The Mysterious Lever: December 2015

Monday, December 21, 2015

Stats (Part 1): Narrowing the Scope

Character stats are supposed to represent how 'naturally good' your character is at something, and are usually used to add generic bonuses to a wide variety of actions.  But natural talent can be either very broad or very specific.  So stats are a difficult RPG mechanic to get 'right'.

For example, if I want to be a 'strong' character, a good stat for me would be 'strength'.  Strength then gives me a bonus to all of the things I would need muscle for: throwing rocks, or running really fast.  But having muscle in one's arms isn't the same as having muscle in one's legs.  So do we need two different stats, one for arms and one for legs?  If I choose legs, am I both good at jumping and good at running?  These are separate muscle groups, so do we need even more stats to represent this?

You could almost endlessly break down stats into more and more specific categories, so let's instead try to sum them up.  Strength and agility, for example, could both be represented with 'body'.  Both charisma and intelligence could be represented with 'mind'. Combine body and mind, and eventually we're left with a single stat: 'goodness'.

Both extremes do not make for a good game.  Too much, and it's too complicated.  Too little, and there's not enough depth to be interesting.  Finding that perfect balance is the challenge for any good RPG.

We need stats because we want to represent a character with a quick glance at a few numbers.  It allows us to envision a 'first impression' for appearance and personality without needed to dig deeper into the character's build.   In addition, it removes the need for "synergy" bonuses between skills (e.g. I'm athletic, so I'm naturally a little bit better at swimming, climbing, and running than the average person).   Stats are a commonly used idea, and it might seem 'different' to try to make a game without them, but they are a fantastic building block both in terms of character development and actual game mechanics.

Finding the right stats for any game comes down to mechanics and feel.  Unfortunately, mechanics is a chicken-egg problem, because in order to make good mechanics, we need at least an idea of the stats we're going to use.  So I've found it best to start with feel, and iterate as much as possible until satisfied with the result.

For Hostargo, I wanted to create a simplistic base system.  That means less is more, so I started with just body and mind.  I feel like these are good stats, since they fully represent two very distinct parts of being 'alive'.   But I wanted a little bit more depth than that.  Some of my favorite systems use 4 stats: body => strength & agility, and mind => intelligence & charisma.   Unfortunately, I have to pick on charisma (there may be a whole other blog post on why).  I want to spread it out, because in my opinion both might and intelligence can make your more intimidating, something usually put under this awkward charisma stat.

Just ripping it out leaves me with three stats: strength, agility, and intelligence.  I don't like this spread anymore, however, since it's bias towards mental attributes.  To be a good 'body' character, I have to increase two stats, where as a 'mind' character only has to increase one.

At this point I'm ready to jump over and look at my mechanics to see if I can come up with some clues as to where to go from here.  That jump will be continued in my next blog post!  Thanks for reading, and hopefully you'll follow up with me next time.

Friday, December 18, 2015

GM-Player Trust in an Open Roll System

Following my initial post about dice mechanics, there was a great question about the "Challenge Ratings" I proposed.  Normally, games like D&D have the game master (GM) secretly think of a 'target number' for the player to roll against.  The player rolls the dice, adds up his bonuses, and tells the GM what the final resulting number is.  The GM compares this result against the secret target number, and then tells the player whether they failed or succeeded.

The "Challenge Rating" (CR) mechanic I proposed replaces this target number (TN).  However, unlike TNs, the CR in Hostargo is going to be revealed before the roll ever happens.  This is almost a necessity in the resolution mechanic equation:
Success IF: Skill Roll + CR < Stat
In the equation, the player knows stat, but is going to roll skill.  This means that in order for this to work, either A) the player needs to know the CR before the roll, or B) the GM must secretly add the CR to the player's roll and compare it against the character's stat.  The second option is very complicated for the GM, so revealing the CR before the roll makes the most sense.

The question is, how does the revealing of this information affect the game?  In traditional RPGs, the hidden information of the TN adds a level of uncertainty and excitement for the players.  More importantly, knowing this information is considered metagaming, which detracts from the game's immersion.  The players generally shouldn't know exactly what they're up against, mathematically, instead relying on the GM's descriptions to judge how difficult a task or enemy will be.

