The Rosetta Stone

My current lunchbreak book is "Switch" by the Heath brothers who also brought us the magnificent "Made to Stick". MtS set a crazily high bar, and I'm not yet sure if Switch will clear it, but even if it doesn't it's proving an interesting and thought provoking read. [1]

One idea struck me as particularly resonant to gamers, and that revolves around why we make choices. The Heaths propose that there are two main reasons we choose to act. The first is based on consequence: we think about outcomes and choose the action that produces the outcome that is best (or least bad) for us. This is what we usually think about when we talk about decision making. The other basis is identity. Sometimes, when faced with a choice, we ask ourselves "What sort of person am I? What would that sort of person do here?" To illustrate, we buy a cookie because the pleasure of eating it is worth more than the price of buying it - simple consequence. We buy the cookie from the local baker because we like to think we're the kind of person that supports local bakers, not because we get any additional benefit from that cookie - in fact, that local cookie may even be more expensive.

That last point is the key of why this issue comes up. Identity is a very powerful way to motivate people, and in many ways is more powerful than consequences. It's something that's used to great end by local environmental causes - when they have little in the way of resources to persuade people that they should save a local animal, they have found much success convincing people that they're the kind of people who -would- save a local animal. If this isn't clicking, think about your own decisions: do you ever make decisions that are not to your benefit because that's the decision you should make? Look at your voting record - if you default to voting your party's ticket, you've done this. Ever spent too much money to buy a shirt because it has your team's logo on it? Ditto.[2]

The bottom line[3] is that identity is incredibly powerful when it comes time to actually take action and make decision. It's one of the reasons lots of things we think will help us make better decisions (like incentives or education) don't actually end up helping. It's not that we don't think littering is bad, it's that it doesn't matter enough, unless we see ourselves as the kind of people who protect the planet (or at least our region).

And that's the part that fascinated me because of this question: How do we make decisions for our characters in games?

The divide of consequence vs. dentity virtually jumps out of the question and waves its arms for attention. It's the classic divide: benefit vs. characterization. optimization vs. "What my character would do". Consequence versus Identity.[4]

And I'm not sure what to make of that. Yeah, I know, usually when I roll one of these out I've thought it through and come to some sort of conclusion, but I'm turning this over and over, and every time I do, it reveals more facets. But what I do see is this: this has been a bitterly divisive issue in gaming, but it's *bigger* than gaming, and the ways its addressed in the real world may shed some light on how we can handle it in our little corner of things.

That's my hope at least.


1 - It's had a ton of useful tidbits, but my favorite small addition to my vocabulary is "TBU", which means "True But Useless." It comes up in the context of problem solving when someone lists all the huge systemic reasons the problem exists - these may be accurate statements, but they are not problems that those speaking can usually solve, so they are distractions from focusing on what one actually CAN do. They are, thus, TBU.

2 - Peter Bregman writes about this, indirectly, and it's a story well worth a read.

3 - It's ultimately a fallacious distinction, and intentionally so, because it's illustrative. Identity, specifically how we feel about our identity, really feeds into the larger consequence decision-making engine. We feel better upholding a self-identity that makes us feel good, so it's part of the equation. However, we very rarely think about our decisions in those terms: identity and how we feel about it is a very difficult consequence to measure. As such, it is far easier to talk about as if it were a separate category of thing, so I'm comfortable with that approach.

4 - And if anyone suggests "Roleplay vs. Roll-Play" then they are in danger of spontaneous combustion via the power of my mind. That chestnut deserves to be forgotten forever.

Something Wonderful

No long post today. Instead, I will only point to this picture and the link it represents.



Now, I can't really say much, but I can say this:

• It's just quickstart, so what rules there are remain limited to what's necessary for the adventure. You can derive a sense of what's going on with the system from it, but not a full picture. The actual game is not yet available.
  
• The rules in question are still recognizable as Cortex, but you need to squint a little. Small tweaks have broadened the engine in interesting directions while still keeping it simple.
• Were I to summarize the changes, I would say the game is better designed to scale with interest. That is, the less interesting or important something is, the lighter is it. The more engaging something is, the more it engages the system.
• Credits page has some wonderful names, people who I should dedicate a whole post to singing the virtues of sometime. And also me.

