Episode 156: Like Performing Divination From Entrails

Role-playing games Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice
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This month, Mike and Roger talk about demonstration games and Roger rants about dice pools.

We mentioned: Game demonstration topic on tekeli.li, The Last Province, The Cthulhu Hack, Dread, Earthdawn, Ever & Anon (Roger’s Doctor Who rant is in #8), Powered by the Apocalypse, Maximum Overdrive, They Came From Beneath the Sea, Outgunned, Reign, Termination Shock, anydice.com.

We have a tip jar (please tell us how you’d like to be acknowledged on the show).

Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.

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I absolutely misread this when the alert popped up on my phone this morning as “Live Performance Divination from Entrails”

Which still seems fitting

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I can’t afford the royalty rates for the cat.

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Yay! I’m a guy that asked a question!

Thank you for the insightful discussion. I have GM’d for literally decades, but only twice for strangers (and I was too young both times to do a good job, tragically).

The store wants to have curated TTRPG sessions, and this is kinda a proof-of-concept, rather than exclusively to sell product (unless you consider me the product, which I guess I sorta am). Honestly I doubt if there will be much traction, but I will be optimistic and try.

I still have two months, but I am going to start prepping soon so I am not running the scenario for the first time day-of (I am good at improv, but not that good!)

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“Glad to be of servce!”

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What good are dice pools?
As stated earlier in the podcast, rolling dice as a visceral feel that cannot be replicated on a computer game. Rolling more and/or different dice than d% or 3d6 provides novelty and enjoyment for the players. I think it was Lisa Stevens who was excited to play Earthdawn (a funky dice pool) rather than Ars Magica (which only used a d10) because she could use all the different dice she had accumulated over the years (as gamers do).

Roger is right in that people don’t understand probability, but I’m going to turn that around and say that no one knows what odds should be attached to nearly activity undertaking by PCs. What should be the odds of successfully taking a sharp turn during a car chase? Or diagnosing and repairing a failed warp drive? Or getting some personal time with the handsome stranger at the end of the bar? Exact percentages are all made-up, even if you’re a GM who wants to know what all the odds are. You’re fooling yourself if you think a difference of 95% versus 98% is meaningful in this context.

The only thing a system really needs is a few guidelines for difficulty on may be a 5-degree scale from really easy to super hard. I definitely agree that the game designer should have a basic understanding of the odds of succeeding would be for characters of different abilities levels based on difficulty, but that doesn’t really need to be exposed to the GM and it’s probably best if kept away from the players given that the PCs wouldn’t know the odds anyway.

If a task is “too trivial to roll for,” this could be because the odds of failure reached (near)zero or because it is so mundane and uninteresting that wasting time on a roll would add nothing to the game.

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That comes into a slightly different gaming truism which I apply to pretty much any game I run now: I will only ask for a roll if I can think of interesting results for both success and failure.

I would argue that most people most of the time have at least a fuzzy idea of how likely they are to succeed at something. I don’t insist on a percentage, but when the game designer says “skill level 2 is pretty good, and task level 4 is moderately challenging” I am much happier if I can translate that to “about 60%” or whatever; as a player, but especially as a GM when I need to set a difficulty. Thus the probability table I drew up for They Came From Beneath The Sea.

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It’s not what the probability is in the Real World that I care about - it’s the probability in the game mechanics. If I’m playing a The Fast & The Furious clone, then I’d feel cheated if making a sharp turn in a car chase was as low as 60%. If I’m playing Coronation Street clone, then I’d be boggled if my PC’s chance of making a sharp turn in a car chase was as high as 30%.

When GMs try to apply Real World probabilities/difficulties to space opera games (or heist games or spy games), then it rapidly becomes frustrating and Not Fun to play.

Player of the thief: Hurrah! I rolled 26 to crack the safe.
Star Wars 5e GM: Not good enough. They have really high security, so this safe is difficultly 30 to break into.
Player of the thief: Uh, riiiiiight.
Other player: Hang on, I have a thing that gives you 1d4… oh, it was a 3. That’s only 29.
Star Wars 5e GM: Has anyone else got a special thing they can add?
Whole party: mutter, grumble, moan.

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My tendency these days runs more to:
GM: “Not enough, it’s a really fiddly safe. you’re not going to get this picked in a hurry.”
Player: “Have we still got all that boomex?”

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On They Came From Benath the Sea - Roger states this well but it was even more complicated than this. For instance, rolling a ‘10’ counted as 2 successes, except when it didnt, and in some situations with some abilities the book suggests you could increase the target number needed to be rolled (from 8). This leads to really counter-intuitive results where you’re more likely to get a critical than a base success with some situations (rolling one die against 2 difficulty, for instance), and adding dice actually increases your chance of fumbling in some situations (as Roger points out)

What I wanted from the rule book, exactly as Roger suggests, is some idea of how hard I was making things. If I increase the target number, does that make the difficulty harder than increasing the number of successes? If so, how much harder? If I say this is a 2-success task, is that -a lot- harder than one? How about 3 versus 2? How about if I say you need one success, then another roll to get another success?
It’s something that’s very hard to come up with on the fly.and while the precise numbers don’t matter too much, it means it’s hard to come up with tasks that are challenging for the PCs but not impossible, generally the sweet spot for tense gaming moments.