But this method isn't without it's downsides.  The biggest issue here can be, oddly, trust. When the GM withholds information about the game, players have no insight as to whether or not the GM is being 'fair'.  This often leads to misfortunes turning into grudges; feelings of being 'robbed' and 'railroaded' can ruin a game, even if the GM wasn't actually fudging numbers.  Of course on the flip side, hidden TNs can give the GM considerable control over the flow of the game's events.  And the players should trust the GM... right?

Really, neither open or secret TNs are bad, or even worse than the other.  Hidden TNs are a tried and true method that has worked in RPGs for decades.  But newer games have shown us that this isn't the only way.  Games like Apocalypse World use such a simple engine that the players always know if they succeed or fail, with minimal math involved.  Games like Numenera do exactly what CRs in Hostargo are going to do: the GM says a number, and then the player tells the GM the result.

Let's look at the benefits of such "open roll" systems.  First, it takes away some of the mental burden from the GM, which is a significant benefit considering GMs are the busiest player in RPGs.  It enables the GM to focus on the consequences of the player's action in terms of the story, rather than needing to think about the result of the numbers and then the story.  Secondly, open rolls help the GM keep the game 'balanced' in terms of relative numbers.  The GM is forced to keep the numbers exactly as they should be, ensuring that, in the views of the players, the numbers are solid and consistent.  This helps keep everyone grounded in both the rules and the game world.

Another benefit of open rolls is tactical knowledge.  In practice, I've found that secretive rolls slow the GM down in the already most time-consuming aspect of most RPGs: combat.  The players quickly deduce the TNs down to a few possibilities anyway, so the benefits of the numbers being secret are soon lost.  Open CRs, on the other hand, not only lighten the GM's load, but also allow the players to see exactly how institutional factors like cover, fog, and flanking are affecting their battles. Having this information in the open focuses the game on the more interesting parts of combat, and keeps the math in the background where it belongs.

Tactical combat brings us back to trust.  In general, players will have less issues losing a particular battle when they know the GM wasn't rigging the game against them. You might be thinking, "but the GM can always rig the numbers and story against the players".  True, but as the world-builder this is already assumed by the players in the game.  What it obvious and in the forefront, is if the GM is suspected of "cheating" the numbers just to have the story turn out the way he wants.  Once a scenario is set up, players take pride in 'winning' with what is presented, but feel shitty about when the GM controls the scene with numbers rather than story elements. The conversation then starts to get into just good GMing practices, but the idea behind open rolls would be to simply remove this possibility altogether.

RPG characters live or die by the dice.

Additionally, Hostargo will be focused on games where the players play as law enforcement, so having that feeling of fairness is important to the overall atmosphere of the game.  In contrast, games where evil reigns supreme (e.g. horror games) might benefit from secret TNs, since it adds to the mystery and uncertainty of the game.  Hostargo is also going to be a generally action-heavy and combat-focused game, meaning that I want every last ounce of speed I can get out of my engine, and pulling pressure off of the GM is a great way to do that.

For all of these reasons, I have decided to go with an open-roll, non-secretive CR system for Hostargo.  I would be lying if I didn't say that the Hostargo CR dice mechanic didn't play the biggest part in that decision, but hopefully I've shown why open-roll systems work well, since they have their own benefits and feel compared to hidden roll systems.

Cheers!

Saturday, December 12, 2015

A Theory of Inverse Dice

The first step to creating a role playing game, for me, was to get a dice mechanic that I was happy with.  Ignoring the actual 'game', you have to start with an engine, and to build an efficient engine you need to build it around a core.  That core is what the players interact with the game the most: the dice.

I, like many people before me, have been studying dice mechanics in tabletop games.  There are plenty of random discussions online where people toss around systems that they like or dislike. There are honest to goodness research papers that try to analyze dice mechanics from an academic point of view.  And of course, there are plenty of blog posts - just like this one - that explain what conclusion they came to when going down this thought path.

The best sites that I've found try to define exactly what dice systems are trying to represent.  My favorite of these definition sites is http://rpg-design.wikidot.com/evaluation. It breaks down the different possible simulated variables, and why the "perfect system" would use one way over another.  This site inspired me to create what I'm calling an "inverse dice" system.

What dice systems today are missing is reduced variance as character skill increases. I define variance as the number of possible outcomes for a given roll.  Reducing variance represents the character's ability to perform more consistently.  This is important because as characters become more skilled, they want to not only to be able to succeed at higher level tasks, but also fail less often (and eventually not at all) at easier ones.  This means both raising their maximum dice roll, and skewing their distribution towards higher numbers. 

