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

Demon City Slickers - an Exalted Podcast Review

I’ve spent the last few months listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.

In today's episode, I will cover Demon City Slickers.

Disclaimers

There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.

First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.

Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.

Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biased towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.

Finally, there will be some spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...

Overview and minor things

Demon City Slickers is an Exalted actual play hosted by @WhatUpDemonCity. It is a comparatively short actual play that met an abrupt end due to the GM studying abroad and not wanting to support OPP. The game features a cast of four players, with one of them being introduced to replace a vacancy left by another.

The series takes the form of an audio-only podcast with 30-60 minute episodes with minor editing.

From what I understand the cast consists of students that mainly got into podcasting thanks to Swallows of the South, this being their first production.

Player Characters

The game features four PCs:

Mel (m), also known as “Harmonious Melody of the Seven Winds of Each of the Three Seas, Each of the Seven Winds Having Seven Individual Melodies Of Their Own Which Each Sound Simultaneously As The Wind Blows”, a Zenith musician and a sword master who sold his soul to a demon.

Kulak (m), a giant of a Dawn Caste, former pirate turned bodyguard for hire.

Kleefin (f), a dirty forest girl Zenith Caste with a familiar, Steely Dan, a giant fire breathing ostrich.

Leela (f), a sneaky sorcerer / alchemist with a Sidereal handler, Waterfall of Hidden Magics, aka Magi.

General Plot

In South-West of Creation, the city of Se'Arah Ayn is under Realm occupation. The PCs are hired to investigate a slaughter at a local Immaculate Dojo and find themselves in the crossfire of the local demon cults trying to vye for power before the Wyld Hunt makes its way to clean up the town. During the conflict, a mysterious Abyssal with a demonic artefact daiklave appears to further complicate matters…

With eight proper episodes and three flashback episodes, that’s all the plot there was.

Highlights

Filled with determination

During the various episodes the GM mentioned that this podcast is a student production, as well as discussing various problems caused by them going to study abroad and so on. In general, it seems making the podcast takes some determination on the part of the GM and the players, and that should always be celebrated. Even if the show might’ve been a bit rough around the edges, hopefully this drive to express oneself will continue to drive the team forward and into bettering themselves as the time goes on.

Extra editing and custom sounds

It was quite noticeable from the start that the show featured some music and sounds that were added as a part of post-processing. I believe the GM also mentioned that some of that music is custom made by him or his brother, which is an extra touch. While during the run of Demon City Slickers the effects could get a bit overbearing at times, a much more subtle use of the same editing used during Dollywood City Slickers showed more potential. Interesting idea, needs a bit more polish to be great.

Good content warnings

Similar to Swallows, this podcast featured some pretty good content warnings for an episode featuring a burning building. The crew also went an extra mile to create an episode summary for those that didn’t want to listen to the normal episode due to the content. Nice and considerate.

Shoutouts to other podcasts

Even being an upstart podcast, Demon City Slickers did give shoutouts to various other podcasts during its runtime. It was a nice thing for them to do.

Lowest point in Exalted

I think that out of all Exalted podcasts I’ve listened to or been a part of, Demon City Slickers might’ve hit the lowest point for the PCs I’ve witnessed. It’s the end of Episode 4, and the characters are dealing with a fallout of a fire at the police station. During the initial explosion one of the PCs, Kleefin, disappeared (because the player had to drop out). Their familiar, the talking ostrich Steely Dan, barely made it out alive, they were limping. Kulak had a major tie to Kleefin, so they were distraught. They also have gone into the burning building to fight the perpetrators going around killing people and they have outed themselves as a Solar. After letting Steely Dan rest his broken leg on Kulak’s boat, the PCs went to interrogate someone they had captured. After the investigation some mysterious figure warned them not to stick their noses where they don’t belong. When they came back, the boat was being investigated by the Realm police and was basically impounded with Steely Dan there. Mel had to lie through his teeth not to implicate them, gaining some considerable Limit in the process. At the end of the day, the party was penniless, because Kleefen was the character with the money. They were also homeless, because they used to live on Kulak’s boat. On top of that, Kulak has lost an important friend and soon all of his past acquaintances would rat him out for being a Solar. They were also jobless, since they pretty much botched their last assignment of investigating the Dojo. If that wasn’t enough, in a few days the Wyld Hunt would show up at their doorstep, looking for an Anathema to kill. So Mel and Kulak decided to make a shelter in the swamp for the night. They failed the roll and just decided to sleep in an old hollowed out tree.

I don’t think I’ve seen any other Exalted characters being brought so low as these two due to just a conflagration of bad things happening at once. It was a really great moment.

Standing up to OPP

Just like Swallows of the South called OPP on some shady things that came to light, so too did Demon City Slickers take a stand against the company. Heck, they did that in their first episode. As always, it’s a commendable stance.

