Rethinking Roleplaying Successes

Also, failure.

Traditionally, RPGs follow a very binary success/failure ratio. When you roll high—or low, in a few crazy games like GURPS and Alternity—you succeed; perform the opposite, and you fail. In D&D, success means killing the dragon, while failure means it killed you. While you can find a third route out—flee the dragon, barter with the dragon, subvert the binary pass/fail by co-opting a league of dragons to fight against the specific dragon you’re trying to kill—most often, the game pushes the pass/fail goals as the primary route.

Granted, you might have to take many recurring steps to get there, but in the end, enough successes equal a pass. Meanwhile, all it takes is one failure more often than not, and bam, you’re gone: one failed Climb check, one failed Save Against Death Magic, one failed Reflex save against a ray of disintegration. That’s the entire reason for the rebellion against save-or-suck spells that dominated 3rd Ed D&D (and ICONS for some strange reason), but I think the results (4e and its anti-save-or-suck balancing, for example) are just patching the problem instead of finding a solution.

An example from my recent dead Pathfinder game. When the group was “ambushed” by pterodactyls while crossing a rope bridge looming hundreds of feet over crocagator-infested rapids, one of the players tried to go all cinematic and grapple one of the dinosaurs into submission. He jumped up and grabbed a pterodactyl with a decent success (27 is, for most things in d20, a damn decent success). When he tried to get a better grip, to control this thing to go after the other ‘dactyls, he rolled a nat one. And when that happens, there’s no real way to prevent extreme, gripping failure, even with the “That’s Fucking Cool” bonuses I’d factored for him: he fell off and went plummeting into the rapids, barely surviving the crocagator attack.

Yeah, I could have swung something to keep the character on the dinosaur. Given a few seconds I probably would have come up with something. But before I even knew what he rolled, he’d decided his character had plummeted into the rapids—the pass/fail mentality is hard-coded into D&D and its mindset, since it’s a big part of the Rules As Written. It’s something I’ve seen come up time and time again.

In, say, Exalted, the player would have received bonuses to make the attempt, and wouldn’t have gone for the binary pass/fail but a degree of success—rolling a pool of dice, where 7s and up count as successes, compared to the basic D&D difficulty class, which you must beat in order to survive. And, granted, he still could have botched and fell off in Exalted—which would require him to roll zero successes and at least one 1 on the dice, which is harder than you’d think in the recent White Wolf systems.

More modern games have introduced degrees of success, such as the Exalted example above—there’s a “bare minimum” success threshold, and everything over that increases the attempt’s effects (e.g., hitting with a melee weapon and passing the required threshold = more damage). Rather than pass/fail, it’s more of a question of “how well did you succeed?” Making failure all the more interesting.

In a cinematic game like Exalted or 7th Sea, it’s also easy for the GM to justify lowballing a pass to keep a favorite character alive—you can still succeed when you rolled under the target number, but the success might not be pretty, or go horribly awry. In the above attempt, maybe the character got their foot caught in a rope tied to the pterodactyl, so while he’s not falling into the rapids, he’s being dragged through the air twenty feet behind an angry ‘dactyl. (Okay, damn, that would make a fantastic cinematic sequence, crawling up the rope to regain control of this impromptu mount.)

Lately, there’s been a rash of games which rethinks the traditional pass/fail mentality. FATE, for example. One of the big elements that turns up in different FATE games is altering the scenery or situation. A success doesn’t always have to be killing the orc; it might involve spending some player currency to alter the situation—set the room on fire, find a lockpick hidden in your boot when you need to get out of a burning room. Even moreso: instead of “succeeding” to find a hidden door, you can spend character currency, and bam, you’ve just found a hidden door. Was it there earlier? Who knows. As long as the GM allows it—and unless they’re bad at thinking on their feet, or the players are dicking with them—there’s no big reason to deny it.

Similarly, player-derived failure. In FATE, players have the option to “fail”—rather, be compelled to take immediate minor setbacks (or major complications) related to their character in return for ingame currency, and the hope/option to succeed, or succeed better, at a later point. In a sense, it’s picking and choosing your battles—losing something now for the options to excel later, when you want/need to.

It’s another form of thinking that I’ve noticed takes some getting used to. Heck, coming from the D&D mentality, I’ve noticed the majority of new Exalted players don’t want to “stunt”—perform cinematic high-risk, high-reward actions for free bonuses—for fear of failure. Or, when they do, they don’t know what makes things cinematic. Altering the game via narrative control in FATE is even more extreme, an entire new way of thinking about handling situations: you don’t have to just find the secret door, you can create one on a metagame level. And the failure thing is another leap of logic—nobody wants a complicated situation or ongoing failures, yet those are what make sessions, games, campaigns memorable: the successes that come after overcoming obstacles, the humorous Rube-Goldberg-Meets-Benny-Hill situations you find yourself in.