So what do current systems do for us? Single die systems have a flat distribution, and a static variance.  Multi-dice systems have a bell curve, but still always the same variance.  They do increase the 'average', but it doesn't actually skew the distribution at all.  Dice pools are interesting, but actually have more variance as skill increases, since each die you add increases the number of possible outcomes.  So far, no one is fitting our bill.

One of the simplest yet most innovative dice mechanic in recent years has been D&D 5e's "advantage/disadvantage" mechanic.  By no means were they the first to think of this concept, but I will cover their true innovation in a future post.  Really, what the "roll two, take the higher" mechanic does for us is skews the distribution in one direction.  This gets us a lot closer to the "ideal" distribution described in the rpg-design wiki article than a "normal" distribution does.  But still, actual variance doesn't change, as there are still exactly 20 outcomes.  In fact, this mechanic boils down to about a 20% increased chance of success (roughly +4).

An unfortunate way of thinking about all of this is the fact that success & failure do actually boil down to a simple % chance.  No matter how wonderful a distribution or varied variance you have, the roll will always come down to % chance of success vs. % chance of failure.  So do percentile systems have it right?  No, but not because they are necessarily wrong. The problem with straight up percentile systems is that they are either boring, too complicated, or more typically, both.  Boring, I say, because generic % ups and downs do not excite players. Most people don't want to know their exact chances.
"Never tell me the odds!" - Han Solo
But that's not all - percentile systems also have a hard cap.  You can't get better than 100% chance of success.  This is not great if you want a flexible game design, because when we want to know the chance of killing the rat vs. the dragon vs. the demigod, all of those numbers have to be relative.  If you define your scope such that the dragon is a 99% difficulty enemy, what is the demigod?  What these systems actually do is always compare skills and abilities against their target, and calculate %'s during the game.  But that's too complicated.  We don't want to calculate it ourselves - we want that information hidden away in our dice.

Instead, we want to easily see our character's skills being represented relative to the presented challenge.  The dice should be the formula; we shouldn't have to apply the formula in order to roll the dice. An ideal system would allow us to simulate the world around the dice with infinite relative numbers.  A +1 knife vs. a +50 dinosaur vs. a +1000 meteor just isn't easy to do in percentiles.

Yikes... we're almost running out of options! This is why I have not found a system that represents this ideal curve, and that some people have claimed it to be probably impossible.  But we have a few things left to explore...

One of the more intriguing systems I've encountered is Savage Worlds.  This system uses increasing dice sizes to represent character skill increasing.  Unfortunately, this has the clear problem of increasing variance as skill increases, since larger dice sizes mean more possible outcomes on each roll.  Yet, maximums are increasing, and most interestingly - even with 'flat' distributions per roll, the system actually has a really nice curve when compared against itself, with a property I also like: diminishing returns.

What really hooked me though, was the discussion around exploding dice in Savage Worlds.  You "explode" when you hit the max number on a die, and you get to roll an extra die to add to your result.  This leads to random wild rolls that can upset the game by having an unskilled character for some odd reason get really high results.  Of course, while this is fun, a lot of people are turned off by it, because it doesn't make any sense.  Why should someone with less skill be more likely to pull of something extreme?  The system still works, of course, but with this explosion mechanic, the chances of success per die increase don't even change that drastically.

I hope at this point you might be thinking what I'm thinking.  Let's inverse the Savage Worlds system. Flip it on it's head.  Lets do smaller dice sizes as skill increases.  Let's make critical hits a '1', meaning that the smaller your dice size, the greater chance of a critical hit.  Awesome!

However, how do we actually make that work in a real system?
Dice Mechanics 101: Comparison > Addition > Anything else.
Basically, we don't want to ever have to multiply, divide, or subtract (or, obviously, anything more complicated).  This unfortunately means we can't subtract, which would have been a very nice implementation to our shrinking dice (e.g. Challenge Rating [CR] - roll).

To solve this, we need to think about what other tools we have to play with.  Some systems like GURPS have a "roll under stat" system, which is neat because most systems have character stats and skills rolled into one ( i.e. stat + skill = roll bonus ).

So in 'roll under' systems, success would be: roll + skill + CR < stat.

