thread: 2005-02-03 : Roleplaying Theory Open House
On 2005-05-04, Collin M. Trail wrote:
I've got a couple of things I'd like to discuss, but here is one that has really been nagging at me...
Things on character sheets, in particular characteristic, skills, and whatnot. What is their purpose, and are we going about the right way of fulfilling their purpose? I'm going to go with the Lumpley principle on this one, and say that ultimately they are apportioning credibility about statements made in the game world. (SIS is the term used here?) Occasionally they communicate things outside the game- as I understand Kickers and SA's, they are as much to communicate about what the creative agenda is between the GM and player as they are about who has the authority to say what in the game. But for most characteristics, they communicate traits that the character is granted to have, such as being strong, or knowing about computers, or being a king, which give them the authority to decide what will happen in the game.
So, what is the best way to communicate and establish this credibility? My instinct is that the best way is through normal, natural communication. "My character is one of the strongest people in all of the world, so he is unlikely to fail at any task of strength unless it is near mythical, contested by an equally exceptional person, or involves extremely adverse conditions".
I have often heard this position countered, by saying that this is too vague, and that some kind of mechanics need to be used to give the idea any rigor. If the character briefly described above tries to knock over a stone tower, how will we decide whether or not he is successful, without knowing that his strength is 20 and you need to roll a 25 on a strength roll to knock down a tower?
There is some truth to this position. It is very difficult to articulate what authority you claim involving a character. If only you have authority over your character, how will your character ever face a conflict with an unknown outcome? If the authority over outcomes is shared, how can you be sure that others will respect your vision, that ultimately you will have any authority given that others may disagree with your unstated assumptions? If the authority is the gamemaster, how can you make sure his decisions don't come down to pure fiat? A mechanic, which gives number and probabilities or some other method for determining what occurs and what doesn't, seems like it could settle these problems.
However, I don't think these mechanics can really deliver. Perhaps in some small area carefully delineated by the game system, they will be able to- like combat in most games, where if I have a certain attack score and someone else has a certain defense score, I will reliably be able to narrate certain effects.
But no game system could possibly model every conflict that will come up in a game completely. Even something as simple as buying and selling is incredibly complicated in the real world, and one of the joys of roleplaying games is that you don't have to narrow yourself down to a small set of rigorously defined options, like in a video game. Some games try to get around this by giving a difficulty scale. But this ultimately comes back to someone's fiat, just as in the cases this method seems to be trying to avoid. The game system can tell me that if I have a computer skill of 5 I have a 20% chance of succeeding at a difficult task, but someone still has to decide what tasks are difficult. So has knowing that a 5 has a 20% chance of doing it useful?
Not that I don't think randomness is useful, just that it might be better to use it more transparently, and not expect system to do something I don't think it can deliver. Saying that you think the character has a 20% chance of knocking down the tower and then rolling for it, because somehow that seems like the best number to you, seems like it will result in better decisions than comparing numbers and setting fairly arbitrary difficulty numbers. Which suggests to me that a really transparent mechanism, like D6 or percentages, would be best.
So I think we are still at the point of apportioning credibility, trying to make sure that everyone's vision is respected while still incorporating randomness and outside input so that the conflict isn't stale. How do we do this? Some games seem to do it by directly addressing credibility, giving it out as points or the result of a roll, which doesn't seem like a bad approach. But is there a less all or nothing approach, where you can have more nuanced control over outcomes, as is suggested, but not in my opinion achieved, by current systems? And what does everyone think of my assessment of the situation- right on, or on crack?
