The Delta Theory of Meaningfulness

[Zombimode]

If we make a binary choice between extremes, both options suck. We want to find the happy medium.

Hm... I'm not sure if there is room for something else. Any event that has a non-zero chance of not happening happens "by luck" if it happens.

[kyoryu]

So, what moves you up or down this scale? Well, there's:

• Player choices
• DM choices
• Luck

You might think of these as being like a pie chart. The more significant any one is, the less significant the other two can be.

For a game to respect player agency, luck and the DM should both have a small enough role in deciding outcomes to allow room for choice to mater. We already know that railroading is widely considered to be bad: a DM who seizes 100% control over outcomes takes away the players' feeling of agency. (This applies whether the DM railroads to success or failure. The latter may be more frustrating, but the former is still unsatisfying.) Granting luck the same overwhelming power over outcomes would create the same problem for the same reason.

I think this is a good way of looking at it.

As a quick model, I'd probably assign in a given situation a number 1-10 for each category, 1 being the worse. You can then think of what's the minimum number you need to win/lose/draw. Arguably, if you play perfectly, luck shouldn't be able to make you do worse than "draw".

It's also worth noting that even thinking of it like this kind of implies a singular event, whereas really it should be multiple events, each pushing the world state forward. In other words, a "final result" shouldn't really be the result of a single element, so worse failures should be the result of continually having a combination of poor choices/luck, and continuing to press on anyway.

I'd add in there that severity of the loss is a factor to analyze as well - if you burn resources on a fight, but walk away? You've lost in some sense. If you withdraw, and that means something happens in the world that you don't like? THat's also a loss. Less severe losses can be more up to randomness/GM decisions. Truly catastrophic ones should require a significant error or set of errors on the part of the player.

[NichG]

This is why my current design heartbreaker is coming up with a system where all rolls only exist to determine costs, and never themselves determine success or failure even of a single one-off action. The most elegant design I have is also sort of psychologically reversed compared to what decades of TTRPGs have established: when you initiate a course of action, the difficulty of what you're trying to do determines the number of dice you roll, your skill determines the threshold for 'complications', and you have to buy off complications with resources (or accept their consequences) in order to complete the course of action you initiated. But this means that the more dice you roll, the worse the situation is - so it's fighting against 'it feels good to roll a big handful of dice'. The alternatives I've come up with involve too much table-side math or manipulation of dice sets...

[Darth Credence]

Luck can be eliminated quite easily, I think. Rather than rolling dice, everyone gets a deck for each dice type, with one card for each number. Whenever you need to roll the dice, select from the deck what number you want to roll. You use every card in the deck before you can start over with using other cards.

That gives everyone a choice about everything they do. If you end up failing a save and dying because you were down to just the cards below 5, well, you had a lot of opportunities to save up a high card for such an occasion. There is no need to carefully plan things to ensure that luck can never cause someone to lose because bad rolls are now the sum of a bunch of choices.

I have had some groups playing games love this in place of dice (never tried in a TTRPG, just various board games), and I have had others hate it. Those who liked it liked it for the strategy because knowing when to play off the bad cards was a hugely important skill. Those who hated it hated the idea that they couldn't get a lucky streak going. I would imagine that in a TTRPG, this would be beneficial to players, especially if you also let everyone know what the DCs are for challenges, or what AC needs to be hit, since that would allow the players to use the lowest possible card that passes.

[Vahnavoi]

@Darth Credence: you deserve a round of applause for explaining that card-based ruleset. Your observation also neatly demonstrates how it is a straightforward trade-off between different game aesthetics - you can eliminate gambling on chance rather trivially, but then you have to face the fact that some people like to gamble.

[Mordar]

You know what. I won't convince anyone else of my position that death doesn't matter in RPGs, and that is fine. The way I think about games and many people on this forum think about them is different. That is why I learn a lot about RPGs by reading these different takes and thoughts. Thank you all for sharing.

I will say that from my perspective the only "Meaningful" decision in an RPG game is when you decide to play and when you decide not to play. The rest doesn't matter. By playing you are embarking on a collaborative experience, and there is no winning or losing, there is only experiencing. The playing was either worth your time or it was not, and you often do not know which until it is all over.

The Play is the thing.

I very much expected this would be a take from you based on exactly one thing: I know you paint and play miniature wargames. I know I have reduced you to that one characteristic in my mind, and hope that it isn't taken as a negative, because I believe you are a fully realized person, but the two things I know about you are (a) you post on the GitP Forum, and (b) you post about miniature games. I think your commentary above is reflective of participation in a hobby where you (we!) spend hours and hours on game-hobby activities that aren't the actual game. Collecting, assembling, painting...all of those are such huge drivers of my enjoyment of miniature wargames that the outcome on the table when it is actually time to play is so tertiary that losing can be more fun than winning. It doesn't mean you don't try to win...just that it isn't a primary or secondary driver.

I agree that it's not inherently bad for some goals to prove unexpectedly unachievable, even by design. Seeing how characters cope with something like that can be interesting. I guess that the main question there is how often feels like "too much": At what point does it seem like our heroes should really just pick a new career?

Oh, and beware railroading, of course. Just like a GM shouldn't commit to a problem having exactly one solution, a GM shouldn't commit to a problem having exactly zero solutions. If the players find a way to do the "impossible", reward their ingenuity.

Potential results can significantly differ from each other in ways that don't make one clearly and straightforwardly "better" or "worse" than another, and that's often more interesting than degrees of clear-cut "success" or "failure".

Can you provide a couple examples for context? Do you mean situations were, for instance, a "villain" plot isn't foiled...but the consequences of that plot end up spawning branching stories that actually lead to a more immersive narrative? A filler adventure at 3rd level that ends up defining the entirety of the campaign, and a throw-away adversary becomes the nemesis? Or something more like a butterfly flaps its wings...?

[ASIDE: Railroads in what I believe to be the generally used sense can spawn great game experiences (where some choice is surrendered as part of a social contract, formal or otherwise). Railroads where there are legitimately no choices, or one and exactly one way to follow the one and exactly one path that can lead to success, on the other hand...well, I played a lot of 80s era video games too...]

I don't, and I'm sure I'm not alone. And I doubt that winning is of primary importance to a majority of gamers.

I use (and read) the question of "care" to imply more than just winning or losing. More of a "Do you play those sorts of games with the intent to win?" versus "Do you get all pouty/tantrummy/upset if you don't win?" Do you cleave to the rules and intent of the game, or do you just actively quarter-ass it to be above all of that "competition and meaning" sort of thing? I don't mean Devils_Advocate you, I mean general you.

But choices are only meaningful insofar as the variance in consequences is meaningful, not just to the extent that that variance exists. And the more regularly that player characters die, the more that players are discouraged from putting any actual, y'know, characterization into them (because it's not worth the effort to write up a detailed backstory nor personality for a character who's only going to last a few hours), instead of churning out a stream of nameless, faceless store brand adventurers whose only notable motive is the acquisition of wealth (as the default motivation for going into monster-infested dungeons is "that's where the treasure is").

Having to play Generic Fighter #378947 instead of Generic Fighter #378946 hardly seems like a terribly meaningful consequence.

[SNIP]

There's a certain tension between "I don't want my character to die" and "I want my character's life to be significantly threatened". Or more broadly, "I want my characters to achieve their goals" and "I want my characters to face obstacles that reduce their likelihood of success." There are lots of different potential ways to address that tension, with various tradeoffs.

I support the idea of balance between those tensions, investment in the game, and the potential for the most dire of consequences. I believe the game remains a game, even with all of the narrative and social values and components. I think RPGs benefit from a tutorial space like many video games...where you learn the system (but in RPGs, also the character?) in a safe zone for a little while, and then the game risk elevates. I believe in a mature, long run game there can be significant fail states beyond death, but I believe death should always be on the table, if you will. And I think death usually should have real world consequence (like time lost playing, as much as that sucks).

@MoiMagnus: humans demonstrably care about, even get addicted to, games of chance where they have less than 50% chance of victory. So your argument for why chance of death has been lowered in later editions of D&D is incomplete at best, and fallacious at worst. There isn't such a straightforward relationship between frequency of loss and how much a player cares about their participation in a game.

The actual reason chance of death has been lowered, is more likely that later developers (and players) idealize the concept of taking the same character through an entire campaign, and that is impossible if random death is too common. They may presume that players remain more invested this way but, again, the relationship is not so straightforward that this ought to be taken for granted.

I think it was just two things, really.

1. The switch to presuming a single character vs a stable of characters.
2. The addition of long-term story, and the difficulties that presented with narrative continuity.

And, really, I think it's mostly the first, though that was probably prompted by the second.

I'm not sure if I agree. Been playing since AD&D (early 80s), and already by that point the groups I played in didn't use rotating characters. There was a lot of churn, though, based on restarting groups - but all the same players making new characters, not some recycling previous iterations or maintaining a stable to draw from. The ideal of single character long run campaigns was pretty common by a few years into my play experience, and death wasn't viewed as "get another sheet from the folder". I really think the "respawn" expectation driven by video games (that don't take quarters and don't have limited lives) drives this more than a desire for single character long runs. Also a bit of maximum time on task being rewarding.

