So I was playing Starfinder last weekend, and couldn't roll over a 6 to save my life. We were "playing up" (the adventures have tiers of difficulty, and we had a large party, so the GM increased the difficulty of the combat encounters) but even if we hadn't, 6'es would have been misses. We finished up the adventure just fine, but even knowing the odds and how dice can have streaks, I found it pretty... boring. My turn comes up, roll a miss, go back to my tablet and wait for my next turn to come up.

Dunno what to say. I've been noodling around ideas on how a game could mitigate streakiness, but nothing that's excited me yet. Any thoughts?

One of the ways that I've found works wonders is reducing or eliminating the null result.

For example, with the set-matching mechanics of a game like legends of the wulin, you get multiple results form a single roll. This naturally takes longer to resolve, but there' rarely a true "nothing happens" result.

You might also take a page form Apocalypse World and link every result to an outcome. Granted, that's technically worse for you as a player, since "get stabbed on a failed attack" is a worse outcome than "you miss", but it's certainly more interesting.

You can have non-roll related things characters can do on their turn. For example, magic-users don't roll dice for their spells typically.

Reducing the group size or otherwise expediting the lag between turns can minimize the "waiting around" aspect of getting a null result, too. Pathfinder has a chunky resolution system, so there's a punishing lag-time between turns. I had the problem back when I played 3.5 in large groups, too (of about six or seven). It's a consequence of the system, but not every system runs like that, and if they do, you can run with smaller groups for more expedient results.

You can be a stronger group-strategy participant by engaging in active planning and re-shaping of the group's strategy. For example in older D&D I get a lot of fun with fighters and thieves by considering different positioning and movement options between turns and discussing the party strategy throughout the turns. That way my interest is linked with everybody's action, rather than just my own.

So there's a few ideas for ya.

The problem is that you can't have light without shadow. You can't have highlights without lulls. If you eliminate lulls, you eliminate (or at least greatly diminish) highlights. If you roll 5d6 drop 2 for stats, a 13 is something different than when you roll 13 with 3d6 straight.

Quote from: Azraele;1076669You can be a stronger group-strategy participant by engaging in active planning and re-shaping of the group's strategy. For example in older D&D I get a lot of fun with fighters and thieves by considering different positioning and movement options between turns and discussing the party strategy throughout the turns. That way my interest is linked with everybody's action, rather than just my own.

True. I zoned out in the middle of the adventure, but got back into it for the rest.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1076672The problem is that you can't have light without shadow. You can't have highlights without lulls. If you eliminate lulls, you eliminate (or at least greatly diminish) highlights. If you roll 5d6 drop 2 for stats, a 13 is something different than when you roll 13 with 3d6 straight.

I don't mind a lull. I do mind spending the entire session in a lull.

Using the Dungeon World 2d6 resolution mechanic, you end up having "at least" partial success, 54.5% of the time.  You end up with a complete success 27.25% of the time.  So, you might see 2 or 3 consecutive failure rolls; but it won't happen all night long.

Plus, every partial success is also accompanied by a complication, or a partial failure.  It gives the DM / GM inspiration for narration.  "You successfully attacked and killed the Goblin; but as he fell, he hit his head on a bucket and caused a loud clanging noise in the dungeon."

I think having a game session where you fail to contribute is a meaningful problem.  I'm not sure how many dice you actually rolled, but in aggregate you should have very few sessions like this.  The next session you might roll nothing lower than a 16.  Since you're a player, there is not a ton you can do, but that's not NOTHING.  First off, you can determine what actions you can take that will help without a roll.  Sometimes if you don't think you can hit the opponent you can set up a flank or otherwise look for a terrain advantage that you could use in a helpful way.  Giving other people a bonus (or setting yourself up for a bonus) won't always pay off, but it'll feel like you're contributing.  

If you're amendable to changing the system there are things you can do.  A d20 has a flat-probability curve - you're just as likely to roll a 6 as a 16.  Adding dice increases the chance of an average result but decreases the chance of an extreme result.  On 2d10 the odds of rolling an 11 are 10% (compared to 5% for a d20%) while 2-5 and 17-20 have a lower chance than they would on a d20.  

Creating options that don't hurt as much on a failure also helps.  If attempting to disarm someone gets you stabbed in the face, it's probably not worth doing.  If you can try (and fail) without consequence, it might be worth doing more often.  Sometimes trying a special maneuver, even if it fails, feels better than the same old 'I attack, I miss'.  At least it means VARIETY in how you fail.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1076676I don't mind a lull. I do mind spending the entire session in a lull.

Well, you can do reroll shenanigans but if you can't roll 6+ on d20, there's pretty much nothing you can do except eliminate dice-rolling entirely. Marvel Universe RPG is diceless.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1076692The next session you might roll nothing lower than a 16.

