The Scarcity of DRPGs

[Hieronymous Rex]

First, I will define a term: An "emulative" game is one with little or no metagame, a non-emulative game has a great deal of metagame (note that this is a scale; there can be games between the two).

Examples of emulative games include D&D, Amber, Traveller, and "traditional" games in general. Example of non-emulative games include FATE, Primetime Adventures, and The Burning Wheel (the latter is an edge case).

Now, my question: why are there so few published emulative diceless roleplaying games? I brought this up elsewhere, but my fellow posters and I were unable to come up with any other than Amber, Nobilis, and Marvel Universe (and the latter is questionable). There are many diceless RPGs, but few emulative ones.

In the aforlinked thread, David R posted:

Didn't Rick Swan (he used to review games for Dragon Mag ) run his D&D games diceless ?

This introduces a possibility: the reason that these games are rarely published is because the homebrew ones are almost always played by single groups only, because they are tailored to what that group enjoys.

As an example of this: In middle/high school, my friends and I frequently played a completely freeform, off-the-cuff RPG where we came up with whatever characters we got the idea for (with only minor consideration for balance) and had them go on bizarre adventures through whatever world the GM cared to place them. This was great fun, but I doubt it would work as wel published; it was driven by accreted "landmarks", so to speak (for example, gnomes are incorrigible mithril thieves), and the competence of the GM.

So, is this the reason for the scarcity? Is there more than one reason?

As a side note: I can put 5 adjectives in a row and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

[arminius]

That's an interesting list, glad you posted it.

Anyway, I think the reason for lack of emulative DRPGs is that "risk" is part of emulation. By "risk" I mean here the idea that you don't predict and/or can't fully control what will happen next.

Amber and Nobilis seem to be special cases where the main source of risk that needs to be emulated is uncertainty about the actions of other PCs. In other emulated situations, there are risks that can't really be fully attributed to conscious decisions by intelligent opponents--the conflicts are more like a sport than a game of chess. (In sport the conflict includes unconscious things like muscle control and reflex; even Michael Jordan, Gretsky, or Pele didn't score every time.) As such they're not as subject to deterministic analysis. Therefore in order to emulate them, random methods are naturally employed. This is why dice or other randomizers are almost universal in wargames, from which traditional RPGs derive.

[Kyle Aaron]

Now, my question: why are there so few published emulative diceless roleplaying games?

Supply follows demand.

Gamers like rolling dice.

[Ian Absentia]

Supply follows demand.

That's exactly what I was going to post.

Gamers like rolling dice.

Unless there's more fun to be had in doing things differently.  The challenge, it would seem, is in producing an alternative that's consistently more fun than rolling dice.  Thus, back to the point quoted above.

!i!

[jibbajibba]

The dice thing is a hold over from when rpgs were wargames trying to emulate the effect of multiple events happening at the same time, the fog of war. In sports and the like again you have multiple actions occuring.
RPGs adopted this as a useful shorthand.

In fact in individual combat and skill use dice are not required. If you put Jordan or Getsky or Pele in front of an open hoop/goal and ask them to take free shots they would probably be in the 99 - 99.99% range. It's similar to you going outside and hitting a tree with an axe. You will not miss the tree although the damage you do to it with each swing will vary. (just checked the world record for consecutive basketball free throws is 5221 )
A guy that can fix the alternator on a Ford Escort can always fix the alternator on a Ford Escort. If you can differentiate a quatratic pynomial you can always ... etc.

It would be possible to use an alternate method of 'random determination'. In opposed situations the action of the opponent compared to your actions could be simulated with the result computed from relative skill and choice of action. This is like weighted Sisscors , Paper, Stone and is basically how Amber runs combat (although Amber does this with a simple open system you could instead run it with a more closed complex system). So fight defensively vs probe cautiously combines with Rank 4 in warfare vs rank 2 in warfare to equal no real openings player 1's defense holds but player 2 now knows he is the better swordsman.
Before the Amber DRPG was released I had designed my own Amber game , also diceless, that took this complex approach. the player selected from a range of combat cards their next 4 moves each round exposing a card and playing the one 4 steps along. They was stuff like Parry in Quarte, Fient a slash to the wrist etc . Each player had a comabt skill and each step was compared but combined with the previous 3 moves. When one player's adjusted combat score was 10 points above his opponents his attack suceeded and the degree above determiend the damage. It was like a combination of SPS ,  Counting cards, en garde and the comabt tables in Top Secret but more elegant
In the same game skills worked by setting a value for a task say 7 and if the PC had more than 7 skill they could do it.
In play testing we found that combat was great but really slow and whilst it worked well for duels against other Amberite types it failed when fighting multiple opponents, giant Siamese Cats or Manticores. Each creature need its own deck of combat cards with the possible interactions writen out on each one. I think you could revisit it though with a simplified system and I even seem to recall some D&D combat cards from the mid 90s that did this using a simplified manuver set and gave you a modifier to hit.

