One of the problems with always being the smartest gamer in the room is that I usually only half listen to what everyone else is saying. Note that I’m not saying I don’t listen at all. No matter how smart you are, you still only have one perspective. And sometimes, some other person – no matter how much less smart – will manage to glimpse something useful or insightful that only they can say from their unique perspective through the hazy fog of their own dim comprehension. Sure, they won’t be able to do anything useful with that revelation or insight with the limited mental hardware they are running, but by articulating that insight – however unartfully they manage to do so with their subpar language skills – by articulating that insight, they can pass it along to someone whose brain is much more well-equipped to analyze it, refine it, and turn it into something useful. So, I do try to pay attention to what other people are saying. It’s just so boring. Because the insights are rare and buried in a whole lot of useless crap.
It’s hard to be me.
That previous paragraph isn’t me bragging. It’s just me explaining why I only remember half the conversation that I’m using as the basis for this Long, Rambling Introduction™. I don’t even remember who I was talking to. All I remember was that, at some point, they mentioned a player’s character leaping off a very high cliff in an attempt to spear a dragon in the head. I think they were trying to impress me with their openness to letting the players attempt cunning plans and crazy capers. And how they even rewarded that clever thinking with a +2 damage bonus à la the charge attack rules from D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder or something. Or else, we were talking about how dumb GMs allow natural ones and natural twenties to change the world and override all the rules. Maybe there was something about how the player rolled a natural twenty and expected to just kill the dragon outright. I don’t know. I was drifting in and out.
Anyway, the whole conversation – which was obviously very memorable – rattled around in my brain a bit and smashed into some other crap and emerged from the whole process transformed into thoughts about the OTHER side of action adjudication. The one I’ve never discussed before. The one that has little to do with using the rules to figure out what happens when the players do crazy crap. The one that recontextualizes action adjudication in terms of a risk-reward negotiation. And it’s a side of action adjudication that is fundamental to role-playing, fundamental to gaming, and also sometimes completely at odds with everything else that action adjudication entails.
So, today, we’re going back to one of the most basic, fundamental topics in all of GMing. One of the two primary skills every GM must learn how to do if they are going to call themselves a GM. Action adjudication. The other one is narration, by the way. Duh.
Action Adjudication for Aspiring Geniuses
Review time: action adjudication. It’s the thing the GM spends half their time on the table. They time they don’t spend describing stuff. It’s the interactive portion of the game. It’s the part that happens after the GM says, “so, what do you do?” and before he tells the players what stupid thing happened because of what they did. And I’ve written about it a lot. Hell, writing about action adjudication was the second thing I ever did on this site. And the thing that actually defined my approach to blogging for the decade that followed. I also wrote a lot about it in my book, Game Angry. In fact, my book pretty much represented me distilling the topic down into its essence. It’s two-part essence. Let’s call them Action Adjudication for Dummies and Action Adjudication for Passable GMs. Or, you can think as the Apprentice Level and the Journeyman Level.
So, apprentice GMs learned that action adjudication was the art of deciding what happens as a result of a player’s action. And it was pretty straightforward. Listen to the player. Determine what they are trying to accomplish in the world and how they are trying to accomplish it. Decide if their plan can actually work. Decide if there’s a reasonable chance it might fail. And then determine the actual outcome. If the plan can succeed but isn’t reasonably likely to fail, it works. If the plan can’t succeed, it doesn’t work. And if the plan can succeed and can fail, then you use the rules of the game – to wit: ability checks and skill rolls and crap like that – to determine the outcome. Easy enough. And that’ll get you through about 70% of running a game.
Journeyman GMs eventually learn there’s a little more to it than that. First, they learn to break down the action into an Intent and an Approach. Those are just the terms for “what the player wants to happen” and “how the player thinks they can make it happen.” It’s the classic “I want to do blank by blank.” You know, “I want to unlock the door by picking the lock” or “I want to get the guard to let us past by lying to him” or “I want to kill the goblin by stabbing it with my sword.” From the Intent, the GM determines the possible Outcomes. Either the door is unlocked or it remains locked. Either the guard lets the heroes by or he sends them away. Either the goblin suffers damage or it doesn’t suffer damage. The GM also figures out the likely consequences of the action based on the approach. Picking the lock takes time, but it’s quiet. So it will slow the party down but it won’t attract attention. Lying to the guard might work, but the party could get caught in the lie later. And failing to convince the guard could end the social interaction completely. Guards tend not to listen to people who have already tried to lie to them once. Stabbing the goblin doesn’t really have any special consequences if there’s already a pitched battle going on, but failing to stab the goblin results in a lost action. And if the goblin is actually a skeleton, stabbing it won’t be very effective because skeletons don’t have any flesh or organs to stab.
So: Intent, Approach, Outcomes, Consequences; those are the basic components of action adjudication. But that’s not all the Journeyman GM learns. The full action adjudication process is also a little different. The GM still decides if the approach can lead to the outcome and if there’s a reasonable chance of failure. But the GM also assesses whether there’s any cost or risk associated with the failure. Something that keeps the player from trying exactly the same thing over and over until they get it right. For example, a lost action in combat is a cost. The guard not trusting anything else you say after you get caught in a lie, that’s a risk. But picking the lock? Well, not being heard is not a change. Presumably, the monsters already don’t know exactly where the heroes are or even if they are there. And the time wasted on the attempt? Well, that usually doesn’t carry a cost unless there’s a time limit or the GM is using a wandering monster system such that the longer the party stands around playing with their thief’s tools, the more likely it is they will get engulfed by a gelatinous cube Roomba-ing its way through the dungeon.
The point is, you only go to the rules of the game – ability checks and crap like that – when an action could succeed, when it could fail, AND when there’s some risk or cost of taking the action such that the party can’t keep doing the same thing over and over until they get it right.
THAT is action adjudication. And it can be boiled down into: don’t use the rules until you’ve used your brain and decided whether you need the rules AND figured out what the rules are going to tell you.
The amazing thing is that, once you learn that, and once you learn that everything in a standard RPG like D&D and Pathfinder is about rolling ability checks with different modifiers against DCs to succeed and there’s no such thing as attack rolls and skill checks, you don’t NEED most of the other rules. For example, take the damage resistance rules for skeletons. That’s basically just codifying what the GM’s brain should already have figured out when they assessed the action. And the rules from Pathfinder and D&D 3.5 about Taking 10 and Taking 20? Those are adhesive bandage strips – because BAND-AID® is a registered trademark of Johnson and Johnson Consumer Inc. and not a generic term – Taking 10 and Taking 20 are bandage strips slapped over a big hole in the rules. The one that tells GM not to use die rolls if the attempt doesn’t cost the party anything. Because the game designers aren’t as smart as me.
So, that’s Action Adjudication for Dummies and for Passable GMs. They tell you when you need the rules and when you don’t. But what they don’t tell you when to break the rules. When to recognize that the rules aren’t just unnecessary, but they are actually actively screwing up the role-playing game. And boy, do GMs every have a problem with that.
Pop Quiz, Hotshot…
The party has been dogging this nasty criminal who has important information they need. And he finds out they are after him. The party follows his trail and it leads back to the home of their favorite kindly, innocent NPC who has been providing them safe harbor for months of gameplay. They burst in and they find the criminal has the NPC hostage and has a loaded hand crossbow pointed right at her head. Tense negotiations begin. But the party’s rogue has other ideas. He has a throwing knife up his sleeve and he figures he can put it right through the criminal’s eye, killing them outright and saving the hostage. How do you resolve that, mechanically? And what are the outcomes?
Just think about that question for now. Don’t go down and post your answer in the comments. It’s a rhetorical. We’ll come back to it. Just figure out your answer.
And, while we’re at it, figure out this one:
The party is in the middle of a pitched battle with a bunch of goblins and their hobgoblin commander. Because the party rogue was scouting ahead, they began the fight completely concealed and have remained so. The enemy is completely unaware of the rogue’s existence. The rogue picks up a convenient brick from the rubble on the floor and sneaks up behind the helmetless hobgoblin. He wants to knock him unconscious in one blow because he figures the goblins’ morale will break with the hobgoblin off the field. How do you resolve that? What are the outcomes?
