Author Topic: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure  (Read 11073 times)

Offline Dan2

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On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« on: November 08, 2011, 06:39:18 PM »
I'm torn between XdY+Z and another system called, "reverse dice-pool."

The way reverse dice-pool works is this: You roll some number of dice (The instance I saw was with d6s); if none of the dice come up 1, you succeed. Difficulty is adjusted by adding and removing dice. If you care what, exactly, caused you to fail, you can use differently colored dice for different things. The more 1s you get, the worse the failure.

So, effectively, you're trying to roll as few dice as possible?  Hmm, I have to say from a flavor perspective, I wouldn't like that a whole lot, though I can't really comment on the mathematical aspect.

So, with your best roll (1 dice) you have a 17% of failure? O_o that really doesn't float for me. Easy rolls (based on the character skill in that field) should have a 100% rate of success, with maybe 10% chance of failure if some maluses come into play, or even less/none for real experts. (basically removing the need to roll at all for trivial stuff for well built characters, thus speeding up the game)

I don't particularly disagree, but if your only problem with a dice system is that there is always a not-inconsiderable chance of failure, I'd invite you to reconsider it.
A trivial task done by experts should have a 100% chance of success, as you claim.  In that case, why would you bother with a roll?  If you know that the task is trivial, let the character do it and move on.  Like you've already said, it speeds up the game.
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Offline Bard

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2011, 07:33:25 PM »
I don't particularly disagree, but if your only problem with a dice system is that there is always a not-inconsiderable chance of failure, I'd invite you to reconsider it.
A trivial task done by experts should have a 100% chance of success, as you claim.  In that case, why would you bother with a roll?  If you know that the task is trivial, let the character do it and move on.  Like you've already said, it speeds up the game.

In my view of a good game, the "triviality" of a task must be determined by the character sheet and rules, not from an arbitrary DM decision (even if it's a good and logic decision).
In a system like D&D for example, when you've got a +24 to spellcraft (between stat, skill and bonuses) you are 100% SURE that you can identify a potion without fail in normal condition. Thus, since by the rules you cannot fail, the roll is not needed, the task is considered trivial and you just do it without rolling anything.
If the dice mechanics don't allow at all for a 100% success rate, like in that case, the triviality of the task can only be decided by the DM or by some convolute additional set of rules about "triviality" (as opposite as the D&D case where the skill bonuses just make it so at some point of the character growth and it's a consequence) and that in my book is BAD.
That's more or less the reasoning behind

(Just as a side note, Cyberpunk 2020 IIRC is the same, it has DC for some action that are so low that it's almost impossible to fail them if your PC isn't really retarted and without talent in any particular field, like if he had no skills and less than 1 or 2 out of 10 in a stat)
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Offline Bozwevial

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #2 on: November 08, 2011, 08:07:21 PM »
In my view of a good game, the "triviality" of a task must be determined by the character sheet and rules, not from an arbitrary DM decision (even if it's a good and logic decision).
But you can never have a completely comprehensive set of uses for skills, especially not when some of those skills are things that don't actually exist and whose uses will depend wildly on the DM anyway.
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Offline Dan2

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #3 on: November 08, 2011, 09:09:36 PM »
I feel like continuing this discussion, but I don't want to clutter up the original topic.  :)

Now, in order to play a game, the GM is going to have to set DCs for something arbitrarily eventually.  No set of rules can be complete enough to cover every set of circumstances that a character might encounter.
You can reduce this set of circumstances by choosing to have rolls only for actions that will be important to the campaign.  However, even then you cannot have a set of rules that covers every set of circumstances for the game.  Even within the scope of situations that are game-influencing you will eventually have to make assumptions about how things will work out, and by necessity, not all of them can involve die rolls.

The point is that in your game (or any game), you are already assuming that some tasks are trivial, even without a set of rules to tell you so.  What I'm saying is that you can do that (and you should do that) in games where the dice mechanics always have failure as an option.
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Offline veekie

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #4 on: November 09, 2011, 12:41:54 AM »
It depends actually, D&D is aimed at relatively specific skills(use rope as the iconic example), systems like WoD or Exalted just break it all down to broad ones, and by varying the ability modifier and specialities, you get different usages. So covering a wide range of rolls is less difficult than it'd seem.
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Offline Dan2

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #5 on: November 09, 2011, 01:46:33 AM »
Even if you have skills that cover every action, the rules can't list (for the GM) the difficulty of every action.  Once you have the GM making up DCs for game-relevant checks, you've already allowed the GM to decide whether something will be trivial or not.