@Darth Credence: you deserve a round of applause for explaining that card-based ruleset. Your observation also neatly demonstrates how it is a straightforward trade-off between different game aesthetics - you can eliminate gambling on chance rather trivially, but then you have to face the fact that some people like to gamble.

I think that is a little reductionist - uncertainty has more attraction than just the gambling aspect. But here's my more interesting thought...does the card system increase the likelihood of death to "trash mobs" rather than failure/death in climactic scenes?

- M

[gbaji]

I have had some groups playing games love this in place of dice (never tried in a TTRPG, just various board games), and I have had others hate it. Those who liked it liked it for the strategy because knowing when to play off the bad cards was a hugely important skill. Those who hated it hated the idea that they couldn't get a lucky streak going. I would imagine that in a TTRPG, this would be beneficial to players, especially if you also let everyone know what the DCs are for challenges, or what AC needs to be hit, since that would allow the players to use the lowest possible card that passes.

Honestly, I would hate it, but not at all because it would prevent me from having a "lucky streak", but because it's too easily gamed (from any/all sides). Don't get me wrong, I'd abuse the heck out of it, but the whole time I'd be thinking "this isn't a great mechanic because I'm basically cheating here".

The problem with this approach, is that it is 100% deterministic based entirely on two things:

1. How much the player(s) know what their target number is.

2. How much the player(s) have the ability to manipulate the refresh of cards.


The first point is pretty straightforward, but relevant. If the players know the target number they need, they can always pick exactly the correct numbered card to succeed, or use the lowest number left if they decide it's not worth it to try. Which allows for perfect play. Only made difficult at all by the...

Second point, is problematic. Do the players have the opportunity to dump low cards as they wish, to maximize the use of high cards for the things they really want to succee at. And how much ability do they have? Can they sit there beteween each combat, spaming search attempts, use up their cards, then get a fresh set full of high carrds, own the combat, then spam again to get the high cards back? And if not, then how does the GM moderate this?

Which leads to a third problem. It only prevents "perfect play" if the GM actually contrives things to make it so. The result becomes extremely determinalistic. The GM can force an encounter knowing the PCs are low on high cards, or he can give them some fluff things to burn out their decks and give them fresh ones for the "big fight". It makes gaming the deck the key strategy, and both players are GMs are going to play that game, instead of the one they are actually playing.

It also goes back to player knowledge being an issue. Even if we assume folks aren't gaming, then we will have situations where a PC enters a conflict, knowing they have no high cards, and thus knowing there is nothing they can do for X rounds as a result. The dice literally have memory in this model, and it's not a good thing IMO.

I vastly prefer a situation where the player knows "I have an X% chance of doing <something>" in each attempt, and knowing that actually means that that's their odds of success. Every single attempt. In this model, if the player has the card needed, then it's a 100% chance. If he doesn't, then it's a 0% chance.

[kyoryu]

I'm not sure if I agree. Been playing since AD&D (early 80s), and already by that point the groups I played in didn't use rotating characters. There was a lot of churn, though, based on restarting groups - but all the same players making new characters, not some recycling previous iterations or maintaining a stable to draw from. The ideal of single character long run campaigns was pretty common by a few years into my play experience, and death wasn't viewed as "get another sheet from the folder". I really think the "respawn" expectation driven by video games (that don't take quarters and don't have limited lives) drives this more than a desire for single character long runs. Also a bit of maximum time on task being rewarding.

I think the shift was already in place by the early-mid 80s. Also a lot of people picking up the game as kids (myself included) never really did that anyway.

I didn't really undersatnd that style until I played in a game with the parents of one of my friends that had been running since the 70s, and it was eye-opening in a lot of ways.

But either way, experiencing that style showed me how it could really work, and how death would be perceived in that style. And there's plenty of historical evidence that that's exactly how Gary ran his games, and likely Greenwood as well as others - Undermountain/Waterdeep follow exactly the pattern of "a town built on a megadungeon, oh, and look at all the retired PCs that are now NPCs".

In that style, character death just... isn't a big deal. Once you presume a party stays together, having characters die creates a lot of problems with continuity, power, bringing characters in, etc.

If there's no "party", and it's just "whoever shows up", then a character being gone isn't a big deal, since there's no expectation. If there is a party and plot, then you've suddenly got a missing role and their narrative threads end.

If your character at level n dies, it's again not a big deal. You can either bring in one of your characters near that level, or the group can just play their lower level characters for some sessions. Since churn is a thing, they won't be permanently behind the rest of the party. In the "one party" game, you have to manage that - do they come in at level - 1 and be behind? Do they come in at level, making it feel like the death didn't matter? Do they (probably not) start at level 1?

Since there's no party, "why do we let in this rando and where do we meet them?" is unimportant. The mechanisms for "put together the party for the week" already exist, so the fact that an additional new character joins the pool (if they even do) doesn't matter. In the one party game, where they're wandering about, how do they meet them? Where do they meet them? Why do they decide to travel together?

A lot of problems with character death just don't exist in the open-table style of play, and become much bigger issues if you assume narrative and a stable party.

Also, to be clear, I'm not saying "everyone played like this". I am saying that that's how Gary and a lot of the other early influencers played, and that the game evolved around that style. And as the common style changed to consistent parties, some of the rules that made sense didn't work and needed to change.

[Herbert_W]

Hm... I'm not sure if there is room for something else. Any event that has a non-zero chance of not happening happens "by luck" if it happens.

Right, but what the "event" is that happens by luck can vary due to player choice. Here's an example of a situation where player choice and luck both matter:

• Do you have a crappy plan? Luck makes the difference between death and a costly (in terms of spell slots etc.) escape.
• Do you have an OK plan? Luck makes the difference between a costly escape and a costly success.
• Do you have a good plan? Luck makes the difference between a costly success and pulling it off freely.

Arguably, if you play perfectly, luck shouldn't be able to make you do worse than "draw".

Bingo.

At least, bingo for DnD-like games. Being at risk of a fate worse than a draw even with perfect play might be perfectly suitable for horror games.

My own personal preference would be for a game where, with perfect (or just consistently good) play, players will often succeed and never do worse than barely escaping with their lives.

It's also worth noting that even thinking of it like this kind of implies a singular event, whereas really it should be multiple events, each pushing the world state forward.

Oh yes, there's a lot of complexity here that I'm skimming over.

Cumulative effects allow randomness to be felt on a moment-to-moment basis while reducing the overall impact of randomness on the final result. You can feel each high and low of a set of encounters with good or bad rolls, but overall your luck should average out. It's very very unlikely that one player will have consistently good or bad rolls over an entire campaign. Plus, players can change their strategy to compensate for or capitalize on the luck that they've had in the past more easily than they can on the fly in an encounter.

I did skim over that complexity for a reason, though: there's a lot of it. It'd be easy to get lost in the weeds.

Luck can be eliminated quite easily, I think. Rather than rolling dice, everyone gets a deck for each dice type, with one card for each number . . .

That's a clever system and you could get a very nice game out of it.

That game would be nothing like DnD. It'd be more strategic, more "gamey," and feel less like a living world with real challenges.

I think this is a good illustration of not just what you gain, but also what you loose, when you take randomness out of a game. DnD has dice because those dice work well for what DnD is trying to do.

[Vahnavoi]

But here's my more interesting thought...does the card system increase the likelihood of death to "trash mobs" rather than failure/death in climactic scenes?

- M

It can go either way depending on how rest of a game is set up. It is easy to set up a test - control for game scenario and all the other rules save for method number generation - but it's non-trivial to carry out and calculate the results.

To give some idea how and why: using cards, it's possible to create a game where you can't lose to a mob, yet can't win the boss. Simplified example: losing to the mob requires two 1s in a row. Beating the boss requires two 20s in row. Using cards, only being allowed to use each card once before a redraw, both sequences are impossible. Using independent die rolls, both sequences have 1-in-400 chance.

A different phenomenom emerges depending on which cards mobs have compared to players. If mobs have the same cards but only have one encounter (the players), this means mobs have incentive to play high cards. Compared to independent die rolls, this effectively means that mobs have higher numbers. This puts pressure on how players can ration their cards. This can lead to a situation where, using the same mobs and the same boss, the boss becomes impossible if players try to play perfect against mobs, compared to die rolls having a steady win %. To counter this, players may be forced to accept (bad) outcomes in mob fights that would only happen some % of time when using dice. The overall effect can be that players have overall 100% win rate strategy BUT it requires that one (or more) player(s) lose(s) their character in one of the fights - compared to a dice version where there is some % chance that everyone survives (even if it is very low).

[Darth Credence]

Honestly, I would hate it, but not at all because it would prevent me from having a "lucky streak", but because it's too easily gamed (from any/all sides). Don't get me wrong, I'd abuse the heck out of it, but the whole time I'd be thinking "this isn't a great mechanic because I'm basically cheating here".