How about this one? The rogue is scouting ahead and spots a group of enslaved goblins and their hobgoblin commander. He’s hidden. Enemies are unaware the rogue exists. The party is some hundred feet away down the corridor, being quiet, with their light doused. The rogue decides to assassinate the hobgoblin, hoping the goblins will scatter if the hobgoblin dies. He sneaks up behind the hobgoblin and shanks him in the kidney-spleen. How do you resolve that? What are the outcomes?
And then, while we’re at it, what about a fighter who manages to climb up to the top of a hundred-foot-high cliff and throws himself off with a spear in hand atop a dragon far, far below that has been utterly wrecking him and his fellow party members? How do you resolve that? What are the outcomes?
Once you’ve figured out a good answer for those situations, read on. And let’s talk about action gambling.
Rolling the Dice
Everything we’ve talked about above comes down to the idea of role-playing as “imagining a world, picturing a situation, projecting yourself as a character in that situation, making the choice your character would make, and then finding out what happens in the short term and the long term.” And that’s fair enough. That’s what role-playing is. And that’s why you can pretty effectively run a game just by asking yourself “can that plan work, can it fail, and is there a cost to the attempt.” The rest of the resolution comes down to this weird sort of physics engine that says “if you are this strong and this creature is wearing this type of armor, these are the odds of your attack penetrating the armor, and this is how close the creature will be to death when you’re done.” And that’s not a bad way to handle things. Because those rules are based on providing a consistent and balanced gameplay experience. That is, the players should know how things will work and things should work the same way every time and the challenges should be reasonably balanced to provide a certain, satisfying gameplay experience.
Now, consistency is important. Because players need to know – basically – what’s going to happen when they try to do something. If the results are utterly random and there’s no way to assess the likely outcomes, the players can only act at random. They can’t act with deliberation. In that case, they aren’t role-playing. Because real people in real situations don’t act at random. They do what they think will lead to the best outcome.
The balanced part is also important. Because the game should be challenging. Challenge is satisfying. It’s fun. If victory is assured, then the decisions the players make don’t actually mean anything. The players can’t change the outcome. Now, some have claimed that it’s okay that victory is assured as long as the players can change the world. But, psychologically, that’s not true. This is the whole idea behind the “fail forward” approach. No matter what the players do, they will eventually achieve their goals. Whatever happens along the way, though – based on their choices – changes the path they take toward those goals. That’s nice. But a victory you’ve earned gives you much more of a dopamine hit – the brain chemical that makes winning feel good – than an unearned victory after a fun choose-your-own-adventure story where none of the pages lead to “you died.”
The dice are there to provide that uncertainty. That’s why dice are a part of action adjudication. See, in real life, we cannot predict perfectly the outcomes and consequences of our actions and assess the likelihood of success and account for every random variable. An expert rock climber can still accidentally grab a loose bit of rock that gives way and sends him tumbling to his death. The best thing we can ever do is guess at the odds. And even if we guess perfectly at the odds, there’s still a chance of the unlikely outcome. That’s what odds mean.
From that respect, the dice are a sort of necessary evil of the game. Losing isn’t fun and no one wants to lose, but there has to be a chance of losing if victory is going to carry any sense of satisfaction if the players are going to have any sense of real agency.
At the same time, the dice do provide another important benefit: they provide a sense of fairness to the game. If all of the outcomes of the game were just determined by the GM according to their whim, every loss would feel like there was a dude at the table who just wanted to screw you over. You, the player, would feel ultimately powerless. Even if the GM was being scrupulously fair in every judgment, you can’t see the GM’s judgment. It’s hidden in his head. So, you have no way of being sure. And if you lose one too many times, you start to feel like your choices don’t matter. But if the outcome is determined based on a die roll and the rules are MOSTLY clear and transparent about how the die result determines the outcome, it feels fair.
Moreover, the die roll allows more agency and more fairness to enter the game in various ways. For example, you – as a player – know all of your ability modifiers. So, you can try to throw your best skills and abilities at a problem. Just like you do in real life. You can nudge the odds in your favor by finding a way to apply your strengths against a problem. And you also have a bunch of extra abilities that can further nudge the odds. If you can sneak up on a foe, you can gain a bonus on the attack roll. Cast a friendship spell before you start talking to the guard and he’s more likely to believe your lies. Once the game allows die rolls to determine the outcome, the game’s designers can then build ways into the game for the players to exercise their agency by tweaking the odds.
Not only that, but the designers can also come up with an idea of what a good, satisfying, fair, balanced, fun experience should look like and set all the odds and all the die rolls around that. For example, in D&D, everything is based on the idea that people feel good if they succeed at things about two-thirds of the time. The baseline level for success in D&D is 66%. All of the modifiers and DCs and whatever are based around most people having a 66% chance on most tasks most of the time. And then, of course, they allow the players – and the GM – to tweak those odds from situation to situation so that the actual choices that everyone is making do matter.
Moreover, the designers decided that combat is a really fun thing to have in your game – and I won’t argue; ass-kicking kicks ass and I love it – and a good combat is one that the party is likely to win after about three to five rounds and after having expended about 15% of their resources. So, all of the HP numbers and AC numbers and damages are all based on most combats hitting that mark most of the time. And, of course, each individual action in combat should succeed about two-thirds of the time.
Now, it’s funny to think about action resolution in this way because we’re sort of trained to think that the action resolution stuff is about simulating a world, right? That, somehow, the ability checks – and even the ability scores and skills that exist – somehow represent the imaginary world in a logical way. In truth, they are all just set to provide a satisfying game experience. And to keep the impact of the dice – the impact of random chance – to an acceptable level.
So, the above system for action adjudication – determine the intent, approach, outcome, consequences; decide if the action can succeed and can fail and if there’s a risk or cost of attempting the action; then roll dice and use the rules – it exists to make sure the rules actually represent something that makes sense, that the rules DO connect to the fictional world in some way, and that the rules are screwing with the role-playing. Which is another way of minimizing the impact of the rules and random chance. Again, it views the dice as a necessary evil.
Lawful Rules, Chaotic Rules
All right, prepare to have your mind blown. Let’s set up a spectrum for action resolution. On one side of the spectrum – at one end – we have the idea that a fair GM can determine the outcome of every action just using their brain and based on the Intent, Approach, Outcomes, and Consequences. The GM doesn’t need random chance. On the other end of the spectrum is the idea that everything – absolutely everything – needs to be determined by random chance. Unpredictability and uncertainty and tension are part of the fun of the game. In fact, they are the most fun part. Making choices and being completely surprised by the outcome? That’s good stuff.
Fine. We’ll call that the Lawful approach and the Chaotic approach. For, hopefully, obvious reasons.
Now, we all know that neither one of those approaches is good. Pure randomness destroys role-playing. Pure determinism destroys the game. Somewhere in between, that’s where role-playing games actually belong. So, what’s in between?
Well, obviously, the system that we actually have in D&D is in between. That is, we use random chance to resolve things, but we provide many ways to tweak the random chance so the players feel agency. And we also minimize the impact of random chance so that the randomness never moves outside what we consider to be a “safe, fun” area.
Now, that’s cool and all but’s also impractical. Because you can’t just roll dice for everything. Some things just, shouldn’t even need that random chance. Random chance adds to the overall fun of the game, but it doesn’t improve every situation. Rolling to get out of bed, rolling to get directions to the inn, rolling to eat your food without choking and dying? Those aren’t fun. So, sometimes, we need a more lawful approach. And that’s where my action adjudication rules come in.
Now, I should say that once upon a time, I didn’t think of them as MY rules. I thought of them as the designers’ intent that they just never really explained well. Now, though, I’ve become convinced they are MY rules. Because too many official game products still ask GMs to waste the tables’ time on unnecessary rolls and include rules like Taking 10 and Taking 20 to cover situations in which die rolling shouldn’t be the answer at all. So, they are MY rules and – once again – I have to lament the burden of being the smartest gamer in every room.
My action adjudication rules take the basic approach and skew it more Lawful when the situation isn’t really served by Chaos. That is, it helps you recognize when randomness isn’t going to make the game more fun and so help you move to the more Lawful end of the spectrum. In other words, it moves the game more toward the “safe, fun” area and less toward the “random, unpredictable” area.
But…
If that’s the case – if the basic rules are a mid-point between Law and Chaos and there are times when the game is better served with a little more Law – does that imply there are times when the game should skew toward the side of Chaos?
Yes. Yes, it does.
