Burning Wheel has a hard & fast, fixed rule that once a player rolls only once for a skill/ability test and does not roll again until conditions legitimately and drastically changes. This is a rule that applies to both the GM and player and is one of the sacrosanct rules of the game. Succeed or fail, you only roll once.
This a rule that I have learned to truly appreciate, and one which I wish was in place in a lot of other RPGs. Instead the most common scenario is for the GM to repeatedly call for skill checks in order to accomplish a task. You know how this goes: ”Want to climb at a 100′ wall? Roll climbing. Okay, now roll again. Okay, one more time for the last 10 feet.” In my mind, this approach stems from a couple possible causes.
The first is the most obvious: The game’s rules encourage or even require this sort of approach. The classic example are saving throws in many versions of D&D (especially for ongoing damage or effects) or skill checks in many RPGs are based on a round-by-round breakdown. 4th edition’s skill challenges actively encourage rolling multiple skill checks using the same skill. Many systems either explicitly call for repeated checks or insinuate that’s the way things should be played.
Interacting with the rules is the phenomenon in which the GM is trying to over-simulate the world. This is really common with new GMs who try to run every scene or situation in discrete chunks of time during which actions take place. However, even experienced GMs fall into this trap, asking for repeated skill checks simply because some sort of ongoing environmental or situational condition is present. Hence, you can only move x number of feet in that time and so you need y number of stealth checks, or an ongoing rainstorm means you need to make a new tracking roll every 20 minutes. This creates a session that runs and feels very mechanical and board game-like.
Unfortunately this type of approach often creates a lot of problems, as well as opportunities for shenanigans. We’ve all been in situations where the GM calls for a skill roll which is then failed, after which the GM calls for another roll (sometimes from the same player) because that missed check brings any further progress to a screeching halt. These types of situations happen a lot in games like Call of Cthulhu where a failed investigation roll can quickly derail an investigation. The same thing happens a lot with traps and secret doors. On the opposite side of the spectrum is where a GM has a desired outcome for the check in mind and hence has players rolling over and over again until the desired result comes up – I’ve seen this happen a lot with railroad-type plots that require failed checks to move things along (e.g., a failed saving throw knocking someone out so they can be captured). At the far extreme I’ve seen malicious GMs use repeated checks to put particular players at a disadvantage – I once had a GM tell me privately that he used the approach to “equalize things with the guy that had min/maxed his character.” *sigh*
The real point of all this is pretty simple: Have players roll once and let the results ride. Move beyond the mechanical side of things and instead focus on the results of the check, which is the interesting part and therein lies the rub: Whether the results are a success ora failure, the results should lead to something interesting. The key to this is making what is at stake with the check interesting: When there’s an interesting situation whether the character succeeds or fails you have a meaningful check. Defining what’s at stake for the check means you can move beyond the purely binomial and uninteresting “success or failure” mode of play and instead focuses on whether the character gets what they want out of the challenge. For example, failing a climb check doesn’t mean a character needs to plunge to her death – it only means that she didn’t succeed in the way she originally intended. She may have been injured in the climb, or damaged the rope, or knocked some stones free and alerted the guards…. the possibilities are endless. This approach sure beats the most typical result “Oh you failed and are going to fall a 100 feet. Ummmm, well, maybe you can grab on before you fall. Make an acrobatic check. Oh, another failure. Uhhhhh, ok you fall 50′. Make another check. Another failure? Ok, well then you… die.”
So let it ride and start creating interesting results rather than spending time repeatedly rolling dice.
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As a GM I know I don’t get the players to roll too frequently. If I cannot make failure interesting I don’t get them to roll, if the problem is too simple I don’t ask for a roll, and if failure would bring the campaign to a halt I don’t ask for a roll
The problem I have is players want to roll all the time. As an example in a recent game one of the players (playing a pretty young female thief) tried to persuade the dock master to lend them a fishing boat. It was proactive – it advanced the plot, and he liked her already because the players had done him a few favours. I already knew that unless she insulted him, punched him in the stomach or something equally stupid she would succeed. I also knew that failure would completely stop a great PC idea which deserved to be explored. Unfortunately she rolled without asking and told me that her diplomacy skill, and rolled a one.
I’m doing my level best to get my players to understand they don’t need to roll things unless I ask them to. I’d much prefer them to roleplay the scenes and if I think a roll is needed I may ask for one at the key moment. I’m having mixed success – the guys I’ve roleplayed with for years have the idea, but the newer guys seem to prefer the idea of rolling for everything as soon as possible and as often as possible.
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Maybe that’s the problem. GM’s spend too much time thinking about what great thing will happen with a success and never think about how to use a failure for cool role playing outside the story.
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Possibly.
In the example above I was actually trying to let the players explore a cool idea they had. Generally if the whole group together agrees some weird and wacky idea is the way to go I’ll let them run with it (unless they decide to place an unnecessary diplomacy check at the beginning as a gate).
Having seen the failure I still tried to make it interesting, but I knew in my heart at that moment we were putting an roadblocks in the way of letting the players do what they wanted.