The problem with this approach, is that it is 100% deterministic based entirely on two things:

1. How much the player(s) know what their target number is.

2. How much the player(s) have the ability to manipulate the refresh of cards.


The first point is pretty straightforward, but relevant. If the players know the target number they need, they can always pick exactly the correct numbered card to succeed, or use the lowest number left if they decide it's not worth it to try. Which allows for perfect play. Only made difficult at all by the...

Second point, is problematic. Do the players have the opportunity to dump low cards as they wish, to maximize the use of high cards for the things they really want to succee at. And how much ability do they have? Can they sit there beteween each combat, spaming search attempts, use up their cards, then get a fresh set full of high carrds, own the combat, then spam again to get the high cards back? And if not, then how does the GM moderate this?

Which leads to a third problem. It only prevents "perfect play" if the GM actually contrives things to make it so. The result becomes extremely determinalistic. The GM can force an encounter knowing the PCs are low on high cards, or he can give them some fluff things to burn out their decks and give them fresh ones for the "big fight". It makes gaming the deck the key strategy, and both players are GMs are going to play that game, instead of the one they are actually playing.

It also goes back to player knowledge being an issue. Even if we assume folks aren't gaming, then we will have situations where a PC enters a conflict, knowing they have no high cards, and thus knowing there is nothing they can do for X rounds as a result. The dice literally have memory in this model, and it's not a good thing IMO.

I vastly prefer a situation where the player knows "I have an X% chance of doing <something>" in each attempt, and knowing that actually means that that's their odds of success. Every single attempt. In this model, if the player has the card needed, then it's a 100% chance. If he doesn't, then it's a 0% chance.

I mentioned in my post how it would be beneficial to the players if they know what the DC and AC they are targeting is. If I were to use this in a TTRPG, I would not tell people the AC of anything, but I would definitely describe what they are wearing and how they move in an attempt to give an idea of roughly what the AC would be. I would not tell them exactly what the DC of something would be, but I would attempt to get across a general level of difficulty - something like, "The ground is firm, and the distance across the chasm is only a little bit longer than a standard jump, so you think you should be able to make it" for a low DC jump, vs "The chasm is wide enough that it would be the farthest jump you've ever made if you succeed, and the moisture in the cave has made the ground slick in places" for a high DC jump. And, yes, an obvious thing to do would be to use trivial things to blow through the low cards. But, if the DM takes the advice of many and only call for a roll if there is a possibility of failure that has a meaningful effect on the game, then they would still be making a choice to fail some things.

As I said, this was purely about showing how luck can be taken off the table. There are trade-offs. The people I played with that didn't like it gave their reason as not wanting to have no shot at a lucky streak - there are other possible reasons, of course, like your concern (although your concern and theirs are closer than you may think - wanting to always have that possibility, no matter how small, of getting the roll you need is not that different from wanting the possibility of a lucky streak). But I don't think it can be argued that it doesn't create a lot of meaningful choices in relation to the thread topic. Every roll becomes a meaningful choice - you are choosing what to get for that roll, knowing that this choice will further constrain future choices. If you go into a fight with nothing but low cards, you had to have used your high cards for something else before. You knew when you did that that it would mean that later on you would have the equivalent of low rolls, but you made a choice that it would be better to have the high results at that time and the low results later.

That's a clever system and you could get a very nice game out of it.

That game would be nothing like DnD. It'd be more strategic, more "gamey," and feel less like a living world with real challenges.

I think this is a good illustration of not just what you gain, but also what you loose, when you take randomness out of a game. DnD has dice because those dice work well for what DnD is trying to do.

I agree it would not be D&D. I have not used it on a TTRPG, just some board games that use dice. Gloomhaven is closer to this, with some cards selected and some drawn for randomness. For as much as I love that game, it definitely has more of a strategy game feel than an RPG.

It can go either way depending on how rest of a game is set up. It is easy to set up a test - control for game scenario and all the other rules save for method number generation - but it's non-trivial to carry out and calculate the results.

To give some idea how and why: using cards, it's possible to create a game where you can't lose to a mob, yet can't win the boss. Simplified example: losing to the mob requires two 1s in a row. Beating the boss requires two 20s in row. Using cards, only being allowed to use each card once before a redraw, both sequences are impossible. Using independent die rolls, both sequences have 1-in-400 chance.

A different phenomenom emerges depending on which cards mobs have compared to players. If mobs have the same cards but only have one encounter (the players), this means mobs have incentive to play high cards. Compared to independent die rolls, this effectively means that mobs have higher numbers. This puts pressure on how players can ration their cards. This can lead to a situation where, using the same mobs and the same boss, the boss becomes impossible if players try to play perfect against mobs, compared to die rolls having a steady win %. To counter this, players may be forced to accept (bad) outcomes in mob fights that would only happen some % of time when using dice. The overall effect can be that players have overall 100% win rate strategy BUT it requires that one (or more) player(s) lose(s) their character in one of the fights - compared to a dice version where there is some % chance that everyone survives (even if it is very low).

Well, two 20s in a row is still a technical possibility if someone arranges for it (two 1s, too, but I don't know why anyone would). Save the 20 for the last card, play it, pick up all the cards and play the 20 again. Unlikely, but possible.

If I were to use this for a TTRPG, as the DM I would shuffle my decks and play them in the order they come to get away from them always having the best numbers on hand. I would also make one deck for all of the NPCs and monsters, while the players would each get their own. This could possibly be a huge benefit to a DM, if players complain about the DM rolling well, or to make it a bit easier to get the results. The DM will always be rolling the flat distribution, and a card with a big number on it won't fall off the table or be difficult to read.

A few other things to mention about it. What to do about advantage/disadvantage being one - those make no sense in a method like this, or at least they just become a good place to burn the low cards. I think I'd replace it with a +/-3 bonus, but I don't know for sure. Or how about portents? is the way to go to pick out three cards for portents and set them aside like any other card being used? Does that make portents a place to dump low cards exclusively, since you can use them on enemies? Is that OP? I don't know.

Would introducing ways to get cards back early be a good idea? Like, say, martials can pick up one used card per short rest as a resource recovery or the like. I just don't know. It would take some significant work, I think, to actually implement this in a game and have it be balanced properly when you dig into the nitty gritty. But as a proof of concept that the game can be played without the randomness of the dice, it works to get the mind running that way and to think about what randomness means to the game, and how the game would function if it were greatly reduced. Maybe it would be better to shuffle the cards, rather than select them, so there is still some randomness but everyone will roll the flat distribution and it will pay to pay attention to what you have gotten recently. If I was running three or four games I'd experiment, but I'm only doing my main game at the moment and we are far too far in for that.

[NichG]

I've stayed away from the card-based thing because of the weirdness of 'intentionally burning cards' to trigger a refresh.

But a hybrid system could avoid it. Lets say you can refresh a hand of 7 cards once per something like a short rest. Whenever you are trying to do something that would require a roll, you can choose either to roll or substitute a card for your roll (if you have a card left). Whenever you are defending against something being proactively done to you and you alone (e.g. someone makes an attack roll against you) you can substitute one of your cards for their roll. A proactive card spent overrides a defensive card spent, so if they're spending a card on their roll you can't spend your low cards to replace it.

Rolls would be on a d10. Maybe remove Jacks, Queens, and Kings or have them be special effect sorts of things. Maybe the DM always rolls, or only top-end villains get card hands to work with, or the DM has 10 cards per session to spend or something like that.

[gbaji]

I mentioned in my post how it would be beneficial to the players if they know what the DC and AC they are targeting is. If I were to use this in a TTRPG, I would not tell people the AC of anything, but I would definitely describe what they are wearing and how they move in an attempt to give an idea of roughly what the AC would be. I would not tell them exactly what the DC of something would be, but I would attempt to get across a general level of difficulty - something like, "The ground is firm, and the distance across the chasm is only a little bit longer than a standard jump, so you think you should be able to make it" for a low DC jump, vs "The chasm is wide enough that it would be the farthest jump you've ever made if you succeed, and the moisture in the cave has made the ground slick in places" for a high DC jump. And, yes, an obvious thing to do would be to use trivial things to blow through the low cards. But, if the DM takes the advice of many and only call for a roll if there is a possibility of failure that has a meaningful effect on the game, then they would still be making a choice to fail some things.

Yeah. I get that approach too. Again though, the problem is that this becomes the game, rather than the one I'm playing. And to be honest, this somewhat as a side effect, ups the stakes for not playing this mini-game well. If I roll a die, and the GM says "you miss", I'm not super upset. Maybe I'll roll better next time. Or, if I did roll well, and still missed, maybe I should try something different. So it kinda has a natural feel to it as you get a sense of what your probabilities are.

Using a high(ish) card, but still missing (maybe just by one) would feel like a real blow. Because it actually cost you something more than just "I have X chance, and still have that same chance next round". You've hurt your capabilities going foward as a result of misplaying that card. I just feel like using cards for this would produce really "swingy" results. Either the players have a good handle on things, and are more or less batting out of the park, or things don't align, and the find themselves overplaying high cards when not needed (which has a "real" effect on them), or just underplaying, and also missing out.