The point is that you kinda have to trust your GM to fairly arbitrate the difficulty, why would you not be able to extend the same trust when it came to deciding whether something is trivial (and requiring no roll) or not trivial?

Though, I will admit:
-snip-
... and by necessity, not all of them can involve die rolls.
-snip-
Here, I hadn't considered the idea of a much more general skill set.  In theory, you could roll some type of check for everything that could turn out important.  [nit-pick]However, you would likely get bogged down in the massive number of checks pretty quickly.[/nit-pick]
« Last Edit: November 09, 2011, 01:53:20 AM by Dan2 »
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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #6 on: November 09, 2011, 08:36:00 AM »
I feel like there's some confusion here.  One of the great strengths of the d20 system (D&D 3.5 and its offspring) is that the DCs are pretty transparent.  Not that they are all set ahead of time, but that you get a really strong sense of where they all end up.  There's that handy chart in the DMG that gives you examples. 

So, I as a player and a DM "know" what that a DC 35 check is fantastically difficult but also fantastically impressive.  It's like Aragorn (film version) tracking orcs no matter what or the smooth talking halfling talking his way into the king's treasury.  So, if I want to build the greatest tracker in the land, I know he needs a Survival modifier of +20-25.

That also informs what would be "trivial" for my character -- as opposed to trivial in general, like buying bread -- a tracking DC of 20 is trivial since I'll always make it, setting aside other mods. 

So ... ummm, what's the problem here?  Furthermore, things like Skill Mastery (an ability I really like for these purposes), lets you raise the bar on what you'll auto-succeed at without necessarily making you better at the skill. 

Now, if the DCs aren't transparent, which is the case in a lot of game systems, then you end up with complete confusion.  The player things "I'm the greatest tracker in the land" but then gets flummoxed when the orcs evade him.  But, when things are working right, then that player thinks there's something exceptional going on, something along the lines of "these are no ordinary orcs" or "they have magical aid." 

Offline RobbyPants

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #7 on: November 09, 2011, 09:42:26 AM »
I feel like there's some confusion here.  One of the great strengths of the d20 system (D&D 3.5 and its offspring) is that the DCs are pretty transparent.  Not that they are all set ahead of time, but that you get a really strong sense of where they all end up.  There's that handy chart in the DMG that gives you examples. 

So, I as a player and a DM "know" what that a DC 35 check is fantastically difficult but also fantastically impressive.  It's like Aragorn (film version) tracking orcs no matter what or the smooth talking halfling talking his way into the king's treasury.  So, if I want to build the greatest tracker in the land, I know he needs a Survival modifier of +20-25.

That also informs what would be "trivial" for my character -- as opposed to trivial in general, like buying bread -- a tracking DC of 20 is trivial since I'll always make it, setting aside other mods. 

So ... ummm, what's the problem here?  Furthermore, things like Skill Mastery (an ability I really like for these purposes), lets you raise the bar on what you'll auto-succeed at without necessarily making you better at the skill. 

Now, if the DCs aren't transparent, which is the case in a lot of game systems, then you end up with complete confusion.  The player things "I'm the greatest tracker in the land" but then gets flummoxed when the orcs evade him.  But, when things are working right, then that player thinks there's something exceptional going on, something along the lines of "these are no ordinary orcs" or "they have magical aid."
I agree. For the most part, the 3E skill system works pretty decent, with about two problems that I can see:

1) It's way to easy to destroy the RNG. This is both because of divergent mods due to one player putting in ranks and another not, and due to it being way to easy to pick up skill boosts. To accept it as-is, you have to be fine with some people being awesome at some tasks and others being pathetic (I'd personally do away with ranks as-is, but that's another topic).

