A Matter of Dice

This very wordy post might be a bit too inside baseball for those of you who do not come here for ttrpg-related things - but hopefully you will find it worth your time anyway. And if you've only ever played one particular ttrpg, perhaps you'll find one of the others I discuss in this post of interest of you - I'll be posting links to stuff at the end. I might do some general recommendation posts for people who are looking for new games to try, too? Let me know if you're interested in that.

Next week, I promise there will be an art-post: that most holy of holidays, Goblinweek, begins tomorrow, and I have things in the works.

There are any number of ways to construct a decision-making mechanic in a ttrpg - card-prompts, questions, exchanges of tokens, coin-flipping, etc. - but the most popular one remains to roll dice. People, it turns out, quite like shiny math rocks. I do too, and in finally taking this fantasy adventure game from vague concept to playable draft, I've been turning over a bunch of alternatives in my mind.

Because each dice mechanic does things a little bit different, and each of them pushes the fiction around them in different ways. And by pushing the fiction in certain ways, it shapes what kind of stories you tell. The dice-mechanic doesn't determine the story, but it certainly impacts it.

Actions and Complications
In a standard Powered by the Apocalypse system, the dice mechanic asks you to roll two six-sided dice, and then add whatever modifier you have associated with the relevant stat. So, if you want to Read A Situation in Alas for the Awful Sea, you roll 2d6+Brains, and add the total together.

The results are then divided into three tiers: if you roll a 6 or less, you fail at what you attempted to do, and there is some negative consequence. If you roll a 7-9, you achieve what you set out to do, but there is some additional complication. If you roll a 10 or above, you do what you wanted, and get a positive extra consequence of some kind.

Due to the dice-size involved, and the commonly small modifying numbers (usually -1 to +3), your most likely result is going to be in the 7-9 range - meaning that your most common result is going to be a success but with complications.

What this means is that any dice-roll is likely to push the collaborative story you are telling in the direction of something messy and complicated. Your character, while clearly capable things most people are not, is more likely to end up having to deal with the complicating consequences of their actions. As a result, systems built on this mechanic are very good at telling stories of people caught up in matters beyond their control - but it is harder to have that arc from zero to legendary hero that fantasy adventure fiction likes to portray.

Position and Effect
Forged in the Dark's standard dice system uses a similar scale of outcomes - with low numbers resulting in failure with consequences, middling results turning into a success with a complication, and the highest number translating into a full success without downsides. The number of six-sided dice you roll is determined by how skilled you are in what you are attempting - the higher your skill, the more dice you roll.

What sets it apart is that each roll is modified by your position in the fiction, and the effect your action is able to achieve. The positions are divided into Controlled, Risky and Desperate . The effects are divided into Limited, Standard and Great. If you act from a Controlled position, you are safer than you would be from a Risky position - but your effect might be Limited, when risking something would have gotten you a Great effect. And the same is true in reverse: if you fail a Controlled roll, the consequences of that failure are less than if you had failed a Desperate roll. You can mitigate some negative consequences by taking on Stress instead - but Stress is a limited resource, and you need to deal with it after a situation is done, or negative consequences will keep spiralling.

It is up to the player to negotiate with their GM, and to act within the fiction, in ways that improve their positioning and effect - which means that Forged in the Dark games often involve a lot of thinking about things tactically, but it is the tactics of fiction, rather than the tactics of spellslots and number of feet of movement and HP numbers.

Stress and Fallout
The Resistance system - showcased in Rowan, Rook & Decard's Spire, and its nightmare sibling Heart - uses ten-sided dice. Your character has a list of skills - such as Deceive, Fight and Investigate - and a list of Domains - such as Crime, High Society and Religion - that represents their personal abilities and the world in which they live. To act, you combine your skill with the context in which you find yourself - if you attack someone in a church, you are likely rolling Fight/Religion (which sounds like the plot to most JRPGs, actually) - and roll your d10s. The highest number you roll is your result.

If you rolled a 1, you fail and take twice the usual stress; if you rolled 2-5, you fail and take the regular amount of stress. If you roll 6-7, you are successful but take stress, while an 8-9 is a success without stress. If you roll a 10, you succeed without stress, and improve your impact.

The stress you take - or don't - gets tracked along different tracks depending on what kind of stress it is (bleeding out is a different kind of stress from being spotted by the authorities in a crowd, for example). But the total number matters, as after a roll that increases your stress, you need to roll a d12 to see if you can hold it together. If you fail, you get a fallout - a short or longterm consequence that changes something about your character or the situation they are in.

It is, as a mechanic, built to put characters under pressure, and encourages you to play hard and fast with your stress as a resource - taking risks and accepting minor fallouts to achieve things. But if you aren't careful, the stress eventually catches up to you, and you suffer more serious consequences.

Bigger Swings
The system that I think is likely most familiar to people is the one used by games like DnD and Pathfinder - rolling a d20+modifier to hit a target number. The higher the level of your character, the bigger the modifier - as long as you roll using a skill or weapon your character is good at using - and the bigger the swing across the spectrum of numbers. While a 2d6-based system usually sticks to a range of 1 to 14 regardless of how strong your character becomes, a d20 system can swing between a 1 and well into the 30s, depending on level, skills used and dice result. At higher levels, you have skills that put you far above the baseline of average humans: you become a kind of legend.

