Sidereals, Fate, gods and prophecies - morality of a puppet

Recently, I was playing a character in Exalted vs World of Darkness that was a Sidereal, a troubleshooter of Fate. Basically, his heroic job description was to right the things according to how Fate wills it - uncover secrets that should be revealed, end people that should be ended, bring joy to the people that need it, etc. However, that got me thinking - what decides those things anyway? Unlike in some systems and settings, Exalted's Sidereals are agents of Fate, which is something that exists outside the control of any deities or similar entities. But since it's not controlled by anyone with an agenda, what agenda does it serve? What does Fate really want in the end? What is it's agenda and morality? If that couldn't be established, should my character go along with it and trust in Fate, or should they try imposing their own morality on the world instead?

Sure, in meta terms, Fate is basically "plot" of an RPG - the story wants the characters to get from A to B and kill C, so the Sidereal gets to make leaps of logic to get them there like a Holistic Detective. Even the EvWoD book calls out Sidereals as being GM's best friend because they always have an excuse to get the right people to the right places for the plot to move on. That can be fun if you want to enjoy the ride and don't overthink it, but as writing goes a Sidereal following Fate is like saying people are following the Force to know where to go next - feels a bit like a cop out.

Dirk Gently the holistic detective is basically a Sidereal

If a character leans into following Fate too much, it can also start turning them into a lawful stupid, a puppet, or a Morty on a Death Crystal - basically an automaton that doesn't think much for themselves just follows orders - "this person is supposed to die? Oh boy, here I go killing again!".

Chosen of Endings without remorse

A comparison to D&D paladins and clerics isn't really that far off, although with those at least you know the deity you're following and their view on morality, so you know there is something that dictates that will. That just means you know what you're signing up for though, not that strict adherence to it will make you less of an extremist murderhobo.

Another popular manifestation of the same problem would be prophecies - should a character in a prophecy that they will do something or kill someone, or should they try to defy it? If they are "the chosen one", can they do no wrong because it's their destiny? Do they have a say in the matter, or are they a slave to the whims of Fate?

What all of those have in common is they tend to turn the characters into puppets of whatever they resign their character to. Whether it's a deity, a code of conduct, Fate, philosophy, etc., the characters can become less interesting for it. When you turn yourself into a hammer, you treat everything as nails or something...

Making it interesting - cutting the strings

Now that is all not to say you can't have interesting and thought provoking ideas some from those tropes, but you have to approach them the right way.

A character that follows some morality 100% of the time is a bit dull. Sure, RPGs encourage you to see how many problems you can solve with your hammer of choice ("I want to see how a good and naive person would fare in Ravenloft! That sounds like a fun game!"), but challenging the character's beliefs can lead to some powerful moments. Try focusing on that - start with the character believing one thing and then make them re-examine their stance when confronted with what Fate wants them to do - would they kill baby Hitler if they were Minority Report? Or would they re-evaluate their stance and vow not to kill people that are innocent save for that they might commit future-crime? Make your character have doubts and define their own morality consciously. Similarly, reward your players for doing so and don't punish them for not being lawful stupid. Screw what the gods might want from your paladin, a paladin with a crysis of fate is much more interesting than one that's an automaton! Don't punish them for it!

You could similarly involve the players in defining what is the will of the Fate. Don't hand them a script telling them what to do, whatever they end up doing might be exactly what Fate wants. To borrow a phrase from Fellowship - let them Command Lore about it and tell you what Fate wants of their character (with room for negotiation as with all things of course).

When it comes to prophecies specifically, they are probably best played as mundanely self-fulfilling - characters believing in them and putting stock in them are inevitably causing them to come true with their actions. A person believing themselves to be a hero rises up to the legend and becomes a hero. However, if you reject the prophecy, there is no other shoe that drops - there is no magic here, the prophecy was always just a fable and a guess. As long as both the players and the GM are on-board and aware of this, such prophecies might not take agency away from the characters and the game.

Finally, you could have the character's morality explicitly affect Fate - someone's fated to die not because the unknowable cosmic force willed it, but because the player character wants them dead and therefore they spin that Loom of Fate and make it a reality with their actions. This retains the character's agency and makes their actions and decisions have meaning in the game and the setting. They are no longer only the puppet, but also the puppet master.