2) I think DMs do often set DCs arbitrarily. I don't mind a DM picking something like 15, 20, or 25 based on the general guidelines of how tough the task is. I do have a problem with the DM assuming the task should have a 50% success rate (or whatever), looking at the character sheets, and assigning the DC after the fact. If DCs are going to work that way, you might as well have put one rank in everything rather than specialized. The same goes for DMs arbitrarily assigning skill mods to opponents to get the results they want on opposed checks.
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Offline veekie

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #8 on: November 09, 2011, 10:00:41 AM »
Divergent dice modifiers is the biggest flaw of the d20, other than the swing factor.
At some point someone thought having a half dozen bonus types ranging from 1-5 would be cool. At another, someone decided +30 is a suitable bonus when your base skill number wouldn't be near that.
Throw in the areas with divergent amounts of applicable bonuses, and there you have the d20 clusterfuck. Through no fault of the d20 itself.
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Offline Unbeliever

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #9 on: November 09, 2011, 11:20:02 AM »
2) I think DMs do often set DCs arbitrarily. I don't mind a DM picking something like 15, 20, or 25 based on the general guidelines of how tough the task is. I do have a problem with the DM assuming the task should have a 50% success rate (or whatever), looking at the character sheets, and assigning the DC after the fact. If DCs are going to work that way, you might as well have put one rank in everything rather than specialized. The same goes for DMs arbitrarily assigning skill mods to opponents to get the results they want on opposed checks.
^ this is pretty terrible DMing, imho, and also at odds with the system.  It also makes the character sheet essentially meaningless, which takes away a lot of the fun of actually playing the game. 

I also agree with Veekie.  There are some things that totally skew checks, like Divine Insight.  But, that's a problem with those particular spells, etc.  Some of them, like Hats of Disguise, are fine, though.

Offline Bard

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #10 on: November 09, 2011, 11:54:46 AM »
While I do realize that no ruleset can set DC for everything that might happen, it can set some generic guidelines that the DM must follow to choose a proper target number for an action not specifically listed.
I wouldn't call a DC choosen strictly following those guidelines "arbitrary" since in a way it's just a consequence of the rules, not of the DM exercising "unholy DM power" over them.
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Offline Dan2

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #11 on: November 09, 2011, 03:35:40 PM »
What stops the DM from using the same understanding of guidelines to figure out whether a test will be trivial?

So ... ummm, what's the problem here?

We were discussing how systems like dice pool (success counting) and reverse dice pool (any 1 is a failure) always have an option for failure.
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Offline Bard

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #12 on: November 09, 2011, 05:27:05 PM »
What stops the DM from using the same understanding of guidelines to figure out whether a test will be trivial?
The DM decides the DC of the act/skil use/etc by using the guidelines in the rules, not if it's trivial or not. It may be trivial for a character and impossible for another. It's the rules and the character sheet of each character that say if the task is trivial for that character and thus needs no roll (because the success rate would be 100% or really close anyway).

In the example that sparked this discussion the rules didn't have any way for a character to achieve 100% success rate in a check, thus no check could be considered trivial since there was a significant chance of failure (more than 15% in that case).
 
Edit: I find dice pools actually better than reverse dice pools. In dice pools with enough dices the chance for failure can become quite small, close enough to a 100% success rate. (I'm not sure about the math, but in nWoD with 8 dices or so the chance of failure is under 3%, close enough to be trivial)
« Last Edit: November 09, 2011, 05:32:15 PM by Bard »
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Offline BG_Josh

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #13 on: November 09, 2011, 09:10:10 PM »
This discussion suffers from really only being a discussion of DnD

Here are some other solutions:

In a game like Burning Wheel you always pick the lock.  The question is "do you pick the lock before the guards get there?"

In misspent youth you can always choose to succeed by burning out your "features"

IN warhammer the difficulty is rolled, in Apocalypse world all difficulties are fixed

Basically there are tons of different systems.  All with different expectations.

Offline Dan2

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #14 on: November 09, 2011, 10:35:15 PM »
So, you're asserting that the only time it is permissible to assume that something is trivial is when you could roll for something, and the result would always be a success.  I disagree with that assertion importantly.

To a large degree the decision regarding whether or not to roll a check for something should depend on the rules.  On this, I don't think we disagree.  What you aren't considering is that there are sets of rules, such as the ones that Josh pointed out, that both allow and encourage you to assume that some tasks are trivial or unimportant.  This is still done within the purview of the rules.

