Dice and Interesting Failures

[kihou]

So, thinking about dice in tabletopping while dicelessly HGing Chuubo's has got me thinking about what I like about random dice roles in tabletopping. And I think it mostly comes down to interesting failures.

Comments

[vatine]

I tend towards the policy of "if failing and retrying isn't limiting in any fashion, you might as well let them succeed, and state that time passes".

For when you're spelunking in a dungeon, time should be of the essence. You're providing movement, sound and new exciting smells in an environment full of hostiles. Clearly you can't spend forever searching for the hidden entrance that may or may not exist in a given room, because roving monsters will be attracted by your delightful smell of "new meat".

In the campaign I'm currently playing (alternate WW2, with added magic and quite a lot extra that the PCs are still trying to figure out), we're almost always under time pressure. Perhaps not in the "ten seconds matter", but when your protective magical ritual takes 3-4 hours, provides a one-shot protection for one character and you have to get the party ready for a covert air insertion using tomorrow's bomb raid as cover...

[kihou]

In a diced game, being willing to say yes instead of rolling the dice is certainly a strong option that can keep the game moving. ( Tangentially related post.)

I feel like time passing, by itself, isn't as interesting as what happens because time passes. The guards arrive, or the villain is better prepared, or a wandering monster shows up, or all sorts of things. But I definitely want to focus on a time delay being interesting because of circumstances that make it matter.

[vatine]

Yep, we've had to send our PCs into conflict with (some) of them not having the protective luck charms that we wanted them to have, because our hermetic ritual magician didn't have time to prepare them (due to a failed roll).

I don't think that's ever caused PC loss, though, Of teh two PCs we've lost, so far, one was due to a rather bad curse, we suspect the PC has been taken bodily into whatever the local equivalent of hell is (this was actually agreed before the campaign even started, to ensure we set a strong tone of "PC elimination is within the scope of the campaign"). The second was a rather impulsive shaman, who not long after having shot a dive-bomber out of the sky with his rifle thought that taking a second pot-shot at the German magical mecha that just shot him in the chest was The Done Thing, earning a second .50 round to the body (and firmly revoking ALL chances of revival). He's still with the campaign as a spirit guide for one of the PCs, though.

[l33tminion]

To me (at least, what comes to me immediately), dice address two problems:

1. Globally, characters failing some of the time is interesting, but many players in the moment always want their characters to succeed.

2. Not knowing in advance whether characters will succeed creates dramatic tension.

In both cases, there are other ways to achieve those goals.

Dice are good at creating interesting failures if the aspect of interesting you're looking for is (moment-to-moment) unpredictability. And I think that makes it more suited for stories where arbitrarily bad things might happen to characters at any time. If you have dice-based mechanics and arbitrarily bad things shouldn't happen to your characters (i.e. not Apocalypse World), then when one of your players has a particularly heinous run of bad luck, things start getting inconsistent one way or another.

[kihou]

The thing is, I don't think that a character's particularly heinous run of bad luck is out of line for Chuubo's; it just feels like it should be narrative instead of random, and probably needs player buy-in if it's going to be sufficiently blatant. Unpredictability can get in the way of narrative in some circumstances, and one way to look at a game like Chuubo's is that it gives characters certain defined areas where they, not the HG, can establish truths to steer the narrative.