Shattered Star

Game Master Zesdead

So, my favourite band is Slayer. No question. Reign in Blood was the first heavy metal album I bought, and I've been a big fan of theirs for well over a decade now.

Last year, they announced that their next tour would be their last. Their drummer had quit, their guitarist had died, and their bassist/vocalist had steel plates in his neck after surgery. One last hurrah for those still standing.

The first shows they announced in Australia were for Download Festival, in Sydney and Melbourne - both interstate for me. My partner and I decided to bite the bullet and buy tickets for Melbourne, because we didn't know if they'd come to Adelaide.

The tickets were $150 each. The flights were another $375 each.

Slayer did end up announcing a gig in Adelaide, for two days after Melbourne, but we didn't buy tickets, figuring we'd already spent enough money and seeing them once would be plenty.

Three days ago, my partner came down with gastroenteritis after eating chilli sauce he'd left out of the fridge overnight. He's been rugged up on the couch ever since with gastric distress, muscle spasms, full-body shakes, and fever dreams.

He'll be fine; he's staying hydrated and getting plenty of rest. But the flight was two hours ago at the time of writing, and we weren't on it.

Slayer's gig in Adelaide has since moved to a downsized venue, and no more tickets are available. We can't get a refund on the concert tickets or the flights we paid for, so we're out $1000, and both unemployed. I've missed my literal last chance to ever see my favourite band.

I won't say this is the worst day of my life. But it's pretty damn close.

"Aaaand I believe I owe you a meal," Joanna adds as the silence stretches uncomfortably long.

Profession(Cook): 1d20 + 6 ⇒ (2) + 6 = 8 Oh that's just too perfect. :D

Poor Jo, she really wanted this to be a good meal. Too bad the dice didn't agree.

In the scheme of things, this was an inconsequential example that Adam was able to work into the storyline just fine, but it's an example of a tenet of traditional RPGs that I find increasingly frustrating: The dice dictate the storyline, not the players.

As I've mentioned a bit off-and-on over the past couple of years, my IRL gaming has mostly shifted away from traditional RPGs like Pathfinder or Call of Cthulhu to narrative-focused RPGs (e.g. the "Powered by the Apocalpyse" family, or GUMSHOE-based games).

With traditional games, a player declares what the character is trying to do, and then rolls the dice to determine success or failure. Success is usally binary: If the roll is good, the character succeeds; if bad, the character fails. Unfortunately, this means that a bad roll effectively negates the player's intent: You roll a failure, and nothing happens. (You don't hit the enemy, you don't disarm the trap, you don't find the secret door, etc). In this sense, the story is a slave to the dice, AND the dice can effectively cause you to have to skip your turn.

Those of you who've played with me as GM know that one of the things I always say in my Session Zero or Recruitment Thread is: "I don't let a bad die roll get in the way of a good story." In other words: I come right out and say that that I will occasionally fudge die rolls if the story would be better served by a different result. A lot of players consider this "cheating," and for traditional games, it kind of is. To me, it's a necessary hack of a game design tenet that's fundamental to traditional gaming.

When I started playing Dungeon World back in 2016, it took me a while to understand the fundamental sea-change of the "Powered by the Apocalypse" game design philosophy. In DW and other PbtA games, you just declare your actions. The GM may ask you what your intent is. If, in the GM's opinion, that makes most sense in the story, then that's what happens. Dice only hit the table when uncertainty is important to the story and/or you've triggered a defined move. And even then, the dice indicate options, not outcome. In PbtA games, dice rolls aren't "pass/fail." The result of the dice roll is: "total success / partial success / something other than success."

In most PbtA games, you roll 2d6, and add an appropriate modifier (which is never more than +/-3). A 10+ is a "hit", a 7-9 is a "weak hit", and a 6- is a "miss."

On a "hit": You get what you want.

On a "weak hit": You either get some of what you want, or you get what you want with a complication.

On a "miss": Something else happens. Maybe before you get what you want, there's a complication; maybe you got some of what you want and there's a BIG complication; maybe you get what you asked for but not what you wanted; maybe something else entirely occurs. One thing you do get on a miss is an Experience Point! (This is called "failing forward.")

Regardless of the roll, something always happens that drives the story forward. It's never just a "you failed."

And the details of the complications are generally determined by a negotiation between the GM and the players. PbtA games go into discussions about "The Fiction" (i.e. world-building and/or the metageme) very often: That discussion is baked in to the game. This gives players a much stronger hand in world-building.

So here's how the above scene might have played out in Dungeon World...

[Forgive me for putting words in the mouths of players...]

