This post is an expansion of my comment on Jay Little's article "Nerd Numbers: Terminal Outcomes" on the Gaming Security Agency's website. Jay is the designer of great games like the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game. You should seriously keep up with his "Painted Thumb" blog. In this article, Jay describes how the dice pools in the new Edge of the Empire RPG (which he also designed) produce results on multiple axes, in contrast to dice mechanics of most classic rpgs that typically just produce results along a single axis. You should read the article for the details, but the point is that results from a system that uses multiple axes provides exponentially more 'terminal outcomes' than uniaxial dice systems, which has implications on design outlook. In the comments, we've started to discuss the implications of the design choice.
I'm not sure that more terminal outcomes are uniformly better. Edge's dice system does handily produce a large variety of distinct/terminal outcomes, and this is an important feature of the game. I still think there are some issues, though. In his response, he refers to an "oversight", in that he didn't state that he wasn't referring to a single dice pool composition, but a generalization of the pool effect. Further, he's somewhat dismissive of the need to understand the probability associated with the terminal outcomes, stating:
"This merely speaks to the potential for various Terminal Outcomes, not the probabilities of any single result."
I'm worried about these statements, because they do relate to design outlook, but, in my interpretation, not necessarily in the way I think Jay believes they do. To explain my position, I need to take a little detour through decision making in games. So keep reading, and please be patient, I'll get to the good stuff soon.
When making design choices, you are creating the way players interact with your game system, and players interact with a game system by making choices, such as "play a healer or a tank", or "Shoot the storm trooper or apply a medpack to my wounded friend", or "Throw a frag grenade or thermal detonator", etc. Now, how do players decide between these options? The same way we make any decisions as humans: We identify a goal, evaluate our options, and choose the option most likely to achieve the goal with the fewest negative consequences. Simple right?
It helps to break it down into some discrete parts. On a very micro scale, a player follows the following path when deciding what actions to take:
Action Evaluation & Selection (AES) -> Dice Roll (DR) -> Outcome Resolution (OR)
In the AES step, a player reviews the all (or a reasonable subset) of his available actions, and decides on one action or set of actions that are available. It is in this step that the player has the most control.
In the DR step, he throws the appropriate dice that correspond to his selected options, and includes any modifiers. This is where the terminal outcome is produced/determined. The player has no control in this phase, since there is no way to roll the dice to manipulate the outcome.
In the OR step, any further decisions that are called for (possibly none) are made by the appropriate parties, and then the outcome of the roll, the terminal outcome, is applied to the game. This is where EotE players decide how to spend triumph and advantage, damage is applied to targets, etc.
So, back to the original point, "how do we make decisions?" Exactly as I stated above, we choose the option that's going to get us closest to our goal with the least negative consequences. But how do we know which option that is? We rely on our previous experience (observed outcomes of previous decisions, rolls, etc) and intuition (unobserved results that can be reasonably expected based on our understanding of the rules) to compare these. Using this information, players evaluate the relative probabilities of the possible terminal outcomes for each of their options, and choose the option that best suits their goals.
How does this related to the AES -> DR-> OR path? Because our knowledge about the relative probabilities of each of the terminal outcomes is determined by the DR step, and our knowledge about the impact of each of the terminal outcomes is determined by the OR step, and it should be clear that our experience and intuition derived from DR & OR steps is absolutely critical for use in the AES step.
Now, when evaluating options that lead to only a few terminal outcomes (say, four, like in Jay's first example), it is easy to evaluate the value of each on the terminal outcome on the game. However, if there are over two hundred terminal outcomes, this because vastly more difficult. Further, you need more rules to interpret all of these additional outcomes. The latter is less of a problem if you can apply general rules, but there's no getting around the first: As you increase terminal outcomes, a players ability to compare the value of options increases.
Also, when we are presented with an option that has four terminal outcomes, and the generating method is relatively simple (e.g. roll a d20, apply a modifier), our minds have little trouble comprehending the relative likelihoods of the various outcomes by either intuition or experience. However, in an exponentially more complex system like EotE's dice pools, our brains are NOT able to easily intuit the likelihoods of different outcomes, which leaves us to depend on previous experience. But this method ALSO collapses because there are so many possible outcomes, we would need to have rolled an individual dice pool thousands of times to have a feel for how JUST THAT DICE POOL behaves. Finally, Jay comments:
"And finally. I’m not a mathematician. That much should be clear. An understanding of math, probabilities and percentages is certainly helpful, but ultimately instincts, gut feelings, and intuition play as large a part as any other factor."
I think there are 2 possible interpretations of this: Jay is talking about either how he makes decisions while playing a game, or how he makes decisions while designing a game. If it's the former, okay, that's cool if the game system behaves in the way that it intuitive based on its presentation. Unfortunately, the EotE dice mechanic fails on this account. This has been documented previously in the long thread on the FFG forums: The upgrade mechanism, which is portrayed as one of 'king' of the dice pool modification mechanics, provides little benefit. This has been shown to be true using not only theoretical calculations comparing the two mechanics AND large numbers of simulated results, but also empirically at my game table and others.
If Jay is referring to the latter situation, that he relies on gut feelings and intuition as much or more than math when he's designing games, then...
I'm speechless.
No, seriously, when I typed that, I just sat here with my jaw hanging open for a few seconds making vowel sounds.
I don't understand how you can tweak and balance and appropriately design an intricate system like a role-playing game, even with huge amounts of controlled play-testing, without a very solid understanding of underlying dice mechanic. I have HUGE amounts of respect for Jay because he's produced some of the best games I've played, and maybe he can write these rules off the cuff with an intuitive understanding, but I think we see examples of unforeseen, uh, hiccups in the system. It also seems to me an odd sentiment to end a comment on after a math-heavy and self described "nerdy" article about multidimensional outcome spaces.
I think outcomes on multiple axes are fucking fantastic! I have no problem with this mechanical concept in games! They add depth to the game and remove the admittedly boring action resolutions we've seen in previous games. I love the dice mechanics of WFRPG, especially they way the rolled results could be spent on:
- A few, clear options presented on the action card that varied between actions,
- A few, clear options presented in the book that were relatively constant between actions, or
- Narratively appropriate actions/effects
However, like any mechanic, it needs to be appropriately implemented in a game to live up to its full potential. It's here where I worry a "go-with-your-gut" design method may have been a poor choice and created a situation where the mechanism may not be able to really shine. The dice just don't seem to want to behave in the game, and frequently lead to some weird and game-slowing results.
Jay, if you're reading this, I hope this hasn't been too antagonistic. I'm just being honest about how I see the dice mechanic.
Anyway, I think that's everything I needed to say to fully support my position. This was way too long for the comment section on GSA, and actually gave me a chance to touch on a few upcoming subjects of future blogs, so it all worked out. Hope to have the definition blog finished soon.
/endofline
EDIT: I mis-credited Jay as the designer of the second ed. of Descent: Journeys into the Darkness, which was designed by Clark, Konieckza, Sadler & Wilson. It has been fixed above.