Taking a Gamble
Human beings – especially YOUNG human beings – are primed to take risks. Taking risks is exciting. Our brain wants us to take some risks because it’s how we discover new, useful, beneficial things. Taking a new route home from work, one you don’t really know and might get lost taking, it might lead you to discover a restaurant you had never seen before. Or it might just make you late. You never know. That’s the fun. The excitement.
Leaving me a tip does NOT help fund my gambling addiction, I swear
Gambling is fun because we’re risking a loss in return for a chance at a better gain. That’s assuming, by the way, that we don’t cross the line from fun gambling to addiction. And that’s an important line to remember exists. Because far too many people – even GMs who SHOULD KNOW BETTER – sneer at gambling. They view it with disdain. And they assume the only reason people gamble is because of Skinner-box style conditioning. Yes. Some people are addicted. But lots and lots of people just find it fun. I play the lottery every week. The Tiny GM and I buy one lottery ticket during our weekly grocery shopping trip every week. We check the numbers. We laugh. And we throw the losing ticket away. It’s a small amount of money – petty really – and we get a little chuckle and some fun each week. And, of course, there’s the fun of fantasizing what it would be like if we DID win. I take at least one trip to a casino every year and blow some money at the craps table. Because it’s fun. It’s exciting. I’m not stupid. I’m very smart. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly. I know the odds are stacked against me. But the stakes are acceptable and I never bet more on anything than I’m willing to lose, and it’s fun to play the game. And sometimes you do win. And that’s really fun. I remember the fun I had one year down in Atlantic City with my cousins after we cleaned up at the craps table and had a couple of hundred bucks to blow on nice dinners and crap at the mall. That was a blast.
Accepting chaos – learning to take risks and live with the consequences – it’s a necessary survival skill. Because our real lives are ruled by chaos. We have very little control over what happens to us from day to day. And that’s terrifying. So, to keep us from waking up every day screaming in terror, we learn to live with chaos and to find some excitement. It’s why we play games of chance.
If you can’t accept that, you can’t be a GM. Write a novel with your group. That’s what you want. But if you can accept that, you’ll probably recognize there are times when you should let your game skew further toward the Chaotic end of the spectrum. When the midpoint of the rules is, in itself, a little too Lawful to be exciting.
So, let’s reframe action adjudication as something else: let’s reframe it as the Action Gamble.
When you ask the players what they want to do – what they want to accomplish – and they come up with something that requires a die roll – because it can succeed and can fail and has a risk or cost – what they are really proposing is a gamble. Take, for example, making an attack against a foe in combat. Players have this resource – actions – and they are willing to risk wasting that action in return for a chance to damage the foe. Now, it feels weird to think about it this way because, well, because they don’t really have a choice most of the time. Right? Most of the actions the players take are described in the rules. And the risks and costs are already mostly codified in the rules. And if there is no risk or cost, there’s no die roll. At least, there shouldn’t be. Without risk or cost, there’s no use for a Chaotic approach. A Lawful approach is the way to go.
But what if the player proposes something different? What if the player proposes a gamble that is outside of the rules? What if the player is trying to circumvent the rules of the game? To end a combat early? To remove a foe in one die roll? To avoid a combat altogether?
Most GMs – those who spend all of their time in Lawful-land – tend to resist that kind of crap. In fact, most GMs call it cheating. And they won’t suspend the rules for any reason. They won’t allow the players to skip a fight with a clever action because that takes the game out of the “safe, fun” area. It RUINS the game. Right?
Don’t make me slap you.
Taking the game out of the “safe, fun” area of pure Law, the area that says the dice are a necessary evil does not ruin the game. On the contrary, it makes the game more exciting. And it leads to some of the most memorable moments in the game, the highest highs and the lowest lows. And every GM knows that in their gut even if they won’t let their brain admit it.
Here’s the deal: most actions that are described in the rules require a small risk or cost and have a relatively small payoff. Making an attack costs one action and it causes some damage. Done and done. At best, a roll of the die allows the heroes to bypass a single non-combat obstacle out of the five or ten that stand between them and victory. At worst, if the players fail on that single die roll, they have to find a different way around. And maybe expend some small number of resources. 5% or 10% for a non-combat encounter. Those are the basic gambles that the game offers.
But sometimes, the players will propose an action that breaks that formula. They might want to avoid a combat by taking a specific action to evade or incapacitate the enemy that stands in their way. Or they might do something that has a chance of costing them a lot more than what the game would normally demand. Like exposing their character to lethal amounts of damage. In those instances, the player isn’t declaring an action, they are taking a gamble. Or, they’re trying to. They want to. They just need the GM to let them take it.
Now, before I continue… think about the answers you gave to the potential situations above. Do you want to change your answer? Go ahead. Reexamine those situations, think about your answer, and then keep reading. No, I still don’t care about your answers. They are still rhetorical.
The Stake and The Pot
Forget everything I’ve ever taught you about action adjudication. There’s no such thing. RPGs are games of chance, of gambling, okay? So, you propose a situation and ask the players “what do you do?” One of the players speaks up. And they are proposing a gamble. They are willing to pay a cost or risk something in return for a potential reward. What they are willing to risk or pay, we’ll call those the Stakes. And what they are expecting to win if they win, we’ll call that the Pot.
As a GM, it’s your job to figure out what the Stakes are, figure out what the Pot is, and then decide if the Stakes are a sufficient wager against the desired Pot. Look at the worst possible outcome if the player fails and compare it to the outcome if the player succeeds.
For example, let’s suppose a rogue has managed to get the drop on a group of goblins and their hobgoblin buddy. The rest of the party is way far away so as not to spoil the rogue’s sneakiness. The rogue decides he wants to shank the hobgoblin. He figures that, with the hobgoblin dead, the goblins will scatter and the party can avoid the fight. So, he says he’s going to sneak up and assassinate the hobgoblin.
So, what’s the Pot? Well, the Pot is that the party defeats the encounter, gets the XP, and continues on their adventure. They avoid spending five rounds of combat and 15% of their resources to get through the encounter. Remember, that’s the basic cost of an encounter in D&D. What are the Stakes? Well, what if the rogue fails? What happens. The rogue will be in the middle of a group of goblins and a hobgoblin leader alone. And the party is one round or two rounds away assuming the rogue immediately starts screaming his stupid head off the minute things go south. That’s the worst case. And that’s a pretty sucky situation for the rogue to be in. The rogue is probably going to get ripped apart pretty quickly. And even if the rogue doesn’t die, he’s going to take a lot of damage. And the ensuing combat, once the rest of the party DOES arrive, will eat up the aforementioned 15% of the resources AFTER the rogue has been pounded on alone for a round or two.
So, is the player willing to put enough on the line to earn the Pot? Hell yes. Easily. No question.
Once the Stakes and Pot have been identified, the action is resolved in accordance with the basic rules of the game, EXCEPT that the outcomes are defined by the Stakes and Pot. No matter what the game says about attack rolls and damage rolls and sneak attacks and surprise rolls and all of that other crap, if the rogue succeeds on the Stealth check, the hobgoblin is dead. If the rogue fails, the rogue is exposed to the entire enemy party and everyone rolls initiative.
As for how you resolve the roll? Well, you use the action adjudication system already boiled into the rules. You’re just overriding the results here. Unlike Action Adjudication, where you override the need for a die roll, with an Action Gamble, you accept the need for the die roll and override the results the rules normally provide.
The Greater the Risk…
In the end, this is why that conversation about jumping off the cliff to kill the dragon stuck in my head. Putting aside the issue of how dumb falling damage is in D&D – and, let’s be honest, falling damage is the way it is precisely to lower the seriousness of a fall which is the opposite of what you want to do here – putting aside the issue of how dumb falling damage is in D&D, what the player is really saying is that “I would like the opportunity to risk killing or maiming myself in return for the chance to bury my spear in the dragon’s head; what’ll you give me if I make the roll.” And I’ve seen GMs handle that kind of crap before. And what they offer is usually something like a crappy little “I’ll consider it a charge attack, mmkay?”
No. No, it is not okay! You’re a bad GM and you should feel bad. If a player is willing to risk their character’s instant death on a single roll of the die, the return had better be pretty damned good. The fact that the game does not provide a good enough return on that risk to make it worthwhile should not be taken as an indicator that players shouldn’t undertake the action and GMs should discourage them. That action is freaking awesome and it has more right to exist at my game table than the shitty rules that make it impossible.
The point is when a player proposes taking a great risk, they are expecting – and they deserve – a great reward. And GMs who fight against that are missing half the point of the game. They are minimizing the value of excitement. The fun of taking a crazy gamble. Those GMs are being Lawful Stupid.
And that’s all there is to it.
I’m done.
Get out of here.
Why are you still here?
Oh, were you expecting some sort of nice systematic approach to Action Gambles akin to my systematic approach to Action Adjudication? And were you hoping for a way to tell when to use one or the other? Maybe a comprehensive system for using both?
Well, sorry kiddo. That ain’t going to happen. We’re hanging out on the Chaotic side of the action adjudication alignment spectrum. I mean, okay, there are some rules of thumb. And there’s a few ways to spot when to use one or the other. And I probably COULD come up with a systematic approach and tie all this together with a really neat bow. But…
Okay, fine. Now that I’ve showed you a fundamentally different way of considering actions, assuming you actually consider what I’m saying with an open mind and don’t fill my comment section with a bunch of pissing and moaning about how awful the idea of shifting toward gaming chaos, I’ll come back with a follow up in a week or two that’ll bring the two systems together and give you a nice way to handle everything.
And I’ll also explain why we’re not going to touch the odds. Why we’re going to let the actual dice mechanics stay the way they are no matter how crazy the gamble.
But, for now, I’m done. Get out of here.
And no, I still don’t care what your answers were.
Great and wise more than ever!
I lean very much towards the Lawful side, but you made me reconsider a few things.
Now I am really curious about the next part.
Thank you!
I appreciate the idea of risk vs reward. A difficult thing to judge, though, is when allowing the expected reward gets out of hand.
For example, recently my party were battling in a flour mill. They were irritated that I didn’t case a massive dust explosion demolishing the mill when they kicked the open sack of flour and used their tinderbox to light it. Not only would such a large explosion have killed the opposition, it would probably have killed the party, and seemed improbable based on their actions.
This article implies that maybe I should’ve allowed the party to risk death to auto-win the encounter based on the cool story it would make? The party were disappointed by a 10′ explosion dealing 1d8 damage, but I feel anything more would have been gratuitous.
The odds of a tinderbox causing the kind of explosion the players were looking for is pretty low if the other sacks of flour weren’t opened, because the flour bag’s (relatively small) explosion has to get through the sacks first.
Fireballs or firebolts though… yeah that place is going up with your players in it.
Lighting flour in a sack won’t explode, it’s unlikely to even burn well. It’s the huge surface area of airborne dust that allows for rapid combustion, often seen as an explosion.
Kicking a bag of flour will not make much of it airborne. I felt the 5′ radius was generous, but the players seemed disappointed.
…. yaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnn
Sorry. This thread about the realism of grain fires and shit is so borrrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnggggg.
You can’t help but be helpful Angry. Perhaps it was me getting to caught up in realism that bored the players.
Thanks!
I think it is a great case of playing the game “how can it be possible” instead of “here is why this is impossible” Angry talked about this a long long time ago i don’t remember the article or rant but it was about disbelief.
I think he should revisit this topic.
Long story short and if I recall correctly it makes for better scenes and sustains disbelief much more to ask yourself why something is or might be possible rather than the opposite. In this case the big explosion might not be likely but asking yourself has a Gm how can it be possible and using that has either part of the DC or part of the narration can help you come up with a pretty cool scene.
Thanks to TheFrenchGM
To clarify, would you recommend that I manipulate the situation through exposition to allow things to make sense, or should I clarify intent and advise the player before-hand to make things more plausible?
I think this might actually be a good spot for some analysis. Now, this is applying today’s perspective to yesterday’s activities, so its not meant to be nit-picky, just to be thoughtful.
1. What was the the reward? It sounds like they wanted the reward to be that the mill blows up and they make it out unscathed. Easy enough — that is a great reward.
2. What was the risk? I think this is where you outright tell everyone, “If you do this, everyone will die. How would you survive the blast?” This invites a plan that may or may not work, and creates a nice risk/reward framework.
“We dive out the windows,” “We use the shield spell at exactly the same time,” “We use gust to channel the flames elsewhere throughout the room!” It doesn’t have to be good, but there you have your risk / reward gamble.
What is absolutely necessary, though, is that the players know what they are risking — maybe not exactly, but a general idea. If the players are unaware that they would likely die in the fire, they might not want to take that risk.
Thanks for the feedback. It can suck to read what I should’ve done, because it highlights my failure, but hopefully it also helps me do better in future.
I think part of the issue is that the players’ expectations were not communicated well in this instance. There were a few enemies within a small radius of the flour, so a small explosion seemed reasonable.
Having said that, the advice of clarifying the risk & reward would have highlighted this issue in advance, and allowed us to be on the same page.
How I’d resolve the dragon thing…
because I don’t know what a rhetorical device is or perhaps I can’t read at all blah blah blah rest of this message deleted..
XOXO
Angry
Angry’s sass is my lifeblood lol
“One of the two primary skills every GM must learn how to do if they are going to call themselves a GM. Action adjudication. The other one is narration, by the way. Duh.”
You notice how he’s stating all possibilities for us now so we don’t have to have pointless threads about “what is the third kind of adventure that has fallen out of favor?”
Yep. You can’t even be trusted to go to the bathroom by yourselves, so I’ve just started coming prepared with toilet paper and mop in hand. I love my life.
I thought about this for a bit, and the first thought that came to mind was “well if I let them do it once, what is to stop the players from coming up with some way to short-circuit the encounters every time?”
And after some more thought, my answer was “If they do that, why would I want to stop them? If they come up with clever tricks to win every encounter then they are engaged with the game and treating the game world like it’s a real place, and having fun while doing it. Those are all things that I want to have happen.”
Yes.
Well, provided that all the players enjoy this. A potential downside would be the spotlight to be focused more and more on the most gambling-oriented players. But this may be the Lawful Stupid side of me talking 🙂
In the end, I think that the group will probably converge on the compromise they are more satisfied with.
So, basically, I agree with you.
This high-risk, high-reward approach, replacing long, conventional combat encounters with exciting “short-circuits”, as you call them, is something revolutionary. I admit that I am a bit scared (probably the Lawful approach is a sort of comfort zone for me). But I also see a great potential into it.
I am impatient to read Angry’s solution in order to experiment it.
It’s very optimistic of you to assume that they will succeed enough of these rolls to consider it a reliable tactic.
The idea is that either you die, or you win. Even at 50% odds, that’s not a gamble your players will make often, especially after Timmy keels over, bashed to death behind enemy lines, or swallowed whole by a dragon.
I don’t think its always an all-or-nothing, but more of a scaled approach. If I’ve got a bunch of PCs that want to get into the backdoor of a warehouse, I might have come up with a couple of likely solutions: break down the door, knock and talk their way in, pick the lock, etc. If the PCs want to operate with some outside the box thinking, use a risk / reward system instead.
“We decide to all get into a large crate on the back of a wagon, marked ‘heavy’ and ‘fragile’, and get ourselves delivered to the warehouse.” That is the reward. The risk might simply be that they open the crate immediately outside the warehouse, or inside with everyone looking, or mistake it for the shipment of armor that was supposed to be shipped out this morning – we better send it immediately to the docks!
There are a lot of applications that aren’t big win / death, but are more like funky plan / getting caught doing something illegal, etc.
I did hyperbole there by implying “death is the only price”, but yes, once players mess up a few times and realize that risk implies cost means loss, they tend to mix it in with their regular toolkit of safer ideas, instead of becoming the ‘if we just do something stupid the GM lets us win’ button.
“I don’t think it’s always an all-or-nothing, but more of a scaled approach…”
Holy crap. This is the smartest thing I’ve ever seen anyone admit on the Internet.
Thank you for your comment.
My point (which could be very wrong) was the following.
Assuming that:
a) Some players are more gambling-oriented than others (which does not mean they use gambling 100% of the time, just much more often than other players)
b) Failing in a gambling does not always mean death, it could mean other kinds of big failure (hostage’s death, imprisonment, loss of items…).
In these conditions, the gambling-oriented player could, hypothetically, use the gambling tactic multiple times in an adventure.
Some times he will have a spectacular success, gathering a lot of spotlight.
Some times he will have a spectacular failure, gathering a lot of spotlight nevertheless (and it is not guaranteed that the negative consequences of this failure will impact only him, and not the party).