Criticism

No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what Demon City Slickers has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve...

Tambourine-assisted rolls

In episode 1, the team decided to roll their dice into a Tambourine for an extra flair. The experience listening to that was comparable to ExalTwitch using glass beads in glass jars for Essence, a very jarring experience. The microphone picked up on the sharp sounds so well the episode was really painful to listen to. Luckily, that idea didn’t make it past episode 1, otherwise this show would’ve been unlistenable…

Post-processing and audio balancing

While the idea of adding music during post-processing was interesting, the execution was a bit spotty at times. The music volume usually ended up a bit too high, distracting from the dialogue. This was especially noticeable when it was combined with a heavy voice modulation in Episode 4. The modulation by itself made the character barely comprehensible, while adding music on top of it made me miss their dialogue entirely. I only learned what they were talking about during the next episode recap.

Mid-episode “ad break”

This one was a weird choice - with one hour episodes the podcast decided to put in some “ad breaks” and talk about things one would usually mention before or after the episode - shout-outs, calls to action, etc. It broke the rhythm of the play a bit unfortunately…

Anachronisms and not taking things seriously

Part of enjoying Exalted is the sword and sandal mythical setting. Unfortunately, that enjoyment can be ruined by bringing things up that don’t really belong in that world, like “a police investigation”, “cab service”, “a god-given right”, “a burrito fast food joint”, or NPCs named “Jerry” and “Smith”. It didn’t help that a good deal of the game revolved around “the police”...

On top of things, there is taking things lightly, and then there is giving mouth-to-mouth and a funeral to some long-dead fish in a fishing warehouse while looking for clues. It’s right up there with Swallows opening the game up with Godwin ripping his pants and possibly soiling himself after some job of cleaning gutters.

But, understandably, sometimes jokes don’t land and that’s the reality of things. I think the show has improved since those incidents…

The missing PC

It was an unfortunate event that Kleefin’s player had to leave the show, and thus Kleefin had to be written up. However, similarly to Swallows, the problem was further aggravated by one of the remaining PCs having an important tie to them and bringing it up a number of times in the coming episode or two. It’s definitely a problematic part of any show where the cast changes without much warning, but bringing attention to it won’t help the situation unfortunately…

Abyssals are common knowledge, but Infernals are a novelty

The game’s primary antagonist was an Abyssal. The fact that they are an Abyssal and what that entails seems to have been a common knowledge among many NPCs (even though that Abyssal seems to have been a new figure in town) - the various cult leaders knew about Abyssals, a random demon knew about them, the PCs seem to know about them too. At the same time, a demon bringing up that Infernals are a thing was treated as a surprise reveal. The difference between how those two splats were handled was a bit jarring.

Conclusions

While it’s unfortunate Demon City Slickers ended rather abruptly, the podcast itself seems to be moving in a good direction. Their most recent project, Dollywood City Slickers, showed that the podcast is improving, so hopefully we will see more fun content from them in the future. As it stands, their Exalted podcast was an okay foray into the game with one or two standout moments.

Related links:

• Demon City Slickers episode synopsis

Rainbow shields, damage of the gaps, prescribed and ad lib skills

In a lot of RPGs, players have skills, stats or whatever you want to call them that are well defined. Things like Medicine, Nature, Insight, etc. in D&D, or Occult, Drive, Larceny in Chronicles of Darkness. Then there are some games that are more flexible where the players are asked to fill in their own ad lib skills and stats - games like DOGS, Godbound or Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, where you can pretty much write anything in as a stat - "Memory of my dead brother", "Fastest gun in the west", or "underwater basket weaving".

The problem with the latter is the fuzzy boarders each such statement creates about when a given skill should be used, when it shouldn't apply, and avoiding skills that are too broad or too narrow.

Broad vs narrow skill applications

There are RPGs out there that like to break skills down to minutia. In Burning Wheel there are a lot of skills - under Carpentry alone you have Fence Building, Ditch Digging, Carving, Carpentry, Rude Carpentry, Cooping (making barrels), Boatwright, Shipwright, Cartwright and a few more. This creates a sort of Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, where the game basically forces the GM's hand to say "sorry, you only have Carpentry, you can't carve and decorate what you build and you can't seem to know how to make a barrel". It can also create traps if characters specialise in some skill that doesn't come up that often - "I know you're a master Cooper, but no matter how great that barrel you make will be it still won't help you sail the sea, you need Boatwright for that".