Wait a minute, this is perfect! Our problem with GURPS's mechanic is that it has a static variance roll of 3d6, so let's replace roll + skill with our shrinking dice mechanic.  All of a sudden not only do we have a really simple equation: roll + CR < stat, we have created a solution for the most elusive of dice mechanics: the reduced variance!

Final Solution:
Skill Roll + CR < Stat 

But we're not done yet.  One thing we don't have is a normal distribution.  This is important because it reduces the chance of wild outcomes in regular systems - a way of mock-reducing variance, if you will.  Or... is it?  In fact, this brings us back around to how everything boils down to %'s.  Remember, the only actual problem with % systems is that they tend to be uninteresting, and more importantly overly complex due to the need to calculate the chances as part of the game. So do we really need a bell curve? I don't think so!  Our single-die system is actually just fine, because while alone it has a 'flat' distribution, when compared with itself over the different skill levels, we see that the reduced variance actually creates a nice % skew curve!

Bonus points: the D&D advantage/disadvantage is still very elegant, because again 'comparison' > 'addition', so instead of adding +4, we get to roll an extra die and compare, which is actually more fun.  So let's borrow (okay - steal outright) the advantage/disadvantage system, and we've got ourselves a deliciously simple and satisfying system.

Now, while I have searched fairly extensively, I have not encountered a system that uses inverse dice like this.  If you know of such a system, please let me know! I am unlikely to be the first in any of these thoughts, so it would be of great help to see how someone else implemented it, so that I can learn from their success/failures.

In a future post, I will explain how I implemented this system in my upcoming game, Hostargo! Cheers!

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Why make your own RPG?

So I want to create an RPG.  A lot of RPG players often do in their lifetime, and I would guess that the majority of GMs indeed have at one point or another.  But few of these homebrew systems actually go the full distance, which includes plenty of mine over the last ten years.  Fewer yet go the extra mile and actually produce something visible and viable for the public.  That extra mile is my goal: to get a physical book published, in print, and for sale.

More importantly though, I want to create a solid game.  Whatever creation comes out at the end of my journey, I don't want to look back and have regrets.  I don't want to have others easily ripping it apart.  I don't want a shaky system that's a "good idea, but poorly implemented" as I've heard so many times reading through indie games and the discussions that follow them.

I'm set out to do this right, which means starting at the very basic, bare-bones concepts and building my way up to the top.  I've already taken that leap this year, as I've finally created something I am proud of, which is a relief after so many years of failed attempts.  What I hope to accomplish by writing about it in this blog is to not only double-check myself, but document my thoughts & design process so others can check it as well.

But, why make my own?  Why, when there's hundreds of professional games, and thousands of free ones out there with decades of content built around them, would I ever need to create something new?  There's two big reasons.

First and foremost, I have yet to find a game that completely satisfies me.  I feel like I'm this awkward middle-ground player, that always sways between deep mechanics, and that awesome story that develops with good role-players.  Despite my searching, D&D 5e has actually come the closest yet to being something I am completely happy with.  Yet... there's still something missing.

Innovation.  While D&D 5e and a lot of more recent games have come out with new, innovative ideas, I believe that we're just now at the cusp of prime creativity - the edge of the wave, just about to crest.  We've seen an upwards slope in recent years, but it's time to push it further.  I think that if we dive deep into what makes some of the most successful games tick, we can pull from them like a whirlpool pulls water from the ocean, gathering up all of their great creative energies and forming something made of pure awesome.

And hey - I enjoy it.  So really, it's just because I want to!

Monday, December 7, 2015

The Start of a New Adventure

Life has gotten in the way of my gaming.  Each day I drag my feet home from work, do my obligatory life maintenance, and desperately try to scrape up as much 'me time' before doing the whole thing over again.

Fuuuuuck that.  So I've taken some life advice, and am putting my favorite hobby first: tabletop role-playing.  As the years roll on, the stack of RPG books that I've read but have never gotten the chance to play continues to grow.  That ends in 2016!

First and foremost, this year I have started a journey that I've been plotting and planning for many years.  I will be creating my own TRPG!  Included in that journey, however, is exploring as many RPGs out there as I can.  I have created a small group to help me do this, and we will hopefully meet once a week to learn, play, and discuss a variety of games, including my own.

I hope that you'll follow me on my journey, and that as I throw out ideas for science, you might just grab a chunk to throw right back!