So I say no more than that, but if you've read my stuff then you now my love of capers is nigh unto a sickness, and I feel it's something that's never quite been served by RPGs[1] primarily because it's hard. This is one of the few remaining white whales, and I'm optimistic we can catch it.

1 - Closest is Wilderness of Mirrors which, yes, rocks, but it's a subtly different beast.

Three Fight Scenes

The other day I talked about the three-fight-scene scenario design method, and it raised a question or two, so I'm going to delve into it a little bit more.

First, let me be clear that this method is blatantly and shamelessly stolen from the ever-brilliant Robin Laws, who wrote it up for Feng Shui. Feng Shui captures the range of 90's Hong Kong cinema, from two-gun wielding assassins on a road to redemption to sinister imperial eunuch wizards to kung fu roosters (sort of)[1]. It's not a game of subtlety or nuance;it's a game of wonderful fight scenes and general badassness. As such, a simple method of creating scenarios that played to its strengths was an important tool for the GM to have.

The idea is simple: since the centerpiece of the game is cool fight scenes, you start planning a scenario by picking three different places which would make for great fight scenes. This step is very simple, but only if you really buy into it. The trick is to think like a movie director, look at a location and think "What kind of awesome things could someone do if they were fighting a hundred zombie ninjas in here?"[2] Are there chandeliers to swing from? Escalators to run the wrong direction on? Giant pieces of machinery to crash and blow up? Huge windows to smash?[3] If you could answer that to your satisfaction with three locations you were pretty much good to go, because at that point, all you needed was to come up with a reason to get the characters to all three locations.

"But wait," you say, "you say that like it's simple, but that's the hard part!"

But the trick is this: it's really not. If you had to come up with the connective material first, then yes, that would absolutely be hard to pull together. But you've got three hard points to work with, and that simplifies the whole process. I know that's kind of counter-intuitive, but this is one of those "constraint breeds creativity" things. It really works.

Of course, part of the reason it works is that these things follow certain patterns. The first fight reveals a danger (A stock NPC is attacked, players are ambushed, a friend asks for help) and points to something that must be done/stopped/gotten at the location of fight two. Fight two reveals the real problem which must be stopped at fight three. Done. You could make a mad libs of it.

Now, this is totally a fight-centric approach to scenario creation, and for fight centric games, it rocks. This formula works beautifully for D&D, especially 4e, and I have always found it much more satisfying (and much more likely to finish in a sitting) than any dungeon crawl you can name. But not every game is quite so fight-centric.

For those games, the underlying model still holds up, but where I say 'fight scene' you really want to think 'set piece'. A fight scene is a kind of set piece, but more broadly a set piece is a location, a cast of characters, and something happening that the players must engage. It could be a social event, or a chase, or an investigation. The trick is you need to give it the same kind of thinking that you put into the fight scenes - that is to say, you need to ask yourself, "How can this scene be awesome?"

This is not always easy to do with non-fight scenes[4]. Coming through a plate glass window with a shotgun in each hand is much more straightforward than wowing the crowd at a party with your wit. Still, this is the kind of game you signed up for, so screw up your courage and take a look at your player's sheets. Stunts, skills, aspects, beliefs, powers...look at them all while asking yourself how you could give the player a chance to actually use this thing.[5] If none of this provides you any inspiration, then stop and consider. You are running a scene in which none of your players get to do anything cool. Ask yourself: do you hate them? Have they wronged you in some way?

If the only place a scene is awesome in in your head, it has no place at the table.

Anyway, once you've got the three scenes mapped out, then you just need to tie them together. This is, seriously, no harder than it is with fight scenes. Once again the gimmick hinges on you having the set pieces done. That lets the connections suggest themselves organically. If you try to tie them together when you've only got half an idea for the scene, then it's going to be a crapshoot how well it all hangs together.

By the by, there is nothing particularly sacred about three, except for the fact that it's got all that magical mojo. If three is too many for your game, there's no harm in going for one or two. If it's too few, then go for more. The purpose of this approach is not to limit what you can do.

See, the hope is this: if you have three really solid set-pieces ready to go, the rest of your game will take care of itself. It's not that those will be the only scenes in your game, it's that they give you a solid foundation under your feet, so you feel confident enough to handle the assorted scenes which may spring up on the fly between them. Having that confidence is a powerful tool, both psychologically and practically. Psychologically, you know you can let things go for as long as they're fun because you have something to gravitate back towards. Practically, you have a concrete sense of the pacing of the adventure, based on where things are relative to the set pieces.

I'm aware that I'm making some broad assertions here about what is easy and isn't, but I do so out of genuine enthusiasm. These are things which are more complicated on paper than they are to just do. If you haven't tried this method before, I strongly encourage you to actually do it. Sit down with pencil and paper and sketch up a three-part scenario for your next game. I think you'll find that it's easy, satisfying, and makes it much easier to tie your characters into.

Personally, I have used this trick more times than I can count, and I consider it a lifesaver. I have encountered very few pieces of game advice as practical as this one, and even if Robin Laws had not also done dozens of other brilliant things, he would deserve a place in the pantheon[7] for this one[8].

1 - Feng Shui is one of my favorite games of all time, and to this day I have yet to see another setting that was so perfectly well designed for gaming. The premise was easily recognizable, had clear goals (over which you could fight), a clear role for PCs, colorful villains and could support an unbelievable range of character concepts without any trouble.

2 - In other games you might need to think about who your opposition might be, but in Feng Shui that pretty much just took care of itself. In this case, for example, it's obvious the Thorns of the Lotus or, if they're techno-ninjas, Architects of the Flesh. For your game, the answer is equally easy: whoever will make the fight interesting. Interesting might be people the players know, or it might mean enemies who are mechanically interesting, as is often the case in 4e. Hell, it might be you've got a really cool mini you want to show off. It's all fair game, just try to make the enemy something other than faceless.

3 - Doing this, by the way, adds an extra layer of fun to travel and tourism. You start looking at new places, from restaurants to monuments to train stations to anything else through this lens. You unconsciously scout for locations, and as a result, the locations for your fights are even more fantastic, becaus eyou've got all the little details that give them the ring of truth.

4 - Here's a tip: never let the scenes be static. Something should be happening or about to happen. Players can shape events and engage the scene, but don't make it entirely inert until they do something. Of course, you need to also make it clear to them that they can do something - the purpose of making something happen is not to create a situation for the players to watch, it is to create a situation for them to engage.

5 - Seriously. Especially that thing you never let him use because you think it makes things to easy? That social control power, or teleportation trick or whatever. You know. The cheesy one. He bought it for a reason and he's totally sick of you blocking him at every turn[6]. I know you think you're being subtle, but trust me. He knows.

6 - Yes, this totally includes using 4e powers in creative ways.

7 - Obscure Joke.

8 - As such, any failings in describing this model are entirely mine, not Robin's. I am sure I have not done it justice.

Playing Paragons

I try to make it clear that I'm always happy to steal good ideas, and I also try to give credit where it's due. This one is the brainchild of my friend Fuzz[1] who solved a long standing problem in a very elegant way[2].

One of the classic tropes of literature is "The Best …" - most often it's the best swordsman, but it might just as easily be the strongest guy, the smartest or whatever. We're all familiar with the idea, and when we see it in literature (Benedict of Amber, Richard St. Vier of Swordspoint, and seemingly every third character in the Thieves' World novels) or in films and on TV. This is hellish to model in most games because the spread of dice and the range of potential outcomes of most mechanical systems requires that this paragon be a substantial margin better, mechanically, than everyone else. This tends to be pretty lame for players. It makes such roles virtually unplayable because the cost of creating such a character is prohibitive (and, in fact, usually requires a little bit of cheating), and underscores the 'specialness' of the NPCs.

Now, for more mechanical games (which is to say, virtually any game with hit points or some other way in which combat is composed of many, many elements) this is really not fixable short of just spiking the skill and calling it a day. But for games where outcomes are a little more interpretive then you've actually got some leeway to allow for a player to be a paragon of some sort without breaking the game.

The underlying mechanic is simple enough: it may take a little tweaking to determine how you want to attach it to the chassis, but I leave that up to the individual tinkerer. Anyway, it is as simple of this: add a line to the character sheet somewhere that declares this superiority (Paragon of Willpower, Best Swordsman in the World or the like) but do not otherwise adjust their stats or skills. The only thing that line means is this: if you lose, the loss must respect that fact. Thus, if you're the best swordsman in the world, you can still be beaten, but if you are your opponent must pull a dirty trick, or bring in allies or otherwise describe the victory in such a way as to respect the fact that you're the superior swordsman.

Now, there's obviously a bit of negotiation with this, and the player has some responsibility to build his character to support this idea (in some game, you might have skill requirements for paragon status) but the net result is that the character can still have a skill that is within the normal range for the game while still occupying the narrative role of being the best at something.

At first blush this may seem to distinguish btween players who buy skill high because that's where they want to be challenged and those who buy up because they want to be secure, but it is muddier than that. Being a paragon introduces a new behavior type, best described as "Seeking opportunities to demonstrate that I'm awesome[3]." It also has some potential hooks into other reward systems: consider the possibility that the Paragon's player can throw a fight for currency, but then has to regain his paragon status.

Anyway, it's a small idea, but it's one I'm really chewing on how to apply, and Monday morning suits small ideas. And now: coffee.

1 - AKA Amberyl, and the inspiration for the Evil Hat. As a group, Evil Hat actually began as a 'brand' that she, Fred and I ran games under at Ambercon Northwest.

2 - As with all ideas, it is quite possible someone else had it first. But she's the one I'm stealing it from.

3 -And here's the real dirty trick. If you, as a GM, have gotten you head around this, then consider what you would do if every one of your players had "Paragon of Awesome[4]" on their sheet. Could you manage that? Could you make sure that every time they fail there's a good reason for it and it doesn't make them look like a toolbox? And if you can, will you?

4 - Assuming it's a game of awesome characters. Not every game is, I know. So feel free to replace it with some other term that suits the tone of your game better, and if you can't think of one, try "Not a Freaking Idiot."

Totally Beat

Man, I am beat. These are the days I kick my own ass for not having a bigger backlog of articles on hand. I'm sufficiently fried that it's hard to pull together any kind of coherent thought. But it could be worse.

I could have a game to run.

There is no feeling I hate more than coming up on a game I need to run when I'm this drained. You scramble and try to pull it together, but you know you're just not going to be able to really put your back in it, and it's probably going to suck as a result. Still, you gotta do something.

Everyone's got their own tricks for dealing with this situations. Some people like to turn to pre-published adventures in these situations, but I've never quite gotten my head around that. If I'm too tired to plan, I'm definitely not going to have the energy to read and capture the intent of someone else's adventure, to say nothing of finding a way to tie it to my game[1].

I admit I'm not above proposing a different game for the evening, but assuming I do need to go forward, I reach deep into the bag of tricks.

First option is one that I am eternally grateful to Robin Laws for laying out in Feng Shui. Pick 3 interesting fight scene locations, then just come up with enough of an excuse to thread them together. Fight scenes can be used pretty flexibly in this regard to cover any kind of set piece, like an investigation or a party. The trick is that each scene needs a gimmick, just one, to make it something more than generic. A fight scene needs to be in an interesting location, a party might be a masquerade, an investigation might be on the clock. If the gimmick pops, the scene tend to take care of themselves as players bounce off the unique element and make their own fun.

If that seems like too much work, or if the game is at a point where that's not much of an option, my next favorite cheat is to give the players a goal and resources but a muddy path to doing it. This is kind of shameless, but it means a large portion of the session will be occupied by player driven action as they plan and prepare. You don't want to do it too often, and you need to make sure the payoff is worth it [2] but it can be a fun distraction, and since your job is mostly to answer questions, it's a lot less work.[3]

If I'm really desperate, I'll steal. From books, movies, TV, or even old games I've run or played. You need to be aware of what your players are familiar with, and you definitely need to be careful to not do do the same thing twice, but this can be the easiest thing of all, but only if something jumps out at you as a good match[4].

Lastly, I'm willing to hit the eject button if things really go south. You don't do this lightly - people have held up their end of the bargain, and you should respect that - but if the game is getting to the point where it's less fun to be playign then no, then it's time to say "Guys, I'm just not feeling it tonight. Who's up for some Dominion?". If it's going as badly as you think, then they'll be happy to take you up on it.