That narrative control was one of the turn-offs for me at first, but after playing for a while, I realized it fit my ad-hoc style of generalized planning better, since the players would feed me plots, routes, and situations to put them in, free of charge. It’s not so much a good thing or a bad thing as much it is a different way of approaching problems. And looking at how different game systems approach problems, complexities, conflict, and the like gives the GM more ideas and tools to use in their own game of choice.

Wither White Wolf?

Usually, I try to keep my posts in the 500-800 word category, and usually end up around 600-1000 because of that.  That was not the case here.

The perpetual fall of White Wolf Games is something that’s unavoidable, and somewhat expected, but still a strange and miserable way for a former major gaming company to end. Its parent company CCP has finally shelved the World of Darkness MMO for the duration, also pulling back their Dust 514 Ps3-based EVE shooter. There’s a number of reasons for this, the big two being the numbers: the number of fans dropping EVE, and the number of executives who’ve been working on projects that aren’t CCP’s existing cash cow, directly correlating with the first. Oh, and the numbers of the current depression/recession, which caused the Icelandic economy to enter the spin zone.

To get the full view of the setup, we have to go back to 2006, to when CCP was raking in the cash, the Icelandic economy was a booming bubble, and White Wolf was looking like hot property.

But no, seriously, think fast on your feet

There’s a good reason I push so heavily for GM improv and the ability to think on one’s feet: it’s a critical skill for every GM to master, because not mastering it leads to… Bad GMing. Not always Bad GMing, but being too inflexible or stalling too often can give this terrible feeling. Become too inflexible and you’re railroading players, and few experienced gamers are willing to chug along on someone else’s rails. Stalling to think is a valid tactic, but doing it too much makes you look bad; it’s a sad but true statement that people (consciously or subconsciously) judge you from how you act and speak, and being the GM puts you in the forefront of the social spotlight.

The opposite of improv and rolling with things is pretty bad: the hide-bound, “my story my game” GM who follows the adventure to a letter, without any deviation therein. Most games fall somewhere in the middle: the GM sticks roughly to an established outline, the players occasionally come up with things that the GM works into the campaign. It’s a valid middle ground; not every game should follow every niggling little thing the PCs come up with, but they shouldn’t be shackled to a single linear progression either. The advantage of tabletop RPGs over films, books, and video games is their amazing amounts of flexibility; harness that power.

White Wolf’s 2011-2012 Schedule Unveiled

White Wolf’s 2011-2012 schedule is now out (thanks to Tenandys for the link), and there’s a lot of interesting stuff on there. Namely, the return to Old World of Darkness, possibly as a tie-in to the WoD MMO (already confirmed to be using the OWoD Vampire: The Masquerade rules), less possibly because irate fans have been clamoring for Old WoD for years.

In all honesty the Old World of Darkness had some serious flaws. With each new game, and each new edition, things began to suffer from not only a bad case of bloat, but also a bad case of power scaling. Oh, the lines didn’t always gel together  mechanically or story-wise. Like how everybody but mages could enter the Umbra fine in Revised. This wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if White Wolf had stuck to its “the games are totally separate” guns, but 2e and Revised had such an over-abundance of crossovers as to make things silly. (Look up Sam Haight if you think I’m wrong.) OWoD was also very much a product of the ’90s, particularly visible in Mage and Werewolf’s Captain Planet, “save the whales!”-esque settings.

New WoD fixed these issues, balanced the game lines, made the games all adhere to the fixed World of Darkness setting, and streamlined the rules (namely by not having every player’s guide/companion feature six dozen worthless new skills). It also managed to piss off most WoD fans; amongst other things, the lines were heavily modified. For example, instead of the bloat of each game having 10-12 playable clans/traditions/tribes, there are a mere five each. And the rules were also “dumbed down:” a little harsh, but true, like how Mage relied more on premade spells (rotes) than ad-hoc freeforming your own. The general consensus is that while NWoD has the better rules, OWoD has the better setting. I buy into that argument and can thus make such biased statements.

Anyways, White Wolf’s moving to reprint its OWoD books… via Drive-Thru‘s print on demand (PoD) services. Having conversion books (“translation guides”) is an interesting idea, since the two lines share roughly the same system (dice pools of “attribute + skill”), but have divergent backstories and settings. Also interesting: Mummy returns, but as a player-developed game and plot line. Given that the last physical NWoD release is already out, Mummy will be PoD/.pdf only… or, perhaps, the first in a return to OWoD. Which would be a bit ironic, since Mummy was almost the last OWoD line released, coming out right before Demon: The Fallen.

The new PoD stuff is great for those of us who still like/want to play OWoD instead of NWoD, but wake me up when they start coming out with new OWoD releases. Not just putting the old lines on PoD, and making conversions between WoDs possible; I’m talking about new material. Yes, the line was jam-packed with bloat to begin with, but:

• a.) the fact that it’s coming back for PoD and is the line for the MMO reveal the level of fan support, and a new edition of OWoD has a lot of potential as a marketing tie-in for the MMO
• b.) it’ll be a while before they get around to doing all the weird OWoD releases in PoD
• c.) to be honest, OWoD needs some cleaning out, revising, and updating so that it all works properly together, so a third (fourth?) edition would work wounders
• d.) what the hell else is White Wolf going to publish? If anything?

Exalted!

Moving on to the White Wolf game line I care most about.

A glance down at the bottom and you’ll see that most of the Exalted .pdf-only releases, including Thousand Correct Actions and Broken-Winged Crane, are heading into the Now In Print part of DriveThru. Thousand Correct Actions tops in at $10, which isn’t bad, since it’s interesting but only really half a sourcebook; my guess is Broken Winged Crane and the other .pdf releases will go for the same. (Waiting for the Scroll of Errata, dammit.) Also, being able to PoD a copy of Autocthonia rules.

There are also three new releases: an update of Manacle & Coin (yay!), more martial arts (double yay!), and Shards of the Exalted Dream, the Exalted version of NWoD: Mirrors. Mirrors was one of the most interesting books in recent memory, and of course, it’s already out of print. (Hey, White Wolf, about that new Print On Demand service…) To be honest, I already thought I’d bought Exalted Modern when I got Scion, but if this one’s half as good as Mirrors, Shards/Exalted will be fantastic. Still, what sells Exalted is the depth of its setting, not the rules—otherwise Scion could have become a longer line, like Changeling did—and I’m not sure that Shards can carry the game without that setting. Wait and see.

On The Move

For such a large publisher to jump into the PoD market is an interesting change of pace. PoD has long been the stomping ground of small-press and indie markets; now, we have a major publisher moving into the mix. Still, the DriveThruRPG Now In Print share is opening up to a number of other large publishers, so it looks to be a cost-cotting move by game companies across the board.  The World of Darkness has such able neighbors as AEG’s L5R and 7th Sea, Catalyst’s Shadowrun (including some old FASA releases), and Monte Cook’s Ptolus.

Having the option to buy hard-copies of out-of-print games—especially AEG’s Swordsman’s Guild for 7th Sea, which goes for a hundred or more on eBay—is pure awesome. The same thing goes for most of White Wolf’s Revised books, which have been demanding some serious scratch online for the past decade. (Well, serious if you want new copies; used ones can be found at or below retail with some work.) And the prices have so far been pretty low: low as in original MSRP, which feels pretty damn low for today’s age of high-gloss, high-price softcovers ($20 for a 96-page Pathfinder Adventure Path module; $20 for the 60-page CthulhuTech: Dark Passions; $35 for all those 160-page L5R 3rd softsplats).

On the flipside, this downsizing of their print lines and move to PoD could be another step of White Wolf turning into nothing more than a content developer for CCP. Truth be told, CCP is probably the best choice for a WoD MMO developer, if it turns out to be a player-driven game like EVE. (EVE doesn’t have developer-written quests or storylines, so it’s totally up to the players to derive fun from its galaxy of pixels and spreadsheets.) EVE’s heists and fuckery is legend, deriving from CCP’s hands-off approach to things like griefing and scamming. Also legendary is EVE’s intense learning curve and hostility to newbs. All of this fits the traditional mold of the World of Darkness, particularly the LARP side, in terms of player-driven paranoia and backstabbing.

But it’s a little disconcerting to see the second largest roleplaying publisher in the country erode as badly as it has. (Yes, there was a long period of time where White Wolf ate up the largest chunk of market after TSR/WotC. Now, that second-tier slot is under some pressure from Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo, Pinnacle, and a few others.) My guess is that White Wolf is gearing up for a major release event to tie in with the WoD MMO, or otherwise is building steam for some new release.

If they did end up cutting their ties to the print RPG industry to focus on the MMO, I wouldn’t be surprised; White Wolf’s had its time in the sun, and while it had a major impact on 1990s roleplaying trends, things have changed. The Storyteller system is a crunch-tastic behemoth compared to the new indie gaming trend. The slower output of the NWoD game lines, last years’ underwhelming Gen Con booth, the ending of the Exalted and NWod product lines, and the CCP buyout… yeah, White Wolf is a mere shadow of its self from a decade ago.