As a side note in the reverse die pool example, zero (and negative numbers of) dice are possible, indicating that you have a 100% success rate.
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Offline Bozwevial

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #15 on: November 09, 2011, 11:41:41 PM »
As an example, take the task of driving to the store to get milk. Every driver can do that with relative ease even though (since they're mostly NPCs) they probably don't have any particular skill at driving from a game mechanic standpoint. If they had to roll they'd have a good chance of failing even a very low difficulty check, but you don't roll to drive out to the store because it is a mundane task that people do every day and 99% of the time it's not a big deal. The 1% of the time it is, you have someone making a relatively easy check with a skill they aren't very good at, which is why on average there are something close to 20,000 traffic accidents daily in the US.
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Offline veekie

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #16 on: November 10, 2011, 01:35:26 AM »
Quote
Edit: I find dice pools actually better than reverse dice pools. In dice pools with enough dices the chance for failure can become quite small, close enough to a 100% success rate. (I'm not sure about the math, but in nWoD with 8 dices or so the chance of failure is under 3%, close enough to be trivial)
As an ongoing player in WoD, I've regularly seen failures on otherwise trivial tasks(13 dicepool, 0 success is one extreme). Reverse dicepool might work better in terms of consistency.

So you declare a driving challenge pool(say, 6 d6 for a race against time in a city) and adds circumstantials(Dark night, raining +3).
Your player subtracts his skill from the challenge.(He has a bonus of 6)
Difficulty 3 roll.

And as a bonus, you can have negative pool, where once you hit 0, you can raise the challenge up to 1 to try something with the difference.
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Offline SneeR

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #17 on: November 10, 2011, 05:11:17 PM »
Even if you have skills that cover every action, the rules can't list (for the GM) the difficulty of every action.  Once you have the GM making up DCs for game-relevant checks, you've already allowed the GM to decide whether something will be trivial or not.

Actually, you can provide very clear guidelines! Just say that a character with X skill level is a novice, Y skill level is highly proficient, and Z skill level is a master.

Then say that a trivial task of any sort has difficulty A , such that a novice can only have a small chance to fail; an easy task has difficulty B, such that a novice may fail occasionally; A normal task has difficulty C such that a highly proficient character may occasionally fail; a hard taks has difficulty D such that a Master may occasionally fail; and an etremely hard task has difficulty E, which a master has a sizable chance to fail. An impossible task should only be in the realms of higher levels.

Just make your skills specific enough and your difficulty class transparent.
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Offline Dan2

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #18 on: November 10, 2011, 05:45:57 PM »
You haven't changed the core of the situation.  The GM is still the one deciding the DCs.  In this case, that comes in the form of deciding whether something is trivial, easy, hard, or extremely hard.  You haven't defined the specific actions into each category.

What you've defined there are the "general guidelines" for the DCs that the GM should be following.
« Last Edit: November 10, 2011, 05:58:52 PM by Dan2 »
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Offline Bard

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Re: On the use of dice mechanics without vanishing failure
« Reply #19 on: November 10, 2011, 08:45:40 PM »


As an example, take the task of driving to the store to get milk. Every driver can do that with relative ease even though (since they're mostly NPCs) they probably don't have any particular skill at driving from a game mechanic standpoint. If they had to roll they'd have a good chance of failing even a very low difficulty check, but you don't roll to drive out to the store because it is a mundane task that people do every day and 99% of the time it's not a big deal. The 1% of the time it is, you have someone making a relatively easy check with a skill they aren't very good at, which is why on average there are something close to 20,000 traffic accidents daily in the US.

If it were me I'd go a step further still, removing the 1% of failure too and considering the incidents that DO happen a result of external modifiers (windy, rainy, slippery road, a kid jumping out, you being sleepy, whatver...). But that's just me being crazy I guess.

This discussion suffers from really only being a discussion of DnD

Here are some other solutions:

In a game like Burning Wheel you always pick the lock.  The question is "do you pick the lock before the guards get there?"

In misspent youth you can always choose to succeed by burning out your "features"

IN warhammer the difficulty is rolled, in Apocalypse world all difficulties are fixed

Basically there are tons of different systems.  All with different expectations.

[cut, a 2 pages long rant about my own vision of the "perfect game" that noone would care about was here and there was no need for it]
Summing up... those games (and a lot more that didn't get mentioned) are way too biased on some aspects of the game... combat (D&D), social interaction (Burning Wheel), investigation (gumshoe), being just plain bad (warhammer), giving random excuses for heroic actions (scion, exalted), etc...
As a consequence their "resolution mechanics" show their bias quite badly and are in my opinion unfit to be used as a good example for a "generic game" that aims to fulfill all those aspects equally well.

(Eventual comments on misspent youth and Apocalypse World postponed to when I manage to get myself the books and the time to read them)
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