1 - Part of this is because adventures are horribly presented. Even really good ones tend to be total crap in this regard. Part of this is because the needs for reading are not the needs for use, but more it's because we default to the gygaxian map and key model. Most good adventures have some sort of thread running through it, but even if the author explicitly calls it out, you still end up having to piece things together from the corners of the encounters. When I make an adventure for myself, my goal is to create a situation and wrap my head around all the parts, so I can roll with things. The method of presentation for most adventures supports a sequence of events, which is all well and good, but getting the complete picture into your head is hard in the best of situations. When you're tired? No chance.

2 - Protip - end the episode on a cliffhanger, and do the payout next session when you're on your game.

3 - One other dirty trick to make any investigative game work is to just say yes. Your players will ask if things are so, just say yes. Roll with it, and the story writes itself, at least so long as they don't catch on that you're doing it.

4 - Another Protip - Stealing from movies is great because you can call it an "Homage".

We Know Each Other

I made a comment yesterday in twitter that needs some expansion. I remarked on how "You all know each other" is a trend I have really, really enjoyed in supers stuff, both comics and games. Without an explanation, this sounds like just another version of "you all meet in a tavern" but it's actually something else entirely. It's the idea that the supers[1] are part of a community. It is not merely that the PCs all know each other, rather that they are all parts of the same community, so they know (and, importantly, are known) the whole community. A member of the group who is not a member of the community is an anomaly.

Comics have always been elevated by their relationships. These relationships keep the stories from being something more than just guys in tights fighting it out. One of the best examples of this is Doctor Doom. As a villain, he is often a template for characters that are identical in almost every way, yet fall completely flat on the page. Even Doom himself can fall flat, serving as Generic Big Bad Guy Stand In. But in the Fantastic Four, he comes to life - he's compelling and gripping. A lot of people like to attribute that to a rich backstory[2] but I think it's something much simpler.

He *really* hates Reed Richards. Not in a grand, huge, villainous laugh sort of way but in the intensely personal, mundane way that you hate that jerk from college. That hate manifests in a number of ways, some mundane, some profound, but it's always there, and it brings the character to life.

This is far form the only such example of characters in comics being brought to life by their relationships. Bruce and Clark are vasty more interesting to me than Superman and Batman ever were. Professor X and Magneto were at their most interesting as good friends with a single bright point of disagreement[3]. Lex Luthor gets better every time his gripe with superman gets more personal (and more motivated than YOU MADE ME BALD!)[4].

To some extent, this is old hat, but it's important because it's informed on the direction comics have been going. As these relationships develop, you start getting larger groups of people who are connected through their superness. Historically, the purpose of a team of superheroes was to take on threats they could not face individually, but more recent writers have been putting a lot more thought into what it means, socially, to be a part of one of these groups, especially n the face of the fact that most superheroes have pretty dysfunctional 'real' lives.

In many cases, the group has become a surrogate for the extended family. Especially groups that have had large, rotating rosters over the years (The Teen Titans and the X Men stand out in this regard). Treating them as more than members of a giant club[5] turns stories that would be banal into compelling tales. Even informal groups, like the Batman Family, or the various super heroes of Marvel's New York City can develop this kind of potency.

Unfortunately, when comics get mature enough to do this, editors usually take this as a sign that it's time for a culling. Nuanced networks of relationships don't bring in new fans, so things need to get simplified. Histories get retconned, characters get killed off[6], and the surrounding characters get rewritten or disposed of as "cheesy".

But the idea has taken root. You see it most often now in stories where supers are new to the world, maybe originated from a single source. JMS's Rising Stars and Supreme Power are great examples of this, and in RPGs, White Wolf's Abberant Setting has many elements of this too[7]. And I love it. I want to see it in more RPGs because, frankly, we can handle more nuance than comic book editors.

I've already seen this idea of membership in the extended group driven home very well in Amber, and I have also seen it brought to life in certain spins on the World of Darkness (new and old[8]). It can contextualize the world, and being stories to life by giving them faces you've seen before. It also lets the world reflect the actions of the players in a personal, recognizable way. Having peers means you can have peer recognition - that's a huge social incentive.

So, next time you're thinking about how your characters know each other, consider for a moment the possibility that they not only know each other - they know a lot of other people too, because they're all members of an extended group of some flavor[9].



1 - I say supers here because, in fiction, they're a discreet, identifiable group. A lot of these ideas could apply equally well to any other genre if the group is similarly identifiable (such as spies, criminals, members of the magical community or the like) but I use supers because they're on my mind and the examples are nicely colorful.

2 - Rich Backstories tend to be about as interesting in Comics as they are in RPGs, which is admittedly double edged. The story rarely grabs us, but the way it informs interactions can be compelling.

3 - This illustrates a kind of key point about talking about comics, which is that you are always wrong. Whatever you liked or didn't like gets sanded and revarnished over so many times that it effectively stops being relevant, and it may never be returned to. Comics can only be discussed as a series of snapshots, and you pick the snapshots you value most. When someone else picks a different set, then you might both be passionate fans who love the property but have (apparently) mutually exclusive views on it.

4 - A point that was reflected wonderfully by Rosenbaum's performance on the Lex Show...er, early seasons of Smallville.

5 - though, to be fair, The Legion of Super Heroes really _is_ a giant club, and part of why it works is because it embraces that role. Less family, more soap opera and more space awesome. Also, Karate Kid should TOTALLY fight an entire planet.

6 - The Teen Titans offer the best and the worst of it. One arc, the Technis Imperative, seems to be about an alien invasion, but is really about just how important the Titans are, as a family, to a bunch of kids who had pretty messed up childhoods, and how far they're willing to go for one of their own. Even more, it delves into the relationship with the previous generation (one of the writer's great turns is illustrating that the JLA has been an extended family too) and highlights where it is strongest and weakness, and why sometimes it needs to change. It is, to my mind, a very rewarding arc (that is, I suspect, pretty cheesy to those without any interest n the characters).

Contrast this with the events leading up to DC's latest rewrite. As fas as I can tell, DC decided that there were just too damn many titans, and had not one but two, back to back fights where the villain shows up, is badass, the titans declare that messing with one of them is messing with all of them, we get a huge splash page with lots of Titans, and then the villain proceeds to murder them. Literally. They pretty much just killed off characters left and right. It was dramatic and all, but it ultimately felt kind of tacky.

7 - Thinking about Aberrant was what got this all started. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Underkoffler's "Fanfare for the Amplified Man" campaign setting in Truth and Justice, which is basically this idea in pure form.

8 - The new Hunter's rules for the scale of your organization are perfect for reflecting elements of this idea mechanically.

9 - The Century Club doesn't _really_ count in this regard because there's no incentive to flesh out any membership beyond those who are playing. It's membership is really a convenience to allow for a rotating cast. But that's not to say it couldn't be used in this way with a little spin.

Arbiters and Oracles

Jonathan Tweet gave some very good advice in a game called Everway. When it came time for a GM to make a ruling on something there were three things to look at: numbers, drama and fortune. He used much more poetic terms than that, but I want to riff off the master, not replicate him, so stay with me here. The idea is that when you are faced with the need to make a ruling, each of these factors may suggest an outcome.

The numbers are the characters stats, descriptors or the like. If the character is a ranger (and this is represented on his sheet) and he wants to track something, then he can probably do it. A strong character can lift things. A smart character can study. Tweet's specific approach was pushed through a lens of dicelessness, but the underlying idea is a solid one, and in many systems it speaks very strongly to when not to roll the dice.

Drama, or more appropriately, dramatic sensibilities are another of the GMs tools. When faced with a question of outcome, which way should things go? Which is more awesome[1]? This is implicitly a judgment call on the GMs part, but the better the GMs judgment, the more likely this would be a good decision.

Fortune, in the case of Everway, was a deck of tarot-like cards which did not reveal a clear success/fail, but rather suggested influences that might be at play, and those influences in turn might suggest an outcome. In other games, this job is handled ably, if a bit more simply, by the dice.

There is no right answer for how these three factors should be prioritized. Every GM strikes her own balance among these, and hopefully does so to great success. Naturally you will have cases where people favor some combination to the point of deriding others, but for the most part that is limited solely to arguments about dice fudging.