Now this is a problem with all RPGs to some extent, but I find it especially hard with dice pools. I have my issue with Challenge Ratings and similar, because they can suggest combat is the only way forward, but it doesn’t have to be this way; there is a value for both the PCs and the GM in being able to say, at a glance, ‘this is too tough for you/us, is there another solution than attacking/rewiring? etc’.

Another issue I have with dice pools is just the feel of it. It’s exciting to pick up a butt load of dice and roll them all together, I like that bit, but it’s generally then followed by (for me) an underwhelming ‘ummm… that’s…. Er… 1 success. No, 2. Okay, er, I’ll use ‘erotic meditation’ to Reroll the 2s. There. Um. No more successes.’

I just find it a bit clunky and anticlimactic.

Bizarrely I do quite like Genesys, for some reason. But I do have similar issues, in fact sometimes more issues, because now I’m looking at symbols, not numbers, and need to recognise them and add some up and subtract others, whilst the others playing have played much more than me, so have their results while I’m still thinking ‘now, was that symbol a fail or a threat?’ - generally I give up and use an online dice roller instead, but that takes a lot of the fun out of it.

I don’t want everything to be percentile dice, but I have a good feel for d20s, and even the 3d6 distribution curve. But I find very little intuitive about dice pool systems grumble grumble.

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I have a whole separate problem with the Genesys symbols. :slight_smile:

Here’s a set I found online:

image
image509×506 9.1 KB

Triumph is a super-Success. Yup, OK, I like that.

Success is opposed to Failure, and Advantage is opposed to Threat. But visually Success and Threat are the ones with circular elements to them, while Advantage and Failure are the ones without. And it’s not at all obvious that Despair is a super-Failure rather than a super-Threat.

This could have been done much better without a whole lot of effort.

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I think you may have pinpointed a big reason why I get confused, but also because the Star Wars symbols (that I have) are different to the Genesys dice, so I need to translate them further to make sense of them in the book.

It’s a wonder i don’t hate the system really! But I do feel when it works, it works well.

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I’m not a fan of having two different axis on which to adjust difficulty. For players, its generally okay to have different effects do different things: add a flat bonus, add a bonus die, change the target number, get a re-roll, etc. But even these get difficult to remember since there isn’t conistency.

I run into the same issue with D&D, except replace adding modifiers instead of counting successes. I have a few players who are incapable of either remember or writing down the total of their modifiers each roll needs.

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The one that breaks my brain is one that Michael mentioned briefly, the One Roll Engine as seen in Reign among others. The value of a set and the size of a set are both important, so you might have to choose between a pair of 9s or a quartet of 5s from your pool of six dice.

But this is another way in which Genesys works for me (but clearly not Michael!) even though most games that do this don’t, Modifiers are taken care of by adding positive or negative dice; then you generate a number of net successes (because each failure cancels one) and a number of net advantage (ditto threat). Usually one success is enough, but advantages can activate special effects (like multiple hits with an automatic weapon).

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I find ORE painfully clunky and trying to be far too clever for its own good. I have an inside joke with a friend who ran a bunch of ORE: “It makes me want to dickpunch Greg Stolze.”

Width makes sense: triples are better than pairs and more likely to happen the more dice you roll.
Height though is a flat distribution from 1 to 10. Sure, rolling more dice increases the chances that you’ll get multiple pairs and can pick the better one, but otherwise getting double-9s is just as likely as getting double-2s.

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I’ve not played it, but I’ve read a bunch of the Godlike material, and occasionally mine it for WWII campaign ideas. The problem I have with it is that normal people fail at at normal things fairly often; four dice is about as many as they roll and you fail to get any pairs on that reasonably often. The game is too focussed on its superheroes.

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I was remembering Advantage and Threat on the basis that the Advantage looks like Star Trek’s Federation symbol (=good) and Threat looks a bit like the Klingon symbol (=baddies).

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When I played Reign, the GM complained that none of the players were using a mechanic which he obviously thought was really nifty. Can’t remember quite what it was… setting aside one die to ‘fix’ its value before rolling??? Or re-rolling???

He asked why we never did it.
Two of us looked at him pityingly and said something along the lines of “Because if we don’t use it, our chance to hit is 50%, but if we do use it that chance drops to 40%”.

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The one time when setting aside a die with a fixed value does work well is when you are trying to do a called shot since (IIRC) the height of a roll indicates the hit location. For example, if you want to hit the head, preset a die to a 10 and then try to roll a 10 on any of the other dice to get a match.

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I’m pretty sure we did the maths on that and worked out we’d kill things faster (and also therefore get hit less often ourselves) if we just stuck to the regular mechanics.

(Made up numbers as example)… Like regular rolls needed 6 rounds to hit often enough to take out a 15 hit point bad guy, with an average of 3 misses and 3 hits. But the called shot required 7 rounds to take out the same 15 hit point bad guy, because even though you did more damage, you hit less often (5 misses and 2 hits).

Never underestimate players’ desire to take NPCs down fast.
Never underestimate players’ desire to minimize the number of rounds they are exposed to enemy attacks.

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