>I want to do the thing.
>-Roll for the thing.
>You did the thing/You messed up the thing.
What tactics do you employ to make resolving tasks more interesting?
Do you have any favorite game mechanics that move away from gambling with die rolls? Have you found a novel way to incorporate resource management or trading into your RPG?
Tell me about your views on mechanics that keep a game interesting.
Non-binary resolution and resource management. Die rolls are worth keeping imo, uncertainty is fun.
>Non-binary resolution
THIS
One of the best GM advice I ever got was to break the habit of thinking of everything in terms of pass/fail. There's volumes written on this subject from every angle, from third-option orientation to "fail forwards" to 'yes, but...' - too much to summarize in one post at five in the morning. Point is, move away from making everything a pass-fail check.
In a system like this, would the DM attempt to keep the odds of a show-stopping failure to an absolute minimum?
What are some interesting consequences for failure, other than a 'game over' or a 'you lose X resources, spend X amount of time to regain them'?
Fortune in the middle.
>I intend to do the thing
>Roll for the thing
>I say how the thing went
Degrees of success are always good.
>consequences for failure
You do the thing, but this causes a different complication
If it's not too much trouble, could I ask you to come up with a few degrees of succes or failure for some scenarios?
>In order to progress, the PC's need to climb an almost vertical, but fairly rough rockface of circa 10 yards.
>Variation: some party members have no experience in climbing or are carrying a heavy load.
>During a fight on board a ship, a PC has gone overboard. He needs to reach the ship and grab hold of something he can climb.
>Variation: out of either hubris or ignorance, he had donned plate armor for the fight.
You allow them to do things without rolling.
90% of the time, you don't need to roll. Just take into account their character's stats, class, level, the situation, and so forth. There is no reason to need to roll to identify ancient runes if the scholar in the party has plenty of time. There is no reason to roll for climbing if your character is a high level, high dexterity thief. They can throw a rope down, and anyone even without much skill or training can climb a rope to help ascend the wall.
Seriously, cut 90% of the non-combat rolls out of your game and it goes much smoother, simpler, and easier.
>climbing
Losing equipment, gaining stress/injuries, disturbing a nest of something nasty leading to a tense "fight" are good negative twists.
Finding rare resources, making a simpler path for the later climbers, discovering a hidden cove, etc. can all be positive twists.
>Seriously, cut 90% of the non-combat rolls out of your game and it goes much smoother, simpler, and easier.
I agree, but what if there were a game mechanic that could be used instead of die rolls with for events that can't fail, or shouldn't fail because it would be an anticlimactic and boring end to the story?
Or should the overarching mechanic of managing your travel time and your rations be the only 'crunchy' part of travel and exploration?
>I agree, but what if there were a game mechanic that could be used instead of die rolls with for events that can't fail, or shouldn't fail because it would be an anticlimactic and boring end to the story?
Yes there is. It's called GM fiat.
>Or should the overarching mechanic of managing your travel time and your rations be the only 'crunchy' part of travel and exploration?
Honestly I'm not really sure what you mean. The concept of resources and mechanics applies to everything the party has. If you use up a ladder by breaking it into chunks for firewood, then you lose your ladder. If your lantern boy gets mauled by an owlbear and fucking dies, now you have less people in the party to help you carry shit.
I apologize if I sound confusing.
I'm being a massive autist and trying to distill a distinct game mechanic for each of the core aspects of an RPG.
I've identified conflict, exploration and socializing. There may be more and they're certainly genre-dependent, but these are the ones I'm trying to hash out at the moment.
The game mechanic for conflict is fairly obvious, as rules for combat are a pretty substantial part of any mainstream ruleset I can think of.
Exploration is a little more tricky. As we've established, pass/fail obstacles that rely on just rolling dice aren't engaging. Letting the players pass them with GM fiat is a bit underwhelming. The only other crunchy aspect I can think of associated with exploration is time and resource management, but like you said, that's not really specific to exploration.
There are probably fairly decent mechanics for social combat out there, but I haven't gotten to them yet. Exploration is a little too distracting.
>Exploration is a little more tricky. As we've established, pass/fail obstacles that rely on just rolling dice aren't engaging. Letting the players pass them with GM fiat is a bit underwhelming. The only other crunchy aspect I can think of associated with exploration is time and resource management, but like you said, that's not really specific to exploration.
What do you expect? Exploration/puzzle solving is entirely based on the situation at hand. The best solution is to figure it out on the spot, which any competent DM should be able to do. It's not "underwhelming" as that's the entire point of the game and your job as the referee.
"Just DM it bro!" is the most useless, condescending approach one could fucking take.
Yes, common sense should always have an overriding ability for any situation, since that's how you keep a world real and interactive, and how tabletop RPG differs from a boardgame, but having a well designed mechanical chassis is incredibly helpful and actually the fucking point of using a system in the first place.
>Exploration/puzzle solving is entirely based on the situation at hand.
And fights aren't?
This is probably the autistic part. I can't think of a satisfying explanation for why we're able to think of inventive and rewarding systems for the sticky and volatile scenario of a fight, even though we revert to "Oh, just have the DM make something up on the spot" for something as dangerous as exploring rough and uncharted terrain.
There are boardgames for scenarios other than combat, right? Their designers managed (or at least attempted to) interpret a scenario of their choice as an engaging, structured set of rules.
I'm looking for an approach that hits a sweet spot between "make a single roll against the situation-specific skill listing on your character sheet" (yawn) and "pull a completely different boardgame-sized set of rules and game pieces out of your collection whenever you reach a different scenario" (over the top).
Let's take example 1.
is that specific 10-yard cliff important enough to merit a check on its own?