The standard d20+modifier systems do not concern themselves with tiered results, or fictional complications: you either pass your dice roll, or you fail it.

In Conclusion: Making Numbers Matter
So, after all that rambling about dice and their impact on fiction - what am I doing with Fantasy Adventure TTRPG*?

I am building a high-adventure system. A sword and sorcery-generating fiction machine. A game for bright sparkling magic, sword-swinging and the stuff of legends. And while it is certainly possible to make that kind of thing using the building blocks provided by Powered by the Apocalypse or the Resistance system, those systems are more about mess and complication and stress as a finite resource.

So at the time of writing this, I am planning to make a d20-based system.

The big swing of d20+modifier is a good way to gesture at the arc that takes you from regular person to grand adventurer: from the dirt to the stars. Besides, I have never made a d20 system before, and it would be a shame to leave those shiny math rocks of mine to gather dust - I have some very pretty ones. I designed The Dark Below just so I'd get to roll d12s; it's a good excuse.

However, one thing about the standard d20 systems that has always irked me a bit is that they are very binary: you succeed or you don't. And while success leads to further fiction, a failed roll often results in nothing happening - and as a storyteller, "nothing happens" is quite possibly the most boring outcome. It is a wall. You can of course try to repeat your action - but if you fail again, you hit the same wall. Nothing changes.

Also - even when you have the blessing of a big modifying number, in certain ways, that number does not matter. As long as you reach or exceed your target number, it does not matter if you exceed it by 1 - or by 15. Likewise, if you fail to reach your target number, it doesn't matter if you failed by 1, or by 12. The result is the same. Setting aside the critical failures and critical successes that appear in DnD when you roll a 1 or a 20 on the die - a failure is a failure, and a success is a success.

Having that +10 on your sword-swing makes your number look nice and powerful - but it is functionally no different than having a +1, as long as you reach your target. Your numbers are, in some ways, not fully connected to the fiction.

And having entered into the world of ttrpgs through Powered by the Apocalypse, that has always felt a little flat to me.

So, for my next trick, I will be attempting to combine the big swing of d20+modifier aiming at a target number, with the tiered results used by some of the above-mentioned systems. To do this, I am glancing both at my own experience in said systems, as well as the tiered results used in games like Quest - and the distance-from-target-number list of consequences I encountered in Teens in Space. How far above the target you are should be reflected in your results: you have accomplished something impressive! And how far below the number you are should shape your failure: a small fumble is less grave than a big one.

Some care needs to be taken here, because having the same list of results regardless of the context of the action can come out feeling a bit weird. Having the consequence for swinging a sword or casting a bolt of lightning at someone be, in rules-terms, the same as when you are particularly successful at persuading someone to sell you a magical artifact for cheap is a bit odd, isn't it?

So I am currently looking at making two separate lists: one for consequences in combat, and one for consequences out of combat. These will be made easy to reference for players, and hopefully clear enough that a bit of practise will help you memorise the usual consequences. It's very much still a work in progress, and I haven't fully figured out what is going on the list as possible consequences yet - I want it to be interesting, but not too much to keep track of, and I want it to reflect the context of what is happening - but I will keep working on it.

But having some notion of what dice I'm using, and how, will let me start thinking about how character-creation is shaped, and how the game will function in different styles of play - how to shape the rules for exploration and social interaction, and how to shape them for combat and intrigue. And knowing that will let me start thinking about abilities and skills and all the little bits that lets you go on that grand adventure.

Little by little - and page by scribbled notebook page - I think this thing might be starting to come together.

*) name pending: I've got ideas.

Systems and games referenced:

Powered by the Apocalypse
Games rooted in a dice mechanic and move structure originating in Apocalypse World by Meguey and D. Vincent Baker. An SRD document for PbtA systems is in construction at the time of writing, on which you can build whatever you want. Good examples of the Apocalypse engine in practise is Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2a, and City of Mist. Alas for the Awful Sea, which was mentioned above, is by the wonderful Storybrewers team.

Forged in the Dark
The family of games that have John Harper's Blades in the Dark as a shared origin-point. In the FitD family, you will find games like Beam Saber - a game about mech-pilots in a time of war - and Songs for the Dusk - a science-fantasy of a hopeful post-apocalypse. If you would rather go on scifi adventures, Scum and Villainy might suit you better.

The Resistance System
The stress-and-fallout centric Resistance system comes with a pretty generous community license, which allows you to build your own games based on it. The community license can be found here. If you would like to have a go at playing a Resistance-game, you can pick up Spire - a game of dark-elf resistance to tyranny - or Heart - a descent into a nightmare warren to reach the ever-calling Heart itself. If you would like to listen to a podcast that puts the Resistance system into practise, the Sangfielle season of Friends at the Table is an excellent choice.

Misc.
Quest is a fantasy adventure system with a remarkable un-searchable name, which uses a flat d20 roll without modifiers, but with a tiered list of results. The digital game book is available for free on their website, as is their license for community created content.

Teens in Space is a space-opera game, spinning off the game Kids on Bikes.

Ryuutama was not referenced at any point in this rambling post, but I really like its dice system and its vibes, and I do recommend checking it out. It is originally a Japanese game, but it exists in an excellent translation - and the rulebook itself is worth having just for how pretty it is.