Fiasco: We All Had Fun In Spite of the Rules

Last weekend's game of Fiasco, like the other three I've been in, was a crazy blast featuring a preposterous mix of meth dealing, Narcanon, Cthulhu phenomena and Alaska. But I also had the strong, recurring feeling that we were having fun in spite of the rules - that the dice mechanics were inelegant and largely had to be worked around. I have always had the strong urge while playing this game to either Ignore the Dice or Respect the Dice.

Case 1: the rolling for relationships and objects/locations/goals by taking dice from a large pool, which gives a bewildering amount of choice for people who go first and an unsatisfying lack of choice for those who go last.

Ignore the Dice: Just pick.

Respect the Dice: Just roll d6/d6 (and make sure every option on that table is AWESOME, and if you can't think of AWESOME, then have 12 or 20 instead of 36 options)

Case 2: the unclear gamesmanship of taking and granting dice during play. Black or white dice are granted to other players in the first round, then to yourself in the second round, either by yourself (if you let the others set the scene) or the others (if you set the scene yourself). At the end, the only people whose characters have positive outcomes are those who have a large imbalance of black vs. white dice (either way). There's also a tension between players who have been gaming this aspect of the game, and others who have just been playing to make a fun story. You could argue that the negative outcome feeds the grimness of the tale, but in the source material of botched-caper films, there's a space for characters who against all odds come out all right.

Ignore the Dice: Just wager for black and white tokens, with outcome based on the imbalance or some other means.

Respect the Dice: Just roll for outcome, regardless of what happened during play.

The larger point about game design is that Fiasco's flaws are very much traceable to an ideology of player agency. An ideology is distinguishable from a technique when it starts getting in the way of fun. Forget GNS or anything else, here are my three necessary ingredients for fun in a game- PLAYER-centered instead of DESIGNER-centered:

1. agency - ability of players to make meaningful choices
2. surprise - results can come up that shock and galvanize the whole table
3. representation - the opposite of an abstract game, where you can visualize how the game mechanics create a compelling situation or story

My point is, the dice element in Fiasco adds very little to point 2, which dice are there to do. Either go full-on storygame (Ignore Dice) and get surprise from the interaction of players, or respect the dice, and open up to the full ranges of twists and turns that they are there to provide.

Another way to put it perhaps: the choices involved in selecting from dice, granting dice, and reading dice at the end are not representational. "Representational" in this game would be picking some sort of theme or strategy for your character, seeing it through and watching it influence play, and having it inform the outcome at the end.

What To Do With A Blank d20?

Yep, I bought one at GenCon.

I've got paints and a fine-point brush. What goes on it?

Take Your Scrimshaw Dice And Shove Em

I know it's bad enough to play a dice game where players are encouraged to bring their own dice to the table. I know this because I was having a conversation with the ghost of legendary bluesman Slippery Okra Van Buren and when I told him he just shook his head and offered to hold on to my wallet for safe keeping.

I know it's worse when players then get possessive about their dice and develop all kinds of rituals and superstitions. I have some news for you. Your "super special lucky die" is actually a loaded die due to inevitable manufacturing defects. You are not blessed by Gary Gygax's ghost, you are cheating at roleplaying. In fact, sometimes I think the "sometimes roll high, sometimes roll low" mechanics of yore are a blessing in disguise because they route around dice bias.

The World Series of Dice is not having any of it.

But hey, I try not to get bent out of shape about it. And then along comes the character who bought these dice that only Abdul Alhazred can read from across the table.

OK, so those last couple of 3D printed ones look cool. But leave them in the display case, wouldya? You're not doing yourself any favors, either; your most lightweight side is the 1 and that's going to constantly roll to the top. And everyone else, it's bad enough you bring your own dice but now I have to trust you to read them off from their 6 inch legibility range? And don't you know that special symbol is robbing your natural 20 of its game-galvanizing power, as everyone sits there going "Uh ... is that a 1 or a 20? Oh, a 20. Uh... cool."