When I have been a player in the past, I was always leaning towards a very conservative and low-risk approach. Which is an acceptable choice as well as the high-risk / high-reward approach, of course.
So, it came to my mind that the spotlight shift towards the high-risk / high-reward oriented players (both if they succeed or if they fail) might be a potential problem from the point of view of the low-risk oriented players.
It was just a minor thing, because, as I said, overall I am very intrigued by this article and as a GM I would be enthusiastic to give this system a try.
Spotlights shift during gameplay, and a GM who attempts to scrupulously ensure that every character gets the exact same amount of screentime is missing the point of the game. So long as your players are all equally engaged, there’s no issue. The risk-averse characters could get their screentime by berating the risky character, getting the Cool Character Moment of arguing their different approaches and philosophies and trying to convince the gambler to fall in line.
And if a table is made up of mostly risk-averse players with one daredevil who doesn’t know when to turn it off, the problem is self-solving – next time the daredevil hangs his ass out on the line and the dice come up snake-eyes, maybe the party doesn’t hear the gambler’s cries for assistance right away and it’s time to roll a new character.
When I play, I *love* those moments. Usually it’s when a situation has already descended halfway down the shitter and there’s no clear, clean solution anymore. That’s when I love to try something bold, obnoxious and reckless, because conservative play has mostly already failed. Sometimes, prudent and conservative play only means delaying a problem rather than solving it, and some players would rather resolve the issue then and there on a wild gamble than allow a situation to just keep slowly deteriorating somewhere between ‘Win’ and ‘Lose’ until it finally tips into ‘Lose’.
And as a GM it’s even better – those are moments of high drama right there, real adrenaline spikes that your players are just giving you, no need to build them yourself. Yes please. Yeah, too much of it can wear people out quickly, same as any other high drama, but if your player knows when to call your bet, that’s an awesome game right there.
the odds of the actions success dont change, still 66%. if you’re clearly out matched, or in a fight that’s going sideways, this could become viable quite quickly.
and if you can convince the rest of the party to follow you off that cliff, that becomes ~97% change of one-shoting the dragon. that shifts this from a risk/reward question to a Cost/Benefit question. (i guess its still risk/reward depending on how much you trust the ‘last man in line’. dragon horde split 4 ways is < dragon horde split 1 way)
Probably eventually word gets around and hob-goblins start posting alarms, in world.
Out of world, maybe the other players get annoyed at getting left out, and you work in more combats that can’t be avoided, or otherwise engage the whole party.
Or the players are happy about avoiding all combat, and you learn something different about your players!
Yes, as a DM, you get the game you deserve. That’s why I am trying to get better.
I like your thoughts. If I may attempt to add to them:
My impression of Action Gambling is that it’s not about clever tricks so much as risk/reward. As long as the stakes are appropriately high, than I imagine most players playing seriously wouldn’t be inclined to gamble too often. Assuming that you don’t want them to gamble too often, of course.
Also, just because the players are able to short-circuit this encounter, doesn’t mean that prevailing conditions will allow them to repeat it.
The problem I have with using clever tricks to skip encounters is that, as a player, regular combat encounters are fun and skipping them is optimal. I built a neat character with cool combat tricks, and I don’t get to exercise any of those interactions because there was some loophole in the scene. Making it an actual gamble would greatly help justify passing up the bypass.
One of my favorite recent encounters was when we tripped some silly trap and alerted every monster in the dungeon. It’s a stupid thing to do in-character and from looking at a reward to resource spend ratio, but the extended combat as enemy reinforcements came in was really fun. Much more so than the Silence-shank combo that had wiped each room before that point.
Honestly, I think you are describing one of the great weaknesses of the more modern game design trends in RPGs. They’ve focused so much on the “how” that they have forgotten the “why.”
When I discuss previous iterations of D&D (or other early RPGs, like TFT or others), I’ll occasionally hear people refer to them as “simpler” systems than their modern iterations. I think this is false. AD&D is at least as “complicated” as 5e, if not more so, just based on the variability of the rules and the different mechanisms used for very similar challenges. In fact, I think Angry has done a good job in demonstrating that the fundamentals of action adjudication are very simple, and I think systems like 5e have a more streamlined process than even early D&Ds did.
The consequence of this simplification is that the “challenge” or “gamble” of newer versions of RPGs tends to revolve around the combination of the mechanics offered by the systems, rather than on the cleverness or creativity of the players in approaching said challenges. Once you codify all interactions in a simple system, it becomes easy to see the purpose of the game as resting in the manipulations of those mechanics. Both players and GMs think in terms of “How do I make my chance of success, as described by the numbers I can apply from my skills and abilities, larger?” Players think in terms of character “builds” rather than in terms of character actions. One benefit of a less comprehensive mechanical system was that the mechanics of the system didn’t constrain the players as much. Or, to give an example, when there is no system to resolve disarming an opponent (other than the DM’s judgment), any character can propose doing so. Once such a system of disarming is implemented in the game mechanics, now it becomes the purview of characters who are “built” for it within the system.
So, it’s a matter of perspective. You enjoy constructing a character with interesting mechanical effects and resent when those mechanics are not relevant to the adventure. That’s understandable. But many of us enjoy the puzzle of how to defeat the encounter without necessarily being bound by what the mechanics say is possible for our characters based on arbitrary numerical features. And Angry’s article is a welcome addition to that discussion!
This is an issue I have with some of the martial builds. If a class ability allows a player to hit a disarming strike, then I feel guilty if I allow a player of another class to disarm the opponent.
Similar problems exist for all sorts of abilities. If I allow the druid to sneak up and assassinate someone, the rogue’s sneak attack becomes devalued.
“The problem I have with using clever tricks to skip encounters is that, as a player, regular combat encounters are fun and skipping them is optimal.”
Two thoughts:
1) Which do you think the rogue’s player would be more likely to remember fondly: the time the party fought some goblins and a hobgoblin, or the time they cleverly snuck into the enemy’s camp and struck down their commander with a single blow?
2) If your players really *do* enjoy regular combat encounters and *don’t* want to achieve instant victory using clever tactics… well, they can do that. Nobody is going to *make* them exploit loopholes to bypass the fight. If they want to take the “suboptimal” route because it’s more fun, that’s their prerogative.
This is an interesting complement to the “pushed rolls” in Call of Cthulhu. A pushed roll lets you make a second attempt after a failed roll by declaring a new approach. If you succeed, you get the outcome you wanted initially. But if you fail the pushed roll, there are extra consequences. So basically…
Normal roll: Standard risk/Standard reward.
Pushed roll: Heightened risk/Standard reward.
Angry’s Gamble: Heightened risk/Heightened reward.
“Pushed rolls” sounds like something I’ve always done while gaming, only it was an unwritten rule.
If I understand you correctly, for the DM the stakes are risking the integrity of the game as codified in the rules and the pot is “more fun.”
This seems a reasonable extension of Schrodinger’s PC from https://theangrygm.com/death-sucks/
Therefore the dive bombing barbarian automatically does damage equal to their total remaining hit points to the dragon in exchange for all of their remaining hit points and any optional rules you may want to apply. And that’s in addition to whatever their weapon does if they hit.
I don’t think you understand correctly. Angry said from the beginning he’s approaching action adjudication from the other side, i.e. the player side.
The GM doesn’t have stakes and the integrity of the game is not dependent upon the RAW in this paradigm. This is a way of reframing action adjudication in order to create a new tool for action adjudication.
I respectfully disagree that a DM doesn’t have stakes. As a DM I do have stakes. I bet that all the time and effort that I gave up front to becoming a better DM will lead to my players and I enjoying the game enough to choose it over all of their possible options for entertainment again and again and again.
I also thought this was about applying an aesthetic (law vs chaos) to adjudication when the RAW and RAI just doesn’t cover the approach of the player.
DMing is an art. Art is about knowing the rules and when to break them in order to communicate a message.
But if there are no rules, it’s not a game. It’s 100% chaos, 0% law, and 0% integrity.
The intent is not to codify and restrict and try to cover shit in rules. The intent is that when your player says “I would like to do something awesome, and I’m willing to risk my ass on one die roll to do it”, GMs LOVE to hammer the player *hard* when they fail but rarely offer a sufficient ‘awesome’ to back it up. And that’s madness. Why would you NOT want to encourage your players to take dramatic risks at moments of high tension?
