The Power Roll (Patreon)

Hey Folks! Matt Colville here, time to talk about the latest refinement to our core die roll! WOO! Just like everything else, some of y’all will like it, some won’t, and there’ll be every reaction in-between. But it’s working for us so far, we’ve run games internally with it, the testers have had it for a while and based on the feedback we’re getting this seems like a good time to talk about it.

When Last We Left Our Heroes…

You folks got the first Patreon Playtest Packet a while ago and your responses were SUPER useful. That should be obvious, it’s the reason we send out playtest packets, but it bears repeating. So thank you all for the time you took to read it, play it (in some cases several times!) and log your results. It will make the game better. And, should the game grow an audience and people are still playing it years from now, you’ll be able to say “Man I remember when it worked like THIS….”

I think James has already said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating here. We use feedback to inform development. The feedback is not in charge. 😀 For a lot of reasons, including; people do not all agree about which parts of the game are good or fun or even comprehensible. I’ve written a lot of rulebooks, I’ve read a lot of rulebooks and I think it’s impossible to write a rulebook that literally everyone understands perfectly the first time they read it. Sometimes, it’s only after you play the game once or twice that a rule finally makes sense. It’s weird, but that’s the way it is.

Anyway, the feedback was wide-ranging but for this post we’re just talking about the core 2d6+X die roll. Oh, and lots of people (including us!) challenged the idea of everyone always adding the same +x to the roll. We talked about that a LOT. Why not just cut that +X? Well, this isn’t a post about that, but the shorthand answers are: player psychology and math. Rolling a 2 on 2d6 feels worse than rolling a 2 when you know you get to add +3 or whatever. Also that +X gives us a little cushion that makes the math work better for rolls with a bane. It also makes leveling up easy! When one characteristic improves, it improves a bunch of your stats instead of you having to track each improvement with a different modifier.

What Folks Liked

Folks just like rolling 2d6. Feels good. Rolling a single die can be pretty brutal. Imagine regular d20 Fantasy, just without the d20 attack roll. You are just as likely to roll a 1 as a 6 even though one of those results is SIX TIMES greater than the other! Surely that should mean it’s at least a LITTLE less likely to come up?? And from this we get the swingyness that I believe contributes to Slog.

And building a dice POOL takes time and reading the results takes time and that’s fine if you’re only making a few rolls per session, but we don’t expect a fight with a monster to resolve in a single die roll, so 2d6 is sort of the sweet spot here.

Folks liked the crit! That is pretty much a universal positive. Getting an extra action (as opposed to just bonus damage) gives the players way more opportunities to do cool stuff, including kibitz and strategize about what they SHOULD do and that furthers the sense of teamwork!

No one misses the attack roll! HUGE surprise! 😀 This is one of those things I think we already knew just from our own internal testing, but it’s nice knowing that everyone else feels the same way.

What Folks Didn’t Like

Folks really, really didn’t like everyone doing basically the same damage. We thought letting Kits, which determine which weapons your character can use, would let us differentiate between heroes? Heavy weapon kits = big damage bonus, light weapons kits, not so much.

But it wasn’t enough. It’s not even that it wasn’t enough, it just didn’t feel good. It was a sticky spot for us as designers because we couldn’t let damage bonuses overwhelm the 2d6 roll, otherwise you’re really just doing X damage plus 2d6. That didn’t leave us a lot of room to vary Kit damage bonuses.

We tried a version of the game where every attack used a different damage die, like a d8 for medium weapons and a d6 for a psionic power, but is made everything worse. Rolling a 1 on 1d8, felt really bad when it was the only thing you did on your turn. Worse than rolling 2 on 2d6 for reasons that are entirely down to player psychology. AND we got the crazy swingyness back that we thought we’d solved..