Your dice can be pretty ... but first and foremost they're tools of the game. And everyone else at the table gots to be able to read them.

Weather Dice

Today's topic is the eight-sided weather die from Chessex, produced in 2007 and still available from dice dealers at various cons - but not, apparently, online.

Source:  http://www.dicecollector.com 

Alas, I had high hopes for this little guy, but he turns out to be a precipitous type. Fully half his sides have some kind of precipitation on them, three rain and one snow. Even Seattle only has 153 precipitation days a year, coming out to 42% (New York has 103, or 36%, which is more typical of a temperate climate.)

Even if you take "snow" as just "cold," rolling one of these leaves a lot of questions open. Is it windy? How can it be hot and cloudy at the same time? When does it actually snow?

Fortunately (for dice vendors that is) rolling three of these gives a pretty good spread of results, if a little system is applied. You can also use normal eight sided dice, with some mnemonic help.

We start out assuming the temperature is average for the month, there is a light breeze and no clouds overhead.

WEATHER DICE TABLE: Roll 3d8 and apply each effect rolled.

1. "Sunny/Warm" = Warm (mnemonic: One is the Sun.)

• Add 10 degrees F/ 5 degrees C to the temperature. 
• This die has a big sun, so it cancels out one rain or drizzle result - rain first, then drizzle. 
• If it cancels one die and the remaining die says rain or drizzle, there is sunlight through the rain; a roll of sunny-raining-raining gives a rainbow. 
• If there is no wind result, this die means there is calm air instead of the default breeze.

2. "Moderately Cloudy" (mnemonic: Just 2 clouds)

• Raise the cloud cover to "Some clouds." 
• This die has a big sun, so it cancels out one rain or drizzle result, except in a wet climate.

3. "Partially Cloudy" (mnemonic: One more than moderately cloudy)

• Raise or the cloud cover level to "Many clouds." 
• In a dry climate, this die cancels out one rain result, like the previous two.

4. "Overcast" (mnemonic: Clouds to all 4 directions)

• Raise the cloud cover level to "Overcast."

5. "Light drizzle" (mnemonic: Rain snaking down like the figure 5)

• Cloud cover level, if uncancelled, is "Overcast."
• One of these, uncancelled, means drizzle, light snow if below freezing, or light sleet if near freezing.
• Two or three of these, uncancelled, make heavy fog.

6. "Raining" (mnemonic: Rain coming down into a puddle like the figure 6)

• Cloud cover level, if uncancelled, is "Overcast."
• One, uncancelled, means rain, snow if below freezing, and sleet if near freezing.
• Two uncancelled "raining" results are heavy precipitation. 
• Three means very heavy precipitation.
• If both "drizzle" and "raining" are rolled without being cancelled, and it is below or close to freezing, there is hail.

7. "Stormy" (mnemonic: Flag flying in the wind like the figure 7)

• Wind result: Increase wind speed by 30 mph/50 kmph. 
• Two of these means a gale, with overcast sky.
• Two "stormy" and an "overcast" on a large plain means a tornado.
• Three "stormy" means a hurricane, with overcast sky and heavy rain.

8. "Cold/snowing" (mnemonic: 8 is a snowman).

• Subtract 10 degrees F/ 5 degrees C from the temperature.

Example 1: Rolling 2-5-7 gives a bright day with some clouds overhead; drizzle from the "5" is cancelled by the "2" unless the climate is wet, and the wind blows briskly at 30 mph.

Example 2: Rolling 7-7-6 gives an overcast day with gale force winds and lashing rain.

Example 3: Rolling 1-1-8 gives a warm, sunny, becalmed day with +10 degrees F to the temperature; the other warm and cold results cancel each other out in effect.

To get the weather on consecutive days, roll d6: on a 6 the weather is the same as the previous day, on a 4-5 reroll one die, and on a 1-3 reroll two dice. This roll can also be used to see if the weather changes during the day, but adding 2 to the result.