Adam: Joanna says to Maroux, "And I believe I owe you a meal!"
GM: Okay. What do you do?
Adam: With her permission, I go into her kitchen and start cooking.
GM: Okay. Maroux raises her hands in mock frustration and points Jo to her kitchen. What are you trying to make?
Adam: Well, I poke around to see what she's got, and I'll add my trail rations to the ingredients if need be.
GM: Okay. So, how good a cook is Joanna? [NOTE: DW does not have a formal skill system: It's all in the narrative.]
Adam: Hmmm... I think she's a pretty good cook!
GM: Okay. Why is a paladin of Iomedae a decent cook?
Adam: ...thinks... Hmmm... Maybe she took a cooking class?
Ronnie: Wait! Jo doesn't get along with her stepmother, right? Maybe when she was little, she hung out in the kitchen to avoid her?
Nate: And maybe the head cook was very friendly with Jo's mom before she died, and tells her stories about her late mother?
Adam: Nice! Yeah, her name was Anya, and she was like a grandmother! She taught me all the recipes I liked as a girl!
GM: Awesome! What's Jo's motivation for wanting to cook dinner at Maroux' hut?
Adam: Hmm... Honestly, she just wants some decent home-cooked food, and she also wants to share with her friends, and maybe also impress Maroux herself.
GM: Excellent. So, I'll put this to you: You can make something halfway decent automatically, describe it. Or... if you want to shoot for making something amazing with the available ingredients, you can roll +Wisdom.
Adam: I'm feeling lucky! *rolls a 3 on 2d6* Or not! A 3 plus 2 is a five!
GM: Oh, man...that's a solid miss! Mark an XP. You also used up all of your rations, so cross those off. Now, I like the idea of you making a tasty feast for everyone, but that was a terrible roll. I want to say that you do cook up a storm, but something bad happens as a result. How about: You make a fabulous and delicious feast that everyone loves, but you got a little carried away, and have used up nearly all of Maroux' provisions for the month.
Adam: Perfect! And the consequence is that Maroux is royally pissed-off at us for eating all her food!
Ronnie: ...and tomorrow we have to go out foraging for her to replenish her supplies!
Escharid: ...While hung-over!
GM: Hey, this stuff writes itself!

Notice how that exchange spontaneously fleshed out more of Joanna's backstory, involved other players, and also drove the action forward: The GM now knows what the players want to do next. There's adventure to be had in the swamp!

"Really? isn't she supposed to be good at this?"

I tend to roll things first then write out the fluff so that it matches and I can work the result into the narrative, but there are times where we all get frustrated because we get a series of bad rolls in a fight or just a bad one on something we're supposed to be good at and it makes our characters look incompetent even when they really aren't. That's one reason I try to think of external factors that would cause even a competent character to fail, like not having anything to spice the food in the kitchen. Honestly, Joanna didn't start learning how to cook until after we'd started getting into the Lady's Light. It makes sense for her to be bad at it and why I wasn't too bummed by the bad roll.

I guess this is one reason I like GURPS and would love to run a game using it even though I'm a little terrified about trying to GM even with a game under my belt. It's not hard to build a character that is competent at several tasks even with as little as 25 character points. It doesn't have the spectrum of success and failure that you have with PbtA games like Dungeon World or Monster of the Week, but it does a far better job of tying mechanics and flavor together.

If I'm honest my beef isn't so much with old school games. GURPS is definitely old school with roots stretching back to the late 70s and I like it. My major TTRPG gripe is more an issue with DnD and Pathfinder, namely that the rules dictate the narrative and characters more than the players and GM do. Just take a look at the spell list and it's clear to see that a fire themed mage is going to have far more options than one that is water or earth based. Trust me on the cold damage spells. I've looked.

To give a recent example, I pulled out of a PBP recruitment because I couldn't get a concept to work out. I was frustrated because there wasn't a way to tie my character's father's sword to her in some significant way and have her use it to wreak bloody vengeance on the Winter Witches of Irrisen while also giving her the arcane power that would have drawn their eyes to her in the first place. My best bet was a Blackblade Magus, but guess what? They have spell books and study magic like a wizard and that would have made zero-sense for my character. I looked at other options, but I was either looking at compromising the whole concept or waiting for at least 10 levels for the payoff.

In short, my issue with Pathfinder is that I pretty much have my character concepts dictated to me by the rules. I can't make the character that I want right out of the gate and have to either hope I can get them into a game that starts at a higher level or figure out how to incorporate them growing into that concept that wanted from the start into their narrative. Pathfinder's okay if the character fits neatly into one of the boxes, but if you try to go outside of that box... well... it's painful. Gaming shouldn't be an exercise in furstration. It should be fun and that's why I've been looking at more generic games like Savage Worlds, GURPS, and Genesys (which I think would make Haladir happy with how it handles success and failure.)

I do love Dungeon World and Dungeon Planet, though, and have thought about running a pulpy space game using them. Probably because it does allow for enough tweaking to make things work. I still miss playing my little rogueish wizard with a sniper rifle.

Sorry to ramble. I just wanted to get my thoughts on this down and show how two guys can be grumpy about things from different angles. :P