Making checks faster in non-combat scenes by reducing the nuance of the situation (i.e. difficulty modifiers) is incredibly strange to me, given that the slowest part of any session is the combat encounter. I get that there was a time (between OD&D and early 2000's) where a number of TTRPG systems had a more simulationist bent and wanted to account for every little detail, with corresponding difficulty modifiers. In an effort to rein in the number-crunching and time spent on accounting for every little detail, many TTRPGs designed afterwards made it so that it was the GM's responsibility to say "the aggregate of all of the external factors going on means that the task at hand is easier/harder than normal to the Nth degree" and slapped on modifiers based on the abstract difficulty of the situation (this is my preferred method for playing more trad TTRPGs). With the roll-under games that you've mentioned, it's vital to keep in mind that the skill level presented on the character sheet refers to a character's chances of success in adventuring conditions (i.e. stressful situations with significant consequences for failure; i.e. "It's go time!"). The games you mentioned that use roll-under also incorporate methods of applying difficulty modifiers for circumstances that deviate from "adventuring conditions:" - With Dragonbane and SotWW/SotDL, it's the use of boons and banes. - Crown & Skull uses numerical modifiers. The mistake I'd surmise that many fledgling GMs have with these types of roll-under systems is that they call for skill checks too often and they don't make enough use of eyeballing an aggregate difficulty and applying an appropriate modifier, which both makes the PCs look more incompetent and takes away nuance, which affects immersion, IMO. Draw Steel (as of this point in time) uses an altogether different approach, which shares common elements with Blades in the Dark's fictional positioning mechanics. In Draw Steel, whenever you're doing a skill check and it's not trivially easy or virtually impossible, the Director determines if the check is Easy, Average, or Hard. Because Draw Steel uses a three-tier system for determining dice roll outcomes, the tiers for each difficulty are different from each other. IIRC, for Easy tasks, you either succeed with complications, succeed, or succeed with benefits. For Average tasks, you either fail, succeed with complications, or succeed. For Hard tasks, you either fail with more complications, fail, or succeed. I also have a video in my channel titled "An Alternative to Difficulty Descriptions" where I talk about an alternative to pass/fail that I call "quality checks" and how the game, Lone Wolf Fists, incorporates them. Like I mentioned in the beginning, the desire to sacrifice nuance for speed in non-combat encounters during a session is strange, because those encounters are just as much a part of the unfolding story as the combat encounters. As for easing cognitive load, just keep two questions in mind? - Is this task trivial or virtually impossible? If yes to either, the thing that should happen happens, no roll required. - If no to the above question, is it challenging, pretty easy, or daunting? If challenging, roll vs. challenging TN (25% for unskilled). If pretty easy, roll with advantage. If daunting, roll with disadvantage. So, in other words, use the Dragonbane mechanics 😄
Personally I'm an old grognard. I like complicated mechanics. Love me tactics, love me gurps, simple as. I don't have anything against the lighter style of play and when sectioned out (like in lancer, particularly when using the narrative play books) i can dig it. I find the good middleground for me is a simple roll with degrees of successes. Like 1d20
I totally get it. I grew up with highly tactical and technical. I feel like the longer the campaign the more I personally want to chew on in terms of rules. But that’s just because that’s how I remember my summers as a kid, haha
I prefer a DC/difficulty that the GM can determine based on the circumstances, falling back on a "standard" difficulty for a lot of the less important or average tasks. If every roll is (mostly) the same, you lose ways of putting emphasis on certain rolls over others - and a way of communicating facts about NPCs and the world to the players through the mechanics. In important moments, an important roll requiring more thinking and time than others is also a good way to create that tension of anticipation and put the focus where it belongs.
These days, i just have four flavors; no check, simple check (d20), with advantage, and with disadvantage. No check is for those times when there is no real fail state and no consequence. That one was the hardest thing for this grognard to wrap his head around
I get that. I’ve really had to pull back on my “make a roll” mentality. I think the four you have there are solid. I’ve slowly moved away from Advantage and Disadvantage. But that’s my own random quirks and thoughts. In terms of simplicity its fabulous
I feel like for something as simple as Quest you could establish competency via granting advantage onto the core roll for each relevant trait/aspect of the character. Having easy ways to adjudicate mods works really well with a static DC.
