enceledean

When To Roll Dice

I’ve spent a lot of time running what I’d say were generally ok but not particularly inspired TTRPG sessions. This blog is essentially a lot of thoughts on what did and didn’t work for me, and what kind of roleplaying system I actually enjoyed. Ultimately, what mode of roleplaying do I want to use to run a game? There aren't really design thoughts here, just an exploration of play and realizations I’ve had over years. Also, it’s long.

That Boot Hill Blog

Recently, Sean McCoy of Mothership linked this blog titled Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice. It's about author Adam DeCamp's experience using a hyper-lethal cowboy themed system Boot Hill to run a campaign thick with social and political intrigue. The blog’s argument is because Boot Hill is so lethal, players and NPCs are highly incentivized to avoid combat, or dramatically tilt the balance in their favor if they can't. Without any formal rules for typical social interactions, the campaign still produced very good sessions and only a handful of impactful combat encounters.

The starting point of all the realizations I had about my style of ttrpg game started with this blog and many ideas McCoy writes into Mothership. Mothership's combat is also lethal, and generally dice have a success rate of 30% on average. It doesn't have any mechanical social rules at all. Initially I didn’t think much of the lack of social rules. You can play an entire session of it just fighting off alien horrors, and the game is a fun time. A station might have single digit numbers of NPCs, so it felt fine that the design didn't spend complexity on it.

Roll For Lying

In that, I was wrong. Reading the Warden's Operation Manual (GM handbook) for Mothership, it very clearly does have social rules, but they aren't codified into the design numerically. The rules don't litigate every social encounter, but set up some guidelines the warden is strongly encouraged to follow. They are:

If the player tells a plausible lie to a NPC, the NPC by default believes them. Later, have the consequences of the lie catch up to the player. If a NPC is lying to the player, tell the player such. NPCs have simple and straightforward desires. To get a NPC to do what a player wants, the player will need leverage. I want to expand on the leverage point, because this is where I spent a lot of time thinking about this and other rpg systems, both with and without social rules. I would eventually realize a lack of social rules freed me to do a lot more social roleplay, and performing it more naturally than ever before. Without any numerical guides, all of it is judged in fiction.

The common GM advice to keep the story interesting is before an Intimidate/Charm roll, ask the player how they are influencing the NPC, and let the roll judge the success. A lot can be said about the limitations of having social interaction broken across multiple numbers and I won’t go into them here. I’ve realized the fact it's a number at all is the failing point for me. It reduces the social interaction to walking up, stating a desire the player has, and letting a randomized result determine whether they get what they asked. The advice of “if the player does a cool speech/intimidate/charm, then they should be rewarded with an automatic success” rings hollow for me. It can produce interesting social encounters sure, but the implication is if the player can’t do a cool thing, then it’s alright to fall back to the random roll that just produces an outcome without context. For me it makes more sense to carry the sentiment through and say, in almost all situations: don’t do any social rolling. Let the vagueness of real conversation and interaction infuse itself into the situation.

In contrast, in the leverage system, the GM simply asks what the player does to influence the NPC, and judges accordingly. Bribing, cajoling, charming, promises - all are fair game, and could work. There is no clear cut answer or response, because you're talking to a fictional person, and it feels more believable. The NPC needs to have some fictional details for the player to latch onto, but otherwise the only tools they have are those in the fiction itself. There’s no fallback to doing a distinct action as defined by the game system, whether lightly dressed up or not. Similarly we have some shortcuts to get past some of the obvious - telling the players a NPC is lying skips to the interesting part of what and/or why they are lying.

All of this requires that the consequences of violence are extremely high, both physically and socially. I doubt this method could work in D&D in the traditional mode, both because it's so combat top-heavy and extremely time consuming, but mostly that the consequences for combat are so low. In Mothership, a NPC might die from one damage roll, and almost certainly be in a hospital for months. If players are cavalier with threatening violence, that reputation will be cemented pretty quickly and have a larger impact throughout the game.

I Just Couldn't Vibe With Apocalypse World

I really want to like Apocalypse World. I think it's a fantastic design, and it was my first real non D&D/d20 system I encountered. I learned many ideas from it, but god every time I tried to run it was a small disaster.

A large part of this was inexperience. I've spent most of my time playing RPGs with a parallel thought of "how do I do this well?", "how do I actually enjoy this?", and AW by virtue of being first was subject to a lot of inexperience. But looking back I realize now that AW is simply not a system that vibes with how I run games. I probably could run it more successfully now, but I’m much happier and more successful in the systems I’ve learned since. So, in hindsight, what was the issue?

D&D faces a lot of justifiable criticism for being a "menu" type game. Because of its breadth of stats and numbers and rules, sometimes as a player you feel like you're just choosing an action based off the menu of stats your character has. Because it tries to numerically score so much, what it doesn't assign a number to must not be as important, so you can't do it, or have to awkwardly bend it into shape. My initial assumption of Apocalypse World was actually surprisingly similar to this, despite having radically different theories of play.

Apocalypse World does a lot to cement the Moves system that all the playbooks operate on. If you roll dice, you have to be using a Move. However, my assumption was the same with D&D - if there's not a Move for what you want to do, then you couldn't do it or had to awkwardly just roll some dice and apply the Failure-Success at a cost-Success guideline. The problems for me at the time were each stat being clearly tied to a Move, and not yet being comfortable with "if the player shouldn't fail at something, don't roll" mentality. This mentality was probably an assumed or written concept for the MC, but either way I didn't have it internalized.