Really the problem, as I see it, was: we threw out the attack roll and went with 2d6, and those two things became conflated in our, at least my, mind. So it seemed like we had something and could move on. But those are two different things! Obviously! No attack roll? A+. Everyone doing 2d6+x damage? Just wasn’t gonna fly. And we feel the same way! Characters should be doing different damage based on stuff like; are they in melee or at range? Are they hard to kill or squishy? Etc… And it can’t be subtle. It’s not enough that different characters are technically doing different damage, they have to feel like they're doing different damage in the moment.

This Wicket Seems Sticky

You add up all that feedback and you get a thorny problem.

People like No Attack Roll.

People liked 2d6.

They liked the crit on a 12. And we couldn’t just switch to different weapons using different damage dice. Because in the absence of an attack roll, which is normally where the crit lives, just saying “well, if you roll max damage (like an 8 on 1d8), then THAT’S the crit!”

Well, you already DID max damage! You already GOT the best result. Making that the crit would REALLY make the game swingy. Way more swingy than the already-quite-swingy D20 Fantasy.

We thought about TONS of other crit options and tested several, but they all had flaws including just “feels weird.” We talked about throwing out the crit! But people loved our crit!

James and I met and talked all this out, and we could not think of a good solution. The real problem, the fundamental problem was: how could we let everyone roll 2d6, keep the crit, AND differentiate damage rolls? Have our cake and eat it too.

The Power Roll

James got there before me. I wrote a long message in our discord laying out all of the above, just trying to define the problem and sum over everything we knew and had learned.

I woke up the next day to an equally long message from James in which he proposed the following.

Your roll, your 2D6+x roll, is the input to a chart and the chart tells you what happens.

You, reading this, are probably imagining something way more complicated than what James was proposing. I immediately (and with undisguised glee) shouted “Like Rolemaster!” An RPG I quite liked. But I knew he didn’t mean that.

He referenced another indie RPG (Apocalypse World) that has a mechanic like this. He wasn’t proposing we use that mechanic, he didn’t think it would work for our game, but it was an example of an RPG that did something like this. And therefore could serve as a proof of concept that the idea is not fundamentally flawed in some way. Might not be right for us, but could work.

By the end of his post–you could see him working it out as he went–he had refined the idea down to the following. This is a sample heroic ability.

James was proposing every combat ability your character has, so not general abilities like the Talent’s Telepathy, would include a chart like this. We would all be rolling the same 2d6, but we could each have very different characters with different weapons with very different, appropriately different, damage results.  Under this model, your choice of kit would modify this chart.

Now, you might not recognize this. James didn’t. But I did! This is the same idea from one of my favorite beer-and-pretzel card games. Epic Spell Battles!!

Epic Spell Battles, aka Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel At Skullfyre Mountain, is a card game where you “build” spells out of up to three cards from your hand. Each spell has a Subject, a Quality, and a Destination. You can use these in any combination to create unique (not literally but you get the idea) spells.

It was awesome and funny for me to see James pitch this because I thought, I really believed, we could steal casting spells like this for the MCDM RPG Wizard/Mage. Sort of the kind of thing Ars Magica implies. The fact that a card game does this tricked me into thinking WE could do it, but I couldn’t make it work. We already know too much about our game, any new system has to serve the existing masters and I couldn’t get this idea to check all the boxes we needed. So I laughed out loud to see some design from it show up. Just not the design I was trying to steal!

As a fan of this game, I was excited. And as soon as I started thinking about how we could do this, I got really excited. “This is a really powerful idea,” I said. There was a TON of stuff we could hang on it.

But first, having played Epic Spell Battles, I said “The chart needs to be the same for every power and every character.” That was something I noticed, playing ESB. The chart is always 1-4, 5-9, 10+. The results on the right are all different and idiosyncratic, but the numbers on the left are always the same. And I think I know why.

It means every time someone rolls? Everyone at the table knows what the numbers on the chart say, even if they can’t actually read the card because they’re sitting too far away. So they always know, if you roll a 9? EVERYONE at the table knows you almost got the best result. That has a huge impact on play. The results can and should be different and unique. But the numbers on the left of the chart should always be the same. “I dunno even know what your power does, but I see you rolled a 10, so I know you got the best result!” Now I’m anticipating the worst. Literally!