Yeah, funny how you never hear them complaining about THAT. How about a rule that eliminates too good rolling, solving the adventure way too easily???

Quote from: Razor 007;1076691Using the Dungeon World 2d6 resolution mechanic, you end up having "at least" partial success, 54.5% of the time.  You end up with a complete success 27.25% of the time.  So, you might see 2 or 3 consecutive failure rolls; but it won't happen all night long.

That is not how random die rolls work. It is still very possible to never get a good roll since the die results of any given roll have no effect on the die results of the next roll. That's not to say that the game results can't be different from one roll to the next through various mechanics (often metacurrency), but the dice rolls themselves are totally independent.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1076700That is not how random die rolls work. It is still very possible to never get a good roll since the die results of any given roll have no effect on the die results of the next roll. That's not to say that the game results can't be different from one roll to the next through various mechanics (often metacurrency), but the dice rolls themselves are totally independent.

This is an important thing to realize about statistics; your results may vary (and generally will).

I've begun to favor design methods that don't link "your ability to do anything, ever" to the success or failure of a single rolling die, or a pool of them.  In Lone Wolf fists, for example, the dice themselves are resources regardless of what they roll; the mathematical reality of rolling 4d10 and matching them into sets is that your smallest possible action is a single die rolling 4 (as rolling a set of matching lower numbers is better, and it's impossible to roll less in that paradigm than 1-2-3-4).

I mean, that sucks, but it's not nothing. I also encoded a lot of activities "below the fidelity of dice": in other words, you don't roll for a huge amount of activities, all of them which can be leveraged in combat even ignoring good rolls.

Just to give an example: I had a player use (a spell basically, it was a kung-fu trick) to summon their sword to their hand after tying it to a lever. Pulling the lever (by the diceless act of sword-summoning) caused a tank shell to discharge at short range, detonating against the boss they were fighting while he remained unharmed across the battlefield.

Another example from d&d: I had a first-level rogue, caught between a gelatinous cube and a griffin (lousy lack of darkvision). My solution? Casually toss the rope I was holding over the griffin's head, and place the other end gingerly into the gelatinous cube; I then moved away. Then, we had a well-distracted cube and a rapidly dissolving griffin. Never touched dice.

Quote from: Azraele;1076702Another example from d&d: I had a first-level rogue, caught between a gelatinous cube and a griffin (lousy lack of darkvision). My solution? Casually toss the rope I was holding over the griffin's head, and place the other end gingerly into the gelatinous cube; I then moved away. Then, we had a well-distracted cube and a rapidly dissolving griffin. Never touched dice.

Was the griffin non-aggressive in this scenario? I would think that roping a hostile beast has a significant and chance of meaningful failure (or else fantasy rodeos are going to be very dull) and should therefore require an attack roll or skill check of some kind.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1076709Was the griffin non-aggressive in this scenario? I would think that roping a hostile beast has a significant and chance of meaningful failure (or else fantasy rodeos are going to be very dull) and should therefore require an attack roll or skill check of some kind.

I did catch it by surprise, yeah. I would have supported the DM's ruling either way though, since there's a disturbing lack of rodeo rules in D&D.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1076698Yeah, funny how you never hear them complaining about THAT. How about a rule that eliminates too good rolling, solving the adventure way too easily???

If an adventure can be "solved" by dice rolls, it's not much of an adventure. More a dice rolling exercise. I can set up a Lego Mindstorm device to do that while I go do something more interesting.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1076700That is not how random die rolls work. It is still very possible to never get a good roll since the die results of any given roll have no effect on the die results of the next roll. That's not to say that the game results can't be different from one roll to the next through various mechanics (often metacurrency), but the dice rolls themselves are totally independent.

So far; in actual play, I've not seen more than 3 successive failures using 2d6.

2-6 equals failure.
7-9 equals success, with a complication.
10-12 equals complete success.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1076663So I was playing Starfinder last weekend, and couldn't roll over a 6 to save my life. We were "playing up" (the adventures have tiers of difficulty, and we had a large party, so the GM increased the difficulty of the combat encounters) but even if we hadn't, 6'es would have been misses. We finished up the adventure just fine, but even knowing the odds and how dice can have streaks, I found it pretty... boring. My turn comes up, roll a miss, go back to my tablet and wait for my next turn to come up.

Dunno what to say. I've been noodling around ideas on how a game could mitigate streakiness, but nothing that's excited me yet. Any thoughts?

Paizo is currently on this big kick where "rolling the d20 should always produce a chance for failure" along with "we need to be rules heavy". Normally people invest heavily in the rules to cut away at that percent chance of failure, Paizo wants you to do that and still miss half of your attacks to waste your turn.

I consider it bad game design to shoot for 50/50 coin flip odds.