A lot of running AW was feeling like I was being trapped by the Moves system, accidentally stumbling into loopholes and wondering how I was meant to implement the design as written. Around this time, I ran Dread and absolutely loved it. Aside from the sheer brilliance of the design, Dread taught me a lot about pacing and when to call for a block pull. Any given block pull could literally mean the death of that character and booting the player from the game. It’s better to reserve it for more important actions, but not too much because you want the tower to continue building. The fact that the player-character is assumed to succeed unless a block pull is called for taught me a lot about when to call for dice rolls. In terms of roleplay modes it was a shock to my system and learning how games could work - I just wanted to play Alien themed Jenga!

The ultimate issue I personally have with AW is there’s not enough simulation of the kind I like, and too much structure in the areas I now don’t think need it. I certainly want to play more AW and it’s many progeny to try and understand my own tastes better. The sense I’ve gotten from AW is its focus is on different types of roleplay. But at the end of the day, I like the simulation side of running a world. I like being surprised by tables and dice, and I’ve now realized I don’t want numbers and dice anywhere near certain parts of the game.

What the Boot Hill blog and Mothership social rules made me realize, I prefer to have almost no rolling or simulation for a social scene between players and NPCs. You play the scene as it lies, and leave the consequences open for interpretation. The numbers and dice are there to provide a threat that, if the scene goes wrong, the consequences might be severe. I don’t think the consequences have to be interpersonal violence either, but one of environment or resources as well.

Putting Many Things Into Motion

What this method I think also needs is a lot of NPCs. This isn’t something necessarily touched on in Mothership, but is a clear factor in the method outlined in the Boot Hill blog. The author creates dozens of people to populate a town with, giving them desires and relationships, and has them play a part in the world. I think this will be a crucial aspect to many of the games I run going forward. Mothership has good structural advice for how to design and act with NPCs, and combined with just a much larger amount of them begins to achieve a critical reaction.

I recently put these ideas into a Mothership one-shot, and for my still early arc of GMing, it was by far the most successful game I’ve ever ran. A small research station had 24 individual NPCs, all with names, stats, factions, desires, and general demeanors. Supply pilots, foremen, interns, drillers, scientists, company goons, and more. It’s a lot of people but I think it still felt like a small and tight knit research station. The players didn’t meet everyone, but I think were imbued with the atmosphere I wanted. Not every NPC had its own hook or storyline to follow, but all of them were involved in the general drama in one way or another.

By far my favorite AW design idea is clocks. I use clocks all the time and have no plans to stop. While I’ve used clocks in different ways, I’m starting to lean into triggering their advancement based on dice rolls. In this Mothership scenario, I outlined six different clocks, and just periodically rolled a d6 in front of my players before quietly advancing the clock. The theater behind this was all to keep my players tense and remind them that things are breaking down around them, but structurally I felt it was important to not know which major event would happen first. It felt more interesting to me to let the clocks tick up mostly at random, and then having to incorporate the results into the story. The clocks I had were environmental disasters, a cosmic horror emerging, and the three NPC factions reaching their boiling point. Whichever happened would essentially dictate the second half of the scenario, and so it did.

With this number of moving parts, it was definitely a task on my end to keep everything in motion, but the social play far outweighed everything else. Players lied and got caught in their lie. NPCs lied, and we immediately got past the if and went straight to the why. Relationships were explored, and NPC desires and motives speculated on, even though my notes for them were only a few words. The players also naturally felt aware of their presence in the world, like asking if certain NPCs in the room they were in could hear them plan their next moves - without major prompts or guidelines on metagaming.

Combat and the threat of violence was present, but there was only one true combat encounter and I feel it was the weakest part of the session. In another moment, a hostage situation was immediately unraveled by one combat roll, wherein a player accidentally shot the only pilot, dooming everyone’s chances for escape. This set the stakes for the entire third act of the session. It’s here that I think the simulation aspects of this mode really shone - it’s unlikely that I or the players would have steered the action in this direction, but the dice fell as they did.

Decide When To Roll

I’ve realized I don’t want to always be deliberately weaving a story and putting the characters in center stage, Apocalypse World style. My preference lies in designing a vast and uncompromising set of gears and variables, sticking the players in the center and then trying to help them somehow escape. I want to be surprised by the twists and turns of the story just as much as the players are. I want to be flexible - and like an unexpected block pull in Dread collapsing the entire tower - make unexpected results part of the narrative.

This Mothership session was the first encounter I’ve written that I wanted to run again, with only minor tweaks. I had never before really spoken with a NPCs voice word for word. This session is the culmination of a long exploration in my own style of running games, and what I want out of a roleplaying system and framework. Essentially I want to roll dice as little as possible, but for each roll to have a high impact on the game.

Where my brain is spinning next on this thread is how to take this mode even further. Mothership’s rules highly recommend tilting the odds of combat in your favor to avoid rolling entirely, I’m wondering how I can apply that everywhere. Rolling dice could be as risky as possible, for every scenario, the players can try to work completely in the fiction to avoid it until they can’t, and give it up to fate. The dice aren’t the engine for moving every small action, but only for those inflection points where fate intervenes.

Addendums

Some final thoughts: