According to my e-mail inbox, this apparently needs to be said:
Yes, the new collectible Fortune Cards for 4th Edition are massively dissociated mechanics. But since this is already 4th Edition we’re talking about, I’m not sure that it really matters very much.
Poking around the web to see the full scope of this fuss, I have two additional reactions:
First, the cards are obviously going to create a power creep within the system. The effects on the cards are not even attempting to be balance-neutral, so the net effect of using the cards will be to essentially give everybody free one-shot magic items that can be used every session. I’m surprised to see anybody actually trying to dispute this; it’s like trying to dispute that water is wet. The only interesting point to consider here is that they just recently got done rebalancing the monsters because they decided they had been underpowered when they released the game. Did they rebalance with these cards in mind? Will they need to issue another sweeping errata to take the cards into account? Or will they simply live with the imbalance?
Second, it is absolutely true that WotC is trying to create an MtG-style market for D&D. Again, I’m not clear on how this could even be a matter for dispute: They are selling collectible cards.
Does this mean they’re trying to turn D&D into MtG? Almost certainly not. They’ve already got MtG.
But it does appear that WotC is trying to figure out how to make money from selling accessories for D&D. Or, to put it more accurately, how to get enough of their customer base to continue making regular purchases that aren’t part of the supplement treadmill that D&D can sustain a viable market without rebooting the rule system every 5 years.
And I think, on the balance, that’s a good thing. It’s something that WotC almost certainly needs to do: 2008 was a very bad year for them, and I suspect they’re trying to figure out how to avoid ever splitting their market like that again.
This article was written in 1999 and originally published in Pyramid Magazine.
All roleplaying systems have a method of resolving action. Most use dice to check against a numerical value in one fashion or another to determine the success or failure of those actions. Few systems, however, provide any framework for interpreting those successes and failures.
This lack is surprising. The roleplaying experience relies entirely on the ability of the Game Master and players to communicate the reality of a fictional world and the characters therein as believably as possible. The real world, and the vast majority of worlds of fiction, do not exist in a binary fashion – when Conan swings his sword he does not “hit” or “miss”, he “swings his mighty blade and with thews of steel crushes the skull of his hapless captor” or “brings his sword about in a massive sweep, narrowly missing his hastily retreating opponent”.
Yet, beyond some mumbling of how a “higher margin of success means the character has had a greater success than if he had succeeded by a slimmer margin” roleplaying systems on the whole do not provide any intuitive clues for the GM to describe the outcome of a resolved action to his players.
This article attempts to rectify this lack by providing a meta-system – a system which can be applied to many different systems. In this case, any system which uses more than a single die for action resolution. It is not an attempt to “lock” GMs or players into an unalterable scheme of description, however. The system is designed to provide more than the crudest outlines of exactly how success was achieved, but it attempts to supplement, not usurp, the creativity of the play group.
OVERVIEW
Before looking into what this new system consists of, let us first look at what is provided by the action resolution systems typically found in most current games.
Any action resolution mechanic must provide, at a minimum, two degrees: A success and a failure for any action attempted under its auspices. Many of these systems, whether they acknowledge it or not, also contain a simple evaluation of how “well” or “badly” the success or failure of the action was. This takes the form of a “margin of success” or a “margin of failure”. In short, the greater the difference between the number you wanted to roll and the number you did roll the better the success or the worse the failure. If, for example, you needed to roll at least a 10 on 3d6 to succeed and you roll a 16, the GM would conclude that your character easily succeeded at what he was attempting to do. On the other hand, if you rolled exactly a 10, he might make your success much more slim – instead of clearing the canyon with room to spare, the character’s foot hits right on the edge and he teeters for a moment on the edge of balance before, finally, stumbling forward.
And this is where the vast majority of resolution systems stop – which is good in itself, but incredibly limiting. The GM is left with a vast void to fill in describing the outcome of actions. When confronted with a system which doesn’t even possess a margin of success, the GM is left with the arduous task of attempting to reconstruct a Picasso painting from a black and white sketch – and even with a margin of success you’ve barely established a grayscale.
What’s missing? In short, the GM knows that you succeeded or failed – and the margin by which you did so – but why did you succeed or fail? What form did that success or failure take? If you succeeded exceptionally, why? If you failed marginally, why? Should a marginal failure ever be catastrophic? Marginal success be akin to slight failure?
The system proposed in this article fixes these problems by giving the GM a wider grasp of what effects led to the success or failure of the PC. Beyond the simple margin of success involved, implementing this system will tell the GM a great deal of information on any number of topics on which he wishes to seek more guidance: How much time was required to accomplish the action? Was it bad luck or a lack of skill that caused a failure? Even a simple hit location system is provided for games without them – without adding a single die roll!
The only proviso to this system is that the resolution mechanic of the system in question must use more than one die. A GM using a percentile system should use 2d10 for percentile dice (instead of a single d100). A GM using a single die system will not be able to use the system found in this article without modification to his resolution mechanic. GMs whose resolution mechanic uses different types of dice (a d20 and a d6 together, for example) may also need to make a few modifications to the system in this article before it functions smoothly.
In short, each die roll is assigned a different quality. To keep track of the different dice, each die should be a different color or have some other form of easy identification mark. Making the decisions after rolling about which die represents which quality doesn’t help the GM at all.
After assigning desired qualities to the dice of his resolution mechanic, the GM then analyzes each roll. The die which is “best” (for success) or “worst” (for failure) had the most influence on the outcome.
For example, if the die which has been assigned the quality of “Time Required” is rolled with the best result, then the action took very little time. If, on the other hand, it was a comparatively poor result, then the action took more time. Quickly might be “an hour” for fixing a car, of course, and a long amount of time might only amount to a couple of minutes instead of a few seconds when picking a lock.
The GM should never feel bound to the results of the dice in describing what happened, nor should the players attempt to point to this system and “force” desired outcomes. The system is designed to be a guideline to feed the creative impulses, not a straitjacket to strangle them with.
WordPress 3.0 has apparently developed a bug where it will periodically close commenting on every post on the site.
This apparently happened within the last 48 hours here on the Alexandrian. I don’t notice because I’m logged in as an administrator (and can, therefore, post normally even to posts where comments have been closed). I was getting a little bit bummed out when nobody had anything interesting to say about the last few posts, but I got downright suspicious when even the spambots stopped frequenting the site.
So if you’ve had something you’ve been wanting to say, I apologize for the momentary outage. If you happen to spot this in the future, please take a second and toss me an e-mail so that I can fix it ASAP.
When encountering a hostile force, a group of PCs can:
Fight
Avoid
Flee
Negotiate
Trick
Suborn
Call Reinforcements
First Thought: When you’re designing a scenario, just give a couple seconds of thought to how a group of NPCs might react to each stratagem. If something particularly clever occurs to you, jot it down and perhaps restructure the scenario to better support it.
Second Thought: When NPCs encounter a hostile force (i.e., the PCs) they can have the same reactions. Think about it.
“There’s a huge plot hole in Lord of the Rings! The eagles could have just flown the ring to Mordor and dropped it in the volcano! The whole movie/book could have been resolved in like 5 minutes!”
You’ve probably heard this hoary old chestnut before. It’s been circling around for decades. It’s got all the traits for a great little meme: It has the aura of cleverness and it attacks something popular.
It’s also complete bullshit.
(And it almost universally indicates that the person uttering it will have absolutely nothing of value to say about The Lord of the Rings.)
Basically, this “plot hole” boils down to two questions.
First: Is it actually a viable solution?
Second: Should it have been talked about at the Council of Elrond?
DOES IT WORK?
Most people treat this as if it were some sort of “slam dunk”. But there are several reasons why the Eagle Solution either definitely won’t work, probably won’t work, or may not work:
(1) There are no Eagles in Rivendell. Although movie-Gandalf has the ability to summon them with his skills as a butterfly whisperer, that’s not an ability he demonstrates in the books. So you’d have to go and get them and then bring them back (a journey almost as long as trekking to Mordor in the first place).
(2) Even then they might say “no”, in which case you’ve wasted a lot of time. (In fact, they would probably say no, as any perusal of their characterization in the novels would suggest.)
(3) On the one hand you’ve got the dangerous temptation of carrying the Ringbearer a couple hundred feet off the ground (splat); on the other hand you have very powerful creatures (on an order similar to Gandalf). Gandalf specifically warns against this mix of power-and-temptation multiple times throughout the novel.
(5) Bad Shit happens every time Sauron gets line-of-sight on Frodo. Flying the Ring into Mordor would automatically mean putting it in Sauron’s line-of-sight.
(6) You’ve also got Saruman’s crebain spies, which become more difficult to avoid if you’re flying.
(7) On top of all this, we have absolutely no idea what aerial defenses Sauron might have had before he was killed. Endless arguments can be had one way and the other about the effectiveness and/or location of the flying Nazgul or the efficacy in catching the Eagles, but for all we know the Eye could have blasted the Eagle straight out of the sky.
Quite a few variants of the “just have an Eagle do it” scenario will usually be proffered at this point in an effort to mitigate some or all of these problems with the plan. (Have the Eagle just carry Frodo. Blindfold the Eagle. Walk most of the way to Mordor and then just fly the last little jaunt. Et cetera.) But these efforts basically admit that there are inherent problems with this plan, which brings us to…
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DISCUSSED!
Here the claim is made that “every possible plan is discussed” at the Council of Elrond except for using the Eagles. Therefore, even if it isn’t viable, it’s a plot hole that it wasn’t included on the agenda.
But this argument is based on a false premise: That every possible plan was discussed at the Council of Elrond.
That’s not actually true. It feels true because Tolkien is, in fact, a very good storyteller. But the reality is that there are lots of plans that aren’t considered. For example, the Fellowship could instead head straight to the sea coast and sail to Gondor. This would have cut weeks off their travel time and avoided the threats of Saruman, the Misty Mountains, and Moria entirely.
My point here isn’t that “they should totally hit that ocean!” (There, are in fact, as many problems with that plan as there are with the Eagles plan, starting with Mordor-sponsored pirates and going on from there.) My point is that the Council of Rivendell wasn’t written to serve as an exhaustive checklist of every single option that could conceivably be taken. It would be a dreadfully boring scene if it was.
Rather, Tolkien includes a few such discussions in order to dramatically hit the beat of “we discussed other options”. (He also uses most of those bits to simultaneously establish other important bits of exposition.) But once that beat has been established, Tolkien moves on to the next dramatic beat.
People think they discussed every option because Tolkien makes you think that through effective storytelling. But there are lots of options that aren’t explicitly raised in the text itself, and there isn’t any particular reason why every single option should be encyclopedically rejected in the text.
THE FUNNY BIT AT THE END
With that being said, this is pretty funny:
But it’s as much a meaningful critique of Lord of the Rings as this is:
According to my e-mail inbox, this apparently needs to be said:
