I ran a crappy encounter, but it wasn’t my fault. Mostly. Were there things I could have done to make it less shit? Of course. But the problem was really baked into the system’s rules. Mostly. Were there elements I could have used to make it less shit? Of course. But the problem was really baked into the fabric of roleplaying gaming.
That got me thinking.
I want to tell you about my crappy encounter and how it helped me recognize something I’m calling The Hacking Problem. Mostly. The truth is, I didn’t need help recognizing The Hacking Problem. It’s something I’ve always been vaguely aware of. It’s something you’re aware of, too. I almost guarantee it. My crappy encounter and the thinking I did after helped me define The Hacking Problem and analyze the different ways roleplaying games have failed to deal with it.
Now, The Hacking Problem ain’t about hacking systems. Rather, it’s about hacking systems.
What I mean is that it’s not about changing the rules of the game; it’s about characters in the game accessing computer systems without proper authorization. It’s about computer hacking. In games. But if this were just about computer hacking — in games — I wouldn’t waste my time talking about it. Because fantasy gaming is the only gaming worth talking about. I don’t run games with computers very often, and I never write about them. But The Hacking Problem also shows up in other in-game activities like crafting and research. It’s also actually hidden underneath most social encounters. It should also be a part of lock picking and disarming, too, but it isn’t because game designers have implemented clumsy, crappy fixes to work around The Hacking Problem.
Now, some of you have already heard some of this speech. Pontification. Rant. Whatever. That’s because you’re part of the secret cabal of high-tier supporters who know about my super-secret roleplaying game engine in development, and you’ve heard me screaming and banging my head against the desk over it. Because now that I know it exists and why it exists, I’m gonna have to solve The Hacking Problem.
With great power comes great responsibility and all that shit.
This discussion here, though, is just a more general discussion about the problem itself and why it’s been so hard to spot and solve. It also corrects something I said in one of my oldest articles ever.
A Craptastic Hack
Context first.
I’m running this modern-world conspiracy-and-paranormal investigation game for my home group right now. It ain’t really a campaign; it’s filler while our main campaign is closed for renovations. The game’s basically The X-Files, but the investigators work for a private research institute instead of a federal agency. They do the same crap Scullder and Mully did, though. So far, they’ve dealt with a Satanic cult’s wendigo, they’ve dealt with psychics, they’ve got a psychic on their team even, they’ve recovered supposed debris from a supposed UFO crash before DARPA agents could send it to Warehouse 51, and now they’re dealing with an outbreak of cnidarian influenza that might have been engineered by Schmonsanto of Pfyzer With a Y or some other totally pretend biotechnology firm while a rogue CDC agent runs interference.
It’s that kind of game.
During a mission, the investigators had to make contact with a subject. All they had was a name, a few secondary contacts he’d maybe made, and the fact that he was staying at a certain hotel. One of the investigators is a former espionage agent with a background in computer intelligence. In other words, he’s a hacker. He wanted to access the hotel’s computer system and see if he could find the subject’s room number and maybe some contact information.
Now, he could have done the whole social engineering thing, or he could have had the party make a distraction so he could access the front desk computer, but he had a fancy computer and a bunch of high-tech gadgets, and he wanted to try remote penetration first through the hotel’s WiFi network. That’s a long shot, but pretty safe to fail at, so it’s a good first move.
Of course, when I say, “He could have done social engineering or direct access, but he chose to attempt a remote penetration first,” what I mean is that I laid out the options and he picked one. Because the player isn’t a hacker. He doesn’t know this shit. Moreover, this is a stopgap game and we’re playing an unfamiliar system and I really didn’t want to teach him all the rules for the whole hacking thing. Not that the system has extensive rules for hacking anyway. It’s a modern-day, realistic game, not cyberpunk. Jakey Mnemonic ain’t jacking in to the Matrix, flying through the Grid, slicing ICE, and smashing through the walls of the Protovision Data Fortress.
The point is, I was laying out the options, and he was making the best choices he could given the context. That’s important. Remember that.
Anyway, Darius — the investigator — discovers the hotel has both a guest WiFi network and a staff WiFi network. He also discovers a couple of printers in the hotel’s business center that likely have credentials saved for both networks. Better still, no one had ever updated the firmware in these things or changed the default security settings, so once he finds them on the guest network, he can get into one of the printer’s portals using default credentials. That gives him a bunch of identifying information for the printer and other vital information. He then disconnects the printer from the guest network and connects it to the staff network. Because he’s got a good WiFi scanner and he’s watching for it, he can capture the handshake between the printer and the network. With the information from the printer, login credentials gleaned from the printer, and the captured, encrypted handshake, he’s able to then spoof the printer and connect to the staff WiFi network himself. Basically, his computer is pretending to be the printer. See? Once on the network, he can see the staff computers, because no one ever disabled their discoverability, and gleans some information about them. He’s able to use an exploit in the operating system’s RDP protocols that were never patched due to inconsistent updates and poorly configured security settings to get remote access to the front desk computer. Then he can access the hotel’s PMS system, search for his subject by name, and get his contact information and his room number.
It was just that easy.
Now, look, I’d decided it wouldn’t be that hard. I purposely set this in a non-chain hotel with slightly older equipment and poor IT protocols precisely because I knew the group had a hacker who’d want to try this shit, but also, you’d be absolutely terrified if you knew how many commercial establishments had every one of the flaws he exploited in my little encounter. Hey, VPN companies, how about throwing me one of those sponsorships you fling at every other content creator ever.
There is also a sprinkling of bullshit in there. Not a lot; I like to keep things plausible — and it helps that the game’s not set in 2025 — but I refuse to go full-on Hollywood Hacking. But Darius has state-of-the-art technology from the Institute, some of it built on chip architecture not of this Earth and he rolled really well, so I had to give him the win. It was a long shot, but he gambled and won.
As cool as all that shit sounds, my player isn’t a hacker, and there was some reality-bending going on. The system’s hacking rules are somewhat limited, and I didn’t want to fully engage with them anyway. So, at the table, all of this amounted to me offering him choices and possibilities like, “You could start by scanning the guest network and looking for vulnerable devices there that might let you pivot to the staff network,” and him saying, “I’ll try that,” and a lot of Hardware [Security Systems] and Computer Science [Hacking] tests with one-step penalties and two-step bonuses and shit like that.
Now, behind the scenes, the system… oh, the system, right. We’re using the Alternity Science Fiction Roleplaying Game ruleset published in 1998 by TSR, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc., and the Dark•Matter Campaign Setting, which I’ve time warped to the year 2015.
Behind the scenes, the system has this fairly standard progress tracker. You know the kind. The player has to accumulate a certain number of progress points to complete a task, and each attempt chews up time or resources, and too many failures or a single critical failure can cause disaster. Alternity’s core mechanic also has degrees of success. So a single roll can net you one, two, or three progress points.
In short, it’s a standard skill challenge setup. You didn’t think Dungeons & Dragons’ 4th edition invented skill challenges, did you? You didn’t think Blades in the Dark invented progress trackers. All BitD did was make them pie-shaped. As such systems go, Alternity actually did the skill challenge thing — it called them Complex Skill Checks — pretty well, but I ain’t doing an analysis or critique of the whole skill challenge thing or suggesting there might be an Angry secret-sauce way to make a actual, good skill challenge system. I’m talking specifically about The Hacking Problem, which, while tangentially related, doesn’t have to involve skill challenges.
Honestly, the big problem is that skill challenges are supposed to fix The Hacking Problem, but just enable it more.
Anyway…
I want to note, before I continue, that this didn’t ruin my game session. The players had fun. The hacking encounter didn’t chew up more than a few minutes of table time. The hacker hacked, everyone else watched over his shoulder, and everyone remained engaged for the short duration of the encounter. My narration definitely helped. I even used this trick of getting slightly confusingly jargonny to keep the engagement up.
Incidentally, a friend of mine has been trying to convince me I should do a series on narration tricks I use to improve my game that you won’t read anywhere else, like being purposely confusingly jargonny. Does anyone want some articles about Stupid Narration Tricks no one else has ever shared? Let me know.
I do admit there was a tiny thing I could have done to spread the involvement around. I tried to, actually, but the players didn’t bite, and the encounter was over so quick that it didn’t matter enough to push. Actually, there’s a whole side discussion about the things I could have done to fix The Hacking Problem and why they don’t fucking matter or count. I’ll probably have that discussion in the near future because it’ll allow me to scream and rant at some of my most loyal, generous, and engaged supporters. But…
I’m losing my laser-like focus on the plot here. Let me make my actual point and move on.
