(Inspired by this post: https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/blog/new-years-resolution-mechanic)
In my recent ponderings on ttrpg design, failure stakes, and resolution mechanics, I’ve come to what in retrospect seems like a fairly obvious realization – what you choose to put in focus for an uncertain resolution is what you, as a game designer, declare is important to have a chance to fail.
Specifically, I’ve been playing a lot of tactical combat rpgs lately, they appeal to me on a lot of levels. And, rpgs being the never-ending swirl of discourse that they are, a perennial topic within the space is that of the [attack roll]. That is, when you roll to hit, and if you don’t get a good enough roll, the attack whiffs, to (usually) no effect. You know, you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons before.
The arguments against having this as a step are, I find, rather compelling. It’s often paired with a second roll or resolution step for what the attack actually does when it hits, at minimum rolling some damage, so it doubles the time it takes to resolve an attack. More importantly, the risk of missing is, in and of itself, questionable regarding whether that’s even good to have. In a tactical rpg where you want people to spend time strategizing around and optimizing their turn, if random chance can say that the big thing they do on that turn does nothing at all, then, not only do they have the gamefeel hit of being inconsequential, they also have the practical time loss of the rest of the round, with everyone else going and doing their things, before they even have a chance to try again. The large time cost of a round of combat, especially in games that work to make combat have a lot of complex decisionmaking, is a significant hurdle.
As a result, a lot of the games that do attack rolls well do it by changing the core assumptions I just mentioned – most commonly, that a [miss] means [nothing happens]. If that isn’t the case, if it’s essentially a roll of how effective a hit is, instead (giving, say, more damage, or a stronger lockdown effect, or what have you), then the uncertainty goes from a bad thing to a good one. If you have a chance of doing less damage than you expect, but not of doing nothing, then you have to recalibrate your plans around that risk, and that’s fun! That’s good gameplay! That’s an interesting tactical consideration, which is exactly what a mechanic like that should provide, without the downsides.
That said, that’s a pretty biased framing of it. When presenting it like that, I expressed [recalibrating plans based on circumstance] as desirable, and [nothing happening as a result of your actions] as undesirable. I will happily form more detailed arguments for why those would be the case in a hypothetical tactical combat rpg, but, arguments or no, that is my vision of what that game ought to be – and, in this hypothetical construction, I am taking the role of advisor to the reader, the presumed author of such a game, meaning the reader would have the final say over the vision of what the game ought to be. If, in your (or rather, the hypothetical “your”) eyes, your game necessitates “my attack has no effect” as a standardized risk, if that adds to the dynamics and fantasy the game is seeking to express, then declaring that as a [downside] is fundamentally off the mark.
Let’s zoom out a bit. An attack is a resolution system. But, in broader terms, so is a fight, in its entirety. Two sides (or more, depending on if the game is built for that) bring opposing goals, battle one another through a mechanically-complex mode of play, and then, at the end, an end condition defined one way or another (most often by there being a [downed] state for entities, and all of one side being inflicted by that, but commonly with more custom objectives instead), one side wins and gets what they want.
The wrinkle there is I so rarely see them treated as such. A lot of people’s first instincts, coming from other media, is that, if a fight is important enough to be actually playing it out, then, the heroes win, right? The closest analogue is a video game, wherein, a loss usually prompts you to reload and try again until you do it [right] – the correct outcome is that the main characters are the victors. Certainly, plenty of stories in further-afield media like books or films will have dramatic losses played out, but, generally, only when it actively fits the story to have the heroes lose. When it makes a point about them as characters, and has a chance for them to regroup, and doesn’t just go “and then they died, the end”. For a fight, or really any mode of play with a large-scale unit of “this can resolve in multiple ways” that you may find in a game, the dynamics of a resolution mechanic emerge – and if the players aren’t prepared to treat it as such, to have the stakes resolve either way as established in advance, and, to establish those stakes in advance, you get smoke and mirrors. The illusion of a fight, where one side is scripted to win. Which is certainly enjoyable in its own right, but, both as designers and as players, I think we have a responsibility to do better than that.
(I’ve been doing a fair bit of work on Draw Your Last lately, my card-game-anime-rpg, and a lot of thought going into it has been on this very subject. The boasts about how hundreds of people will lose their souls if the hero doesn’t win at a card game are an important part of the tone, but actually making that a risk drastically affects the game and how people approach it, and fundamentally that just isn’t the kind of thing that the stories it’s trying to emulate would let happen. So, the split has to come between what is diegetically at stake and what is actually at stake – while there still has to be enough actually at stake to make it a genuine resolution mechanic. It’s an interesting quandary!)
But, I do digress. The point of the challenge was to construct a resolution mechanic, not to discuss my thoughts on what a resolution mechanic can be and ought to be. So, without further ado:
Factory Floor
A challenge is presented by an integer, no more than 4 digits long. For simple tasks, multiples of 2 and 3 are ideal, while for more complex endeavors, a prime is ideal.
A timer is set, beginning at 3. After the acting player depletes their dice pool, reduce the value of the timer by 1 and reroll their pool. Once the timer hits 0, the remaining integer value of the challenge represents how many souls are eternally lost from the wheel of reincarnation. (This isn’t a card game anime – that’s a genuine risk!)
The acting player begins with a pool of 5d6, and rolls them. They must then spend them individually on reducing the challenge’s integer value, either subtracting the die’s value from the challenge’s value or dividing the challenge’s value by the die’s value. So, for instance, if the challenge is at 3363, and my current die value is a 3, I can either subtract it to 3360 or (much more desirably) divide it to 1121. It must divide evenly, no truncation or rounding is allowed – so if it was 3364, I would have to subtract, pushing it to 3361, or to use a different die.
If you do not appreciate the result of a particular die, you may instead change its value to that of the timer. For instance, if the timer is at 2 (meaning this is the second roll of my dice pool), and I roll two 1s, I could replace both of them with 2s, or just one of them, or leave them both as 1s. Same for my 3, 5, and 6, but I definitely want to keep those.
The challenge is labeled according to the task the player is trying to accomplish, but note that they always succeed. As champions of humanity, they can always consume power from those they fight for in order to overcome impossible odds. The question is how hungrily they must feed, how much of humanity they will consume in their quest to save it.
Keep track of the total number of souls lost from the world. As it grows, a death spiral begins for the world. For every order of magnitude this value hits beyond the first two, the players have one fewer die in their pool for the rest of the game. (That is – all souls lost up to 99 are free, but the 100th soul robs a die, the 1,000th soul another, the 10,000th a third, etcetera. Once 1,000,000 souls have left the world, the tears of the sun dry out and hope ceases to be.)
Ru's Roleplay Rants 