Fickle Fortuna: The Oracular Powers of Dice (Angry DM Part 3)

In the last two posts, I've built up some thoughts in response to The Angry DM's article Angry Rants: Randomness. If you haven't read them, checking them out can provide some more context but they aren't totally necessary for the discussion to follow.

Angry DM Rants: Randomness (An Alternate Take)
Lessons from Mordheim (Angry DM Randomness, Part 2)

As stated in the first of the two articles, the problem The Angry DM faces isn't randomness. It's when the application of randomness feels as though it overturns player agency. At first, it would be easy to argue that the problem is that we don't like randomness of outcome, but that's completely false: after all, if the game were played as "I want to kill the orc." "You swing your sword and kill the orc, now what?" it would be painfully boring.

We want a certain degree of unpredictability in outcome, it's what makes things interesting. It's what makes them role playing games as opposed to simply playing make believe or telling stories. Unpredictability is not enough, however. It must be tempered with the understanding that in some way, the players influenced their fate, either by the choices they made in the fiction, or through mechanics. Even just the idea that I invested specific points into making my character good at something is often times enough to make me feel as though I had some power over the situation.

This is the biggest issue in the example The Angry DM cites. Not only did the players lack agency in designing the characters they were playing, the characters themselves were largely irrelevant to the outcome. A 50% miss chance even if you hit? Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Why not just flip coins to find out who wins? 

I earlier made the argument that the problem was 'doing it wrong,' which directly implies a 'correct' way exists. I'll step up. 

Randomness is done right when it meets two basic criteria:

The first is that the actual probability of a thing should in some way match your expectation of that probability. If my character is a high-level grandmaster blacksmith, I shouldn't have a 50/50 chance of successfully making an axe. I should be able to guestimate probabilities of a thing without actually knowing the mechanics, just on based on my understanding of the fictional reality.

The second criteria goes in hand with the first. As a player, my actions have to matter. If they don't, I immediately check out. If I can't influence what happens, you've made me a placeholder. Why should I actually care about what's happening? The more influence I can have over this probability of outcome, the more willing I am to accept everything going totally badly.


Give the players enough agency, and they will happily accept hanging themselves.

All of the above chiefly speaks to the idea of randomness of outcome. Where the true beauty in randomness shines is through the generation of circumstance. 

I love random tables. My DMing style for games like AD&D or OSR titles is very heavily dependent on the idea of creating systems for myself that generate circumstances for the players to confront. I set up the sandbox, set up the system, and let them run wild. In practice, this means having lots of random tables.

Dice have a particular kind of oracular power to them. With the right kind of setup, and the right kind of tables, the story can bend in interesting and unpredictable ways all of its own accord. They make the game take on a will and a life of its own. They can shape the parameters of the fiction in ways that no one in the group would have thought of or chosen if they had the opportunity.

This is a major point for me, as I'm kind of a softie as a DM. I don't want to kill my PCs, I want to see them succeed. I want them to do awesome things and feel awesome doing them. This is why things like damage being random are a godsend - if I had to choose damage for the PC? I would feel even worse when they died than I do now. If I carefully scripted every encounter, I would always find myself leaning towards going soft on the party, always making sure everything was just under what they could handle. Worse, if I did kill them off, they would feel their deaths were arbitrary and unfair. It would cause hurt feelings and OOC issues. There is no winning.

Operating from a system that randomly generates content is extremely liberating. The players and I are on the same page, and my role becomes an impartial adjudicator and interpreter of the fiction rather than forced into some adversarial position, and because the results of many of these things are random players are more willing to accept it when things do go badly. As a special bonus, players quickly lose their video-game expectation that everything will be carefully balanced to their ability and become more cautious as a result.

At least for me, however, the greatest benefit of all is that I as the DM get to take part in the excitement of the story. Rather than setting up a careful script and wait for the PCs to figure out how they will act it out, I get to watch the story unfold with them, learning information as it is established.

Lessons from Mordheim (Angry DM Randomness, part 2)

I played a campaign of Mordheim earlier this year. It was a lot of fun in its own right, but after a couple years of playing and developing narrative-based RPGs, it was also a breath of fresh air and a real eye opener in terms of game design.

The thing that separates Mordheim from other skirmish games or wargames that I've played is that there is a continuity from one game to the next. Your little warband grows, changes and adapts over time. You gain the resources to hire new members or upgrade their equipment. They gain experience over time and can become more effective, and through injury they can also be wounded, maimed, or killed.

What makes this really charming is that when a character "Advances" (read: levels up), the exact nature of that advancement is randomly determined. When one of your men earns enough experience points, you roll to find out what they gain. Likewise, when one of your heroes is taken out of action during the game, you get to roll afterward to find out what happened to them. Do they succumb to their injuries or find themselves permanently diminished by them? Do they live with scars from their trauma, or do they walk away stronger for it?

Sometimes, this gives you hilariously useless results (Str4 archers? uh, thanks), other times, this winds up being completely broken, but that's part of the experience. That's part of the draw. When you aren't in direct control of what happens, the excitement becomes watching it develop. You want to watch your men organically grow and change through the trials and tribulations set before them, and regardless of the outcome, a story emerges.

I've talked about the idea of Post-Narrative gameplay before, and I'll have to write more on the subject here sometime, but there is a significant draw to finding out what happens. When an outcome seems to come about organically, there is a satisfaction in watching it even when it's not an outcome we would have wanted. This is the draw behind such masochistic endeavors as the computer game Dwarf Fortress, and most of my experience with minecraft (I never knew how much could go wrong in a game).

This idea even cuts both ways. One of the most interesting events of our last Mordheim campaign was that the Kislevite player had a youngblood he named Wesely Crusher. For whatever reason, this character routinely managed to get credit for kills, get away with objectives, and otherwise pull off MVP status even with the awful stats youngbloods start with. He was busy using his heavy-hitters to do heavy-hitter stuff, after all. Halfway through the campaign though, those experience points start adding up. Through absurd advancement rolls, Crusher winds up upping his strength and toughness, gains a couple extra wounds, extra attacks, and then special abilities with greatweapons.

Wesley Crusher gets swole'.

Soon, Wesley is not just good. He's a broken one-man killing machine with something like 3 greatsword attacks per round and the ability to soak wounds like he was on PCP.  It was insane. And hilarious.

Conventional wisdom would argue that this is actually a failing of the system, that it can create such monstrosities, and they would have a point - if the player had been able to intentionally build him that way. Because it was decreed by the dice gods however, it became a spectacle. A quirk of fate that created this god among men, and it was awesome.

Competitive players will probably not buy this logic, I'm sure, but Mordheim is not meant to be a competitive game. There are plenty enough of those floating around out there as it is. Mordheim is a game that is played to find out what happens, and it is awesome.

(So awesome, in fact, that we wound up writing a skirmish war game after the campaign ended. It's sitting in my google drive, waiting for me to finish the writing on it one day..)

Smart readers will counter that there are a lot of differences between this kind of game and an RPG. Mordheim is a skirmish war-game. You're not expected to role play your decisions, and you control a whole group of men rather than a single character. You aren't attached to the individual members of your warband in the same way you are attached to your player character. These are all true and valid points, and I'm not sure that I would advocate that character advancement in an RPG be random (though it might be an interesting experience), but the heart of the lesson is the same:

We crave randomness in our games. Unpredictability fills a certain need and provides a certain joy that can't be fulfilled through deliberate decision making, even if we say we prefer to be in charge.

And this, my friends, will be the topic for tomorrow.

Until then,

Angry DM Rants: Randomness (An Alternate Take)

This morning, The Angry DM posted an article entitled Angry Rants: Randomness which shared some of his views on the place of chance in a role-playing game and his opinions thereof. As you might guess by the title, he wasn't a fan. While I can see his point, I'd like to offer an alternate take.

Random chance in a game is a very specific tool in the GM or game developer's arsenal. Like electricity, it is a neutral force. Used correctly, you produce wonders. Used incorrectly or carelessly, you're going to get someone fried.

The argument presented in the Angry DM's article is mostly demonstrated through a discussion of a poor experience in a prewritten module and from what I understand of it, yeah. It sucked. At a glance, it seems to ask players to play through what is essentially a lottery to determine an important plot point, and that is a very poor way to make use of chance. I can't blame him for not being pleased.

That said, what the Angry DM is addressing is player agency. Players want to feel like they are making decisions, and that those decisions matter. This is a big deal for a game, as otherwise you wind up just going through the motions. "Oh, there's a monster? I guess I keep rolling dice until it dies."

I'm a big fan of player agency. In fact, that's one of the driving design goals in Band of Bastards - that everything from character creation to combat and social politics are based on interesting decisions that the players have made, rather than simply "how many dice can I roll?" or "How high is my modifier?" It's the chief reason that there were no "combat bonus" Edges one could take, as we wanted explicitly to get away from the idea that you had to "build" your character a certain way in order to be effective. It's about choice. 

But does that make randomness the enemy? (Even a necessary one?) Absolutely not. It's about how you use it. So how do you pull this off correctly?

Join me again tomorrow, where we'll explore that very topic and more.

Until then,