It feels good to finally figure out how to use these dice effectively...

D&D Next: (Dis)advantage

I thought I would share my ambivalent slaloming reactions to the D&D Next playtest documents now inexorably crawling across the net. Here's the first; it's a positive zig.

Plus or minus 3.325. On average.

That's the statistical impact of D&D Next's all-purpose mechanic to replace circumstance bonuses on d20 rolls: advantage (roll 2d20 and take the higher) and disadvantage (take the lower). But the impact across all possible chances is where this mechanic really shines.

The chart below plots out the effective bonus given by "advantage" across all possible chances to succeed against a given DC with a given bonus, from 1 in 20 to 19 in 20. I compare it against the flatter bonus given by the impossible but statistically equal +3.325.

Check out that stegosaurus spine - that's a fat effective +5 bonus when you're at even odds (your 50% chance becomes 75%), and an average of +4 in the midrange.

At the same time, the advantage system doesn't favor long odds like the bonus system does, over on the left. And it makes it nearly impossible to fail when high skill and advantage coincide, with a final chance approaching 20 once added up, on the right.

It's styling, but most importantly, it's simple. One bonus fits all, is some good Old School mentality.

The Die of Crazy Coincidence

Having praised the loose-ended approach to building a fictional story, I want to share a device I use in play to tie loose ends up. It is a six-sided Die of Crazy Coincidence. When I deem it possible that a crazy coincidence might happen I roll it, and the coincidence happens on a 6.

A couple of examples:

• The party is headed out to the castle to fight some bandits. By crazy coincidence is their friend the ranger just coming back from his conclave in the woods and does he run into them and offer to join their righteous expedition? (He did, and this saved the party's bacon.)
• Last week, the party was heading out of town on a caravan. I roll up some random characters along for the ride. One of them is a "Guard" and the other is an "Elf"? Is the elf the very same high-elf who had been pitching woo to one of the party members? (No.) Is the guard the very same fellow who went into the dungeon with the party, blackmailed them for a take of the treasure on account of their using illegal poison arrows, thought they were quits because he didn't testify against them in their trial, and is leaving town because his corrupt ways have come to light? (Yes - and in yesterday's session, a carousing episode in a far-away town gave him his comeuppance in a completely randomly determined yet amazingly elegant way.)

In literature, coincidence has had a long and controversial history. Aristotle thought it added greatly to  satisfaction with the story if, for example, you had a guy who murdered some dude being killed by the self-same dude's statue falling over. Early Western literary genres - romance, picaresque - thrived on scenes where characters thought left behind cropped up again, or new characters had some kind of connection with old ones. This technique was disparaged by 19th century realists and 20th century modernists, but made a comeback with postmodernism. Today's literary advice for amateurs generally warns away from coincidence, though if you read closely you'll see they take "coincidence" to mean an unexplained, deus ex machina appearance at the end - not the proper harvesting of a coincidence that is carefully developed earlier on in the story.

All this comes from my reading of an article by the literary scholar Hilary Dannenberg called A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction (Poetics Today 25:3, Fall 2004, if you have university library access). Let's leave aside the theme of separated family members meeting by coincidence - which underpins a surprising number of classics from Oedipus Rex, to The Tempest, to Fielding's Tom Jones. A more general use of coincidence, corresponding to my use of dice, is to have characters meet again when the reader thinks they have separated from each other.

In general, Dannenberg says that such coincidences in literature demand an explanation by the author, who often complies. Sometimes coincidence is explained explicitly as a sign of the hand of Providence within the story. Other times it's done with a nod and a wink to literary contrivance; certainly it is more satisfying to pick up an old character where they left off and develop them further, than to start anew. But at still other times, particularly in realist novels, it's just explained as one of those chance meetings or an incredible happenstance. In effect, this last one is the explanation I give my players when I announce the chance for a coincidence and roll the die in plain view.