I think that a better approach, if people are concerned about the "bad roll means I die" aspect of things, is to reduce the dependency of death/failure on single die rolls in the first place (or single card uses). The use of cards doesn't change that problem, it just changes the specifics of how it manifests. Now, I'm not worried about dying because I rolled poorly, but because I run into a "save or die" situation, right when I already used up the cards that would have saved me. And it has the added problem (which I touched on before) of potential gaming by the GM in that both parties probably know which cards that PC has already played. Players already sometimes feel like they were targettted when/if the GM has something really bad happen and they have to roll to avoid it. That's going to be doubled down on, when the player knows that the GM knows that he already used the cards he needs to save his character, and then hits him with the "save or <bad thing>" anyway.

Which would seem to only maximize the pressure on the GM to fudge things to avoid such things *or* risk the players being upset at the GM for putting them in a known impossible situation.

As I said, this was purely about showing how luck can be taken off the table. There are trade-offs. The people I played with that didn't like it gave their reason as not wanting to have no shot at a lucky streak - there are other possible reasons, of course, like your concern (although your concern and theirs are closer than you may think - wanting to always have that possibility, no matter how small, of getting the roll you need is not that different from wanting the possibility of a lucky streak). But I don't think it can be argued that it doesn't create a lot of meaningful choices in relation to the thread topic. Every roll becomes a meaningful choice - you are choosing what to get for that roll, knowing that this choice will further constrain future choices. If you go into a fight with nothing but low cards, you had to have used your high cards for something else before. You knew when you did that that it would mean that later on you would have the equivalent of low rolls, but you made a choice that it would be better to have the high results at that time and the low results later.

And do you think that knowledge will make the player feel better, or worse, than if each time, he's just rolling dice?

And it does highlight a problem that always exists between GMs and players. How much do the players expect the GM to "cover for them" if/when they make poor decisions? Imagine, you have a player who just likes it when his player "wins" (cause don't they all?). So this player just always usees his best cards as early as possible, to do as well as he can. We can objectively say that he "used up his luck" already, so when you hit him with something after that point, and he epically fails (due to not having any good cards left), it's his own choice. But IME, that's *never* how that kind of player will see it.

He's going to see it as the GM being unfair for hitting him with something when the GM knows he's out of good cards. He's going to come to expect that the GM should provide a fluff encounter, and skill rolls, or minor things, so he can use up his low cards, and then get a new set of high cards to "kick some butt!" again. While we can certainly say that this is bad playing on the part of the player, that isn't going to change that this may create some conflicts and unhappiness as a result. You just make it about die rolls, and the problem is eliminated.

And yeah. This is setting aside that not every scene is the same. Not all require high skill rolls to succeed, nor is the importance of a given success or failure the same. But the weight on each is treated the same based on the card use. A 17 card used to succeed in spotting some minor thing is a lot different than the same 17 used to evade a fireball. This kind a loops back to "you're playing a mini-game here", where the players are trying to guess how many different die rolls may exist between "right now" and "when it's going to be really important", and adjust their behavior and card use accordingly. If I know that we're going to spend the next few days sitting around town, I'm going to be more confident using high cards for social skills, perception skills, bargaining for a good sale price for loot, etc. But if I know that we're about to be attacked by the mercs sent by our number one enemy, I'm going to want to fail those things, so I can save my "good cards" for that.

Dunno. It just seems like it would make that guessing game more important than the stats and whatnot on the character sheet itself. And that's before getting into the real fact that "dice don't have memory". The fact that you were just really lucky (or unlucky) does not actually change the probabilities of being really lucky or unlucky again one bit. Your odds of drawing a straight flush this hand, is exactly the same if you drew one last hand as if you didn't. But this mechanic somehow imposes some sort of "conservation of luck" in the game universe. I just find that... odd.


Again. Better to just make luck less of a facor for the major stuff in the first place IMO. Details along the way? Sure. But big "live or die" stuff? Luck should have very very little to do with it.


EDIT: Oh. There's another reason why I think I dislike this idea. It will make characters with low skills in some things, much more hesitant to try them. If I have like 1 skill point assigned to some skill, and a situation comes up where I could use it (let's assume this is some minor social skill maybe), the card system effectively requires that I use up one of my higher cards to have a shot at succeeding with the skill. So I now become less capable later because I did this one thing now. That just doesn't sit well with me. I like to encourage my players to try things, even if they aren't that good at it. That character who just put one point in sense motive? Go ahead and try it. You might get lucky and get something useful. Or not. But it costs you zero to use that skill whenever a situation comes up to use it. In the card system? There now is a cost . And it kinda reinforces bad play IMO. The honest player, who honestly wants to attempt to use that sense motive skill, is going to want to (need to?) use a high card to have a chance to succeed. Which hurts him. The dishonest player, will just walk around using sense motive, as often as possible, and playing low cards, so as to burn through them and get more high cards in his hand.

You've turned "luck" into a game resource that the player has control over. I'm not sure I agree with that.

[KorvinStarmast]

You've turned "luck" into a game resource that the player has control over. I'm not sure I agree with that.

Interesting thought. How do you feel about the Lucky feat, or the Halfling racial feature of luck?

[Herbert_W]

But a hybrid system could avoid [the weirdness of 'intentionally burning cards' to trigger a refresh]. Lets say you can refresh a hand of 7 cards once per something like a short rest. Whenever you are trying to do something that would require a roll, you can choose either to roll or substitute a card . . .

This is very strongly reminiscent of a diviner's Portent, except that you've given players more uses and made it into a core mechanic rather than just a class feature.

Like Portent, it has both offensive and defensive uses. Also like Portent, there's a potential for players to never use it offensively because they're saving it in case they need it defensively. (There's some potentially-unintended interactions where a high roll is good offensively for attacks and defensively for saves, unless you also rework saves to get rid of the defender-rolls aspect.)

Compare this to hit points. Hit points were added back in the very early days of the game to solve exactly this problem: they make it impossible for a character outside of very low levels to be felled by a single blow from a level-appropriate foe. Save-or-die effects intentionally bypass hit points. If you don't like that, the simplest (not necessarily best) solution is to just not bypass hit points. You could make Disintegrate deal damage and only reduce a creature to dust if it is already reduced to 0hp, etc.

I think the biggest difference between this expanded Portent and HP is that the former tempts players to get "greedy" by spending too much of it offensively and the latter tempts players to get "greedy" by pushing forwards despite it running low.

[NichG]

Like Portent, it has both offensive and defensive uses. Also like Portent, there's a potential for players to never use it offensively because they're saving it in case they need it defensively. (There's some potentially-unintended interactions where a high roll is good offensively for attacks and defensively for saves, unless you also rework saves to get rid of the defender-rolls aspect.)

That was actually intentional to make cards lower than the average of the roll still be useful. So all your low cards are defensive and all your high cards are offensive (or 'proactive') and you wouldn't ever be trading offense for defense, it'd all be about timing - which roll do you want to force?

It'd be nice to have low cards work defensively for saves rather than needing high cards for that. But if you make the attacker roll against 10+save, AoEs and save or dies are just so much more efficient of a card use that its kind of too obvious (and casters end up getting much more mileage out of cards than non-casters in that case as well, due to being able to synergize two limited resources together). It's a kludge but you could just say 'when using cards on saves, take 11-value as the value of the card'.

Anyhow, the point of something like this for me wouldn't be to make death less likely, it'd be to remove 'non-actions' from the game - e.g. things where you try to do something but then afterwards find out 'oh that failed', so your action may as well have not happened. Personally I much prefer a case where when you fail its because you decided that success was not worth the cost. Or you just know in advance that you can't afford to succeed at a particular thing, so you don't initiate the action that will end up getting nulled out in the first place.

I still prefer the thing I described up-thread where you roll and pay off complications, because with that I could say 'you can't try again - your roll establishes the complications that are now just things about the situation, so if you ever want to succeed on e.g. picking this particular lock, you'll need to pay off those particular complications'. That really makes it so that trying to do something always leaves the game in a new state - either you do it (and pay off the cost/accept the consequences) or you see the price and say no, but now the price is known and fixed whereas before it was not. So it cleans up a lot of the 'I keep trying until I succeed' or 'I roll, fail, okay fine when play returns to me in 20 minutes I'll just do the exact same thing again' kinds of dynamics that can sometimes crop up in D&D.

[gbaji]

Interesting thought. How do you feel about the Lucky feat, or the Halfling racial feature of luck?

I don't know how either work specifically, but assuming that these are in game effects on existing rules, and not broad changes to the rules themselves, I don't think they are the same. Something that adds some plusses to existing rolls (or even limited re-rolls) isn't the same as replacing the concept of rolling in the first place.

I'm not even adverse to variations on "karma point" type systems. And honestly, if your really trying to fix the problem of "pointless deaths" in a game, adopting something like that may be far more fruitfull (and less likely to create other problems), than replacing the core resolution dynamic of the game itself.

My issue is with the very concept of "you wil get exactly one of each possible numerical die result and choose when to use them". I just see a system like that causing far more problems than it solves.

[Vahnavoi]

I've stayed away from the card-based thing because of the weirdness of 'intentionally burning cards' to trigger a refresh.