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Thinking about it I can see a number of obvious possibilities. All of these refer to the couple of players who want to roll for everything:
1) They want a degree of randomness in their gaming experience and see dice as a way to get this.
2) They don’t trust me and see the dice as a way of forcing DM impartiality
3) They’re afraid of (or don’t like) roleplaying through situations and see dice as a quick method of getting past the roleplaying and onto scene resolution.
4) They want a tactical game and like to see things in terms of probability
5) Its a habit picked up from previous games where the GM asked them to roll all the time.
Since its something my long term players don’t exhibit, just the newer players who’ve joined the group in the last year I can’t help feeling there is a degree of habit in it, but in fact I think the main cause is sumed up in items 3 and 4. Roleplaying through situations as opposed to moving miniatures and rolling dice takes them outside their comfort zone. Its far easier to just say “I persuade him to lend us a boat. Diplomacy +12. I rolled a 17.” than to actually roleplay through the encounter.
Unfortunately repeated rolling for binary tasks is going to eventually result in a block. If the task rolled for had been to get a merchant to drop a price, or to make a good impression with an NPC then I can easily work it into the adventure, but when its a binary thing it becomes more of an issue.
This brings up another inspired thing Luke Crane suggested in Burning Wheel – working out the stakes before you roll the dice. The GM should be doing this anyway, but by making it a specific task you force the GM and players to actually consider the imapct of the roll on the game.
I’ve got a feeling I used to be the GM these players expect. I used to ask for far too many dice rolls. As such I know the perfect cure. I suggest every GM should spend atleast a little time running Amber DRPG.
I’ve got a feeling if I continue I’m going to start mentioning words like Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism – and a discussion of Immersion so I’d better stop quickly…
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Luckily LiR is very portable principle; with care it can be used in almost all traditional games.
The key to not making some things roadblocks is figuring out interesting complications. Sure, you get the boat, no problem, but the information also gets sold to your enemies or some random pirates. The But cards have some ideas.
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@Declan – I’ve been in that boat too: Players who want to roll simply because they want an element of chance. That’s where the intent/stake setting part of Burning Wheel (or IMO any skill check) comes to the rescue because it opens up the possibility of even failure yielding something interesting or adding a complication. Thinking on your feet also helps though I hate being put on the spot. For example, in the case of your thief’s blown diplomacy roll, I would have either had the fisherman fall madly in love with her (and perhaps even become an obsessive stalker) or have him agree but then turn around and betray the party to pirates or to their enemies. In other words, give them what they want but make them pay for it.
@Tommi – Absolutely. Complications are the key which is why I love Mouse Guard: those complications are built right in to the conflicts. SotC has the same potential through consequences, especially if you use the damage track mods floating around (e.g., the 2/4/6 rule). You can apply these principles to any game though, even something like CoC. That generator is pretty cool, even if you just play with it to give you an idea of how “yes, but…” works.
My problem in writing this particular article is that the “Let it ride…” rule really buts up against a bunch of other related issues such as stakes/intent, the “make it a gimme” rule, and using “Yes, but….” I probably need to write a series of articles and string them together to show how all these things link together to form a cohesive approach to play.
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Hey MJ,
Here are a couple thoughts for you if you ever get around to writing that series of articles.
1. I think “intent” is a much, much better term than “stakes”. I also think the way Burning Wheel breaks things up between Intent and Task is of tremendous importance. I love how it’s the Task that determines the skill & difficulty, but that the Intent must be valid for the Task. Also, it’s important that any complications of failed rolls relate somehow to the Task involved.
2. I think Declan’s situation where the player started rolling Diplomacy when the GM didn’t want a roll*, is an example where Say Yes and its corollary “when there is a conflict always roll dice” could have helped. If players and GM had all bought into that idea ahead of time, it would have allowed the GM to say “hold on, I don’t see a conflict here, he’s pretty amenable to lending you the boat… what’s your intent?” The player might have responded with anything from “ok cool” to “I want him to lend me the boat without expecting any favours in return”.
Sometimes I think the reason players want to roll dice is because deep down they’re actually craving conflict. They want something thrown in their path! (I think this may be why a lot of inter-party fighting happens in some games too)
Anyway, LiR is obviously very wrapped up with Say Yes.
*Awesome example there!
3. This is kind of an addendum to #2, but I just wanted to state that my personal taste is to favour Ron Edward’s paraphasing of Say Yes, something like: “When there is a conflict for characters in the fiction, always roll dice. When there is no such conflict, never roll dice.”
This makes it obvious that the conflict is a conflict in the fiction — there may be times when all the players or GM are rooting for things to go a certain way, but if there is a fictional level conflict you still roll!!
Anyway great post & comments, thanks for the discussion guys.
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Thanks. I intentionally used both stakes/intent to try and span a couple different systems – you can see the DitV influence coming through there (a game that had a profound effect on my development as a player/GM).
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[...] with Wrax so that more varied checks were required, and used a Burning-Wheel-style “Let it Ride” rule on Diplomacy: “Eva, you rolled well once, so you get one success on the [...]