I was re-reading the rules for the tabletop RPG Strike yesterday and I read some of the back matter for the first time, and the author thanked another game for teaching him that it's okay to make a game that doesn't have difficulty/target numbers.
Strike uses a simple 1d6 roll for resolving success/fail checks, using one table if you're skilled and another table if you're not. Apart from advantage and disadvantage (a game term for rolling two dice and taking the higher or lower), there's no different difficulty levels.
Which, in practical terms, amounts to five different difficulties:
Trivial: No roll necessary! Obviously doable.
Easy: Roll with advantage.
Normal: Roll for it.
Hard: Roll with disadvantage.
Impossible: No roll necessary! Clearly not happening.
I'm working on a game system where there are more levels of skill than "yes" and "no", represented by having different sized dice, from 1d4 (untrained) to 1d12 (legendary master).
And it wasn't until I was reading the bibliography of Strike and saw that acknowledgment that I really felt good about one aspect of this system, which is that success is always a roll of 3 or higher.
There really is something kind of powerful about not just seeing another game doing something that breaks with an established convention, but also seeing a game maker say outright "Yes, this is allowed. You can do it."
Just seeing that acknowledgment changed my mindset from "Maybe I should figure out how to work in a range of difficulty levels" to admitting I'm actually pleased with the statistical effects of it always being 3.
Now, one small wrinkle is that if you roll *exactly* 3, the game considers that a marginal success, which has no mechanical ramifications but is described as "you don't look very elegant or dignified doing it".
So if you're unskilled, you're rolling 1d4. A 3 is a marginal success, a 4 is a clean success. You've got a 50% chance of success, and 50% of your successes will be messy.
If you're trained, you roll 1d6. You've got a 66% chance of success, and 25% of your successes are messy.
I'm of the opinion that succeeding about two thirds of the time is a kind of sweet spot where something feels reliable enough to be fun for players, so I like how that shakes out.
Higher expertise? 1d8 = succeed 75% of the time, 16.5% of your successes are messy.
1d10 succeeds 80% of the time, 12.5% of successes are messy.
1d12 succeeds 83% of the time, 10% of successes are messy.
So higher skill levels are not only more reliable but also more likely to look cool doing it.
You might be thinking, "The best expert in the world still fails 17% of the time?" I mean, yeah, on the face of things. There are metagame ways to turn failures into successes, though.
And characters who are strongly oriented towards skills will have more access to them, while having fewer times they need to use them.
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I'm very much one of the people who built her career on reacting to Trumpism. I've never been worried about what I'll do after Trump because I never set out to do this in the first place.
The fact that I've been able to make a living -- sometimes more precariously than others, but always getting by -- tweeting about politics without any larger corporate backing speaks well of my ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
This from a thread about the NLRB board firing yesterday is sticking out to me today. A lot of things in our government were broken on purpose. We need a "Move fast, fix things." attitude.
"But if we fire people from typically non-political positions just because they're doing the opposite of what the position is for, Republicans will come into power and fire people to put those people back in."
Good point.
Counterpoint: Carthago delenda est.
If we have a Democratic Party that is not afraid to govern, that does not let itself be fearmongered and headfaked out of passing the popular, good policies that people turn out for, there's no reason to assume Republicans will take power again.
So one of the central pillars of post-election QAnon, which keeps growing among the remaining faithful, is this bizarre belief that the "good guys" have to let the "bad guys" get away with a crime before they can punish them for it.
You can see why this idea appeals! Because the mythology is that Trump and Q are both unstoppable geniuses who never miss, never lose, never fail, and may have access to literal time travel or future-scanning computers.
So how can they lose an election?
The answer must be that they lost on purpose.
Why would they lose on purpose?
Because the election is stolen and they want to expose the crime by catching the criminals in the act.
But isn't the act over?
No, not until the crime is "sealed", which is always... later.
Did you know? "Stars and Stripes Forever" was selected as a sign of unity to mark the transition from the Trump administration, as it is traditionally the song that is played when a circus catches fire.
The second part of the preceding tweet is true. The first part is a joke.
I hope all the ceremony today doesn't take too much away from Ella Emhoff's busy schedule of solving mysteries.
You can't tell me she didn't come dressed for sleuthing.
You know you would watch the heck out of The Second Daughter Mysteries. BBC/BBC America co-production where all the main parts are played by British actors who drop a pirate noise at the end of their r-words.
"I've nevARRR been to England. I've never traveled outside AmeriKUH."