Now, if I was being a total realist about things, the coincidence die would only hit on a 1 in 100 chance or lower. Indeed, sometimes when something would be just too bizarre a coincidence, I roll 2 dice and require 2 sixes (in today's session, there were human heads on stakes by the side of the road - does anyone recognize them?) Yet even this 1 in 36 chance, or the 1 in 6 normal chance, is weighted heavily to let coincidences happen. And in this I recognize I'm telling a literary story, that sometimes could get some good mileage out of recycling and developing a character, but works best if it's seen as not completely stage-managed.

Skill Resolution: Red, Yellow, Green

I believe there is an apocryphal quatrain of Nostradamus that starts out

When the Cook of the Mountain returns to Wizards' lair
To beat the Old School drum, or maybe not

And the Monsters and Manuals swell to the number 78
With the crackling flames of men of straw
Then Tupac shall slay the one whose initials are JFK ... (etc., etc.)

In other words, how should dice rolls, DM rulings, and rules procedures be balanced? This sounds strangely familiar to me. But let me try and tie it all together.

What Monte Cook was proposing is simply a feature that all RPG resolution systems have. Think of three zones. In the red zone, an action fails. In the green zone, an action succeeds. In the yellow zone, more resolution is needed.

The d20 resolution system that Cook co-designed for 3rd edition lays the zones out like this, based on what's known about the action's difficulty class number (DC) and any modifiers that apply:

 1 + mods > DC           
 Any other DC/mods combination (resolution from d20 roll)
20 + mods < DC    

Going to the other extreme, a system based on DM's say-so and interaction with players looks like this:

DM says you can         
DM asks you for more questions and decisions (resolution from information provided)
DM says you can't    

 What exactly was Monte proposing in that recent article? Details are hazy, but it looks something like this:

Rules say you can (character skill > challenge level)        
If character ability = challenge level, roll dice against an ability check (resolution from dice roll) OR player describes action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules say you can't (character skill < challenge level)   

 Which is not too far from the Grand Unified Model of all Refereed Gaming:

Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can (character skill > challenge level)        
If the DM finds no clear "yes" or "no" in the rules or in the DM's head, roll dice against an ability check determined by the rules, or by the DM if the rules do not cover it (resolution from dice roll). Player can describe action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can't (character skill < challenge level)  

From which all else can be derived depending on the exact procedures which are privileged in the yellow box, the amount of stuff in the rules, and the amount of stuff in the DM's head.

But you know, since I started on this post earlier today I think it might have been scooped a little more elegantly.

Emotion Dice Chart

And now, here is my one page emotion dice encounter reaction chart. You can use the emotion dice if you have them, or substitute regular d6; as an aid to memory, the odd numbered faces are negative (vs. positive) reactions, and the high-numbered ones are strong (vs. weak) reactions.

Click to enlarge

And one example.

The party, led by a charismatic warrior with a +1 bonus, runs into some orcs with a Hostile disposition.

The orcs greatly outnumber the party (so circumstances favor a move to the right) and the party quickly throws a couple of sacks of gold at them, which is deemed fitting tribute (circumstances favor a move down).

An ANGRY (5) and a NEUTRAL (1) are rolled.

First, the hostile orcs get angry, moving one to the right.

Then, circumstances come into play. The orcs stay in the rightmost column, but shift one down to CONFIDENT. The orcs laugh and bid the party begone, scooping up the gold.

Next time I'll show what one-page format has done to my more traditional-style reaction table using two rolls of 2d6. I think the format has changed it for the better.

Emotion Dice

In Amsterdam this summer I picked up a pair of these dice that are meant to teach kids about emotional expressions. What a great way to mingle gaming with my research into emotions ...

The 6 faces of each die.

Scanning across from top left, let's number them 1 to 6. Four of the expressions are easy to label: 1 is sad, 2 is happy, 4 is indifferent and 6 is angry. But 3 and 5 are interesting because they're expressions that emotion researchers haven't paid much mind to - yet here they are in a set of basic emotion dice for kids, which tells me someone needs to pay closer attention to them.