Saying “you trade all your HP to deal it as damage to the dragon” is not an Action Gamble. In that case you lose either way, you’re just rolling to see if you did so pointlessly or not. The aforementioned Dragon Drop would incur recoil either way, but telling a player ‘roll to see how you die’ isn’t what this is about.
Wow, awesome article.
I’d thank you for giving me another tool for my GM’ing toolbox, but this feels more significant than that. More like my toolbox spontaneously generated a new compartment of tools.
I would love to read more from you about this topic.
There’s an obvious answer to the “What if players start to do this all the time…” question. It always comes back to stakes and pot. For the dragon spear fishing example, the stakes are close to life and death. It only take one character dying before players realize that your serious about this shizz. You could even be clear about the stakes before hand if you’re a nice GM, or you could let them gamble with their lives like grownups assuming they understand the risks. Either way, I’d prefer players who at least consider the high stakes heroics sometimes, but that’s me, YMMV.
You’re always aware of the stakes when you gamble, and if you’re not, you probably shouldn’t be gambling. I think the same can be said here. If you want to encourage this type of outside the rules thinking from your players, you’re not going to do it by throwing unknown consequences at them when they fail. Doing that will only teach them to remain in the comfort zone of the system.
Otherwise, yeah, I completely agree. If your players are doing this all the time to the point that its causing problems in your game, you’re probably doing something wrong. I’d start reexamining the stakes, because my bet would be they’re not being forced to put enough on the line.
I think part of the issue with “stakes” is that players can essentially be gods when it comes to a roll on one of their preferred skills. A rogue getting +10 and advantage to stealth, or a fighter to Athletics is not uncommon, and it can be hard to justify a DC 20+ check for something.
I don’t know, man. Some gambles can be pretty d___ed unlikely. If a player wants to do something significantly harder than a standard action, of course the DC is as high as it should be.
I think you miss the point – a hand of poker is a hand of poker whether the bet is $1 or all in. The odds don’t change, just the stakes.
My gut reaction on the cliff dive attack…
… is totally freaking irrelevant since it was a rhetorical device and literally no one cares what your take is. At least, I don’t care. And this is MY website.
Cheers, Angry
I’ve always run games this way, but if you’d asked me to explain how I make those calls I wouldn’t have been able to state it very clearly, if at all. Now I can make my GMing that much more consistent. Thanks again for your insight Angry! 😀
“One of the problems with always being the smartest gamer in the room is that I usually only half listen to what everyone else is saying. Note that I’m not saying I don’t listen at all. No matter how smart you are, you still only have one perspective. And sometimes, some other person – no matter how much less smart – will manage to glimpse something useful or insightful that only they can say from their unique perspective through the hazy fog of their own dim comprehension. Sure, they won’t be able to do anything useful with that revelation or insight with the limited mental hardware they are running, but by articulating that insight – however unartfully they manage to do so with their subpar language skills – by articulating that insight, they can pass it along to someone whose brain is much more well-equipped to analyze it, refine it, and turn it into something useful. So, I do try to pay attention to what other people are saying. It’s just so boring. Because the insights are rare and buried in a whole lot of useless crap.
It’s hard to be me.”
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
It’s my bad for reposting your whole intro here, and for saying nothing really insightful after this phrase, but this was the BEST introduction of all your articles ever! This is genuinely great and sarcartic, in a very consise, grounded, not trying-too-hard way, that hit very hard my reading-pleasure bone.
I also admit that I just commited a very grave sin: I came here to post this before reading the rest of the article. But I couldn’t hold back my sincere and heartfelt congratulations for such a well written paragraph. Thanks.
Let me go back to the rest…
I am reminding of the line from the MST3K Movie:
Crow T. Robot: “Believe me, Mike, I calculated the odds of this working versus the odds I was doing something really stupid, and… I did it anyway.”
When you admit you know what you’re doing is bad or wrong or stupid, that doesn’t absolve you of blame. It makes it WORSE. Because it removes any chance that you might have done what you did by accident. Nope. You knew exactly what you were doing. I’m going to let this comment stand, partly because I want everyone to see what you did and that you knew what you did, and partly because it flatters me. And I like flattery.
“Throw dagger in the eye of the criminal with critical information” is an interesting variation on the theme, and maybe I’m a bad GM but I really just want to make it instantly successful. Yup, great. Hostage saved. Also, the last guy who knew where McGuff’s treasure was hidden is dead, so… next quest?
Basically, there are cases where rather than offer a gamble, the players offer a trade. Give me this thing I want and you can take away this other thing I want or have. Since the consequences balance, it feels a little weird to even roll. Perhaps falling off the lawful side of the curve rather then the chaotic.
Something to think about, if you’re going to adopt this awesome advice, is how does tone affect stakes and pots in your game? D&D lends itself very well to action adventure, but it can be grittier too. Stakes and pots will be very different in a Call of Cthulhu (where no amount of stakes can kill an elder abomination) vs a Ghostbusters where you risk crossing the streams to send the destroyer back to hell.
The conclusion of this article seems to put the responsibility of balancing the payoff of the risk squarely with the GM. When the article states that when a player takes a large risk, they expect and should be provided a large payoff reduces the game, and effectively any action, with a gamble that the GM should provide a reasonable reward for.
Taking a chance for a big payoff is all good and fine, but being reckless with the expectation that the GM will put a reasonable reward for that recklessness isn’t, and as a GM, you can put a finger on the outcome scale, but how far you press it is dangerous business.
Take the cliff-spear-dragon-impaling-move. That’s awesome. You know what’s also awesome? The same, but with a sword. Or with a dagger. Or bare-handed. As a wizard.
All those things carry the same risk. Should they also carry the same reward? Of course not! Because jumping off a cliff barehanded as a wizard in order to kill the dragon by punching it is bloody stupid, and should result in certain death. Even on a natural 20.
But what about the dagger? And what about the sword? If the results are tailored to the risk, and the actions found to be things that you could potentially successfully pull off, and we’re not touching the odds, then we’ve reduced the choice of weapon to a non-choice, because it doesn’t affect the outcome, they’re just the flavor of the effect.
In a game so combat-oriented as D&D, what you do in combat should count, and count for at least as much as the risk you’re running while doing what you do.
1. Decide if the action can succeed;
2. Decide if the action can fail;
3. Decide if there’s a risk or cost of attempting the action;
4. Then roll dice and use the rules.
The Action Gamble modifies number 4. But your example of the Barefisted Wizard already fails number 1. It doesn’t even get to the Action Gamble part of the process.
Am I missing something in your argument?
Maybe you’re mistaking the Action Gamble for the Rule of Cool?
“As a GM, it’s your job to figure out what the Stakes are, figure out what the Pot is, and then decide if the Stakes are a sufficient wager against the desired Pot. Look at the worst possible outcome if the player fails and compare it to the outcome if the player succeeds.”
The spear through the head seems like it would kill the dragon to me. The dagger through the head, maybe just blind one eye and do a good chunk of damage?
The stake for the wizard might be death if he misses, while the barbarian could justifiably just break his legs.
Angry still proposes rolling a relevant check: perhaps Athletics. So the barbarian has better odds.
He only demands “sufficient” wager, not a fair bet. I read the conclusion as encouraging us to be generous of our interpretations of what the heroes could accomplish. But it doesn’t mean any time a player wants to try out some poorly thought out suicidal plan I have to lavish treasure on him.
You know, every time I start to lose faith in gamers, someone makes a comment like this and proves that people really CAN read. It was very astute of you to notice the difference between “sufficient” wager and fair bet. It’s ultimately on the player to decide to take the gamble. To decide if the bet is fair. But I will talk more about this in the future.
Overall, I like this (which won’t be apparent from the rest of the comment, but I do). When does the DM take the bet? He is the arbiter between malarkey, sufficient wager, and fair bet.
Enter the concept of pot odds (google it (not you Angry, your post tells me you know this)) in a poker game. As stated above, normal encounter is a few rounds and 15% resources. Player one of the four in party takes a risk, which, if it fails, likely consumes 80% of his personal resources (so, 20% of party resources), but if it succeeds is insta-win. “Sufficient” wager? Does it depend on the odds he succeeds?