I think people overestimate both the ease and impact of doing so. Consider: just like in a dice-based game, not every action requires a roll, a game master in a card-based game can just pass and fail trivial actions without allowing spending and refreshing of cards. This means only impactful actions are left for "burning", at minimum costing time on the game clock.

For example, if a player is left with seven worst cards and wants to get a full hand for the next big event, now they have to plot seven moves in a limited time period where failing on purpose won't by itself screw them over. It shouldn't be assumed to be trivial.

For a similar reason, I think gbaji is prematurely and pointlessly playing a scare schord about perfect play. Yes, perfect information and deterministic rules mean perfect play is possible. We have great many deterministic perfect information games exemplifying how actually playing perfectly can be hard task for a trained mathematician, and utterly impossible for a layman to do on the fly. Since players can have more than one possible move to use a card on at any given point, the complexity space for open cards roleplaying game is open-ended. For example, if each decision point has two mutually exclusive forks, and a player has 20 cards, optimally using all those cards requires the player to think 20 moves ahead and identifying desireable paths from over a million (2^20) options.

In other words, cards make a roleplaying game trivial only if the rest of it is already trivial. But it sells everyone short to weigh the merit of a concept based on a trivial implementation. It's equal to weighing Chess based on Tic Tac Toe.

[KorvinStarmast]

Something that adds some plusses to existing rolls (or even limited re-rolls) isn't the same as replacing the concept of rolling in the first place.

Got it. Thanks.

I'm not even adverse to variations on "karma point" type systems.
In the "Pirates and Dragons" d6 game, you get doubloons at the beginning of each session that you can spend to avert really bad outcomes. Seems similar to karma points.

[kyoryu]

I don't know how either work specifically, but assuming that these are in game effects on existing rules, and not broad changes to the rules themselves, I don't think they are the same. Something that adds some plusses to existing rolls (or even limited re-rolls) isn't the same as replacing the concept of rolling in the first place.

Agreed. It mixes in some of the "choose your fate" aspects of the card into a more traditional randomized system.

I'm not even adverse to variations on "karma point" type systems. And honestly, if your really trying to fix the problem of "pointless deaths" in a game, adopting something like that may be far more fruitfull (and less likely to create other problems), than replacing the core resolution dynamic of the game itself.

I mean... the easiest solution is twofold:
1. Ensuring you can retreat from battle reliably
2. "Death just means that you're out of the fight - exactly what that means is up to the person that took you out".

But, yeah, some limited rerolls can help, too.

My issue is with the very concept of "you wil get exactly one of each possible numerical die result and choose when to use them". I just see a system like that causing far more problems than it solves.

You could do a hybrid system, where you draw n cards from a deck and have to use them before your next draw. That retains some level of luck, while still giving you the "choose when to use what" stuff. The only issue here is people calling for meaningless rolls to blow through bad cards, but I think that's reasonably solvable. At some level, you want people to use the bad cards on things they care less about - you just probably want it to not be on utterly meaningless things. (The basic answer, of course, is "don't call for rolls on meaningless things"). The bonuses/fate/karma system gets rid of this while still allowing for some of the "what do you care about?" gameplay implicitly, as the choice isn't "use the good card or the bad card" the choice is then "I only have n of these good things to use, is this important enough to blow one?" Unimportant stuff is kind of a no-op, then, you just need to make sure you have enough important things that the choice of using it is actually interesting enough that you will have times you want to use the bonus/reroll but don't because you think something even more important will be coming up.

[NichG]

I think people overestimate both the ease and impact of doing so. Consider: just like in a dice-based game, not every action requires a roll, a game master in a card-based game can just pass and fail trivial actions without allowing spending and refreshing of cards. This means only impactful actions are left for "burning", at minimum costing time on the game clock.

For example, if a player is left with seven worst cards and wants to get a full hand for the next big event, now they have to plot seven moves in a limited time period where failing on purpose won't by itself screw them over. It shouldn't be assumed to be trivial.

That introduces a lot of onus on the GM to prop up the system, take an antagonistic stance towards what the players are trying to accomplish (e.g. it encourages proactively searching for reasons why they can't refresh their hand, when being able to 'take 20' on particular things would be distorting otherwise), and it also creates the potential for a lot of OOC negotiation bogging down play. I think it was the guy behind Arcen Games who said something like "If the optimal course of action in a game is tedious or boring, people will either feel compelled to do it and be bored, or will feel bad about the fact that they could have done better and chose not to". Controlling refresh and in general hand manipulation is a centrally important strategy for most card-based games; something where you refresh your hand when you use it up strongly signals 'if you have only bad cards, you should find trivial stuff to burn them on to get a refresh' as the actual strategic thing to do, so it's going to be that kind of situation for a lot of players. Given that some of the stuff I want to try to design away from is situations like this that already occur with D&D and some other dice-based systems, this isn't the correct design direction to go in.

This isn't saying that card based mechanics are never appropriate. But I'd use them for much more restricted segments of play rather than as a long-term resource, *especially* if basic system functions rely on someone always having a card at hand. Because then you must either deny agency of when to try things that would require a card, or just accept that the player will be able to get the maximum possible result whenever there isn't time pressure, even if there's consequence-of-failure pressure. On the other hand, if cards are an 'extra' then you can just not make it automatic to refresh them when you're out, and that resolves some of the issue. Or even if cards are needed for taking any action at all you can still say 'when you're out you're out and you can't act' and avoid the refresh metagame, but that doesn't work well when things external to the character can force a card to be played (like saving throws, or just the GM calling for checks for whatever reason).

Crusader mechanics are basically a card draw and refresh mechanic like this. They're great in combat, but once you get out of combat they really encourage weird little rituals to get access to infinite healing - start up a spar with your party members to draw a hand, punch a tree to trigger a heal if you drew one, otherwise surrender and then start the spar up again. It's silly and in practice the GM can and should just say 'no, you can't do that', but from the perspective of a designer it would be better to have avoided that in the first place so you're not handing every GM this little conflict to resolve every time they have a new player or group who has the same old idea.

So 'just replace dice with cards and play D&D' wouldn't be my approach.

[Darth Credence]

I guess for me, it has to go a bit further - not just a delta, but an informed delta. Or maybe another way to look at it is, there are lots of different kinds of ways to perceive deltas. Maybe it boils down into three categories: 'you can predict the delta', 'you can retrodict the delta', and 'there's a delta but you can't tell'.

For me, the 'predictive deltas' are the most meaningful, even when the prediction ends up being wrong. It kind of ties to agency - there's a situation, my choice can influence the situation, and I know enough about how my choice might influence the situation to feel like if the situation goes one way or another way it was my responsibility.

That introduces a lot of onus on the GM to prop up the system, take an antagonistic stance towards what the players are trying to accomplish (e.g. it encourages proactively searching for reasons why they can't refresh their hand, when being able to 'take 20' on particular things would be distorting otherwise), and it also creates the potential for a lot of OOC negotiation bogging down play. I think it was the guy behind Arcen Games who said something like "If the optimal course of action in a game is tedious or boring, people will either feel compelled to do it and be bored, or will feel bad about the fact that they could have done better and chose not to". Controlling refresh and in general hand manipulation is a centrally important strategy for most card-based games; something where you refresh your hand when you use it up strongly signals 'if you have only bad cards, you should find trivial stuff to burn them on to get a refresh' as the actual strategic thing to do, so it's going to be that kind of situation for a lot of players. Given that some of the stuff I want to try to design away from is situations like this that already occur with D&D and some other dice-based systems, this isn't the correct design direction to go in.

This isn't saying that card based mechanics are never appropriate. But I'd use them for much more restricted segments of play rather than as a long-term resource, *especially* if basic system functions rely on someone always having a card at hand. Because then you must either deny agency of when to try things that would require a card, or just accept that the player will be able to get the maximum possible result whenever there isn't time pressure, even if there's consequence-of-failure pressure. On the other hand, if cards are an 'extra' then you can just not make it automatic to refresh them when you're out, and that resolves some of the issue. Or even if cards are needed for taking any action at all you can still say 'when you're out you're out and you can't act' and avoid the refresh metagame, but that doesn't work well when things external to the character can force a card to be played (like saving throws, or just the GM calling for checks for whatever reason).

Crusader mechanics are basically a card draw and refresh mechanic like this. They're great in combat, but once you get out of combat they really encourage weird little rituals to get access to infinite healing - start up a spar with your party members to draw a hand, punch a tree to trigger a heal if you drew one, otherwise surrender and then start the spar up again. It's silly and in practice the GM can and should just say 'no, you can't do that', but from the perspective of a designer it would be better to have avoided that in the first place so you're not handing every GM this little conflict to resolve every time they have a new player or group who has the same old idea.

So 'just replace dice with cards and play D&D' wouldn't be my approach.

That first quote up there was your first in the thread, third overall. I would say that cards in place of dice (and I would like to reiterate here that this was purely a statement of, "hey, you can eliminate the dice randomness by doing this" as a way to stimulate thought about randomness) fits your predictive model

Let's say it is only for the d20. You start with the full deck. You engage in a fight with an orc that is described to you as having only one eye, wearing ring mail of a higher quality than the dross worn by most of the other orcs, shield in one hand and spear in the other, and it is charging you.You know your bonuses to hit. You know that ringmail is heavy armor, so dexterity of the creature shouldn't matter. You know basic ringmail provides AC14, and a shield would bump that to 16. You may have a question in your mind as to whether or not that armor is enchanted, since it is described as better quality than the other orcs, but since the others were called out as dross, maybe that just means it's normal armor.

You have a +5 to hit with your attack, so you know you probably need at least an 11, but if it's enchanted that could go up a bit. If you've fought a lot of orcs, you may identify the exact type, and have a good idea about its hp, but if not, you can guess higher than most orcs because of the higher quality armor. Your question to yourself is, do I use the 11 and hope it's normal armor; do I use a 12 or 13 just in case it is enchanted, or is it appropriate to crit here? (If you're a paladin and can smite, that might be a way to one shot the creature, but that could also be a waste.) You make that decision knowing that an 11 may or may not hit, a 12, 13, or 14 would be the way to make up for possibly magic armor, and a 20 will let you double the attack damage dice, but it will also mean you have to "roll" 19 more times to get another 20. You choose, the combat continues, and in the end you have spent your cards knowing what they would do for you and what the tradeoff was farther down the line. Seems to fit your preferred type of informed choice as well as anything could.

And I would disagree about this being a burden to the DM to prop something up any more than how a DM is already burdened doing it. The DM should already not be calling for rolls if they don't matter. If there is no possibility of success, there shouldn't be a roll. That's more important with cards, I think, because if someone saves up their 20 to ask the king to abdicate in favor of them, if the DM let's them roll for it, there is now a major issue at the table. Not letting people roll whenever they want is not "denying agency". It is the DM's job and a basic part of the game. The players can say they want to do something - that's the agency they have. If they want to jump across a 2000' wide canyon, the DM is not denying their agency by not giving them a roll and just saying that they leap their strength scores into the gap and then fall the rest of the way. If they say they want to jump across a 4' wide creek bed that is 6" deep, it is not denying agency to tell them that they can easily make the jump all day long without a roll. It's the DM doing their job and adjudicating how the world works and whether or not players succeed.

I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is. I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

[Vahnavoi]

That introduces a lot of onus on the GM to prop up the system, take an antagonistic stance towards what the players are trying to accomplish (e.g. it encourages proactively searching for reasons why they can't refresh their hand, when being able to 'take 20' on particular things would be distorting otherwise) and it also creates the potential for a lot of OOC negotiation bogging down play.

No, it places an onus on the game master to make non-trivial scenarios. Characterizing that as antagonistic is either a mistake or irrelevant, since antagonism of the type "don't let players win too easily" isn't pathological. The game master does play the antagonist roles and is meant to deliver some degree of skill-bases challenge by doing so, and a card-based system allows them a fairly straightforward way to adjust difficulty when doing so.

Potential for OOC negotiation? Like, say, the kind we see in dice-based games, when players whine and beg to roll the dice at improper times, as naked lobbying for advantage and out of the mistaken impression that rolling dice is the sole way to achieve anything? That kind of negotiation? The way to cut that out is to tell those players a hard no and move on. The solution to this particular problem does not lie in domain of number generation, it lies in the domain of social conduct and creating respect towards a game master's position as game referee.

I think it was the guy behind Arcen Games who said something like "If the optimal course of action in a game is tedious or boring, people will either feel compelled to do it and be bored, or will feel bad about the fact that they could have done better and chose not to". Controlling refresh and in general hand manipulation is a centrally important strategy for most card-based games; something where you refresh your hand when you use it up strongly signals 'if you have only bad cards, you should find trivial stuff to burn them on to get a refresh' as the actual strategic thing to do, so it's going to be that kind of situation for a lot of players. Given that some of the stuff I want to try to design away from is situations like this that already occur with D&D and some other dice-based systems, this isn't the correct design direction to go in.

I've heard that quote too and I'm not contesting that manipulation of hands and refresh rates can be important aspects of strategy. What I do think that you're misapplying the principles to the point of turning them on their head.

Consider: when players can do trivial actions to refresh their hand, that is the tedious and boring optimal course referred to in the quote. By disallowing that, the optimal course is shifted to something else. It is perfectly possible, as matter of rules, to direct emphasis of hand manipulation and refresh rate manipulation to areas of game where they serve to create interesting gameplay. Removal of degenerate strategies from play is one the most straightforward ways to do that and the actual lesson taught to me when I first encountered that quote.

For comparison, in a dice game, the equivalent tedious and boring course is rerolling dice until the player gets the result they want- and the solution is to take control of rerolls away from the player. Every version of D&D has had mechanics of this type. "Take 10" and "Take 20" obviously exist for this. So does the AD&D rule that certain feats (such as picking a lock) can only be attempted once per character level.

[Mordar]

I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is. I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

My point, and mine alone, is that eliminating chance (not randomness IMO, but other people probably have a better handle on definitions) is contrary to my needs in a game - RPG, card game, basketball, whatever. Agency, IMO, should never mean certainty. On the cover, I agree with NichG's first quote about having an impact on the situation to sway chance in my favor...but still facing uncertainty.

I don't mind the idea of card-based chance systems, even as you describe maybe with some modifications, but removing chance altogether for me reduces risk and reduces enjoyment. Especially since (now, especially) we have so many ways to mitigate the one-roll-oops-death.

Consider: when players can do trivial actions to refresh their hand, that is the tedious and boring optimal course referred to in the quote. By disallowing that, the optimal course is shifted to something else. It is perfectly possible, as matter of rules, to direct emphasis of hand manipulation and refresh rate manipulation to areas of game where they serve to create interesting gameplay. Removal of degenerate strategies from play is one the most straightforward ways to do that and the actual lesson taught to me when I first encountered that quote.

Unless there is some limitation on the resource itself? Card dumping in a "reshuffle" game is often a clear easy choice. Card dumping when your Fate deck is a trim 30 cards is a very impactful choice. Maybe in this system randomly remove one card from the pool each refresh until a sufficient rest occurs? Still don't like the idea for fantasy RPG, but maybe that makes it a bit more palatable to some.

- M

[NichG]

That first quote up there was your first in the thread, third overall. I would say that cards in place of dice (and I would like to reiterate here that this was purely a statement of, "hey, you can eliminate the dice randomness by doing this" as a way to stimulate thought about randomness) fits your predictive model

Somewhere in this thread in the sub-discussion about luck we went from 'making the players choices meaningful' to 'making the dice meaningful', which I think is at least a partial error anyhow with regards to the proposed point of 'delta'. E.g. I don't care if the dice feel useless, but I do care if my players feel useless.

Let's say it is only for the d20. You start with the full deck. You engage in a fight with an orc that is described to you as having only one eye, wearing ring mail of a higher quality than the dross worn by most of the other orcs, shield in one hand and spear in the other, and it is charging you.You know your bonuses to hit. You know that ringmail is heavy armor, so dexterity of the creature shouldn't matter. You know basic ringmail provides AC14, and a shield would bump that to 16. You may have a question in your mind as to whether or not that armor is enchanted, since it is described as better quality than the other orcs, but since the others were called out as dross, maybe that just means it's normal armor.

You have a +5 to hit with your attack, so you know you probably need at least an 11, but if it's enchanted that could go up a bit. If you've fought a lot of orcs, you may identify the exact type, and have a good idea about its hp, but if not, you can guess higher than most orcs because of the higher quality armor. Your question to yourself is, do I use the 11 and hope it's normal armor; do I use a 12 or 13 just in case it is enchanted, or is it appropriate to crit here? (If you're a paladin and can smite, that might be a way to one shot the creature, but that could also be a waste.) You make that decision knowing that an 11 may or may not hit, a 12, 13, or 14 would be the way to make up for possibly magic armor, and a 20 will let you double the attack damage dice, but it will also mean you have to "roll" 19 more times to get another 20. You choose, the combat continues, and in the end you have spent your cards knowing what they would do for you and what the tradeoff was farther down the line. Seems to fit your preferred type of informed choice as well as anything could.

My preferred scale for the meaningful consequences of choices is a bit larger than the time between hand refreshes. 'What facilities do you buy for your castle?' not 'do I hit this orc now but miss the dragon later?'. But I think its going to be a distraction about this design point since its rather a separate thing.

The specific reason I want roll-for-cost vs roll-for-success types of mechanics in the context of this thread, was the point about how randomness in tends to dilute agency because it has to be able to cause successes or failures in order for it to be meaningful but then that removes those outcomes from being consequences of the player's own choices. Pivoting to cost avoids that in the sense that instead its asking the question 'how do you relatively prioritize the various things you want, and how do the things you want depend on each-other, when sometimes you can have more of them or fewer of them than you expected?'. Having those costs have multiple ways to be paid further increases the meaningful choices that can be made.

E.g. something like, here's a catalogue of 100000s of gp worth of home base improvements. You have 20000gp to spend, so you're already making long-term meaningful choices about which things to get and which things not to get. Now add into that the possibility of up to 25% cost overruns or underruns. Maybe some of those improvements are only meaningful if you can have them together, so when you encounter that budget overrun you have to figure out another way to arrange things. Maybe you have an underrun and you can get a few extra things now that you wouldn't have considered otherwise. Maybe because you really need all the pieces you picked, you take a loan or use some other way to make things work rather than just giving up on your design. The consequences of the budget rolls are relatively permanent, but they also at the same time don't replace player agency in determining the outcome - instead they modulate the way in which the player has to express their agency.

Or, you're running a team of explorers through the jungle and you only have so much food and water and medicine and such. There are 60 days worth (counting travelling times) of different things to explore at around 1-2 days of travel to get to each (but deep things stay deep), you can only really bring 10 days of supplies with you at a time, and random events may cause you to take longer, lose (or gain) supplies, etc. Randomness in costs means you'll have a different set of journeys as you explore that jungle and you might end up in a failure state if you take big risks, but mostly what it's doing is forcing players to expose their priorities: "I'd rather go to 5 nearby sites" vs "There's one far away site I really want to get to, lets ignore the nearby sites and beeline for it" vs "Okay maybe this trip we spend building a road and a base in the jungle that we can use to stock supplies". What gets sacrificed, what gets re-arranged, etc when things go wrong?

And I would disagree about this being a burden to the DM to prop something up any more than how a DM is already burdened doing it. The DM should already not be calling for rolls if they don't matter. If there is no possibility of success, there shouldn't be a roll. That's more important with cards, I think, because if someone saves up their 20 to ask the king to abdicate in favor of them, if the DM let's them roll for it, there is now a major issue at the table. Not letting people roll whenever they want is not "denying agency". It is the DM's job and a basic part of the game. The players can say they want to do something - that's the agency they have. If they want to jump across a 2000' wide canyon, the DM is not denying their agency by not giving them a roll and just saying that they leap their strength scores into the gap and then fall the rest of the way. If they say they want to jump across a 4' wide creek bed that is 6" deep, it is not denying agency to tell them that they can easily make the jump all day long without a roll. It's the DM doing their job and adjudicating how the world works and whether or not players succeed.

If I'm designing a new system, I don't have to take on all of the failings of the current system either - I can aim to do better.

If every time a player calls for a roll it has a cost, then naturally players won't call for specious rolls, which means in that case its fine to put the ability to call for rolls back into players' hands. Which then becomes one less thing for the DM to worry about. Yes you still have to make sure that what a roll can accomplish is bounded in a sane manner, and that costs and consequences are such that you don't get crazy stuff like trading a kingdom for a feather. But that's not too hard to do if you just avoid being too open-ended and vague in the wrong places (especially trying to reduce things like persuasion to a single, unilateral action).

I'd instead have something more like you can't roll to make the king do a thing, but you could roll to get some blackmail material on the king if you want. That's a 12d10 difficulty and your skill rating of 6 means that rolls of 4 and lower are complications, and the buy-off price is Influence. Going for it? Okay, you rolled 5 consequences, so lets see:
1. The king finds out you're looking and sends guards to arrest you,
2. The criminal underworld also finds out what you find out and they move to simultaneously use it,
3. It ends up costing 8000gp to get the information,
4. The blackmail material has errors in it but you don't know which bits are true and which bits are false, lean too heavily on a false bit and the king will just ignore your threat,
5. You end up implicating yourself and someone random gains blackmail material against you in exchange for you getting this stuff.

So if you pay 5 Influence, you've got your blackmail material and no consequences and you can move to your stage 2 of trying to leverage it against the king. If you want to keep your Influence, now you have these five problems to deal with. Maybe you buy off getting arrested and the errors in the blackmail material, but you don't care if the underworld also knows or if someone has something on you and 8000gp is no big deal. If Influence took you a month to generate per point, well, you're probably seriously going to consider taking some of those side-effects but probably not all of them.

That's the sort of thing I'm imagining anyhow. It's not D&D and it wouldn't be trying to be faithful to D&D.

I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is. I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

Well its fair enough. My position is more, I've traversed this design ground before and rejected it because for long-term usage it felt awkward and inelegant and created more problems for me to design around down-stream than it ever solved. Whereas I have also used some variants of 'you get to decide when you fail a save' that have actually worked as far as the kind of gameplay I wanted to achieve, but whose implementations were a bit mathematically cumbersome (involved doing division, even if it was always division-by-5, to figure out the right amount to spend).

Don't get me wrong, I like the *idea* of card-based games. But I think they work better when the refresh is fixed and the game has a precise tempo to it, like 'one card per round, only used in combat' versus 'an hour of play could represent 1 minute of time or 1 month of time, and you might be rolling to invent a spell over that month or to dodge a single fireball from an assassin' that you can get in the full TTRPG space.

[gbaji]

For a similar reason, I think gbaji is prematurely and pointlessly playing a scare schord about perfect play. Yes, perfect information and deterministic rules mean perfect play is possible. We have great many deterministic perfect information games exemplifying how actually playing perfectly can be hard task for a trained mathematician, and utterly impossible for a layman to do on the fly. Since players can have more than one possible move to use a card on at any given point, the complexity space for open cards roleplaying game is open-ended. For example, if each decision point has two mutually exclusive forks, and a player has 20 cards, optimally using all those cards requires the player to think 20 moves ahead and identifying desireable paths from over a million (2^20) options.

The problem with this is that you are (once again) discussing RPG systems by introducing concepts from non-RPG games, and typically exclusively PvP games. When there is no referee, perfect knowledge games work great. Chess, checkers, etc. But the second you have a GM running a RPG, perfect knowledge goes out the window for the players (but not for the GM). Which is what I spoke about before. Even your response supports my problem. The GM will have to "rig" things to make this work. The GM has to decide which rolls are significant, and which are not. That very choice represents an impact to how the game itself will be played.

And... IMO, incorrectly focuses said game only on what the GM considers "important", and away from what the players may. It also may unfairly penalize or reward PCs based on build choices. If the GM thinks that perception and social skills are "unimportant" and thus don't require rolls/cards, then PCs who focus on such things may well feel cheated ("I spent 5 points on spot, but the GM never has me roll it, and just tells the entire party what we see"). The kind of system that would utilize this sort of card/hand mechanic would basically require focus purely on a "same level" basis, and most of the time that "same level" would be "combat encounters" (or some kind of "life and death" situation).

So sure. If you're the kind of GM who runs adventures via narration to the players and "ok. You encounter X, roll initiative", then this system will work perfectly. But if you want to have a more descriptive game, with more choices for PCs, and where information perceived/learned/gathered informs their choices and *those choices* then lead to encounters/conflicts, such a system will not work well at all. I lean heavily towards the latter sytle of game running.

In other words, cards make a roleplaying game trivial only if the rest of it is already trivial. But it sells everyone short to weigh the merit of a concept based on a trivial implementation. It's equal to weighing Chess based on Tic Tac Toe.

I disagree. Your own post says that the way to make it work is to force a bunch of things we might normally use rolls to determine to be determined by GM fiat instead. That's absolutely 100% about trivializing all of that "other stuff" in the game. And it's not surprising really. I commented on this earlier. Not all things we roll dice for in a game session have equal weight and import. So, to make this work, you have to make each card expenditure of a given value card of equal value (otherwise, you will get players tossing low cards at low impact actions). But to do that, your propsed method is "just don't roll for anything not important". To me, that trivializes a good portion of the game. RPGs are about roleplaying. They are not exclusively combat/encounter simulators. But your solution kinda requires the latter approach.

Let's say it is only for the d20. You start with the full deck. You engage in a fight with an orc that is described to you as having only one eye, wearing ring mail of a higher quality than the dross worn by most of the other orcs, shield in one hand and spear in the other, and it is charging you.You know your bonuses to hit. You know that ringmail is heavy armor, so dexterity of the creature shouldn't matter. You know basic ringmail provides AC14, and a shield would bump that to 16. You may have a question in your mind as to whether or not that armor is enchanted, since it is described as better quality than the other orcs, but since the others were called out as dross, maybe that just means it's normal armor.

You have a +5 to hit with your attack, so you know you probably need at least an 11, but if it's enchanted that could go up a bit. If you've fought a lot of orcs, you may identify the exact type, and have a good idea about its hp, but if not, you can guess higher than most orcs because of the higher quality armor. Your question to yourself is, do I use the 11 and hope it's normal armor; do I use a 12 or 13 just in case it is enchanted, or is it appropriate to crit here? (If you're a paladin and can smite, that might be a way to one shot the creature, but that could also be a waste.) You make that decision knowing that an 11 may or may not hit, a 12, 13, or 14 would be the way to make up for possibly magic armor, and a 20 will let you double the attack damage dice, but it will also mean you have to "roll" 19 more times to get another 20. You choose, the combat continues, and in the end you have spent your cards knowing what they would do for you and what the tradeoff was farther down the line. Seems to fit your preferred type of informed choice as well as anything could.

