Make every roll impactful

Efficiency in a tabletop system is a nice thing to have. The more systems I try with my group, the more I'm bothered by rolls that don't affect the story on their own - either ones that you need to chain together, or ones that don't carry consequences with them.

Chain rolls

When my group started looking into playing some Exalted vs the World of Darkness, I started getting flashbacks to my old days of playing Vampire the Masquerade and the old mechanics that are still in that system. Of them, the most pertinent to our discussion today are the attack rolls.

To attack someone in Vampire the Masquerade, you roll your Dexterity and say, Melee. If you succeed, you take however many successes over 1 you got, add your Strength and the damage of the weapon you are using, and roll that again. That is the amount of damage you do. Now the enemy makes their soak roll and subtracts the successes from your attack roll. So you roll three times in order to get the result you want (you can also start adding the cost-benefit analysis of various manoeuvres like "if I strafe with my assault weapon and get +10 to hit but +2 difficulty, is that a net gain for me?" but let's keep it simple...).

Now, let's compare that to Vampire the Requiem. You roll Strength + Melee - your opponent's Defence. The amount of successes you roll is how much damage you do. Done. In one roll you accomplish everything you used to in three rolls.

This type of rule design can really speed up how you resolve each action in combat without lowering the depth of character builds. You can still make glass cannons, soak tank and what have you.

Try, try again

A thief walks up to a lock. They roll to pick the lock, and they fail. They roll again, and they fail. Someone else from the party decides to give that same lock a try, they roll, and they fail. Then the thief rolls again, succeeds and the party moves on.

A lot of you could probably think back to something like this happening in your game, probably even the exact same scenario. It's an example of a roll that's not impactful if you fail it. Sure, if you only had one chance to pick that lock, that would be something, but if you're picking a lock that's the only way through to continue your adventure, failure is not really an option.

There are two ways of addressing this issue - either ignore the roll entirely if the characters are skilled and equipped enough for it to not be a challenge, or think of some meaningful consequences for failed rolls.

The first approach can be found for example in the Vampire the Masquerade games - if your dice pool for a roll exceeds the difficulty of the roll, you automatically succeed at the roll (under certain conditions). Even if your system doesn't support it, you can usually tell when some roll is beneath your player's character - just roll with the fiction and move on.

The second approach is very prominent in the Powered by the Apocalypse systems like Fellowship. Each time you fail a roll, either there are set consequences to be had, or the GM can use Cuts against you. Maybe they'll "Show signs of an approaching threat" - you made noise and attracted the guards to your location, or "Use up or take away their resources" - your lock pics gear breaks and now you have to batter the door down, etc.

At any rate, you want the roll to be important, whether it succeeds or fails. If it's not important, it's not necessary.

Conclusions

If you can help it, try making every roll in your game be meaningful and impactful. Sure, sometimes it's fun to ace a roll you're really good at, but you can just as easily narrate how awesome you are when you auto succeed. Try giving your rolls weight for failure beyond "nothing changes" - that outcome is the most boring of them all.

Player agency over dice randomness

As I explained last time, I'm a mechanically-focused gamer. I enjoy engaging with various game systems to figure out in what ways they work, and in what ways they don't. Last time I covered the difference rolling two dice instead of one can have on game feel, and this time I would like to talk about how a few systems handle player agency over dice randomness. By that I mean various mechanics and resources the players can use to influence their dice rolls, especially the important ones.

The problem - roll and pray

At least once every session a player will come across a situation that is very important to them - perhaps they are down to one last hit point and need to kill the enemy before they themselves are killed, or the character is preparing for a hack that is a culmination of the adventure and their paycheck depends on it. Those dramatic moments where the players wish there was anything they could do to improve the odds, but alas - they can only roll and pray.

I really don't like such situations of being powerless and not having some mechanic one can leverage to improve those odds. Luckily, there are a number of options that various systems have implemented.

Rerolls

The simplest approach to addressing the issue is letting the players have a reroll handy. Those often are a resource shared either between the party or given to the characters individually. Stars Without Number has an Expert class that can reroll one non-combat roll each scene, Savage Worlds gives players a few Bennys per session they can use as a reroll, Godbound has a Word of Luck that is all about manipulating rolls and causing rerolls in various ways.

In general, rerolls are a good option when the characters are somewhat competent at a task and should be able to normally succeed at it. It's a bit less useful when the character is trying to tackle something they are woefully unprepared for - if it's unlikely they will succeed, they will likely still fail with a reroll.

Improving the odds

Another approach that can be taken is improving the odds of the roll before it is made. Chronicles of Darkness gives you more dice to roll if you have the proper gear, and you can further improve your odds by spending Willpower - a limited, refreshable resource. The system also features a number of ways to fudge the dice math to imrove the chance of an exceptional success by using 9-again or 8-again rules. Star Trek Adventures makes you accrue Momentum by performing tasks you're good as so you can buy more dice for a roll when it's really needed. CoD, STA and Stars Without Number give the option of other characters assisting the primary character performing a roll - usually a success by the assistant gives a small boon to the primary roll.

Overall, improving the odds can be especially useful when the character isn't as competent - even a small boon to an unskilled character usually translates to much better odds than adding a simple reroll. They also usually are simpler to justify narratively - you have a clear explanation of why you're getting that +2 to the roll.

Success, but at a cost

Success in a role playing game is often seen as binary - you either succeed, or you don't. Maybe you also have a botch or an exceptional success, but either way - the line is drawn hard. However, there are a few systems where there is a gradient to the failure.

In The Veil (or Powered by the Apocalypse in general), you almost always have two or three gradients of a success. You can outright fail, succeed completely, or in the middle - succeed at a cost. Perhaps you don't get everything you wanted, or there is some complication that occurred as a result of your actions. Star Trek Adventures gives players an option to Succeed At a Cost instead of accepting a failed loss. This allows the task to be successful, but some complication will arise as a result of that roll.

This option is useful for fudging the numbers a little - if the player is just slightly off from succeeding. It's always useful to have it as an option to allow the player to decide whether their task is important enough to warrant the extra cost.

Controlled botches

Somewhat related to the previous section, although distinct enough to warrant its own. In a lot of games you will find rules for botching a roll - failing so badly it's causing some trouble. World of Darkness up to Chronicles of Darkness had a rule where rolling 1s meant subtracting from successes and causing botches if their amount got too big for example. While fun in their own right at times, it's perhaps best when this option is left to the player - letting them decide when they want to be discovered, mislead and so on to create a more interesting game.

Chronicles of Darkness is perhaps a good example of how to give players agency over their botches. When a roll is a failure, the player can opt to make it a dramatic failure to get a beat (a point of XP basically). Outside of attempting a roll with only a chance die, this is the only way to botch in the system, giving the players agency over when it occurs, and rewarding them for allowing it to happen (hopefully giving the GM a chance to make the game more interesting as a result).

Trumping the roll

Some games allow the characters to outright trump the roll with some usually high-end powers or skills. Stars Without Number have some Psychic and True AI powers that roll back an entire turn or a single roll, or go as far as dictating an entire turn and all of its rolls completely (max level True AI power). The same system also features a Warrior class that can auto-succeed at one combat roll per scene, or negate an incoming attack completely. Godbound has one Gift that once per character's entire life they can succeed at any undertaking, albeit only at a basic level.

Those powers are neat, but they need to be carefully balanced not to throw the entire game off balance.

Conclusions

There are many ways RPG systems have figured out how to allow the players to influence their rolls. It's good to have at least once option available to the players, and multiple of these examples can be used simultaneously without feeling like they're overlapping too much.