If no, it is probably a part of a larger sequence of vertical ascent, and a roll could follow into any sort of setback on progress (PCs get to the top but lose resources/HPs, are delayed, need to take a different path where they meet something etc) or boost (PCs arrive early, find something useful etc).
If yes, the roll is what determines the result of the specific trigger you placed there, be it an encounter, a problem to solve and so on.
If you're just making them roll to see if they take 1d6 fall damage or not, git gud.
When a game tries to implement mechanical systems for that (skill challenges, social combat etc) grogs get up in arms.
Respectfully, grogs can suck my nards.
My goal is for the game to be engaging, interesting, entertaining, exciting, or any combination thereof. Game mechanics play a huge part in providing that to the players (and myself).
So what I'm doing wrong is that I'm thinking too granularly? I'm 'zooming in' too much?
I think "you fail, but you can try again" is underrated.
I keep a strict time record, so my game basically runs in 10-minute intervals. If the thief spends his 10-minute turn trying to pick a lock, and fails, there's nothing stopping him from trying again. But the party might not want to stick around waiting for him. And wasting time is bad in my games since I do random encounters. So it's a common scenario for a rogue to grumble and leave a locked door that he failed, but a locked treasure chest or story-relevant door he might consider worth the time to retry.
What I meant to say is that if you look around in games made in the last, say, 10 years, you'll find a number of attempts at subsystems that try to structure non-combat scenes in a way that's more interesting that "just roll a die". And that's not counting the storygame-types built around conflict resolution.
Okay, let's take skill challenges as an example of a simple way to structure non-combat interactions.
> you need to do X
> to do X you need to generate Y successes working towards that goal before Z failures
> the ratio of success:failure decides how well you succeeded or how badly you failed doing X
> each step is of course played out and can change the situation to allow other approaches to work (or not), resources can be used and gained, etc; basically also treat each individual roll as if it was a "normal" roll, not part of a structured challenge
The crucial part here that can throw a wrench into the gameplay loop is the Z failures. This discourages taking actions with a low success rate, which can, depending on the challenge at hand and the options available for characters, mean that some players are stuck twiddling their thumbs while the others play because they cause more harm than good. You need to offset this in some way, like making character competency broad, having a time-limit that forces the characters who'd sit out to join in to have a chance at success, etc.
Another interesting system to look at could be Team Conflicts. This abstracts the players and the thing they are trying to overcome (be it climbing a mountain, passing a test, or infiltrating a corp building) as entities that have a defense and offense value that their actions change, then in each "round" they roll against each other to see what happens. It's a bit more difficult to explain, but I attached a PDF of one such systems. I think Burning Wheel uses a similar system.
This brings time management to the forefront. I like that, because the players are making informed decisions. Being consistent about your 10-minute intervals helps in that respect. It turns time into a countable resource that can be spent in discrete units.
Going by the second or by the minute would be overkill, and going by the hour would stretch disbelief a bit too much for short, self-contained actions like picking locks.
How do you integrate random encounters into this? Low chance of an encounter every ten minutes, or slightly higher chance of an encounter every hour/part of a day?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: it's not "doing it wrong". Too many games used to give you that kind of specific information, often while giving only vague suggestions about "making rolls matter". The thing is, it's a kind of punctual resource management that is not really interesting or conductive to good gaming, not even if you base the game around that (there's good ways to do it, but they're relatively recent experiments).
The critical issue of what you're saying is that something like a skill challenge (which, by he way, is just an example of a kind of mechanic that you can find in many games) need to be thought-out and designed at least as much as you would do with combat.
If my players face a group of, say, ghosts, and nobody has a way to fight them, and there is nothing in the encounter area or background that lets them overcome it, I designed a bad encounter. The same way, if I give my players a challenge, and some of the characters have no way to take part in it, I didn't design a good challenge.
I find that having built in failsafes helps, yes.
If your failsafe is "let the DM handle it", it's just shunting work from the system-side to the DM side.
Then again, what you are saying could also be fixed on the system level with encounter creation guidelines that are based on character capabilities in some way, but I feel that that's putting the carriage before the horse.
I'm not precisely saying "let the DM handle it", but skill challenges don't spontaneously generate in a vacuum, so there is a component of human error that goes into them and can be worked upon.
This is an issue of the specific mechanic, but I'm thinking of similar mechanics in other games (see social combat/investigation in CofD), and the point still stands.
>I want to do the thing
>Roll 2d6 for the thing
>On a 10+, you do it.
>On a 7-9, you stumble and the GM will offer you a worse outcome or tough choice.
>On a 6-, you don't do the thing and something fucks you over.
In other words: replace "Yes or no" with
>Yes.
>Yes, but...
>No, and...
To be expanded into
>Yes, and...
>Yes.
>Yes, but...
>No, but...
>No.
>No, and...
There's always a component of human error, sure. You can, however, take steps to lessen it with clever design. I'm not sure if we are having a disagreement at all here?
No, I guess not. Just pointing out a few things for the audience.
>This discourages taking actions with a low success rate, which can, depending on the challenge at hand and the options available for characters, mean that some players are stuck twiddling their thumbs while the others play because they cause more harm than good.
This is just a random thought I'm throwing out here.
If only a single character has a decent succes rate, perhaps he could (given a little prep time) instruct the others in simple support tasks for the main challenge. They roll against an appropriate skill or ability, and the target number for the main challenge is lowered by a small, but not insignificant (possibly randomized) amount.
In my mind, this offers unskilled characters a chance to attempt a meaningful contribution. If I remain flexible in allowing the players to work out their supporting actions together in-character, perhaps it'll stimulate them to roleplay interactions.
Theoretically, this sounds like an elegant approach to me. Do you see any parts that don't hold up?
It's one of the things you can do for sure. Alone, it is probably not enough, and it isn't always applicable, but it's one of the generic options that has wide applications.