I totally agree that there could be some really fun Homebrews to add to Quest to give it a bit more meat on the bone. I still love that game, but agree that often times its a bit TOO simple for me
I find that, as a GM, I really hate not having any control over the difficulty of a roll. To me, it is one of the primary means of communicating and controlling the game world.
I can totally appreciate this. It’s one of the reasons that I started creating the Pressure System. I wanted the game to still feel fast, but have a dial to ratchet up the difficulty of the situation.
Hey @9HPRuneScape, Pressure System is the base resolution mechanic for my game. Currently I’m working with Runehammer to get it published. I think I have some old “tutorial” videos that bring up some of the mechanics. But it has changed a TON since then.
I genuinely want simpler checks, and I think that outside combat, it’s pretty easy to achieve. Don’t make players roll for what their character should do by rote, avoid mini-games (unless people love them), make a quick call on bonus/penalty, and set a dc based on difficulty (for me, this is an absolute number, but I know some people like to set it based on level). (I usually combine the last two on-the-fly to speed it up, unless I’m with bean-counting power players). It’s usually quite fast and lets us keep focus on what the characters are doing. But combat. Oof. I always seem to be at a table where some people want to adjudicate a thousand rules and modifiers and the others just want to get to their roll and move on. My problem is that the mechanics either piss off the power players (dis/advantage is a crime against probability and it is to be shunned) or bore the hell out of the others. I would love to find a system that deeply understands this balance and allows GMs to tweak on one side or the other.
For Dragonbane I introduced a D30 for more difficult tasks, and D12 for easier ones, so now D12, D20 or D30. For D30 rolls, I'm counting nat 20's *and* nat 30's as Demons.
For D12's no chance of demons, and are automatic for some characters... Think that uphill hike that the Barbarian and the Rogue can handle, but the Wizard gets winded by.... By keeping it to single dice roll just with different dice, it's just as fast.
Does PbtA or BitD capture what you're discussing? the DCs are laid out, player competency is there, the resolution of the roll varies in how fast its resolved. Some "Moves" are clear cut results, while others are very up to further interpretation, buying you the time you discussed you might like to have. If I remember correctly, I think Worlds Without Number does something similar to this for its skill checks?
I think PbtA is definitely in there. The only part of that that can be “slow” is the “with consequence”. Depending on the GM’s confidence/competence with dispensing out those “with consequence” scenarios it might slow things down a bit. But again, I’m totally cool with slower narratives and pacing. I’m just seeing a trend here with some games. BitD also fits that with the d6 pool. A lot of games with d6 pools are pretty quick.
@@jfacegames7354 GM confidence is paramount! I've taken a break recently from GMing (new baby!) and one of my players has stepped up. I help them with prep and I can see the terror in their face to make calls, worried they'll ruin the whole session if they trip up or take a minute to think of an answer. Poor guy...
I go even further than the simply rolls, just like there are some systems who came to the conclusion that attack rolls have not to be rolled, so I found out that competency rolls all can go as well. And well, for my system I abolished the roll of GM as well, so the narrative can flow even faster. Don't get me wrong, I still have dice rolling, it just doesn't measure success but instead like the attackless games it directly looks at the effects and impact.
Skill checks are vibe checks. The DM determines the DC and never reveals it, so it's purely what you roll and how I feel it measure up against what I feel you should be getting. combat mechanics are combat mechanics.
It’s Obsidian.md. I love it. It’s a free tool with a slight learning curve, but there are good YT vids on it. Then I am using a specific theme and added some CSS to it
I don't like the oversimplification. That's why my OMG sandwich system has a "floor" of difficulty that the GM sets, and "ceiling" of proficiency that the PC has. A gelatinous cube should be easier to touch with my blade than that dodgy little gremlin.
Great question. I used to have all the rules up on a page as I was slowly designing it. However, now I’m working with Runehammer to get it published, and part of that deal was to take it all down so that it was a bit more of a “reveal” when the game actually drops.
@ oohhhh no shit!!! I’m excited to see what you come up with. Whenever I want to learn a new TTRPG I come to your channel hoping you have a “the teach” video on the game.
This is what Draw Steel does. Their kits utilize HP instead of AC. I think it’s a brilliant idea. It doesn’t necessarily make “thematic sense” fully, but mechanical sense its primo
Another interesting wrinkle to this conversation is the idea of a system that simulates a reality, simulates a world, regardless of the presence of the players versus a system that is purely "player facing". Some folks prefer a game system that gives them physics of that universe, I guess you could say. While others want the game to "flow" directly from the players' actions. Neither is the correct answer, just different ways of conceptualizing a world through its dice rolls, particularly skill checks.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames ok, better way of stating what I mean - for some "player-facing" means that "doors all have the same difficulty of being picked" because it's based purely on the character's stat. Doors don't exist as their own entity outside of the character. And I don't disagree! But I find it interesting that this causes a lack of immersion, when if you think of skills in reality, there are rarely such fine differences between most locks. Once you are capable of picking locks the difficulty between individual locks rarely matters, it's well within the margin of error. Or same with knowledge checks - you kind of either know things or don't. So I just find the demand for "immersive simulation" for objects in the game world very curious given everything else that goes against that notion due to the limitations of the medium. It's a complaint about immersion that is never held to it's logically consistent conclusion, in my experience.
I think this is one of those "be careful what you ask for" scenarios. The people who want fast paced checks that don't interrupt narrative REALLY want fast paced successes. If they were simply failing fast, they'd hate it. On the other hand, if success is easy then satisfaction is low, which leads to disengagement. As opposed to... A difficult check (high satisfaction on success) that allows the player to modify results in their favor (player agency matters). This necessitates a certain level of crunchiness. I think that in the end, when compiled data shows what people actually choose, as opposed to what they say they want, the displayed preferences will be crunchier than expected but with the burden of those calculations resting mostly on the player.
Game mechanics are representation of in-game world logic. Checks made against variable DC (like in DnD) represent that there are both variety of character competence (some are stronger, some are weaker) and variety of difficulties (pushing a big rock is harder than pushing a small rock). So checks are basically an opposition of how good your are against how difficult your goal is by itself. You know, like in real life. Oversimplification of checks ruins this logic. If players always roll against static DC (like in SoWW) or against its own skill level (like in Dragon Bane, Crown and Skull, and Vagabond), it means that in those games there are no difference between actions - they all have the same difficulty. Throwing a knife is as difficult as throwing a horse. Which is absurd. Some may say, that in those systems GM can actually manipulate DCs with Adv/DisAdv or Boon/Bane system. Which is true. However, this creates an additional cognitive load on GM, which contradicts to original goal of reducing cognitive load in the first place. Not all things should be simplified. Some old things may be not as fast, as some desire, but they are elegant in their representation of "how the world is working"
RPG mechanics do not have to be focused on in-game world logic, though I prefer them to be primarily that. Some trend towards board game mechanics and get very simple and abstract to facilitate a more gamey experience (like Hit Points), some are focusing on the characters and let the game world adust to fit their narrative like in improv theater (like Fate Points).
![ละลาย (LALALYE) - DAOU PITTAYA ต้าห์อู๋ พิทยา [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wo6r9TgausI/mqdefault.jpg)
Making checks faster in non-combat scenes by reducing the nuance of the situation (i.e. difficulty modifiers) is incredibly strange to me, given that the slowest part of any session is the combat encounter.
I get that there was a time (between OD&D and early 2000's) where a number of TTRPG systems had a more simulationist bent and wanted to account for every little detail, with corresponding difficulty modifiers. In an effort to rein in the number-crunching and time spent on accounting for every little detail, many TTRPGs designed afterwards made it so that it was the GM's responsibility to say "the aggregate of all of the external factors going on means that the task at hand is easier/harder than normal to the Nth degree" and slapped on modifiers based on the abstract difficulty of the situation (this is my preferred method for playing more trad TTRPGs).
With the roll-under games that you've mentioned, it's vital to keep in mind that the skill level presented on the character sheet refers to a character's chances of success in adventuring conditions (i.e. stressful situations with significant consequences for failure; i.e. "It's go time!"). The games you mentioned that use roll-under also incorporate methods of applying difficulty modifiers for circumstances that deviate from "adventuring conditions:"
- With Dragonbane and SotWW/SotDL, it's the use of boons and banes.
- Crown & Skull uses numerical modifiers.
The mistake I'd surmise that many fledgling GMs have with these types of roll-under systems is that they call for skill checks too often and they don't make enough use of eyeballing an aggregate difficulty and applying an appropriate modifier, which both makes the PCs look more incompetent and takes away nuance, which affects immersion, IMO.
Draw Steel (as of this point in time) uses an altogether different approach, which shares common elements with Blades in the Dark's fictional positioning mechanics. In Draw Steel, whenever you're doing a skill check and it's not trivially easy or virtually impossible, the Director determines if the check is Easy, Average, or Hard. Because Draw Steel uses a three-tier system for determining dice roll outcomes, the tiers for each difficulty are different from each other. IIRC, for Easy tasks, you either succeed with complications, succeed, or succeed with benefits. For Average tasks, you either fail, succeed with complications, or succeed. For Hard tasks, you either fail with more complications, fail, or succeed.
I also have a video in my channel titled "An Alternative to Difficulty Descriptions" where I talk about an alternative to pass/fail that I call "quality checks" and how the game, Lone Wolf Fists, incorporates them.
Like I mentioned in the beginning, the desire to sacrifice nuance for speed in non-combat encounters during a session is strange, because those encounters are just as much a part of the unfolding story as the combat encounters. As for easing cognitive load, just keep two questions in mind?
- Is this task trivial or virtually impossible? If yes to either, the thing that should happen happens, no roll required.
- If no to the above question, is it challenging, pretty easy, or daunting? If challenging, roll vs. challenging TN (25% for unskilled). If pretty easy, roll with advantage. If daunting, roll with disadvantage. So, in other words, use the Dragonbane mechanics 😄
Personally I'm an old grognard. I like complicated mechanics. Love me tactics, love me gurps, simple as. I don't have anything against the lighter style of play and when sectioned out (like in lancer, particularly when using the narrative play books) i can dig it.
I find the good middleground for me is a simple roll with degrees of successes. Like 1d20
I totally get it. I grew up with highly tactical and technical. I feel like the longer the campaign the more I personally want to chew on in terms of rules. But that’s just because that’s how I remember my summers as a kid, haha
I prefer a DC/difficulty that the GM can determine based on the circumstances, falling back on a "standard" difficulty for a lot of the less important or average tasks. If every roll is (mostly) the same, you lose ways of putting emphasis on certain rolls over others - and a way of communicating facts about NPCs and the world to the players through the mechanics.
In important moments, an important roll requiring more thinking and time than others is also a good way to create that tension of anticipation and put the focus where it belongs.
These days, i just have four flavors; no check, simple check (d20), with advantage, and with disadvantage. No check is for those times when there is no real fail state and no consequence. That one was the hardest thing for this grognard to wrap his head around
I get that. I’ve really had to pull back on my “make a roll” mentality. I think the four you have there are solid. I’ve slowly moved away from Advantage and Disadvantage. But that’s my own random quirks and thoughts. In terms of simplicity its fabulous
I feel like for something as simple as Quest you could establish competency via granting advantage onto the core roll for each relevant trait/aspect of the character. Having easy ways to adjudicate mods works really well with a static DC.
I totally agree that there could be some really fun Homebrews to add to Quest to give it a bit more meat on the bone. I still love that game, but agree that often times its a bit TOO simple for me
This is what Nimble does, and its very elegant.
I find that, as a GM, I really hate not having any control over the difficulty of a roll. To me, it is one of the primary means of communicating and controlling the game world.
I can totally appreciate this. It’s one of the reasons that I started creating the Pressure System. I wanted the game to still feel fast, but have a dial to ratchet up the difficulty of the situation.
@@jfacegames7354 What is the pressure system? Do you have a video on it?
Hey @9HPRuneScape, Pressure System is the base resolution mechanic for my game. Currently I’m working with Runehammer to get it published. I think I have some old “tutorial” videos that bring up some of the mechanics. But it has changed a TON since then.
I genuinely want simpler checks, and I think that outside combat, it’s pretty easy to achieve. Don’t make players roll for what their character should do by rote, avoid mini-games (unless people love them), make a quick call on bonus/penalty, and set a dc based on difficulty (for me, this is an absolute number, but I know some people like to set it based on level). (I usually combine the last two on-the-fly to speed it up, unless I’m with bean-counting power players). It’s usually quite fast and lets us keep focus on what the characters are doing.
But combat. Oof. I always seem to be at a table where some people want to adjudicate a thousand rules and modifiers and the others just want to get to their roll and move on. My problem is that the mechanics either piss off the power players (dis/advantage is a crime against probability and it is to be shunned) or bore the hell out of the others. I would love to find a system that deeply understands this balance and allows GMs to tweak on one side or the other.
For Dragonbane I introduced a D30 for more difficult tasks, and D12 for easier ones, so now D12, D20 or D30. For D30 rolls, I'm counting nat 20's *and* nat 30's as Demons.
Oh man, that sounds brutal!
For D12's no chance of demons, and are automatic for some characters... Think that uphill hike that the Barbarian and the Rogue can handle, but the Wizard gets winded by.... By keeping it to single dice roll just with different dice, it's just as fast.
Does PbtA or BitD capture what you're discussing? the DCs are laid out, player competency is there, the resolution of the roll varies in how fast its resolved. Some "Moves" are clear cut results, while others are very up to further interpretation, buying you the time you discussed you might like to have. If I remember correctly, I think Worlds Without Number does something similar to this for its skill checks?
I think PbtA is definitely in there. The only part of that that can be “slow” is the “with consequence”. Depending on the GM’s confidence/competence with dispensing out those “with consequence” scenarios it might slow things down a bit. But again, I’m totally cool with slower narratives and pacing. I’m just seeing a trend here with some games. BitD also fits that with the d6 pool. A lot of games with d6 pools are pretty quick.
@@jfacegames7354 GM confidence is paramount! I've taken a break recently from GMing (new baby!) and one of my players has stepped up. I help them with prep and I can see the terror in their face to make calls, worried they'll ruin the whole session if they trip up or take a minute to think of an answer. Poor guy...
I go even further than the simply rolls, just like there are some systems who came to the conclusion that attack rolls have not to be rolled, so I found out that competency rolls all can go as well. And well, for my system I abolished the roll of GM as well, so the narrative can flow even faster. Don't get me wrong, I still have dice rolling, it just doesn't measure success but instead like the attackless games it directly looks at the effects and impact.
Skill checks are vibe checks.
The DM determines the DC and never reveals it, so it's purely what you roll and how I feel it measure up against what I feel you should be getting.
combat mechanics are combat mechanics.
This is an interesting take. Do you see yourself more as a ‘storyteller’ or a ‘referee’ (or any other word you like) when you are GMing?
TFW Jface talks about Attack Checks and you are Czech
Haha, damnit. Now I have to put out a public service announcement that I don’t condone Czech hate crimes
What note-taking tool is this? I really like the formatting
It’s Obsidian.md. I love it. It’s a free tool with a slight learning curve, but there are good YT vids on it. Then I am using a specific theme and added some CSS to it
I don't like the oversimplification. That's why my OMG sandwich system has a "floor" of difficulty that the GM sets, and "ceiling" of proficiency that the PC has. A gelatinous cube should be easier to touch with my blade than that dodgy little gremlin.
I get it. I think that it’s a solid design to have those ranges either closing in or opening up to build the feel of challenge and competency!
Do you have a website for your RPG?