Number 3 is the wink. A facial expression, yes, but an emotion? The wink to me communicates something more intentionally than an emotion does; amusement, affection, a secret ... I know of no papers on winking.

Number 5 is the "mean smile." At another conference this summer I got into a conversation with a fellow psychologist about this one. He pointed out that the muscle groups for frowning and smiling are rarely activated together. But every child knows the meaning of this expression. It combines the powerful, hostile message of furrowed brows with the pleased expression of the smile, and it means "Ha ha! I gotcha!" Is it just that people often don't show this expression to pictures in a lab? Or that it's more a caricature expression than one found in the wild - combining elements of hostile frown and smile that are understandable when combined, but rarely actually expressed together? These questions require further study.

Anyway, for gaming purposes I also noticed that expressions 1, 2, 5 and 6 vary in two ways: mouth grimacing/smiling and eyebrows frowning/lifted.

Eyebrows are an interesting way of signaling dominance. Some research finds that frowning actually makes you look physically more mature and masculine, because grownups and men have heavier brows. Likewise, the raised eyebrows you see in expressions of fear, surprise and sometimes happiness convey that the person is temporarily feeling less powerful, because children have more space from eye to browline. In gaming, they can represent whether the person is feeling more or less powerful than whoever they're facing - in other words, a morale roll.

As for the mouth, that's used to communicate agreeableness - in other words, a reaction roll.

If you've been following this space for a while, you may see where this is going. Stay tuned - I'm going to adapt that table to use with the emotion dice.

Why I Give It Away

Some vague worries have been inhibiting my posting today, somewhat brought up by Courtney's post that is zinging around the blogosphere. I want to share with you my resolution of those worries, not to diminish anyone else's decisions, but to exorcise personal jimjams.

In the eight or so months since I have turned from a merely theoretical blogger to a practical DM blogger, the focus of my efforts in this hobby has radically changed. I have gone from trying to produce things someone will find useful, to trying to produce things I will find useful, in the face-to-face game that has come to be a high point of every week I run it.

The more I focus on this experience, the less I care about counting things like comments, followers, or page clicks on the blog. I don't mean that I utterly don't care, but given a choice between100 new blog followers in a flash and two additional players in the game ... no contest. And face it, if you're writing a blog you're pretty much guaranteed to be the kind of person who sees 75-90% of the stuff out there and goes "that's neat, but I've got my own way" ... Too many divas, not enough chorus.

Rather than seeing this as "work" I am doing to get paid, in cash, comments, internet thumbs up or what have you, it is vital that I see my output instead as by-products of play. Perhaps this is because I am doing paid work elsewhere in the gaming industry, as well as managing a professional career that is also all about producing creative work.

Pretty much all the things I have put up here for free have been works of near-compulsion to finish. I never once said to myself, "Oh god, another monster for Varlets & Vermin" or "Time to make the dooonuts and finish another one-page chart..."

But that doesn't mean that I don't have drudgework projects in the old-school vein. Remember color magic? As my players gain level, I'm going to have to come up with more detailed spell descriptions for higher and higher levels. If I ever publish that book, I'm highly likely to not have it be free.

The same goes for an idea that came to me this week - the encounter table that is more than an encounter table. That's too insanely fascinating to share just now without actually producing it, but also too much work to just crank out in a weekend. Or if I ever pack all the insights, techniques and play aids from my game into one bumper volume - let's call it "Desperate Deeds" - with crazy amounts of bonus material, yes, I'll be charging a nominal fee.

In other words, I'm only asking to be materially paid for not having fun. But as for the larger questions of gratitude, respect, acknowledgement, community, those are more difficult to answer. Some of it is ego, some of it is genuine. One way I try to give back, come to think of it, is my practice of the "play report plus" ... the session report with insight into GM techniques and decisions. It's there I can give credit where credit is due for things I use in the game.