This hacking encounter wasn’t a bad stretch of gameplay. It didn’t ruin the session, it didn’t chew up more playtime than it deserved, and I didn’t lose the players. From the other side of the screen, it was a perfectly fine stretch of gameplay. It was a workhorse encounter. It kept everyone interested, did its job, and then plodded away. There was a small missed opportunity that only I noticed and that only pisses me off because I’m me and anything less than perfection is failure.
The Hacking Problem isn’t a system-breaking disaster. It’s not a giant-ass problem. It’s the sort of thing that’s only noticeable if it happens a lot, and, beyond that, it’s just a missed opportunity to do better. It’s midweek dinner. It’s baked chicken breast with steamed broccoli over rice. It’s tacos made with one of those Ortega Taco Night kits and iceberg lettuce. It’s satisfying, even tasty, and it’s totally nutritious, but if you do it too often, it gets depressing, and it’s eating up the opportunity to do better.
So let’s keep that perspective in mind, please.
The Hacking Problem: What Actually Is It?
On the surface, The Hacking Problem is just a stretch of gameplay in which the player rolls the same check over and over to make something happen. But that’s just a surface-level explanation and, until you dig deeper, it lends itself to bland, crappy solutions. So let’s dig deeper.
The Hacking Problem arises when a character must carry out a protracted task using specialized knowledge or training that falls under the umbrella of a very small number of skills. Usually just one skill.
A protracted task is one that requires minutes, hours, or even days of effort on the character’s part. It ain’t something someone just does instantaneously. If you’re just hacking your way past a single login screen, fine, but a full-on penetration that involves accessing a system, bypassing security, locating key data, getting control of devices, and maybe even some track-covering cleanup ain’t the sort of thing you do with six seconds of keyboard poking. Likewise, first aid after an injury is pretty quick, but providing proper medical treatment for injuries is more involved. Crafting is always protracted. You don’t just throw your ingredients on a crafting table and bang them with a crafting hammer. Brewing a potion or making a sword takes a few hours or days.
The whole specialized knowledge thing refers to the idea that the player — not the character, the player — has no mental model or frame of reference for the task. My player isn’t a hacker. He doesn’t know how hackers hack. They type and stuff happens. Hell, I’m not a hacker either, but I’m sure as hell on a watchlist now thanks to my game prep Internet research. I have a player at my table who isn’t a doctor, but she plays one in my game, and she kept a critical patient stable for several hours while the paramedics fought through a blizzard. To my knowledge, none of my players are wizards or alchemists, but they conduct magical rituals and brew potions all the time in the game. The point is, their characters are experts in things they have literally zero understanding of, and so they have no basis from which to form plans, choose approaches, or experiment with alternatives.
The last part about the limited skill list is pretty easy to understand, and it often goes hand-in-glove with the whole esoteric knowledge thing. Crafting uses the Craft skill, hacking uses the Hack skill, and medicine uses the Treatment skill.
It’s important to note that even if shit was broken down into very specific subskills, it’d still land firmly in The Hacking Problem. I could split Medicine into Diagnostics, Pharmacology, Physical Therapy, Surgery, and a thousand other skills, but the use of those skills would still be dictated by the task at hand. It would still just be, “First, use your Diagnostics skill to determine the problem, now use Pharmacology to come up with a drug panel for problem management, etc.” And even if the task didn’t dictate the skill — “Do you want to take a Pharmacological approach or attempt a Surgical intervention?” — you’d run smack into the problem of the player and the Game Master and the adventure writer all lacking the knowledge to play, run, and design such an encounter.
So, you have an in-game task that intuitively demands — and mechanically benefits from — multiple action checks to resolve it, but one that just amounts to rolling the same check over and over because the check is either defined by the task or because the player lacks the knowledge necessary to choose different approaches or both.
That’s The Hacking Problem. And yes, I know there’s a big assumption in there that I commented on years ago and provided an easy solution for. I’ll get to that. It’s not a good solution. It’s just the least crap solution available. Except it wasn’t.
The thing is that The Hacking Problem is way more insidious than you think it is. There are lots of parts of lots of roleplaying games infected with The Hacking Problem. Some are obvious, like actual hacking. Others are asymptomatic. Others still are hidden under crappy Band-Aid™ brand adhesive bandage strips.
Take, for example, social encounters. In the end, a protracted social encounter — one that isn’t just a one-and-done roll — usually amounts to the players and the Game Master saying a lot of stuff, but the actual gameplay is just rolling the system’s equivalent of Interact over and over until the subject either gives in or gets pissed off and attacks. But social interaction doesn’t feel like The Hacking Problem because players and Game Masters have a mental model for how conversations work and so can come up with infinite approaches just by playing out the conversation as a conversation. The game mechanics under the hood are still just, “Keep rolling Interact until you succeed or fail.”
Have you ever heard anyone comment that melee combat can get pretty boring, and even playing a warlock is just about flinging eldritch blast over and over? What is melee combat but rolling the same check over and over to make progress toward eventual success without any real framework for defining approaches with any more detail than, “I try to kill the orc with my sword.” It just doesn’t seem like The Hacking Problem because there are so many other things going on in combat.
By rights, picking locks and disabling traps should also be The Hacking Problem. The reason they aren’t is that the designers made them into single-roll resolutions. They did that because The Hacking Problem, but I’d argue that’s a crappy solution. Consider what you have to do to run one of those pick the lock while the others hold off the monsters or disable the trap before the spiked ceiling crushes you all, scenes. I have to say, “This is a special lock that you can’t pick just once.” That’s stupid. That’s really how picking locks and disabling traps should always work.
Which brings me to one of the most common solutions to The Hacking Problem. The one I, myself, sold all y’all fifteen years ago.
The Single Roll Band-Aid™
Years ago, I told y’all that you should never use multiple die rolls to resolve something when one roll would do. I said that because The Hacking Problem. A stretch of gameplay wherein a player rolls a single check over and over multiple times to accumulate enough progress to succeed sucks, but, honestly, it doesn’t suck enough to make that approach worse than a single-roll resolution.
There actually are some very good reasons to use multiple checks to resolve protracted tasks, even if the whole thing is just down to accumulating progress toward success. To save myself some typing, I’mma call this the Progressive Check approach. That’ll distinguish it from the Single-Roll approach to task management. Cool? Cool.
First, Progressive Checks make intuitive sense. If a task takes minutes, hours, or days of effort, you shouldn’t resolve it the same way you resolve a punch in the throat. That’s why I had to work so hard to convince Game Masters not to use Progressive Checks. They’re so natural. By itself, that ain’t a great reason to use Progressive Checks, but it’s a starting point.
Second, Progressive Checks also help you maintain engagement, pacing, and synchronicity. Often, when a character gets wrapped up in a long-term task, the other characters use that time to do other things. Progressive Checks give you a reason to check in with the character committed to the progressive task. You don’t have to say, “You’re still committed to your task; we’ll resolve it when enough time has passed. Now, let me play with everyone else.”
When I said engagement, you thought I was going to mention the opposite issue, didn’t you? But, no, it’s usually the diligent long-term tasker that gets the short end of the engagement stick once you’re a good enough Game Master to pull off that Everyone Doing Everything All At Once bullshit.
Notice, too, that Progressive Checks let you keep everyone’s clock in sync when you’re doing that. If each Progressive Check represents ten minutes of effort — or one hour or one workday — you know precisely how much time the other characters need to fill or pass on between checks. In short, the Progressive Check anchors your Action Clock.
This shit’s especially important when it comes to failed tasks. Imagine the party’s in town. The wizard spends three days brewing an important potion while the rest of the players interact, network, train, run down leads, maintain gear, go shopping, sell treasure, carouse, or whatever. If the wizard gets one, single chance at the end of those three days to roll a success, that’s a lot of potential gameplay the wizard’s player sacrificed for one sucky roll if it fails.
Which brings up something else the Single-Roll thing can’t easily model. How do you handle commitment to — and abandonment of — tasks in a Single-Roll setup? See, in the Single-Roll Approach, there’s this weird thing where the character has to commit so many minutes or hours or days to a task to earn the chance to roll a check. Abandoning the task means any opportunities given up before abandonment got the player nothing. Moreover, when the opportunity to abandon the task arises — for whatever reason, good or bad — the player doesn’t have a good way to make that choice.
Imagine real-life me is working on a project. I’ve spent three days and made no progress. It’s just going shitty. Then, along comes my friend with an opportunity. If I abandon my current project, I can get a payoff. Maybe it’s not as good, but it’s something, and if the project is already stuck and I’m frustrated, it might be good to cut my losses and pick the sure thing. Meanwhile, if the project is going really well and I think I might be on the verge of a breakthrough with just one or two more days of work, that changes the math, doesn’t it?
Progressive Checks also make it easier to pause tasks that can be paused. Because some can be. You can’t put picking a lock on hold, and putting medical treatment on hold can be dangerous, but a crafting project is the sort of thing you can set aside and come back to. In a Single-Roll setup, the Game Master now has to track how close the character was to earning the roll before pausing a task. In a Progressive Check setup, the Game Master is already tracking progress, so there’s nothing extra to track to allow a task to go on hold.
A Progressive Check setup lets players see progress in return for their time and resource investments as they go. That’s great because players have to see progress when they’re playing games, but it also lets the players make reasonable choices about continuing to invest in the task as the situation changes or if the payoff isn’t coming.
That brings me around to the best reason to use Progressive Checks. When you start a protracted task, you might have an estimate about how much time and how many resources the task will probably take, but you can’t be precisely sure exactly how much it’s going to take to get the task done. That’s as it should be. You shouldn’t know precisely how long it’ll take to search a room or pick a lock. You shouldn’t know for absolute certain that you won’t run out of supplies in the middle of your crafting project and have to buy more.
Progressive Checks work even in systems with binary action resolution. In fact, the variable cost in time and resources thing becomes the big difference between something you can do immediately and something that takes a few minutes, hours, or days.
Thus, the Single-Roll Approach doesn’t really solve The Hacking Problem. It’s not even a Band-Aid™ brand adhesive bandage strip solution. It’s avoiding the problem of filling a bathtub by drowning your baby, or however that phrase goes.
To be totally honest, the reasons here are why I use Progressive Checks even when they lead to The Hacking Problem. I’d rather have The Hacking Problem than throw out Progressive Checks. The Hacking Problem isn’t that bad, especially how often it comes, and especially because I’m aware of it and I keep it under control. My terrible hacking encounter was only terrible to me. My players had a perfectly fine time with it. It would have been way less satisfying if I’d just handled it with one die roll.
Other Crappy Solutions
Now, I know there are lots of very obvious-seeming solutions to The Hacking Problem, and I know lots of you are going to want to comment them below. Go ahead. I won’t yell at you. Hell, I want you to do it. It’ll help others work around The Hacking Problem the way I do. But don’t fool yourself into thinking your solutions aren’t crap too. They are. I promise. Crap and kludge are the only solutions. I don’t want to analyze every bad solution to The Hacking Problem, but I will comment on a few.
The most common solution is the Minigame Solution. Lots of cyberpunk games go this route for computer hacking. Alternity does too. It’s just kind of shitty at it.
Basically, the Minigame Solution means building a dedicated subsystem to resolve a specific, protracted task. There are specialized rules, equipment, abilities, actions, and options. The player and the Game Master then use those special rules and systems to play out a little minigame to resolve the task.
Obviously, that makes sense for some games and some tasks. Hacking the virtual internet has been a cornerstone of cyberpunk since Gibson invented the genre. But as a bigger-picture solution to the problem of protracted, esoteric task resolution, it just doesn’t work. Do you really want your players to have to learn a bunch of minigames to play their character? Most players won’t even learn the general rules of the game. For that matter, how many minigames do you want to learn how to run? Are things like lockpicking and crafting and magical ritualing so important that they deserve a twenty-minute mingame with specialized rules? Do they come up often enough that you won’t have to look up the rules every time they do come up to remember how they work?
And what about the shit the designers didn’t make a minigame for? What if I want to run an encounter about cooking a meal to impress a visiting dignitary? Or what if one of my players with the cooking skill just decides that’s a good way to impress a dignitary? Do I have to invent a cooking minigame on the fly?
Then there are the solutions that involve structuring encounters or running games the right way. Tell adventure designers not to build hacking tasks that don’t include other skills and solutions. Tell Game Masters they always have to cut protracted tasks in with other activities for pacing reasons. I have a very long, very angry rant about the toxic-to-the-point-of-damaged mindset behind those suggestions, but I’ll save it for another day. I don’t believe in solving system-level issues by forcing contrivance on adventure designers and Game Masters. If something is broken on the system level, fix it there. If you have a hacking skill in your game — or a crafting skill or a lockpicking skill — using that skill should be interesting and engaging in and of itself. I shouldn’t need to flood a room to make lockpicking engaging.
In the end, though, while those solutions might reduce the impact of The Hacking Problem, not one of them gets to the real core issue. The real issue behind The Hacking Problem isn’t about dice or resolution or engagement. It’s actually about the problem of letting players play characters who are experts in things the players aren’t. And about Game Masters running games without the expertise the characters have.
Didn’t see that coming, did you?
Gameplay is Strategic Choice
Say it with me, “rolling dice isn’t gameplay.” Gameplay is making choices that affect the outcome of the game. If you ain’t making choices that change the game, you ain’t playing a game.
When Darius’ player chose the remote hacking approach, he was done making strategic choices. That was it. He’d picked his gambit, and everything else was just a long exercise in seeing how it turned out and what it cost him. The only choice he made as we played out the die rolls was to either keep hacking or give up, and, without a change in the situation, there was no reason not to keep going.
That’s The Hacking Problem. It’s that choosing to keep going or give up just isn’t a very exciting gameplay decision to make in general. In certain, specific situations, it can be exciting, but even when it is, it isn’t that exciting. It’s sure not as exciting as changing your approach as the situation evolves or experimenting with different solutions until you find the one that works.
If you’re hacking and you trigger a trace, the decision to keep going while that trace is running is very tense, but it’s still just deciding how much to gamble before your risk tolerance is maxed out. But if you’re hacking and you don’t trigger a trace, you’re just rolling the next check. Just like if you’re crafting in your downtime and you don’t have a crappy run of luck that chews up your expensive supplies.
Incidentally, this is why social interactions don’t feel like The Hacking Problem even though, mechanically, they’re identical. At least, they’re identical the way most Game Masters run them. Playing out the conversation — deciding every moment what you say next — provides such a possibility space that you might never realize you’re just making the same mechanical die roll over and over.
Of course, good Game Masters adjust their resolution to the situation. If you say the right thing, you get a bonus on your next Interact check. Say something offensive, you might fail automatically, or you might find yourself saddled with a penalty for the rest of the conversation. Of course, if you apologize and make it right, that might erase the penalty.
That shit works not because of the rules, but because Game Masters and players know how conversations work. The Game Master can modify each individual check because he knows how people and talking and shit all work. What’s the equivalent when a player who isn’t a hacker is playing a hacking game run by a Game Master who also isn’t a hacker?
Think about it…
If two hacking experts played a hacking encounter as Game Master and player, it’d play out like a social interaction run by a great Game Master. The Game Master would modify every check based on the player’s very specific action declarations, and the player would adjust his strategies and approaches based on the Game Master’s descriptions and the outcomes of his actions.
And that, there, is The Real Hacking Problem. How can a roleplaying game let two non-experts simulate a task that requires expertise in a way that’s strategic, exciting, and engaging? How can a roleplaying game let two non-experts simulate any such task they can imagine? On the fly? And how can it do so without adding so much abstraction that tasks themselves don’t feel like anything other than abstractions? How can you solve The Real Hacking Problem without introducing The Burning Wheel Problem? Is it even possible?
Hooray For Impossible Problems
And that is where this discussion ends. At least, that’s where it ends for now. Because, really, there’s not an obvious way to let a non-hacker run a hacking game that feels like hacking for a non-hacker. Not without minigames or abstraction. At least, there isn’t one yet. I do believe there is a solution out there. I think part of it involves a better toolset for constructing complex, protracted tasks. Basically, a better approach to skill challenges. But I also think it might require a completely different way of thinking about action resolution. Like at the deepest core of the core mechanic. Whether you could sit it over something like Dungeons & Dragons is a whole other issue. And that’s not even discussing other, more specialized, more abstract, and more indie roleplaying games that actually slap extra kludges and bandages over The Hacking Problem without approaching The Real Hacking Problem.
Meanwhile, though, I do suggest that y’all take my lead and lighten up a bit about The Hacking Problem. I know some of y’all have rejected the idea of Progressive Checks either independently or because you read my earliest work and haven’t looked back, even though I have, several times, offered contrary advice on the subject. By all means, be aware of The Hacking Problem, and don’t let it get out of control, but also don’t sink into contrivance or abstraction or minigames or the Single-Roll Approach to avoid the hell out of it.
I’ll probably have a lot more to say about this in the future. I am absolutely, definitely working on some things of both the firm advice and rule hack variety to build out and share in the coming weeks and months.
So, I guess, stay tuned.
Stupid Narration Tricks sounds amazing! Also this was a really useful breakdown, thank you.
Also interested in Stupid Narration Tricks
Very much agree with your assessment of the problem – RPGs are all about meaningful decisions, which are always driven by player skill, which CAN take the form of a comprehensive knowledge of mechanics (as many players do for combat), but ideally being able to engage with the fictional world and work things out from that perspective, which works out a surprising amount of the time.
One doesn’t need to have real-world experience in rock climbing to talk about handholds, and how far you can reach, whether you have something that helps you cling, etc, and most of us have climbed something as kids at the very least, plus we absorb a fair bit from fiction. Or narrating a search and getting the player to engage with the fictional physical environment, rather than just rolling a perception test.
But yeah, there are certainly chunks of the game where we can’t even simulate it. I’ve sometimes wondered should I research lock picking, and write up a summary of lock picking in the skill description? That would of course requires a player to actually read and internalize that, and engage with it when lock picking comes up. Given its hard enough to get many players to master even the basic mechanics, that’s not likely…
So I look forward to whatever it is you have in mind (and yes, in the meantime some narration tips on using some bafflegab to make the player feel like it’s the real thing, of course I and everyone else want it 🙂 )
Ironically lock picking in real life is mostly like punching a throat: commercially available locks, even expensive ones, are basically all dogwater and can often be picked by looking at the lock sternly.
I have a musician player at my table, who plays a bard. When the party returns from their adventures to the tavern, she always wants to perform a show that impresses the hell out of the locals, increases the party’s fame and gets the party free lodging, food and drink.
When she declares her action, she actually gives me a whole plan and approach (start with a mellow lute solo, soft voice, draw them in, then add percussion and energy, time minor illusion “fireworks” at the chorus’ first bar etc etc)
I wish I could have some way to resolve that better than “Roll your performance check” and then me narrating like hell to bring the scene alive.
I *love* the idea of resolving it like a protracted task that rewards her approach.
That’s why I don’t like crafting, hacking minigames and so on, we want meaningful choices but how meaningful can it be when you don’ really understand what you’re doing? Either someone’s slapped a minigame on it and in the end it’s about math/logic to decide whether the parameters make it worth continuing or not: you’re solving a how long does it take to fail the wrong way: the roll told you already: slightly bad = you failed fast, very bad you failed after a long while, no need for multiple rolls.
Depending on the setting and what you actually know about what the character is doing, something that should be long could be short and nobody will know better or you can just pass the time with the power of narration to reach the next actually interesting piece of aventure. If nobody knows how long or difficult it actually is it’s a shrodinger cat problem that doesn’t need solving except for theorical purposes. If you manage to make it interesting and realistic, congrats, but it’s a risk and you need prep or knowing what you’re talking about enough that it sounds alright.
Does it mean that one roll gives it all is the best solution in every case: of course not: we’ve gone past that kind of stupidity a long while ago. But I think the generic solution that you’re looking for could just be about figuring out when to use it or not, and that might depend on the DM and players involved and their skill, knowledge and interest in the task in question.
For a couple months I’ve been thinking that what I most need to do to improve my Game Mastering is to up my narration game. So yes, I would love to hear the tricks that have not been shared.
This was very enlightening and one of those rare articles that got me thinking about the very structure of RPGs.
I’m wondering if world presentation might make a difference in how players engage with it, and if that engagement helps a little with how abstraction feels.
But really, awesome article and excellent explanation on progressive checks.
I haven’t finished the article yet, but I need to tell you Angry I’m weeping tears of joy right now at your description of the hack scene.
I work in Information Security and party of my duties include “penetration tests” which are basically just hacking. I have always hated how stupid and horrible and incorrect “hacking” is portrayed in movies, to the point it ruins everything for me.
Angry’s description was spot on. That is pretty much exactly what I would expect in the real world without any crazy lingo or made up words, it is realistic, believable, likely and used the correct words for the most part.
Thank you Angry for making it so one time in my life I can come across a description of hacking in the wild and it is accurate!
You’ve softened this bitter old cynics heart.
Having done work on network security in hotels and how they protect their PMSs from the printer and stuff like that… absolutely echo this.
Also well done for even finding out what a PMS is!
But I feel like you’ve gone to a lot of work that most people wouldn’t understand or appreciate.
If I’d DM’d this, maybe one other guy in the group would have known what a PMS is as he used to do network installs for hotels. Only half of them would be familiar with a guest WiFi network. But none would suggest trying the printer.
Is there a middle ground between progressive checks and a minigame, where you give the player enough “tools” and clues for them to guide this, but the checks are resolved in the normal way, no new mechanics? Like a playbook which says “peripherals and smart devices are often weak spots” might prompt them to ask to go for the printer?
My low-effort solution is like the single-roll band-aid, but with two rolls, so it’s at least twice as good.
When my player says “I want to access the hotel’s computer system and see if I can find the subject’s room number and maybe some contact information,” I assume that they don’t actually want it to feel like hacking, they want to imagine a little story where their character hacks the system and gets the information. Rolling a d20 is a great way to prompt the player’s brain into making a story (if they know what they’re rolling for). So I get the player to roll their Hacking and I add a die to the Tension Pool.
If they roll an 18 on the d20 the player’s brain is going straight to thinking about how great they are at hacking and I’ll jump straight to giving them the information they were looking for.
If they roll a 3 the player’s brain is going to assume that they didn’t hack good enough, and they’ll probably make some excuse like “Shit, I guess I’m pretty hungover from that rave last night”. I’ll use that nugget to narrate what they already know–”Your head is pounding and your eyes are watering; this is certainly not your best performance…”–and then I’ll set up a second roll–”…but this is a fairly basic system, you’re pretty sure you can get in eventually, it just might take longer than usual.” Then the player says they keep trying (they always do) and I have them roll Hacking again, but this time the player is thinking less about IF they can do it, and more about how long they take (i.e. what it might cost them). So if they roll well, I add a die to the Tension Pool, and they get the information they want, they leave with a little story about trying to hack while hungover and powering through like a champion. Or they roll poorly and I add TWO dice to the tension pool, before giving them the information, and they leave with a little story about how it took them forever to hack a simple hotel database because they partied too hard.
That’s the baseline that I start with. Sometimes the result of the first roll is “it quickly becomes clear that this system is beyond your skill”, or “it seems like the information your looking for is isolated; you’ll have to hack in from a terminal on the closed network, probably in the hotel itself”, or, if the first check fills the Tension Pool and a complication happens, “you’re making good progress when the power goes out”.
oh, I like this! The problem is that you don’t have enough information to offer interesting decisions, but that resolving with a single roll takes away the nuance and the story.
Going with two rolls that give a like, spectrum of info on the two things that are relevant, “how good did you do” and “how fast did you do” is pretty elegant.
You don’t add non-decision rolls, it takes very little time, bonus/malus to the rolls are more important (cuz they count twice instead of once), and it gives a wider spectrum of results (doing something smooth and slow has a very different feel than shittily but super fast), and as a DM you don’t need to know anything about hacking or cooking to give the result
The only downside I can think of is that if you get both middling results it might be hard to narrate well, but that’s a problem of narrating “normal” results, not of the system.
100% stealing this, thank you for sharing!
addendum: you could add some strategic choice by letting the player focus in one of the rolls and disregard the other (like, +2 to one by giving -3 to the other). It’s not much of a decision, and sometimes it’s dictated by circumstance, but it lets the player express what they care about more
also, a possible “push your luck” mechanic would be to allow a rerroll of both dice by giving a minus to both rolls or something. Flavored as stepping back for a second and trying again (the minuses are because you wasted time before and are starting a bit frustrated and not at your best).
Thinking about it, it’s not much of a decision. If you failed at what you cared about, try again.
So there should be uncertainty about the outcome of the die after it’s rolled, which isn’t easy to do, especially if the player knows a bit about dice and can make informed decisions using math instead of engaging with the skill (which like, duh. They don’t know squat about flying a biplane and neither do I)
Hm. What even is a strategic choice? The simplest definition I can come up with is “a decision made with uncertainty* that alters the situation for decisions that come after it” (uncertainty coming from incomplete information, random chance, and future decisions made by other people)
Kinda hard to square that with a self-contained skill challenge. You’d have to incorporate some element from the rest of the game so that decisions made in a skill challenge affect stuff outside of it. Something like the tension pool (hell yeah) or a stress meter, or some kind of resource that’s used for a lot of things
Thought Experiment:
What is the difference between making a player feel like they are playing a hacker, and making a reader feel like they’re reading a story about a hacker?
Decisions.
Readers don’t need to know the specifics of hacking to keep reading. A tv show doesn’t stop if you’re unfamiliar with hacking. In fact, experts in hacking may find it difficult to read or watch hacking scenes if the writer has done a bad job of presenting those scenes.
However, players need context to their decisions to avoid stumbling through their task. The hacking problem is the equivalent of walking through a dark tunnel until you reach the end. Any decisions they make is essentially picking left or right at an intersection without knowing anything about where the paths will lead. (And let’s be honest, they usually lead to the same place anyway).
Exactly.
This scratches the surface of something I consider a bigger issue in modern TTRPG discussions: the blurring of the lines between “narrative” and “roleplaying”. When I am playing in a TTRPG, I’m not trying to tell a story, I’m trying to live an adventure as the character I’m playing. I think of people in real life, and the events that lead to their best stories. When they are experiencing the event, I don’t believe they are thinking, “what can I do now that will create the best narrative impact for the story I will tell about this?” Rather, I expect they are thinking, “this is crazy! What the hell can I do now?”
I want my RPG experience to feel the same way. I’m not thinking about a story, I’m inhabiting my character and trying to experience the situation they way they are in real time. And uncertainty and choices are the biggest difference. When I’m delivering a narrative, I already know what the outcome of each character’s actions will be so I can relate them with maximum narrative impact. When I’m playing characters, they don’t know what the result of their choices will be and I want to play them that way.
I’m not sure if there can be a real “solution” to The Hacking Problem. One of the core elements of RPGs is the opportunity to play characters vastly different from yourself, which inevitably includes skills that you (and likely your GM) are not nearly as adept as your characters. I’ve run into it myself, and the worse version where one of the participants (the GM, the Player, or another player at the table) actually is an expert (or fancies themselves one) in the field and the other(s) aren’t. There has to be some level of trust where the exercise of GM fiat (hopefully executed correctly and artfully) can allow the game to move on with fun and a minimum of friction (like it sounds like happened in Angry’s game).
I feel like this is also the problem at the core of starship battles with multiple characters on the same ship.
On a resolution level, systems with meta-resource and pushed rolls can help you out improvising a minigame of simple choices.
On a scenario level, progressive checks can relate with other players action and a dynamic team work can emerge, and i agree with you that should be natural and not artificial.
On a drama/narrative level, a new details with new choice and consequences can emerge “while hacking the system, you found a directory with your sister’s name, what do you do?”
On a fictional level, the system rule book should give fictional details on how hacking/disarmin/lockpicking works, i remember in a previous article you saying that about 3.5 D&D.
The goal is to link a die roll to a player decision, and you can do in very different way based on the system goal.
I learned all this from you, the fact you fuck up the encounter it’s just a quantum fluctuation of life, and does not surprise me you come back reflecting over to it despite your players had fun.
This is a problem I have been pondering off and on for several years now. Lockpicking is actually what lead me to it. You did a really good job outlining how several other sticking points in roleplaying are at their heart the same issue, and opened up some thinking avenues for me. I tried making structures modules / mini-games. I tried excessively studying certain topics so that I could better improvise challenges and obstacles and help explain decision points and implications.
Then I also experimented with different types of progressive checks that I “made” for my own home games. they are really just concepts for different ways to use dice to sum up moments that are kind of bigger than one roll but also kind of.. aren’t. They mostly just summarize these types of moments, but there may be a more creative way to use them.
Those rolls look roughly like:
– Hurdle (Obstacle): simple check against a difficulty
– Dispute (Contest): simple check against a roll
– Trial (Combination): a check that is both a hurdle and a dispute. For example, a race to climb a cliff. The cliff has a difficulty, and a contest. You need to beat both to win.
– Test (Summary): a check where the players single roll is compared against all of multiple hurdles or multiple disputes simultaneously. This creates a spectrum of success – kind of like how you could get a grade on a test. You managed to get through 2 pins on the lock this turn, but there’s still one more.
– Stop-Test (Summary): like a test, but the player roll needs to be compared against the difficulties in a certain order. At the first one in which you fail, you stop. The player character fails against each difficulty that would have come after, even if they would have won that bit in a normal test. I think of this like getting dogpiled – once they get you on the ground, or once the first zombie in the mob grabs you, the rest don’t really have to roll now – they jump in too.
– Drain (Subtraction): each difficulty you compare the players roll to actually subtracts from the players roll. They can keep going until they zero out.
– Phased (mini-gauntlet): the essentially single action requires you to press X to continue – each pin in the lock needs to be rolled for separately, or each main point of the negotiation as you talk, or the portal doesn’t unlock until your wizard activates each glyph individually. Works as an action clock.
This is not a good solution, but you said to give our bad solutions, and I think this may be slightly less worse than just doing a straight Progression check with no choice but to stop or keep going?
Some sexy game master once came up with this system that essentially lets you choose every time you take the next step, whether you want to go with the Safe and Slow approach or the Decisive and Loud approach. So you could let the player continue to make checks, but routinely present them with jargony nonsense that essentially boils down to “do you want to cover your tracks/make sure the pin is secure in the lock/sweep the network for black ice (add a die to the Tension Pool and make a little progress) or are you ready to charge in and finish the job (roll the Tension Pool and make multiple steps of progress). I might be getting the specifics a bit off, but the basic idea is to jazz up the Progression Check’s binary (continue/don’t continue) with three choices (continue careful/continue loud/don’t continue).
1. Oh yes, I’d love to hear more “Stupid Narration Tricks”—please share!
2. I always felt something was off with how this kind of challenge gets handled, but your explanation really helped me see why. As for fixing it, it looks like Hollywood writers have been wrestling with this forever. Their go-to move is an exposition scene (“Careful! You can’t trigger the Zigloid unless you desynchronize the Warpotarior first”), and then they show the character sweating it out under pressure. From what I’ve read (multiple times), novel writers get away with it by throwing in lots of jargon and get super detailed about one thing, which makes the story feel real—even if the rest is pretty generic.
3. My preference would be a generic multi-step system like the one you described. If the mechanics are always the same, I don’t have to learn new rules every time and can focus on narration. Game Masters who know their stuff can add lots of detail and options, while others can keep it vague. And if fans can pitch in, it’d be awesome if people shared realistic steps and options for different problems for other GMs to use in their game.
4. Lastly, I believe the skill challenges should play on two aspects. The better your character is, the more likely they’ll succeed of course. But also, higher skill should mean you can better estimate how much time, effort, or money it’ll take. So if you’re trying to hack a hotel’s system, a seasoned character should have a pretty good idea of how tough it’ll be and how long it’ll take. Whereas someone with low skill—or who flubs a knowledge check—might totally misjudge it.
I’m actually doubtful if The Hacking Problem can ever be solved (though I’m always willing to be proven wrong). It could be that you just can’t break reality in that way. Which is to say, that you just can’t simulate something you have no knowledge about.
On another note though, player vs. character skill is an always interesting discussion, and one I see tackling in basically every GMs book. One I’ve read recently was ACKS II, and it had an interesting take on synergy between the two that seemed to echo some Angry advice I’ve read previously (again correct me if wrong). They used phrases like: “The player is the instructions and the character is the guy trying to follow them.” or “The player talks, the character translates.” Stuff like that. Curious if anybody familiar with the system has any thoughts.
I think the problem has to be principally solvable, because as someone with combat tournament experience combat in rpgs has the exact same problem and basically nobody ever notices it.
And what about when the player’s an expert and the GM isn’t?
One of the expressions of this that sticks with me is gambling scenes. Do we just actually start playing poker? Isn’t that kind of like whipping out Operation when your doctor PC wants to perform surgery in game? It’s kind of like two progressive checks are happening at the same time, the social/insight vectors, the skill vectors and then luck on top.
I think the main problem is differentiate what’s a skill check and a skill challenge. I combat, we wouldn’t have this discussion since an attack roll succeeding and the monster being defeated are two different metrics, but non combat situations are often built to be resolved with a single skill check.
So I believe that the problem cannot be solved at the action level, but at the encounter level. You need to have some framework on to how to build a skill-based encounter.
Thinking about it, you could have a 3-level system, where success it’s not an automatic win, but leads to another scene that requires another test (could be the same or not, or even a test by some other characters to enable the first one to do his thing). Something like that:
Test 1
If W, Test 2
If L, Test 3
Test 2
If W, Test 4
If L, Test 5
Test 3
If W, Test 6
If L, Test 5
Test 4
If W, Best Success
If L, Sucesso & Complication
Test 5
If W, Success & Complication
If L, Failure
It’s a simple framework, but you can easily fill the blanks. Also, if you have multiple entrance points, you can make it so much more complex
First, I wanted to mention that I think the email system is broken; I didn’t receive emails about this post, or the “Order Matters” post. Maybe it’s a New Year issue, somehow?
Second, I think that per Mortumus’ comment above, this isn’t a truly solvable problem; it’s baked into playing characters that are different from you. However, the other thing to keep in mind is that while a “hacking problem” situation might feel like a problem from the GM side (i.e. a “press button to continue” type of thing), a couple of tweaks can make it feel quite different from the player side; some of the examples above are great for this.
Another tweak you could throw in is figuring out some way to incorporate another player into the “hack”; maybe your wizard is researching an evil ritual, and the ranger, who is proficient in survival, spots the fact that if you need a deadly nightshade, there’s only a few places that they regularly grow. Or maybe the dwarf fighter can narrow the five possible ritual sites down to two with use of his Stonecunning. All that to say, if you’re adding detail to the “hack,” you might be able to add details that other players can help with.
The analogy with combat is interesting.
Imagine a character is challenged to single combat. Perhaps its a big thing and they’ve solved a mystery, accused the baddie but now he’s used some old law to call for a battle of champions.
The character is an expert in all weapons and fighting styles, the opponent has been trained by a famous swordmaster.
In D&D the player now gets to roll a bunch of times at his ‘Attack’ skill to see if he can make enough progress to win before his opponent makes enough progress to win.
The combat mechanics no longer hide the lack of player knowledge as to exactly how to try to parry a thrust to the face from a low guard or whether to try to rush in or fence cautiously or whatever.
I’d think this is because a duel with weapons is not central to the D&D combat system.
A different game could have more rules. (E.g. A character with a shorter reach could have to make decisions about how quickly they try to close the distance. There could be reckless vs safe attacks. Feints could be much more of a thing. It might be important to deduce your opponents fighting style or who trained them. There could also be psychological aspects, bluffing etc.)
I think to an extent it is inevitable that a game system can have some aspects of interacting with the world that are fleshed out and allow a rules based abstracted simulation or mini-game, but can’t possibly have this for everything.
I’d guess that if you ran a game where a duel of this sort was going to be a major event or especially a running theme you might consider changing system or at least adding some house rules. (Or you might decide that actually a contest involving all the party fighting at once in a special arena might be more fun and not have this problem.) Whereas if you only did it once, would it also like the hacking thing just have to be carried by the GM narration etc.
I think perhaps its the same for hacking. If it’s going to be a big thing it probably needs some rules that are complex enough to be fun, or if it’s just a one off ‘special’ or normally only used as a ‘pick lock to overcome obstacle’ type skill it probably just kinda works ok as it is.
Heya! First comment ever, love reading the site:)
I think a (probably crap) solution would be a universal minigame mechanic, that can be reskinned. I can think of 2 systems off the top of my head:
You fill a progress bar, and have a fix number of tries. eg, 1d4+2 progress, or 1d8 (specifics TBD). The number of rolls you have, and the amount you need to fill out are how you can tweak the difficulty. The meaningful decision is going safe or taking risks.
You have 2 bars: success and failure. If you fill out success first you get it. If you fill out failure first you lose. Failure has to be a limiting factor in some way: time, ingredients, heat before you notice your hacking, whatever. You roll 2 dice, one foe success and failure, and add it to the corresponding bar. The decisions could be: using a d4 for failure and d6 for success, or d6 for failure and d8 for success, or d4+3 for failure and d10 for success etc. The combinations they have access to could depend on their skill, with some being strictly better for those who are proficient in this task.
Example for the first:
You’re cooking for the visiting duke. You have to make a great meal (DC15), and you don’t have a lot of time (3 turns). You decide to try and go for a novel spice mix (risky roll:1d8=6). More fluffy narration here. Then you decide to make a conservative soup, that’s always popular (1d4+2=3), but some of your vegetables went bad and you have to leave them out and improvise. It doesn’t go great. You know you have to finish the meal with a killer dessert, so you use a limited skill, and bump the d8 to a d10=9.You made the meal.
I won’t type an example for the second one, this took long enough, but hopefully you get the gist of it.
Ofc you can combine it with the whole partial success, yes but/no and spectrum of resolution. It still needs the GM to narrate it well, but hopefully you tips can help with that 🙂
Not exactly a Hacking Problem, but close?…
One example that I use in my games is for identifying magic items with Arcana checks. The DC for the check is set based on the rarity of the item, and each check represents one hour of attempting to figure out what the item is. Each subsequent check gets a bonus to the roll, meaning that it becomes more and more likely that the character will succeed, and that identification is guaranteed as long as you spend enough time.
I use this system to give the players a chance to identify loot mid-dungeon during a short rest, but it isn’t guaranteed.
The reason the game Mage the Ascension has a reputation for being extremely difficult to explain is that literally the entire game is a hacking problem with the particular hack being “Design a non-Christian religious ritual, using the assumptions of an American in the early 90s about how non-Christian religion works.” And if you did grow up reading that kind of stuff you can run it like a conversation, but explaining spell design to someone with no background is like teaching someone Comptia to play shadowrun.
“How can a roleplaying game let two non-experts simulate a task that requires expertise in a way that’s strategic, exciting, and engaging? How can a roleplaying game let two non-experts simulate any such task they can imagine? On the fly?”
Not sure about the exciting part, but The Hacking Problem seems very similar to problems in program management. Often, decision makers aren’t Subject Matter Experts, so information has to be condensed and understandable to non-SMEs to make a decision. Maybe some sort of global mechanic that is easily describable that expands the solution space from continue/don’t continue to some sort of meaningful, grok-able tradeoff. WhiskeyBoat’s two-roll solution is kinda like this, but there’s probably more generalizable tradeoffs than time/risk. It would be aesthetically pleasing to have a 3 or 5 point approach assessment criteria that you could throw up on a radar chart and ask what option a player wanted to pursue. I don’t need to be an expert hacker or doctor or anything to understand cost / loss risk / time / opportunity on a given approach, and how those values can change over progressive checks or with different approaches. You could even have baseline rules where reducing one value generally increases another (cost-time tradeoff). We’re always doing periodic checks on spending / progress / metrics on our engineering programs (but making that non-boring is another challenge :P).
It would have to be at the same level of a D20 test, so necessarily would require some kind of systemic rework. Less determining success and more determining how your approach affects the meta-metrics which govern potential outcomes. This at least gives some dynamic levers to pull for players to pursue different approaches.
This seems like the best take to me. I don’t really care about ‘solving’ it, but instead just make it as close to consistently engaging as possible, no matter the method. You’ve got it though: interrogate the solution-space. Figure out non-technical ways to describe the risks and benefits for continue, pivot approach, or cease; via cost, threat, opportunity, etc. Weird dice like Genesys might be useful for this since they give you alternative pips to introduce things that don’t contribute or take away directly from success, and thus act as more of dressing or pivots (though I’m still not fond of the dice). Otherwise you need to be able to visualize the problem, the method, the goal, and the context and what objects are in motion. “Attack, attack, attack” combat occurs when there’s no meaningful reason to pivot and you’re just filling up progress reliably, safely, efficiently. You need to incentivize pivots and alternate paths; slow or diminishing returns, limited opportunities, alternate outcomes, changing context, resource or time cost, etc. Otherwise, it may as well just be one-roll, that’s just efficient.
ok, rough first draft I came up with heavily inspired by WhiskyBoat’s method. General system, with d20-specific stuff in parentheses
– The player decides on a course of action that you deem worthy of a Skill Challenge
– They will roll two dice (both d20s). One measures the quality of their work, the other measures the time it takes.
– Before rolling, they may choose to take a penalty (-3) to one of the dice to give a bonus (+3) to the other.
– After rolling, but before revealing the results, they may choose to reroll both dice with a penalty (-2), and paying a cost related to the wider game (add a die to the Tension Pool).
– This rerroll can be attempted any amount of times, but the penalty is cumulative (so a -4 on both dice, then a -6, etc), and the cost related to the wider game is paid every time.
– Determine and describe the outcome based on the final result.
Fast, simple, very general, requires no technical knowledge about the action being attempted, offers strategic decisions that affect not only the Skill Challenge itself but also the future circumstances. (if I remember correctly, the tension pool was about random encounters. But it could be like Stress from Mothership, or Heat from Blades in the Dark. Anything that gives long-term weight to short-term decisions)
I think because complex systems get used in situations with binary outcomes their ability to be engaged with strategically is limited. You either open the lock or you don’t, so rolling multiple die or trying to understand the problem using real life knowledge feels flat because of this.
The hacking problem doesn’t apply to conversations because the complexity of the interaction matches the complexity of potential outcomes. If you are requesting something from an NPC and you realise the conversation isn’t going well you can offer a favour to sweeten the deal. Now if it goes ahead that deciscion you made has effected your outcome as you now owe them that favour. Because the interaction has a broad range of possible outcomes then the space for strategic decision making opens up. Players can shift their desiscion making to account for the trade-offs of multiple outcomes as different opportunities appear or the risk involved with certain approaches changes over time, which allows for players to enage with the strategy of it.
To adapt some of that strategic gameplay to crafting, each stage of die rolling could offer choices that effect the outcome. A failed stage on crafting means the player chooses between accepting a small flaw in the end product or they can risk destroying it to remove that defect. A success could present the player with the option to add an even more expensive component in for some new beneficial affect. The crafting process could develop into a give and take negotation between the player and the gm about how they adapt to new problems and opportunites in the crafting process.
With progressive checks in lock picking I would also consider the idea of each successful skill check stage banking a certain percentage chance of success, so for every minute you work on it you get a cumulative +10% chance of success for when you finally decide to cash out. That way you learn the upper limit on how long the task could take (the time it takes takes to hit 100% success) but also you have the option of cashing out earlier if the situation calls for it.
Maybe Risus and its ‘if more than one roll is needed, everything can be a combat’ approach to problem solving could at least provide inspiration.
Because you might bash the same aspect of your character (Cliché) against a combat for its entire duration repeatedly… or you may make use of overexertion mechanics (pumping) gambling that you win the race faster, switch to a different appropriate Cliché to keep your health and damage potential up, find a way to justify an inappropriate Cliché to do triple damage, team up with a fellow adventurer and make use of vengeance bonuses, use your Lucky Shots to have a consistent edge and so forth.
I know this may sound obvious and/or burdensome, but couldn’t you just try to learn about the systems you plan to run, at least enough to be able to describe the risks well enough so players can make informed choices? That wouldn’t completely solve the problem but it would go a long way. Angry, your description of hacking sounded pretty reasonable here, I’m assuming based the fact that you researched it before the game. It’s work, but scientia potentia est.
1. That is a massive upfront cost that may or may not bear fruit. At least, at least writers have the benefit of knowing how deep they need to go for whatever project they’re working on.
2. It also requires the player to put in the effort to learn about the systems. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to learn hacking in order to RP Hacking. I don’t want to learn about blacksmithing to RP making a magic sword. etc.
3. It has a massive blind spot in fantasy and scifi games where real world research isn’t going to help.
4. You’re still up the creek if you have to run something that you didn’t plan on.
And like Angry said, it’s not that big of a problem. Certainly not worth the effort of learning entire skill sets which may be used as a one off and never touched again. It’s the RPG equivalent of a video game cutscene that gives “Press A to Continue” prompts. They’re absolutely fine when used sparingly.
If the goal is to make something more like what is basically improv, then I would say prompts. The one making the checks writes down 5 single words they associate with whatever activity they’re trying to do. The GM writes down 3, and maybe the other players gets to write down 2 each, why not. Put all the prompts into a receptacle or online randomizer, the one doing the activity draws a set number of prompts decided by the GM. The doer picks the first prompt and interprets its meaning, the GM decides on a check to make, then the GM picks one, and alternating, until the activity is finished or aborted. The downside of which is that you’re doing a meta-activity outside the game world.
As for dice mechanics, maybe something proven like yahtzee. The activity requires a set suit of dice to be cleared, like three threes and two fives. You roll a number of dice decided on by your ability score(s) and or skills. For each roll, you can decide to bank any number of dice showing the same face, but that will also mean you’ll have less dice to throw next round. So in the example above, do you bank threes knowing you’ll need more of them, or do you bank fives knowing that statistically they’re slightly harder to roll? This way you’ll have some escalating tension and some added choice, with a simple model that can be used for anything from lock-picking to cooking. The downside of which though, is that it is pretty generic and it’s probably hard to tie the rolls to any meaningful narration (I banked three threes, what does that represent though?).
I don’t think its possible to solve the hacking problem—the player needs to know the context governing a specific field before making an informed and non-abstract decision, and the DM needs to know that context too, if not even more than the player knows.
I think that’s OK though, because a player who isn’t informed in a field probably isn’t interested in skill challenges involving it. If I’m not a fan of medical dramas, I probably won’t enjoy an encounter about trying to stabilize an ill NPC. If I’m not into metallurgy or material science or any of the technicalities behind smithing, I might tune out the details when smithing arms for a militia on a time crunch.
Especially with the lockpicking example—why would you wanna design substantial gameplay around picking a lock if no one at your table has ever been remotely interested in locksmithing?
So I think the ‘solution’ to the hacking problem, at least for homebrew DMs, is just not to build your encounters and adventures predicated on subjects your players are unfamiliar with. Or unwilling to learn, if you don’t mind teaching them along the way.
I think you are underestimating the amount of fantasizing among players. Lots of people would love to play a cop, but most of them would have little interest in learning the tedious art of interrogation even though it is an inevitable and unavoidable element of being one. Unless you are suggesting simply hand-waving those parts of the game, which is (I assume) one of the various non-perfect solutions to which Angry referred.
To the contrary, I think fantasy is why we won’t ever need to solve the hacking problem. But I am suggesting we hand-wave parts of the game that not even fantasy can make interesting.
Interrogation is a good example actually, because dramatized interrogation (like in Ace Attorney or cop movies) has a way better general reception than the in-and-outs of realistic, drawn-out interrogations. Thus, most people already have a good mental model on how dramatized interrogations play out, and you can avoid the hacking problem by leaning into those tropes instead of boring real-life procedure.
Same thing with combat—most systems are built to be a more theatrical portrayal of physical combat. Same thing with stealth as well, since most everyone’s seen a heist scene somewhere and understand the principles of “tiptoe around, silence guards, and start running if the alarm goes off.” You can do a lot with just those bullet points.
And if your players want something more realistic, like more drawn-out interrogations and legal procedure, great! Then most likely they have more law and psychology knowledge under their belt, and if not, they oughta be ready to learn.
If none of that is true, but you still want to design an informed encounter about lock-picking or shepherding or something… why? I feel there’s a reason we don’t have entire novellas or fantastical systems dedicated to the craft—their inner mechanics don’t really have a crowd appeal, so it makes sense that locks are subject to the hacking problem. As a corollary, however, a lock-picking encounter, with lots of lock-picking decision trees, modifiers, and twists, probably wasn’t going to hook your players anyway. You might as well save time by just reducing the ordeal to two checks and fancy narration.
In other words, I think the hacking problem is only really going to show up in realms of expertise a player or DM wouldn’t care to simulate and engage with in-depth.
If I was going to try to solve this problem, I would start with the standard skill challenge system. But instead of starting the players at 0, I would start them somewhere in the middle of the track. Let’s say 5 out of 10. Naturally, the players are going to go up and down the track based on how well they do. Let’s say about 1 or 2 at a time with a bonus for natural 20s or 1s. I want to leave room for big wins that can make a lot of progress, and big misses that can put the players right up against the failure point.
This will let players know how well they’re doing. Which is something that a person with a specialized skill set will know. After a couple of rolls, the player will know on average how well they’re doing. Which again is something that a specialist will know. And it gives players a chance to use limited abilities to give a last push or avoid a bust.
You can also add other things like timers as necessary.
I don’t think this is a comprehensive solution nor is it necessarily applicable to non-d20 games, but it gives some depth to progressive checks that allow for some more dynamic choices: Progressive Successes.
Progressive Successes add an additional dimension to the traditional progressive check by allowing multiple successes to be gained on one roll. For every time you exceed the DC by a certain amount, you earn an additional success towards the total successes needed to clear the progressive check. For example, picking a lock might take 3 successes, with a DC15 and exceed by 2 per additional success. So a 17 would get two successes, and a 19 or above would earn enough successes to pick the lock in one go.