Great question. I used to have all the rules up on a page as I was slowly designing it. However, now I’m working with Runehammer to get it published, and part of that deal was to take it all down so that it was a bit more of a “reveal” when the game actually drops.
@ oohhhh no shit!!! I’m excited to see what you come up with. Whenever I want to learn a new TTRPG I come to your channel hoping you have a “the teach” video on the game.
@bonderoff That’s awesome to hear! If you have a game you’re wanting to learn I’ll throw it on my list, buddy
What if armor just added HP? Going along with your ideas here, you can get rid of AC and DR, but just letting armor add to your HP.
This is what Draw Steel does. Their kits utilize HP instead of AC. I think it’s a brilliant idea. It doesn’t necessarily make “thematic sense” fully, but mechanical sense its primo
Another interesting wrinkle to this conversation is the idea of a system that simulates a reality, simulates a world, regardless of the presence of the players versus a system that is purely "player facing". Some folks prefer a game system that gives them physics of that universe, I guess you could say. While others want the game to "flow" directly from the players' actions.
Neither is the correct answer, just different ways of conceptualizing a world through its dice rolls, particularly skill checks.
At some point simulation gives way to narrative flow or gamist concerns, simply due to how much computation is feasible at the table.
@LeFlamel agreed! What is obfuscated and what is enhanced really shapes a game's feeling.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames ok, better way of stating what I mean - for some "player-facing" means that "doors all have the same difficulty of being picked" because it's based purely on the character's stat. Doors don't exist as their own entity outside of the character. And I don't disagree! But I find it interesting that this causes a lack of immersion, when if you think of skills in reality, there are rarely such fine differences between most locks. Once you are capable of picking locks the difficulty between individual locks rarely matters, it's well within the margin of error. Or same with knowledge checks - you kind of either know things or don't. So I just find the demand for "immersive simulation" for objects in the game world very curious given everything else that goes against that notion due to the limitations of the medium. It's a complaint about immersion that is never held to it's logically consistent conclusion, in my experience.
@LeFlamel That's a very good way to put that. Makes sense to me! It's like, is there really a difference between a DC17 lock and a DC 13 lock? Haha
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I don't play DnD, but doesn't the difference of 4 mean like a DC17 is like 4/13ths tougher, (30.7%) ?
I think this is one of those "be careful what you ask for" scenarios.
The people who want fast paced checks that don't interrupt narrative REALLY want fast paced successes. If they were simply failing fast, they'd hate it.
On the other hand, if success is easy then satisfaction is low, which leads to disengagement.
As opposed to...
A difficult check (high satisfaction on success) that allows the player to modify results in their favor (player agency matters). This necessitates a certain level of crunchiness.
I think that in the end, when compiled data shows what people actually choose, as opposed to what they say they want, the displayed preferences will be crunchier than expected but with the burden of those calculations resting mostly on the player.
I like the way you put this. Well stated
Game mechanics are representation of in-game world logic.
Checks made against variable DC (like in DnD) represent that there are both variety of character competence (some are stronger, some are weaker) and variety of difficulties (pushing a big rock is harder than pushing a small rock). So checks are basically an opposition of how good your are against how difficult your goal is by itself. You know, like in real life.
Oversimplification of checks ruins this logic. If players always roll against static DC (like in SoWW) or against its own skill level (like in Dragon Bane, Crown and Skull, and Vagabond), it means that in those games there are no difference between actions - they all have the same difficulty. Throwing a knife is as difficult as throwing a horse. Which is absurd.
Some may say, that in those systems GM can actually manipulate DCs with Adv/DisAdv or Boon/Bane system. Which is true. However, this creates an additional cognitive load on GM, which contradicts to original goal of reducing cognitive load in the first place.
Not all things should be simplified. Some old things may be not as fast, as some desire, but they are elegant in their representation of "how the world is working"
RPG mechanics do not have to be focused on in-game world logic, though I prefer them to be primarily that.
Some trend towards board game mechanics and get very simple and abstract to facilitate a more gamey experience (like Hit Points), some are focusing on the characters and let the game world adust to fit their narrative like in improv theater (like Fate Points).