Another way is to do more reviews of other people's work. I'm not sure if this is something that works for me, though. I have been sitting on a review for months now - dare I say that writing it has felt like work? Should we get paid to write reviews?

Perhaps the best "review" is actual use.

Paying the bla bla toll, here is a chart of the probabilities for one of my favorite dice rolls, 2d6 minimum.

1: 11/36 (about 1/3)
2: 9/36 (1/4)
3: 7/36 (about 1/5)
4: 5/36 (about 1/7)
5: 3/36 (1/12)
6: 1/36

Chance of 3 or higher: 4/9;  chance of 4 or higher: 1/4.

Dice Icons, d2 to d100

To welcome my 100th follower and honor the 99 before, here's a quick idea that relates to the number 100: dice icons from d2 to d100.

They're based either on the die face or the die silhouette; d2 represents a coin and d100 is "percentile dice".

And one of their purposes is to lend a more low-key, black-and-white design to the modified hexmap I showed last time:

For example, 2d6 centaurs per patrol; no icon = 1.

Definitely taking on a more wargamey feel.

Who Rolls?

It's Delta's in-depth recounting of a run of Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl that has me thinking again about saves and hit rolls (previously on RRR), and in particular the part about giving monsters saves against critical hits:

Since the "save" is in the hands of the target, the player doesn't potentially "fail" at a confirm roll to end their round on a sour note (instead, the experience is that the monster target managed to skillfully avoid a potentially devastating strike).

Common wisdom has it that the more rolls a danger resolution has, the more bogged down it gets. Simplicity is the grail, so two-roll combat is great and if you can get it down to one roll so much the better. Right?

Well, the one-roll versus two-roll debate rages in the halls of miniatures wargaming, from where the concept of the saving throw came. And here we find - as Delta found - that some people like distributing the rolls between the players. The reason in wargaming is slightly different. In a game with dozens of figures on either side, it's desirable to have both players engaged in the action at all times.

In a smaller, skirmish sized game with less of a player downtime problem, it may still be desirable for both sides to roll dice in any given resolution. Influential systems like Runequest and GURPS have taken this approach, and there are a couple of benefits:

1. Probabilities work out cleaner. For example, in one-roll standard 20 combat, a -3 to hit when you hit only on a 17 means you will be doing 1/4 of your average damage per round, as 3 of your 4 hit chances on d20 are taken away. But a -3 to hit when you hit on an 8 means your hit chance goes from 65% to 50%, reducing your average damage only by a third. This makes rules like "you may take -2 to hit in order to get +2 Armor Class" subject to game-y thinking in a single-hit system. For example, a well-armored and skilled fighter against a weaker for should always take this option, because it hurts the enemy much more than it hurts you. Bonuses or penalties to a separate defense roll, though, are not affected by "to hit" probabilities on attack.

2. More interactive feel. Delta's observation is sound. Who rolls the die can make a psychological difference, and having both sides roll allows the most give and take between the players and the "world."

One way to keep things simple is to divide up the task in the classic D&D manner, so that for combat the attacker rolls, but for dangers and traps (and crits in Delta's game) the defender rolls. 4th edition divides things up somewhat differently. Saves are now reserved for trying to break free of ongoing effects like poison or slowing, while things like traps and spells make attacks.

There's also the solution I came up with for my dodge defense rule (here, bottom right of sheet) only to find that Errant RPG has a similar idea. Forget  the weaksauce +2 to AC that 1st edition gives you for giving up your whole attack. I answer the question "why can't you save against a melee swing the same way you save against a spear trap?" by letting characters do just that - if they dedicate themselves to concentrating on defense instead of attacking. By replacing the attack roll, the total amount of dice slinging is kept constant.

Anyway, the basic design lesson: while fewer dice often means more, fewest is not always best. There are good reasons to get people involved in both sides of the dice ritual.

D20 and Gelatinous Cube Breed

And their baby will either roll the exact number you want, or eat a hole in your palm.

(start video at 2:00 for best effect)