Conclusions

Making your character beholden to an external system of morality or something else that dictates their choices can take away agency from the character, the player, and make the game a bit less interesting. On the other side, confronting the character's morality and making them actively engage with it can be more engaging. Embrace it.

Equivalent Dice Theorems of RPGs

My group and I have played a good amount of PbtA games (Fellowship, Legacy, Dungeon World, etc.). After getting used to them we did a one shot game of iHunt, which used the FATE system. During the session my GM remarked how FATE is making him roll again to set our difficulty and how he got used to not having to do that in PbtA. This got me thinking - "was that roll even necessary?", which lead me down a math rabbit hole...

Lets back up and start from beginning.

FATE dice rolls

The FATE system uses FATE dice, an alternative set of D6s that can roll +1, 0 and -1:

FATE Dice

To figure out how much you rolled, you take four FATE Dice, roll them, add their results together and add whatever skill modifier your character has. Then that is either compared to a static number determined by the GM for a "passive opposition", or another roll with modifiers for an "active opposition".

The second situation was what my GM remarked about, and when you think about it - you really don't need to have more than one side rolling dice in this system.

FATE Dice are a bit different from the standard dice - their average roll is a "0", and you have both positive and negative 1s on it. The dice is symmetrical - it doesn't matter if you roll a FATE dice or its opposite, the result is the same.

So if you wanted to avoid the GM having to ever roll dice, you would just make the player roll 8 FATE Dice and give them a passive opposition instead and it would be exactly the same roll (4 GM dice turn into the player rolling 4 opposite dice, which in this system is the same as normal dice, therefore 4+4=8 dice total roll).

This got me thinking - could something similar be done in other systems?

Equivalent dice and rolls

After thinking about it, turns out you can do something similar. Here is a more formal explanation of what that entails if you like math, but to summarise it based on D6s:

Rolling a D6 and rolling "7-D6" is the same - you get the same results. Based on this you can turn any versus roll into a single roll by one side that uses all the dice vs a static number.

If you subtract the average of 3.5 from every side of the D6, you get a symmetrical die D6Sym with sides {-2.5, -1.5, -0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5}. Based on that, rolling a D6 and rolling "3.5+D6Sym" is the same. While this doesn't help much by itself, it allows you to easily make a statistical analysis of rolls involving multiple dice (since the average will always be 0, so you can easily compare these binomial distributions).

Based on the last one, I did some programming to figure out the statistics of rolling various amounts of dice...

Dice roll statistics

This part is probably the hardest to understand. Basically, it boils down to this:

The goal was to figure out rolling how many dice is "good enough" - when you don't need to roll more dice to get "random enough" results.

The more dice you roll, the closer the results is to a binomial distribution, but there are some diminishing returns. After you roll about 3-4 dice the results don't get much better.

Size of the dice rolled doesn't change things that much beyond making the results more granular. Rolling 5D4 is comparable to rolling 5D12.

So where does this all lead us?

Conclusions

When designing a system, you don't really need to roll a lot of dice - rolling more than 3-4 gets a bit excessive and doesn't improve the probabilities of the roll too much.

When you have a versus roll, you only need to have one side of the conflict roll, while the other would provide a static difficulty. The exact math of a roll can be a little complicated, but it's mostly fixed for any given amount of dice.

If you don't want to roll a lot of dice, you can instead roll fewer but bigger dice to get a granular enough result (again providing you're rolling those 3-4 dice).

So after all that, I can say that the GM never needs to roll dice in FATE - the 4 FATE dice the player rolls should be good enough of randomness in most situations. The rest would be taken care of by a static difficulty for them to beat based on how challenging the enemy is.

The same principles could be applied to a lot of systems. Maybe not something that involves a lot of dice manipulation and tricks like CORTEX, but others - maybe. There is definitely room for some systems designed from the ground-up to minimise the amount of rolls you make (similarly to how Chronicles of Darkness limited the amount of chain rolls).

Related articles:

• Make every roll impactful

Related links:

• Central Limit Theorem
• Reddit threads 1 & 2