character based on early perceptions.

However, I have two pieces of advice.

A) Your "protected introduction" idea can be done -> but not mechanically. The protected introduction is done during character generation, during your session zero.

You have players Bob, Bill, and Ann. The game will feature around stopping a mad king, so you all need a reason to party together, and a reason to be in the capital. Bob makes a Barbarian. He is in the capital because he got into a drunken brawl and burnt a tavern down. Guards arrested him, and he's awaiting trial. Ann makes a wizard, she's in town studying. She spends time at the town hall / jail copying documents to make money to pay for wizard school. Bill makes a thief. He's actually been hired by the city to put traps into the jail to prevent escape. --> Character creation completes. Session zero starts. Mad King pulls some shit, Guards start acting like jackasses, and the King decides not to pay the thief for his trapwork. The three of them are united in the jail. They decide to party together because adventuring is worth more money than copying papers, the Barbarian feels honor bound to follow the thief who helped free him and the thief wants to screw over the king who denied him his payday. In the process of their 'escape', the thief untraps the path, tells the barbarian about the guards. The barb facesmashes a few, and the wizard summons some horses.

Now, you can start your game, you have some cinematic moments, your party is forged, and the game should begin.

TLDR -> If you want a protected opening, then you should have a cinematic moment when the party is being formed, and the characters created. Think of it as a FMV from a videogame or a cutscene. That gives your first impression before the dice are ever rolled. It's before the first session. But once the game is on, the game is on, including mechanics.

B) Try to stay to systems that allow for a more freeform or rules light mechanic. Something that lets you succeed and move on, or fail and move on. Where the story advances based on not so much overcoming obstacles, so much as it does for encountering obstacles. Like Wulin, or Monster of the Week.

When I started my Rogue Trader session, I asked each of my players to come up with a reason why they knew each other character beforehand. From that, we created a narrative. The void master/ex mercenary captain had once hired the seneschal/bounty hunter in a war before, the techpriest was a close acquaintance of the void master's now-deceased brother, and the techpriest and seneschal had once survived a crash landing together. From this, we established a story of their spaceship's demise and subsequent repair and revival, in which all characters played their essential part.

When a new player (cleric) joined, he was introduced by storming out of his cathedral with a sword, breaking up a firefight by threatening damnation on anyone who would fire a single round more.

By narrating character introductions, every character has been established to be competent in their area of expertise before the game starts. I think doing this is a greatly beneficial thing, because it avoids exactly the problem you described. I think that's better than doing a no-risk-of-failure introduction in play.

>hen the dice actually started rolling and, in rapid order, I failed to sneak up on a minor gangster (despite wearing full Chameleon Gear, mind you), missed him with two full bursts of automatic fire, missed AGAIN with my katana, then took a single punch to the face that very nearly killed me.

Obviously, you've pissed off a gypsy and have been cursed, or were a seriously bad guy in your past life and are paying back your karmic debt. Just accept roleplaying games are not for you and be glad you still have all your fingers and toes.

That's not too unreasonable, I'd like to think. One of my players has a similar problem. He's great at the RP side of the game, knowledgable as hell on various facets of the game, and is one of the best paladin players I've ever met. But I don't think I've ever seen him roll greater than a 15 in the decade I've been friends with him. Usually, he'd be lucky to break double digits on most rules. Which in unfortunate, because he's usually the face of the party, and everyone else essentially follows his directions. It got to the point that, when through a combination of me wanting to see how they'd react and the party relying on him for everything, I threw an orc war horde in their path. Given the choice of waiting for the orcs to leave (not an option), or going around the orcs (also not an option) the party threw the newly introduced rouge at them. Fully expecting a TPK, the rest of the party started drawing up new characters. I ended up fudging the skill checks, went easier on the guy than I normally would, and long story short he accidentally a continent spanning war migration. But hey, he proved his character could do what they hired him for.

I'll take "things that never happened", thank you.

I think you're on to something OP.

My personal preference isn't to do some preliminary narration about how badass all the characters are. It's always forced and lame. Instead, I would bring them into the narration and, for the first few scenes, play strictly freeform (by setting the DCs to 0). Afterward, slowly scale the DCs of the tasks up from 0 until they're where the game is supposed to be.

Your players will balk at first, but they'll enjoy the chance to flex their muscles quickly enough and the game will become appropriately difficult so no one ends up getting too bored.

>My 12 spellcasting looks like useless shit, really.
Because you don't know SR.
Spellcasters btfo all others save hackers, be smart with your dice, rather than try to brute force it.