Now, I am not here to praise or bury dice fudging. From my perspective, the sanctity of the outcome of the dice is only one of the three pillars, and I will respect or ignore it based on a number of factors, not least of which is what game is being played.

It's a boring argument that goes round and round, so I've decided to strip mine it for something useful. See, the one thing that the die-fudging argument does reveal to me that people have profoundly different relationships with their dice. Naturally, these relationships are intensely idiosyncratic, but I have seen two roles that people assign to their dice: arbiter or oracle.

Arbiter dice are not to be fudged. This is not some simple desire that dice be obeyed, but rather a well thought out approach that combines a respect for the system being used and a desire to introduce the unexpected into play. This is not just about making sure all outcomes are interesting, admirable as that is, but it is also about providing a challenge for the players AND the GM. Because the dice are neutral, absolute, and unpredictable, the GM may find herself having to scramble to keep the game going in the face of a bad (or good) run of dice. A lot of GMs thrive on that sort of challenge.

Arbiter dice work best when the outcomes of die rolls have a concrete mechanical impact which is either binary or directly measurable (such as to hit and damage, respectively). Making alterations to these sorts of die rolls is just a roundabout way of changing outcomes, which invites a certain amount of unintended consequences. More, these systems are usually tuned to handle the full range of outcomes that the dice might provide.

One key point you can look for in these systems is how robustly they can handle a single bad roll. One of the things that classically called for fudging was "Save or Die" situations in the vein of Old School D&D. When a single roll could remove a character from play (especially when that removal was drastically in contrast to the rules of drama) that was sufficiently unfun to demand a little cheating on the GMs part. One of the hallmarks of more modern systems is that things very rarely come down to a single roll - instead they are the aggregate of many rolls over the course of play. The removal of that problem removes the need for fudging, or rather, it does if that was the sole reason to play fast and loose with the dice.

Oracle dice serve a somewhat different purpose. There's an idea in Spirit of the Century called "Testing the Breeze" that reflects on this a bit. When the GM already knows the likely outcome (as determined by numbers or drama) he may still call for a roll of the dice to see how to color the outcome. A GM who buys into this idea may apply it to most of the rolls made in play. These rolls are looked at as ways to color or inform on play, rather than being true decision makers.

Oracle dice work best in games where the outcome of rolls is strongly subjective, as in simple games like Risus. Because there is not much hingeing on precisely what value is rolled, there's not a lot of impact in taking things lightly.

In the strictest sense, oracle dice aren't fudged because the GM has already made all the necessary adjustments before the dice are rolled. This is a subtle enough distinction that I prefer to describe oracle style dice rolling as fudging - the alternative is to open the phrase ot such semantic manipulation as to make it meaningless.[2]

See, the most obvious solution to this divide is to suggest just keeping these two modes clear and distinct and you won't have any problems. Except that's not quite true. If a game is running late and needs to wrap up, an arbiter-oriented game might start bending the rules in favor of pacing. In an oracle oriented game, there might come a tiem when the greatest drama _is_ in pure fortune, an open roll with a lot hanging on it. As much as a given GM and a given game might lean in a certain direction, a specific situation may muddy the waters.

And that leads to what I think is the most important point. Ultimately, what you do with the dice is far less important than understanding why you do it. If you do not have a clear understanding of what you expect from those dice when you pick them up, then you're inviting trouble. The dice will eventually turn in ways you are not ready for, and in your scramble to adjust you are likely to leave things on the floor. When peopel talk about the problems of fudging, this mess is one of the big ones.

But I want to emphasize, that mess comes from a failure of understanding. If I pick up a die and know I'm going to go with what it shows, then all is good. f I pick up a die and know I will be using it purely as a suggestion or as a means to color the outcome that is going to happen, that's fine too. But if I pick up a die and don't know what I'm going to do with it until after it rolls, then the quality of my outcome is probably going to be as random as that die.


1 - For 'more awesome', feel free to substitute in 'a better story', 'more satisfying', 'more appropriate' or whatever floats your boat.

2- "I'm not fudging because I change target numbers, not die outcomes!"