We assume players pit their strong abilities/skills against the perceived weakness of their foe. Does your answer to the “sufficient wager” analysis change if the character knows he only needs to roll a 3 to hit the goblin holding the hostage because FEATS, REASONS, and MAGICAL DOOHICKY OF STUFF? That guy has an 85% chance of success. What if those odds are 90%? 95%? At some point you’ll reach “that wager is insufficient to garner the pot (rewards).” Part of this might be encounter design, but in theory the problem remains.
Then look at the other side of this. Assume the plate armored fighter decides to sneak up and assassinate the DUDE. Can he succeed? Yes. Are there consequences for failure. Uh, holy mother of F#@!, yes. Unlikely success, but it could happen. So it goes to a die roll. Maybe fighter needs to beat dude’s roll by 17 on an opposed check. Odds are slim. He’s risking (assume, please) the same 80% of his personal resources to save the party 15% of theirs. Sufficient wager from DM’s perspective. Uh, yeah. Smart bet? Not so much.
So, should your answer about whether this is a sufficient risk turn on the odds of success? In a world where the fighter could succeed (maybe, someday, odds say no) because his wager is sufficient (but stupid), yet maybe the sneaky rogue’s wager isn’t enough of a risk because he’s actually too good at this, leads to a simulation (and right now I’m embracing that part of the game) where stupid maneuvers can have a benefit that smart ones cannot? Because the smart one would potentially break the encounter system. Because the party has resolved 4 of the 8 encounters for today with some gamble that had a 90% chance of success.
I want to find a middle ground here.
People keep reading this and assuming “Well this just means rogues will destroy my every encounter” and asking how a GM is supposed to know when to allow an Action Gamble vs. normal adjudication.
First of all, if you don’t like players using stealth and subterfuge to gain an edge in dangerous situations, disallow rogues from your game. They are designed from the ground up to do that sort of shit, and if you’re not willing to let them have it EVER, you shouldn’t let players play a class you intend to hamstring from the start.
Second of all, Angry already gave you the answer: when it’s freaking awesome. When the player declares the action and the rest of your table sucks in a gasp and leans forward bright-eyed to see what you say? That’s a Gamble. When the player declares the action and the rest of the table groans or rolls their eyes? Adjudication – and probably pretty unfavorable adjudication for the player.
The entire article is about reading the tone of your game and figuring out where your player is doing something Dramatic vs. something Dumb. If the former, propose a Gamble. I’d suggest even framing it that exact way: “Okay. I’ll let you have that if you make a bet with the universe”, or otherwise let your players know ahead of time that you’re open to dramatic gambits during moments of high tension – and that if players try to abuse that you’re perfectly willing to poke them in the eye and say no.
I mean, you’re the GM. You run the game, not your players.
If the spear through the head is enough it would kill the dragon, then that invites the question: would it also be enough to kill the dragon if the risk weren’t that high?
If so, then this has nothing to do with risk, or this entire article. If you want to say that spearing a frickin’ dragon through the frickin’ head by jumping off a cliff by al means sounds reasonable and awesome and it should work, well, that sounds like a fair point, and you should probably do it, regardless of whether failure would lead to the characters dead or not.
But if not, you’re in a similarly sized pickle — because you’re changing the effect of the action based on something that’s not inherent to the action itself. The dragon dies *because* the action was dangerous, because if the same action didn’t wager the characters death, it wouldn’t have that payoff.
In other words, a player can make the same actions more effective by making them more dangerous. That has the result that actions in a dangerous environment are more effective than actions in a less dangerous environment, which, and this is the important part, diminishes the value for the players to assay danger and act accordingly — where accordingly isn’t the same as running headlong into it regardless of possible dangers.
If the Dragon were hovering over a lake, the barbarian could still make the leap but with no particular danger. You can still give some small benefit here, a bonus to damage or call it a charge or whatever. So within the world, everything’s consistent enough. It’s not that barbarians can only leap off cliffs when it’s dangerous. It’s that sometimes that attack will kill the dragon and sometimes it won’t. Maybe this particular dragon has a harder skull then that one.
It turns out that the logic of which dragon is killed is tied to the dramatic tension of the story, to the risk involved. And this is how story-telling usually goes. It’s a heroic tale, the heroes rise to the occasion. And it’s a game, so maybe the hero, despite that epic jump, hits the ground and goes splat.
Some players may object. They see the man behind the screen and it hurts there sensibilities. That’s fine. You’ve got to run the game that works for you and your players. But I think most/many will have internalized this sort of literary logic anyways and will appreciate the moments of heroism.
You are correct that reckless play is no longer as severely penalized as otherwise. But it’s still not a smart way to play. RPG’s are survival games. If the dragon battle is going poorly, it’s better to flee and start a new quest next week then to push your chips in and risk the party. Even with heroic gambles the party assessing dangers and making smart choices should be more successful.
I doubt the dramatic tension of a player taking a high risk is the tension that makes the game more enjoyable for most players, and raising the rewards on that behaviour yields in my opinion questionable returns in terms of enjoyment on the play table.
The dramatic tension should in my opinion come from fighting the dragon and the risk of what happens when you lose that battle. That’s inherent to the risk of the fight, not the risk of the individual action.
Good stuff, this. Wringing genuinely creative approaches out of players is hard enough without discouraging it by trying to wrangle novel approaches into the ruleset.
There is a danger of course: if your player wants to flick her throwing knife into the hostage-taker’s eye, no doubt the stakes are that she could either miss and hit the hostage, or not deal a killing blow. What you don’t want is her succeeding with her gamble…then in the next ‘meat and potatoes’ standard battle, attacking, saying she’s aiming for the enemy’s eye, then whining when she hits and you ask her to just roll damage as normal.
And of course, from the players’ side of the screen, it’s never obvious what is coming straight from the DMG, what is more ruley-of-cooly, what is a one-off-chaos-gamble etc. I guess the way round that is by making clear to your players that the extraordinary gamble is just that. That doesn’t have to mean imposing Law on the Chaos, just labelling it to let your players know you’re not setting a precedent you expect to become a new ruling. Otherwise your Fighter will keep throwing his stupid self off that cliff until he kills himself.
I’ve actually adapted something out of Angry’s Guide to Lifelike NPC’s (wherein each NPC gets a distinct Personality, Posture, Pause, and Pfidget, and that turns out to be enough). When I’m deviating from DMG Rules, I use a special Pause – folded hands, resting my chin on them, glaring into the middle distance – and that seems to subconsciously indicate to the players that this is a special case, not to take it as precedent. I don’t think I’ve ever called it out, but we do discuss how the game went from time to time and I sometimes bring up these cases to see the reactions and so on, so I think it’s working.
Watch it backfire on me next week. It would serve me right.
Yes.
I admit that I would feel more comfortable where there is at least a certain degree of (pretended) cause-effect relationship between the high risk and the high benefit which constitute the two sides of the Gambling.
In the example of the barbarian leaping from a high platform… blah blah blah, I can’t read.
And it goes on about ALL the examples. Be grateful I deleted it. – Angry
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I really like this. Always wondered how to handle those moments of desperate daring. You feel like the players should get more of a reward than the rules provide but you feel locked in at the same time. I like your rational and process.
I still remember one time, when a GM attacked us with a huge worm and our barbarian got swallowed and decided to cut his way out. Big gamble, big payoff. It was a greate moment.
I’m reminded of the time I did way more analysis on 4th edition D&D than it deserved, particularly the ‘page 42’ rule for things the rules don’t cover.
Given the nature of 4th edition, in combat your bread and butter was going down your list of encounter powers until they ran out, then use at-will powers because they weren’t as good, saving daily powers for when you needed them. As I recall, the page 42 table meant that this was actually the wrong thing to do: the ‘correct’ thing to do (where ‘correct’ here means ‘nominally highest damage’ rather than anything meaningful) was to use your highest level encounter power, and then start doing things the rules didn’t cover.
If only people had played it that way.
This is essentially Dungeon World’s entire resolution mechanic, which is probably why so many GMs from a lawful tending game like d&d have problems running it. Dungeon World’s basic rule is to ask the player what they’re trying to do and tell them the ability score and the price of failure. Every other rule is basically just a codified implementation of that. For example, attacking in melee will usually have the downside of the enemy attacking you if you fail.
What I wonder is how you handle XP in cases when a smart or lucky move ends the combat before it starts. After all, in D&D player are aware of the concept of experience points which is one of the most important rewards of the game, and cutting a battle short and avoiding getting hurt will not please most players, as it would be expected in real life, if they are sacrificing the XP that would be gained if they fought.
