Talakeal's Campaign Diary (1 Day without a horror story!)

[NichG]

But as I said, my default is, "that could work, roll for it." Not sure how that is biased in either way.

Every time you add a roll, you decrease the overall chances of success. Neutral would be that you decide that an idea is good enough to bypass a roll or introduce fail-forward mechanisms as often as you add rolls which gate whether the players can continue down a path they've started or hit a wall.

Compare these two cases:

1. Player: I want to journey to this temple in the jungle. GM: Okay, roll a difficult Survival check [with a 40% chance of success given your stats] to see if you prep correctly, find your way, deal with the hazards of the jungle, etc and eventually get there safely or not.

2. Player: I want to journey to this temple in the jungle. GM: Okay, first lets talk supplies. How do you deal with that? Player: I'll go and buy them. GM: Okay, roll an Appraise check [80% chance of success] where failure means there's something wrong with the supplies. Player: *rolls* Okay, I want to leave town through the gate. GM: There are some guards there who are looking for criminals or contraband, roll a Diplomacy check or Bluff check to get past [80% chance of success]. Player: *rolls* Okay, traveling to the temple now... GM: Alright, lets see if you get lost. Roll a Survival check [80% chance of success] to see if you're on track the first day. Player: *rolls* I keep on going. GM: It's the first night, roll a Search check [80%] to find an appropriate camp site. Player: *rolls* Okay, I camp, wake up, keep on going. GM: Now the second day, see if you keep on track [80% chance]. Player: Okay, *rolls*. GM: Did you get a disease from going through the swampy terrain? Roll an easy Fortitude check [80% chance of success] or you might have to turn back. Player: *rolls* Do I find the temple yet? GM: Good point! Roll a Search check to see if you can locate the Temple in the dense jungle [80% chance]. Player: *rolls* GM: Alright, you found the temple.'

In the first case it might be a hard check, but it's actually much easier than the second case which, because the GM cut things finely and injected a roll every time there was some kind of aspect of the journey that they thought 'could work, roll for it' about, the actual overall chance of success becomes 0.8 ^ 7 = about 20% if all rolls are 'go/no-go' types of things.

So every time you add a go/no-go roll to a process, e.g. one where that particular avenue dead-ends on failure rather than fails forward, you increase the chances that basically that avenue is just not going to go forward at all. If your instinct is to increase the number of steps along a given avenue or approach and to find justifications for adding rolls (or just to think of what rolls you could add to the approach), it will tend to make things fail more often than if you looked at things at a higher level of abstraction.

Edit: This why things that are designed to have lots of rolls, e.g. stuff like 4e skill challenges, use stuff like 'need 3 successes before 2 failures' or 'need at least 50% of rolls to be successes' or other ways of compounding rolls than via sequential gates. Those are patterns designed so that changing the number of rolls doesn't change the difficulty.

As I said upthread, they already want to murder helpful NPCs because they took a bad offer from a pawnshop seventeen years ago; I can't imagine that NPCs feigning helpfulness and then leading them into a trap would lead anywhere good.

They might not be happy with the result, but the game would move on rather than getting stuck with hours of thumb-twiddling.