This progressive scaling gives the DM another lever with which to delineate choices for the player: base DC; total successes required; time cost for each check; and now, difficulty of progressive successes. While this doesn’t change the adjudication very much, it allows for choices to be made within the realm of the singular “hacking” skill. Consider these examples:
Do you want to take the easy way despite it taking a while to do (low DC, high total successes, high time cost, low progressive success)? Maybe you want to use a risky, time-consuming method since it’ll be smooth sailing once you’re in (high DC, low total successes, high time cost, low progressive success)? What about some quick-and-dirty method that’s commonly known and defended against (low DC, high total successes, low time cost, high progressive success)? Or perhaps it’s time to press your luck with something fast and direct (high DC, low total successes, low time cost, high progressive success)!
Despite your player not having the applicable knowledge their character does, the greater depth in player decision-making comes closer to emulating the character’s actual application of their knowledge. More importantly, it doesn’t complicate action resolution with rules that are far different from the standard.
I’m thinking about why combat doesn’t seem to exhibit this problem. Though, as you say, it does to some extent, especially when it gets locked down with everyone just rolling to hit & damage. But, usually, there’s just enough extra stuff going on to keep it interesting.
I played Silverpine Watch over the Christmas period with my brother, his two boys, and my two boys (ages 10 to 16). Thinking back on the combats, initial setup and movement was often tricky, with the characters going up or down stairs into rooms of zombies. Some characters quickly got mobbed while others were stuck behind and couldn’t see. That extra bit of friction made a big difference.
And everyone knew enough of the physics to get how line of sight would work, or that climbing on or over tables might be challenging, and that the zombies were too clumsy to even attempt it. The cleric got frustrated when he was stuck at the back and was about to cast Bless when one of the players said “No, they’re easy to hit! We don’t need that bonus”, which was a nice bit of tactical thought for beginner players.
I think that extra intricacy is one of the reasons I much prefer playing with minis.
I’m not sure this helps with the general case, though, except for illustrating a counter example. None of us know how combat really works, but we know enough about moving about a room and what physical actions can and can’t be done. There’s just enough decision-making going on to make it challenging.
I think the only real “solutions” are those that are keyed to the situation and players around that exact table at that exact moment. In Angry’s game example, the hacking player seemed to remain engaged in his character’s attempt. And the other players around the table in that moment seemed likewise engaged enough in watching that they still enjoyed the session. If the players around the table in that particular moment had not shown enough interest or engagement in how it was going, I presume Angry would have found a way to change things to make sure everyone was still having fun (at least everyone but him; alas, heavy is the head who wears the crown, or whatever).
The biggest hazards I have personally experienced basically boil down to various failures of GMing and, to some degree, playing. Most commonly it’s stubbornness. Either the player or the GM, or both, decide they ACTUALLY know how the whowidget would ACTUALLY connect to the fizzbatigater and how many quimtzics it will take the remodulate the picapecka, and argument ensues that grinds the whole game to a boring (at best) or awkward (at worst) halt. That’s where the trust has to come in. At some point, especially in fantasy/sci-fi where there is literally no real world expertise to provide an answer, the GM has to arbitrate how the “real world” of his game actually works in this context, and the players have to trust the GM enough to go along with it and let the game roll on. It requires everyone involved to put the game and everyone’s enjoyment of it ahead of their personal ego need to be “right”, which sometimes feels like a depressingly rare event.
I think a major reason that skill challenges fall flat is that rolling to make progress towards a goal, on its own, is just worse than rolling to accomplish what you want to accomplish. It’s much better to measure progress towards something undesirable. Combat isn’t tense and engaging because you have to roll many times to kill your enemy, it’s because as you roll to kill your enemy you are at risk of taking damage and being pushed to the point where you can’t play anymore because your character is incapacitated. Forcing players to chip away at a monster only serves to create space for the monster to chip away at them. It is the persistent, predictable, measurable, and consequential cost of taking damage, and the many incomparable ways to influence how much damage you take that makes several turns of combat better than one “Roll your Dragonslaying…you killed the dragon”, and much better than “Roll your Dragonslaying until you kill the dragon. I’ll wait”.
With regards to the hacking problem, the Tension Pool is a great way to measure undesirable progress in a way that is relevant to extended tasks. Money is also a logical cost, especially for things like crafting. However, without the specific mechanics of a minigame, like combat, there probably isn’t enough depth to fill 3 to 5 rounds of actions; you don’t need to create enough space in the game to warrant rolling to make progress. Instead I would make rolls to succeed, with accumulating costs for failure. For example, picking a lock costs time (die in the tension cup) and if you fail you haven’t unlocked it yet so it costs more time to keep trying. You could keep rolling until you succeed, but that gets tedious with a string of bad luck, so if the player is intent on sticking to their strategy it’s better to roll for whether you “got it this time” or “got it eventually”. Note that if your character is competent it’s likely you’ll succeed the first time and not have to think much about it, but if you’re not you are more likely to fail, have your attention drawn to the Tension Pool, worry about the cost of spending more time, think about faster strategies for getting through the door, and end up engaging with a challenge. That’s what being good (or bad) at a specialized task feels like; the more competent you are, the less likely you are to feel challenged.
Can two non-experts simulate a task that requires expertise? Magic systems are a good example, they usually allow it to some extent.
Lemme share my hacking sub-system I use for infiltration and action games.
I run them using building plans subdivided into physical areas (Fate-style). Each physical area gets one hackable node (wi-fi, bluetooth or some other vulnerable short-range remote connection) of a specific type. Each type has specific functions, such as Media, Devices, Logs… Types of nodes are revealed in advance, usually when players obtain the schematic of the place.
To hack a node, the hacker needs to be in the same area, although the specific spot is up to them. It’s up to the party to get their hacker to a node of desired type, and give them enough time, cover, and distractions to hack it.
Bigger facilities can have multiple nodes of the same type. Hacking nodes of the same type upgrades the access level of all nodes of that type. For example, lvl1 access to Media only gives you recently cached things, while lvl3 reveals all original and even deleted files. So if the hacker wants more options, they will have to infiltrate or breach facility further.
Effects this system has on the game:
– somewhat like magic, it’s a player facing system that doesn’t require GM to construct a unique challenge every time, and walk players without expertise through the solution. It works the same all the time, the challenge is to leverage it optimally.
– core verbs required to engage with hacking system is “go to”, “sneak” and “break into”, which are also core verbs of location-based adventures.
– somewhat like fantasy chests, rewards and bonuses are placed at specific places of facilities, accessible only by hackers. They can both be adventure goals, or sources of advantages to get to the goal. Rather than being all or nothing, players can figure out to which extent hacking would be useful in their current situation.
– player-facing rules allow the whole party to form actual plans that include hacking, rather than isolating hacking as “weird esoteric hacker’s thing”
– it avoids using Progressive Rolls, as any system should :p
I guess I don’t really understand the problem. Maybe its because my players are easily entertained. :^Þ
Seriously though, if a task CAN be done, and a player’s skill shows it WILL be done eventually, one roll is all that’s really needed. Even if it’s a failed roll, the MoF will tell me as GM how long it should take and what it should cost the player in resources. I don’t need to be an expert in computer security or any other field to look at a roll and use the MoS/MoF to determine time and costs and weave a narrative about how their poor roll resulted in mistakes, wasted time and materials, but EVENTUALLY they got it right. That’s my job as GM. (yes, even a failed roll at my table can result in a success if the outcome is that they will inevitably succeed… I don’t need my players to “press X until you succeed”… that’s what MoS/MoF are for)
I guess you could call my solution the One Roll To Rule Them All. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sucky roll or not because my players aren’t “wasting their time” to “earn” a roll they botch terribly… they make the roll at the beginning of the endeavor that determines the time and other resources consumed in the task. I don’t need to narrate about wi-fi device spoofing or other stuff my players really don’t care about. All they want to know is, “Did I succeed or fail and how long did it take?” If they roll a critical failure, I tell them, “You spend a day working on it before you realize you forgot some crucial ingredient. You’ll have to start all over and the stuff you used is ruined. You’ll need more supplies.” If it’s a task and not making something, like picking a lock, a really bad roll may get them, “You’re just about to get it when you hear a sickening ‘SNAP’! Yeah… you just broke your lucky lock pick.” If it’s a failed roll but not TOO bad, they may get, “It takes you a LOT longer than you thought it would. You’re not sure HOW long it will take, but the Sheriff’s Deputy could walk by the window any minute. Do you want to press on and see if you get it open or try something else?” I already KNOW if he has enough time based on how bad the roll was, but I put the choice in the player’s hands because neither they nor their character know the outcome, even if they know they made a bad roll. That’s roleplaying!
Looking forward to reading about Stupid Narrative Tricks!