Would you give no/half/full XP to the rest of the party, when all they do is watch/let a party member do a heroic feat to avoid a combat, either smart or stupidly heroic?
Giving diminished exp to the rest of the party sounds like a good way to disincentive clever play.
Would you also give diminished exp if the fighter kills every enemy and no one else lands a blow? You wouldn’t.
In most games, the party is an entire unit. One member overcoming a trial is just a part of the overall party overcoming the adventure. I see few compelling reasons to ever give the party unequal exp, frankly.
I would absolutely give them all the XP! That’s part of the pot that angry was talking about. What they’re gambling for with their big dangerous action is, in some senses, taking a large risk to not have to spend the resources to get the XP.
If you take the XP away from them, only giving half or none because they “didn’t beat the encounter properly” you’re robbing them of part of the pot that made them willing to take the risk in the first place! You don’t have to be so afraid of players “breaking your encounters” or “getting off easy” (which is a stupid concept in and of itself anyways). They took the risk, decided it was a fair bet, gambled the odds and won. Don’t take that away from them with the random dick-punch that is half XP.
Actually that’s what I do. When a smart and/or risky action of a character either makes the encounter much easier or totally bypasses it, I give full XP to the party (that is half of the normal XP worth of the enemies if it’s a random encounter, either they beat it or smartly skip it, but it’s another subject) and award some extra to the character for the heroic/smart act. But since I don’t announce the XP they gain to the players, the extra XP isn’t the thing that motivates such actions.
Story time:
In a game I was running, I revealed the villain to the players around middle of the campaign. It was a sort of flesh golem with necromancer abilities, and he had broken into the town’s catacombs and used all the bones to create this gigantic bone monstrosity that was his minion.
My goal was to show the players what they were up against so they could make a plan.
One girl decided to sneak up behind them and try to persuade the bone monstrosity to join them and attack its master. I warned her it was a bad idea before she did it but she insisted. I leaned into the deterministic side of things and didn’t even let her roll anything before the monstrosity attacked her.
Considering the monstrosity was meant for a few level-ups later and she was alone, I gave her one chance to dodge its attack. One roll to simply prevent instant death. The dice were not in her favour. I described her gruesome death and how the bones were torn out of her body and became part of the monstrosity.
She was indignant, saying I should have at least let her roll persuasion, but the other players agreed that it was a perfectly understandable outcome.
It was fun, at the end of the campaign when they fought it, I described how they could still recognize the skull of her ex-character as part of the thing.
It took me a while to figure it out (i’m not as smart as Angry) but this is exactly why I drifted from D&D towards PBtA games like Dungeon World
Games like Dungeon World (by design) force the GM to think about the stakes while encouraging players to define the pot by narration.
D&D caused a lot of my players to play the game like a PC game: Press this button to do 1d8 damage with a probabilty of 75% of success. Which also caused the same players to become upset whenever I would not keep strictly to the rules. Even if it made total sense (the scenes above could have easily occured in my games).
Dungeon World actually helps GMs think this way, and leads to players EXPECTING this and actually coming up with interesting stakes and pots. For many players, in my experience this leads to better (more fun) games as they feel less constrained by the rules, and gives the GM more ‘rule based’ tools do their job right.
Assuming you strip the whole ‘ask the players for input on everything’ part, because that just leads to a mess unless you have players with an exceptional sense to what keeps a story on point.
Any chance we ever get an article on PbtA games from you Angry?
No. Because they trade one problem for another. You go from an all Lawful solution to an all Chaotic solution. The point is to be versatile. To broaden the usable spectrum, not to shift it.
“If a player is willing to risk their character’s instant death on a single roll of the die, the return had better be pretty damned good.”
What is the value of character death?
Does it change in OSR where death is always present?
Do players just get a new character at the same level or a lower level?
Is it based on their emotional reaction?
Should a player that burns through characters get less of a return because of how the player is playing?
Is the stakes just character death or “character death + consistency of the game” or “character death + consistency of the genre of the game”. Are we playing season 8 Game of Thrones with heroic feats or Season 1?
If your player’s biggest concern about character death is potential loss of levels then you’re probably running a hack and slash style campaign with a heavy focus on combat, loot, and levelling. In that kind of scenario these rules don’t really apply as much, as it’s more important to keep the rules of combat consistent. If you’re in a campaign where players are invested in their characters as more than their effectiveness at winning then it makes sense to lean more towards chaotic, as your campaign focuses more on the RP and less on the G. Obviously this is a spectrum and should be adjusted for every campaign and group, but as a general rule the less you care about damaging the consistency of the game rules, the more you want be chaotic with your adjudication when the situation calls for it.
I second the advice above. If the story is meant to be an action movie, death feels different to that in a comedy, which is different to that in a drama. In role playing games, the players often determine the tone through their attitudes and style as much as the DM does through setting and plot.
If the players are so engrossed in the story that death would ruin everything, the party shouldn’t be risking death as freely as they would in a more light-hearted game. In this case, I would be more forecoming with information about the dangers in an area and how they can be avoided.
A player who chooses to run through the volcanic dragon lair as a shortcut in order to retrieve medical herbs for their dying mother will be more willing to accept death if there was longer, safer path available. On the longer path, the stakes should be more story-based, such as every delay past a certain point comes with a chance of worsening their mother’s condition (See Angry’s time/tension pool).
A while ago I was in a situation in-game where I wanted to sneak up behind an enemy and knock them out with a blow to the head, and the GM wouldn’t allow it. Their argument was, “The D&D rules don’t allow for that, and if the PCs can do it to others, then others can do it to the PCs, and that’s no fun for the players to be on the receiving end of.”
How would you respond to that?
My responses (in order) are:
1. The rules for D&D allow just about anything that is logical for the setting. There are also no specific rules for whistling. If you want one player to whistle to another as a signal, there is no ‘rule’ for that. The actual rules for D&D are open ended. They do not need to be defined. Hell, I would even just do an attack roll with advantage, with a hit rendering the creature unconscious – no need for damage.
2. Their table, their rules. If their bad rulings are enough to sour the game, find a different group. Most GMs have a little bad along with all their good – you just need to settle on whether the bad is bad enough for you to not enjoy the good. This sort of thing doesn’t make them terrible, but it might make their games not-as-good-as-they-could be.
3. There is no reciprocity of hero and villain powers. There are plenty of things that villains can do that heroes cannot do (multiattack being an easy one to think of), and plenty of things that heroes can do that villains cannot (action surge!).
Going back to risk / reward, the risk was very obvious: it might mean a fight, alert being raised, etc, with the reward of bypassing an encounter. Perhaps the GM thought there was not enough risk and too much reward, in which case it was the GM’s responsibility to up the risk somehow. Like a level next to the enemy that does something if pulled – like lock a door behind your character that seals them away from the others.
Angry had a good concept a bit back on his Mega-Dungeon articles, where he would only give half XP for bypassing a combat encounter, with the other half earned if they choose to go back and clear the room. I think this might give the GM a weird relief (even though it is unneeded) that the PCs don’t get all the rewards lazily, and if that GM wants combat, it would be a good incentive to include.
Some people care more about a consistent world then others. Some are fine with movie logic and treating the players as “main characters” and others want a virtual world where the players don’t have “main character” powers.
Do you want a movie or history? Main characters don’t die from random arrows or disease but plenty of important historical figures (including kings and generals) did.
1: Home brew mechanic that strongly resembles a Skill chalange but is hopfully natural enough to not be noticed as such. You need to get all the players involved in this as it will have a big impact.
2: Normal sneak attack rules but with nonleathel damage. It’s a fight and I want to have my fun. Hobgob is not defensless here and allowing the knockout could have long lasting tactic considerations.
3: Going to fall back on skill challenge here like a uncreative chump lol.
4: Crap that is a hard one. Player takes fall damage if he makes it and just dies if he fails and it should be a challenging roll. As for the reward… not really sure but maybe massive damage and a crippeling long lasting wound. blindness, loss of a wing, or maybe even death depending on the dragon. Important the player knows the reward and risk so he can be sure this is what he wants to do.
Now to read the rest of the article and see how I scored!
“Don’t go down and post your answer in the comments. It’s a rhetorical.” Pretty sure your score is an F.
I always sucked at test.
This one was still fun to answer.