It also helps a lot with what we call the Cognitive Load. How much shit is the average player expected to be able to hold in their head? If every ability in the game could have unique ranges? Players and Directors would go insane. There’d be no real way to know “Is that good?” just looking at the dice. Now, obviously the cognitive load is even lower if the 2d6 roll was just…the damage you did, but we tried that and it led here!

I can’t tell you how many problems this solved. Using 2D6 as the damage roll meant we had to inflate everyone’s HP up to what seemed like stupid high levels to people. That didn’t bother us, it’s all relative, fights would play out the same way, but it sure felt weird. Well, folks would get used to that, there is precedent, but this lets us bring things back to normal.

As soon as I saw what James had posted, my brain started fizzing. I immediately, that day, prototyped the Elementalist (we’ll talk about that next post probably) using the new Power Chart. I’d already been working on the Elementalist but this was what I needed to really get excited by it. I saw ENORMOUS possibilities for this.

You could have a spell where the effect was always the same, but the chart sets the Target Number to resist! Or, the spell always does the same damage, but the results tell you how big the area is!

You could have kits that did MORE damage when you rolled badly! 😀 I dunno if that’s a GOOD idea, but it could be cool! You could have magic items that added an effect to ALL your abilities, at the 10+ level. Or artifacts that added a 13+ level to your existing powers! I can’t even put all the idea and possibilities here. There’s too many.

After testing this a few times with different people, we felt like it was working well. But we knew there were challenges with this solution. It was powerful and exciting and, we thought, fun, but it wasn’t perfect.

Known Problems and Challenges

You, reading this, have already thought of everything I’m about to say. EVERY heroic ability on your sheet has a whole CHART? Even a tiny little chart is still a LOT! Yep. That’s suboptimal. But we think what it gets us is worth it.

For some players, adding a step? Roll + look up the result, vs the roll IS the result? Feels like a lot. But most folks haven’t had any issue with it and having played dozens of games of Epic Spell Battles, I think it’s fine. The reality is, the three results are always just different versions of the same thing. Typically something like…

Some Fire. Better than nothing!

A Goodly Amount of Fire. Woo!

A Lot of Fire! And something cool happens!

Always fire! Only question is; how much? It’s never three unrelated results.

Requiring every heroic ability to have a three line chart could cause the character sheet to become unwieldy, but we have some control there. We could reduce the number of abilities for one thing, which seems reasonable considering each ability now has three results.

As we played it, I realized what we’d done. We’d sort of taken the entire experience of d20 Fantasy and baked it into one roll, without the null result. 2-6 is “A bad turn.” Except not anywhere near AS bad as “I miss, next.” Because remember, you can hit in d20 fantasy AND have a bad turn just because you roll a 1 on the damage die! Here, we have precise control over what counts as a bad turn. You’re always going to make progress, just: how much?

You also have a Good Turn result, a REALLY good turn result, AND we still have the crit on a natural 12!

We started to think…maybe skills should use this too! I think most people want a range of results rather than the Boolean pass/fail results and this lets us have a range of successes for any skill roll. We’ve already started on that.

That’s It!

Is this the final iteration of the Core Die Roll? Ah, probably! We think it’s so powerful, it’s now our job to make it work, file off any edges. We spent a lot of time dialing in the actual ranges. Should it be 2-4? 2-7? That kind of thing. And that may get refined as we go. Should there be a fourth tier? Probably not, we can let magic items and stuff create those exceptions, or not if it’s a bad idea.

But I think we’re committed to making this work. It worked great in our internal tests and really…it did what I always say the rules need to do. It worked and got out of the way. With maybe like one exception across several tests? No one even commented on the chart. It just worked. People loved the RESULTS!

In other words, this chart isn’t what will make the game fun. It’s what we do with it. It’s everything else.

Next post? Probably you’ll get to meet The Elementalist!