I adapted the combat for a ccg where you get a number of combat cards based on a Prowess stat and then draw randomly from that set of cards and compare to an opponent. This looks sophisticated but in effect it is the same as a Savage world model where everyone rolls a dice but the size of the dice depends on your skill. and the hit and wounds done compute from the difference in dice rolls. So I get a d4 you get a d10 and the higher roll does the difference in score to the opponent.

[Nicephorus]

Anyway, I think the reason for lack of emulative DRPGs is that "risk" is part of emulation. By "risk" I mean here the idea that you don't predict and/or can't fully control what will happen next.

I think is the heart of it.  Most of reality involves making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.  You don't know the exact odds of a stock going up or down; you don't know which car will require the fewest repairs in your particular case.  You may not know for certain what will happen if you ask your boss for a raise and threaten to quit.  Sports is full of uncertainty - it's rare for a team to win 4 in a row of a 7 game series, implying a decent amount of variability.

When two players or a player and NPC have goals that conflict (such as "no, you die and I stay alive"), you have some idea of the odds based on stats but how do you determine the exact results in a way that reflects normal uncertainty?  Dice rolls that add to some base level are a good way to simulate uncertainty but not total randomness.  Or you can go with dice substitutes such as cards or chits.  If you have no injection of uncertainty, how do you determine outcomes for major events other than a metagame mechanic?

[jibbajibba]

I think is the heart of it.  Most of reality involves making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.  You don't know the exact odds of a stock going up or down; you don't know which car will require the fewest repairs in your particular case.  You may not know for certain what will happen if you ask your boss for a raise and threaten to quit.  Sports is full of uncertainty - it's rare for a team to win 4 in a row of a 7 game series, implying a decent amount of variability.

When two players or a player and NPC have goals that conflict (such as "no, you die and I stay alive"), you have some idea of the odds based on stats but how do you determine the exact results in a way that reflects normal uncertainty?  Dice rolls that add to some base level are a good way to simulate uncertainty but not total randomness.  Or you can go with dice substitutes such as cards or chits.  If you have no injection of uncertainty, how do you determine outcomes for major events other than a metagame mechanic?

You need to differentiate between events were there is a degree of randomness such as the stock market from ones where there is little variability, and indeed where there is no variability like switching out a starter motor in a car or a motherboard on a PC.
Take a sport where it's a head to head game (less variables) one player will often beat another. In fact in a game like bowling a top professional will beat a club player all the time. Not most of the time all the time. You only get variablity when top players are playing each other. So when 2 players with 99% bowling meet who winds up winning is hard to predict.  A player with 70% tennis might be fantastic but he is never going to beat Federer .
You have to think if the wins to losses ratio is about randomness of skill on the part of the opponent. So if player A has a weak backhand and player B keeps attacking it is that the thing that gives them the win?
So in opposed situations you could remove chance and replace with some sort of tactical decision.

Similarly with skills. A surgeon who is experienced can remove an appendix all the time. I mean if you were going to have surgery and you could see the guy had 80% skill in it you would hope that that wouldn't mean there was a 20% chance you would die.
Now there will be new procedures where he is not familiar where the complexity of the task equals or exceeds his skill and situations where there are other variables like time or whatever.

In team games and pitch battles there are too many variables. Once you add too many variables I think a random roll is the best solution unless you want to build a Computer model that can compute the effect of each variable.

[gabriel_ss4u]

wasn't Boot Hill like that, all those variables, (or was it paranoia)?

[jibbajibba]

wasn't Boot Hill like that, all those variables, (or was it paranoia)?

no

[Trevelyan]

Jibbajibba is right, again.

Far fewer things in this world are anywhere near as random as most RPGs make them out to be, so for any given contest between two individuals operating at anything other than a very similar level, the outcome is usually a forgone conclusion, and ADRPG model this quite well, albeit in a manner which many traditional gamers find disconcerting.

This covers most human activities - a given individual is usually either consistently capable of an action or incapable of it. In everyday life we don't expect the same individual to turn up for work only to discover that they're incapable of tasks they performed perfectly successfully the day before, yet random dice rolls suggest that this could be a reality.

In many cases, the random roll might be taken as evidence that other factors either complicate or ease the situation, with a good roll suggesting that things were favourable, and a poor roll indicating otherwise, yet this still allows for what might be a straight roll, i.e. an average task, having a variety of potential outcomes. And, of course, most games heap further modifiers on to rolls which are supposed to be easy or difficult anyway.

The real reason for having dice, I suspect, is that most players don't wnat to simulate a real experience, they want to play a game. This is all well and good, and probably makes many RPGs far more interesting than they would otherwise be (playing a D&D dungeon crawl with an ADRPG style diceless system would be monotonous and probably unfun), but a lot of gamers mistake 'fun' for 'necessary' or even 'realistic', and shun diceless games as a result.

On a completely different note, I submit Everway as another example of a diceless "emulative" game.

[Nicephorus]

In fact in a game like bowling a top professional will beat a club player all the time. Not most of the time all the time. You only get variablity when top players are playing each other. So when 2 players with 99% bowling meet who winds up winning is hard to predict. A player with 70% tennis might be fantastic but he is never going to beat Federer .

Most rpgs handle these situations very well as they are not pure dice.  Games vary in the weighting of skill and randomness but most mix the two.

[Nicephorus]

The real reason for having dice, I suspect, is that most players don't wnat to simulate a real experience, they want to play a game.

I would go the opposite direction. People who want to remove randomness are control freaks who don't want the randomness of reality.
 
Real life has a great deal of variability. Even top tennis players fault on serves. People make mistakes at work. The best programmers still have bugs in their code.

[The Yann Waters]

When two players or a player and NPC have goals that conflict (such as "no, you die and I stay alive"), you have some idea of the odds based on stats but how do you determine the exact results in a way that reflects normal uncertainty?  Dice rolls that add to some base level are a good way to simulate uncertainty but not total randomness.  Or you can go with dice substitutes such as cards or chits.

Nobilis essentially accomplishes this uncertainty with the use of miracle points that represent spiritual strength and the additional expenditure of energy, in such a way that you can never be quite certain what the "base level" of another character's attribute even is.

For instance, defeating a world champion in tennis would typically have the difficulty level 2, but there's really no way of telling how much winning that match exhausts the opponent. Maybe he has Aspect 2 or higher, and can then handle that sort of thing effortlessly. Perhaps his Aspect is only 0, and he spent two MPs on the victory. Or it might be that he's just really good at tennis with a personal Gift for the game (which wouldn't help at all with any other sports), or he could have borrowed some helpful trinket from the God of Tennis, or possibly he played dirty tricks on the champion's mind or manipulated the ball in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with athletics...

And so on, and so forth.

[jibbajibba]

Most rpgs handle these situations very well as they are not pure dice.  Games vary in the weighting of skill and randomness but most mix the two.

Most is a stretch. Some RPGs handle these situation well. A lot do not.

Trevelyn is right, again . Most gamers want to use dice because its a game. This gets equated to dice are an excellent way to predict events. This is not so. A top tenis player double faults because they are trying to serve at 120mph into an area of the court a foot square. If you said to them serve just each of these balls in don't worry about speed or position they could do hundreds with no faults.

A few roleplaying games have systems for this but you could achieve the same result with a non-random system. Both players have skill in tennis (hidden from each other) each player selects a tactic and bids points from his skills. The tactics are compared and have a -/+ affect on their skill the player with the highest total of this + the ammount they bid from their skill wins the point but if their skill gets to a - point they loose. So as close to 0 as you can go without going to far. The player that plays safe and saves a big chunk in reserve will beat players much weaker than himself but will rarely beat better players and after a few rounds players as good will be able to expend a bit more and beat him consistently.  
You might argue the 'select tactics' step is the randomiser and akin to a dice roll but you could assign play styles that limited the number of tactical choices and PCs could have skill points to spend on certain techniques if these were public then its more tactics than random action.
The problem with these mechanics is they are great for the core activity of the game but are rather complex for periferal activities. Amber uses a simpler mechanic that has a far simpler implementation (I added skills to Amber because I thought it too simple). You can have a simple dice mechanic that you can apply consitently to most situations and it would be good enough.

Anyway its all kind of moot. No one is saying dice aren't great, some people might be saying dice are not the only tool for determining the outcome of events and perhaps they are not as good at it as some roleplayers suggest.

[flyingmice]

AS a baseline, in all of my games, I say something to the effect of "Never ask for a roll if a normal person could do it without a problem." The advanced corollary of that is "only ask for a dice roll if there is a reasonable chance of failure for the character in question." With that corollary, you cut out about 80% of dice rolls for skilled people.

I have in development a randomless T-R subsystem for my StarCluster system called StarKarma. It works fine in playtest, but my players are never enthusiastic about it, so I have never released it in a game. It obviously need work.

-clash