Which leads to another problem with this system. Time. One of the biggest complaints about many RPGs is the time it take to run an encounter/combat. Given that's already the case, you are replacing "Player rolls a D20 and adds the already known bonuses to it and reports this to the GM, who compares it to an already known target number and reports the results back" with "player spends 5-10 minutes speculating about what the description by the GM means in terms of AC values, then agonizes over the choice of card to play, plays, then reports the resulting number to the GM (who then compares to said target number and reports back the result as normal).

This is really going to move things in a direction most players don't actually want to go. Takes 2 seconds to roll a die and report the result. The card playing mini-game is now consuming a whole lot of table time.

I'll also point out that everyone on the "pro" side of this idea seems to be restricting the scope of their discussions to just combat. There's more to RPG games than combat. A skill resolution system therefore needs to handle those other things as well, preferably all by using the same mechanical rules.

And I would disagree about this being a burden to the DM to prop something up any more than how a DM is already burdened doing it. The DM should already not be calling for rolls if they don't matter.

Kind of a restating of the opinion I responded to above. Big problem. The GM is providing information to the players by deciding which skills "matter" and which dont. In my game, if a player suspects there might be someone hiding in the bushes, and says "I'm going to look and see if there's someone hiding in the bushes", I will have them roll (or I'll roll for them), and tell them if they spotted someone or not. Not spotting someone could mean that there's no one there *or* or their spot roll wasn't good enough to spot the person who is there. The player doesn't know this. But if the GM simply says "you see no one" without requiring a roll, the player knows there's no one there. What this means is that, to preserve the inability for the player to know for sure, the GM must allow a resolution anytime a player says "I'm going to do <something>", and the mechanics of that resolution method must look exactly the same regardless of whether the attempt is "relevant/important" or not.

So every time a player says "I'm going to listen for sounds of enemies approaching" or "I'm going to look around and see if I see anyone coming/hiding/whatever", the GM *must* follow the same proceedure when there is someone aapproaching, or there is something to see, as when there is not. If we are just rolling dice each time, this is easy to do. If we're handing players decks of cards, we have also handed them the "flush the bad cards" tool for them to use. Again. If your GMing style is that information gathering or investigation or social stuff just doesnt' matter, and you just narrate until "action starts", then this method will work. But I'm really really really not a fan of that style of GMing.

I go the other direction. Lots of rolls, all the time, for lots of things. That's how I move away from "one die roll" outcomes. There is a series of decisions and rolls leading up to "things happening" most of the time (but not always!).

I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is.

Except that every argument for how to actually implement this and avoid the obvious (flush) pitfalls, involves actually reducing meaningful player choices in the game being played. Sure. You get a choice of exactly the "die result" for any given action, but only on a specific and smallish set of actions that the GM has decided you get to attempt in the first place. Everything else, the GM is apparently just narrating to the players. Nope. Not a fan at all. But if you don't do this, you get the "flush" problem.

I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

There's a difference between eliminating "randomness" and eliminating "arbitrariness". I don't use "save or die" mechanics in my games. Even when I play D&D (heck, we houseruled this back in the old AD&D days), we changed poison to "X damage" or "stat reduction" or "AC/to-hit reduction" effects. For exactly this reason. I also tend to allow players to make a lot of die rolls in a game session. Rolls to determine what they see, hear, know, etc. Opportunities to investigate, learn, discover. And yes, this allows the PCs to avoid ever getting into a "you fall down a pit trap and die" and "assasin shoots you from the shadows" sorts of things. They way you eliminate wild vartions as a result of random die rolls is not to reduce the number or rolls (which actually maximizes the impact of each individual roll), but to increase the number. That smooths out the randomness. If your odds are 70% to do something, and you just roll one die one time, you will 100% either succeed or fail. But if the overall result is determined by rolling that several times over the course of an encounter, with each roll having a minor effect reather than a major one, then the overall effect of that 70% chance is "I'm going to do twice as well as someone who only has a 35% chance".

You make success or failure the result of a large number of small effects, rather than a small number of large ones. That's how you eliminate "bad die roll kills me" in a game.

Which yeah. Is the opposite direction that most people seem to want to go with this.

I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

Again. One flip of the coin is really random. 100 flips? Not so much.

If every time a player calls for a roll it has a cost, then naturally players won't call for specious rolls, which means in that case its fine to put the ability to call for rolls back into players' hands.

While I technically agree, see above for the additional problems this may introduce into the game.

I guess my problem with the idea of using a fixed set of cards is that in attempting to solve one problem, you introduce another (flush problem). And to fix that one, you must introduce yet another (GM removing player driven actions and providing unintended info to the players as a result). And when you run through the process, you discover that you also really haven't solved the initial problem. Youv'e just modified it a bit. As long as you still have single resolution methodologies with very very high weight (like "save or die"), you will always have this problem. Whether the player feels cheated because they failed the die roll, or because they didn't have a high card left in their hand, it's still going to make them not happy.

Better to reduce and/or eliminate those things from the game itself instead.

I think it's also of general use to note (since this is the general RPG forum), that I play mostly in RQ, whcih is a skill based game. PCs literally only get better at doing things by... doing those things. So it's actually really really important in the game system to give the PCs plenty of opportunities to attempt scans, and searches, and listens, hides, sneaks, conceals, climbs, jumps, etc. Or those skills never improve. If all you do is combat, then no one's ever going to be good at anything but combat (whicih I suppose works, in a very ciruclar way). The proposed card/hand system is problematic for most game systems, but would actually be catastrohpically bad in a game like RQ.

[NichG]

While I technically agree, see above for the additional problems this may introduce into the game.

With what I'm proposing, only the players would ever get to call for (themselves to) roll. Not all actions would require one, but something that does require one also gives you certain guarantees like 'you will succeed if you're willing to pay enough resources'. Anything passive or ongoing or checking against hidden information wouldn't use a roll based system. You would 'roll to spend stamina to increase your alertness for the next 4 hours, which makes it more expensive to stealth near you' rather than 'roll to check for an ambush'.

[gbaji]

With what I'm proposing, only the players would ever get to call for (themselves to) roll. Not all actions would require one, but something that does require one also gives you certain guarantees like 'you will succeed if you're willing to pay enough resources'. Anything passive or ongoing or checking against hidden information wouldn't use a roll based system. You would 'roll to spend stamina to increase your alertness for the next 4 hours, which makes it more expensive to stealth near you' rather than 'roll to check for an ambush'.

Oh! Sure. I think I posted earlier, that I have no issue with PCs having some sort of expendable resource they may selectively use over some time period to give them boost, advantages, do-overs, etc.

I was specifically responding (negatively) to the idea of handing each player a set of 20 cards, each with one of the numbers 1-20 on them (or whatever die range the game would otherwise use), and they then pick which one to play as a direct and complete alternative to rolling a die. Then, I was responding to those saying that the way to avoid players intentionally flushing bad cards in such a system by doing a bunch of minor skill attempts with "don't make them roll for those" as well.

I think that's a monumentally problematic system to use for a RPG system. I will caveat that it may very well be a great system for a non-refereed game, with players opposing eachother and using different levels of otherwise identically "powered" abilities (sort of a rock/paper scissors thing). There are actually a number of games that utilize this sort of concept. Heck, it's basically "Stratego", right? And it's effectively exactly what you are doing in the card game "war". But the moment we're trying to play a game where there are a variety of different things that players may choose to do, but with different "cost/value/weight" to them, the system breaks down.

And yeah. Doubly so if we allow players to choose when to take different actions with those different costs/values/weights. And yeah, we could restrict those things, in order to make our resolution system work, but then you're eliminating 90% of what makes RPG's actualy fun and interesting and differentiated from a basic strategy game. It's a solution that looks great on paper (haha!) at first, but doesn't really work when applied at an actual RPG table.

[KorvinStarmast]

Agency, IMO, should never mean certainty.

I may add this to my sig if there is enough room left. This concept applies very well to Blades in the Dark.

[warty goblin]

I think there's a quite interesting core to the card concept, however I rather suspect you'd need a substantially different game structure to take advantage of it. Subbing them in 1 - 1 for dice doesn't really play to its strengths, and is substituting a deterministic mechanic for a stochastic one, which has all kinds of knock on effects.

Instead, I think you'd want to use them in a much more narratively driven game. You don't play a card to hit an orc, you play a card to outright defeat the orc, and the question is then if it's worth the resource cost. Maybe you can negotiate or sneak past for a lower cost, but with knock-on complications because the orc is still around. You might have an entire quest for getting a card capable of defeating a dragon or something. You'd also need some sort of mechanic for hand refreshing, something like you can redraw your discard pile any time you rest, but you lose access to the highest card until you can recover in a safe area.

You could still attach some mechanical differentiation to characters, e.g. the fighter gets +1 to any card played to fight an enemy, so he can beat a Difficulty 3 orc with only a 2, or magic items that give you additional cards that don't exhaust, and so on. I don't think you want something mega-crunchy here, rather something with a couple points of differentiation that feel evocative rather than in depth or representational.

I think you could get something that's not quite free-form, but has a lot of the flexibility of that mode, with a resource model that allows for decisions to carry real weight. Good for drama, bad for deciding to move 2 squares left to flank the Abyssal Half-Dragon Ghost-Bound Minotaur.