You can run into similar problems in games where players can define their own ad lib skills, but those also sway in the other direction - they can be too broadly applicable. You could have players put ranks into "underwater basket weaving" only for that to come in handy once or twice in the entire game, while someone else makes a stat called "fast" and they want to use it all the time - "I shoot him, but like, fast", "I read, fast", "I sleep, fast", etc. The boarders where such player-defined skills apply are fuzzy - you can't really tell them that because there is some other skill that also works for the situation theirs might not apply. Moreover, players will often skew the problem in their favour just so they can use their best skills - "I make a basket under water and it's so well crafted I can use it as a raft with a sail to navigate the rough sea. It's all baskets, just different shapes."

City of Mist tried addressing this problem by classifying its tags into "specific" and "broad". Most tags on a character sheet should be specific - only letting the character use them in specific, limited scenarios. One tag could be broad - applicable in wide variety of situations.

Rainbow shields and damage of the gaps

While playing Exalted / Godbound with my group we would often reference a "rainbow shield" defence - a power to negate any kind of incoming damage, no matter whether it's physical, magical, fire, electricity, etc. A system that would allow for such widely-applicable defence to exist wouldn't be too fun to play really. Exalted 2nd edition suffered from something like that from what I heard - someone created an optimal way of playing the game called "paranoia combat" that's all about using perfect defence against the high-lethality rocket-tag and outlast your opponent.

In our first round of playing Godbound we ended up being too generous with defences, letting the players counter most attacks with most power sets - "I use Artifice to instantly build a wall around myself to deflect the incoming blow!". As we later found out, Godbound was not intended to work like that - any given Word should only counter a very narrow range of powers that are thematically linked to it. You could use Sea to counter a Fire power, but not say, Sword.

However, the game had a different problem, one which I'll call "damage of the gaps". The system did not have a specified, finite list of damage types. A number of powers did either give you things you could be immune to, or let you specify said immunity - for example, if you had the Word of Fire you had "an invincible defence against flame and smoke". But since "smoke" was ill-defined, we had an argument about whether that Word would apply against chemical fumes and poisonous gasses. Similarly, in the Ancalia expansion introduced an Incendiary Court - fire-golem-like creatures from outside of reality that while clearly having fire-based attacks nonetheless came with a note that their "flaming powers are not wholly of natural fire, and so enemies with invincible defences against fire still take half damage from them". This was probably to prevent players circumventing a big boss fight entirely, but still felt like a weird way to make a power less useful.

In a similar vein you could start splitting hairs on many things - if you are immune to mental attacks and someone uses music or mean words on you, does that count? Where does mental damage end and emotional damage begin? Is a psychic blow magic, mental or physical? Is a laser attack fire, sunlight, or neither? Can I make some very snowflake-y Word that has its own damage type that none of the statted enemies have defence against?

Because the game had no finite and well-defined list of damage types, you either have to make one yourself before the game starts, or possibly have to argue about this kind of damage of the gaps...

Conclusions

While being able to get creative with skills and powers can be fun, having things that are well-defined and concise can help everyone at the table know when something is applicable and avoid the problems of things being either too narrowly or too broadly useful.

Gaming and solving the fun out of RPG systems

Over the last few years my group and I have played a number of systems that had mechanics you could game to get XP or other advantages, or had some of their mechanics boil down to a solvable math problem. Both of those situations ended up detracting from the experience, either drawing more attention to themselves rather to the game being played, or just being bland mechanics.

RPG mechanics as math problems

The first category of mechanics are essentially math problems - mechanics that for any given situation have a correct solution on what to do to maximise your outcome.

oWoD Automated Fire

First one of these is Automatic Fire from Vampire the Masquerade:

This attack basically gives you a lot of extra dice to a roll, but makes the roll Difficulty higher. It's basically a move you want to use either when you need a hail mary, or the Difficulty is already so low it doesn't matter much. For other scenarios, whether or not to use this move would require running the numbers, but there is still a definitive yes or no answer to whether using it is a good move or not. Figuring it out for certain however requires some complicated math of using your AnyDice-fu.

DOGS Growth

DOGS presented a similar math problem to its players when it came to Growth.

DOGS is a system in which you have stats that take form of multiple dice of a given size - "3D4", "4D6", etc. When you undergo Growth, you get to either increase the number of dice for a given stat, or increase the size of those dice - so from "3D4" you can go into either "4D4" or "3D6". Turns out there is an optimal way of progressing through those dice to get the best result on average:

So for example, 3D6 gives you on average 0.5 higher roll than 4D4, while 5D8 is better than 7D4 by 5 whole points on average. The game doesn't explain those concepts to the players and it's simple and abstract enough that these things shouldn't matter, but for a problem-solving player it's a solvable mechanic.

Mouse Guard and optimal combat

Mouse Guard is a system with its own little combat / conflict engine that relies on picking actions (Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre) and seeing how they interact with one another. Attack lowers opponent's Disposition (HP essentially), Defend heals your Disposition, Manoeuvre is a way to get an advantage on next rolls, while a Feint is like an Attack with caveats - if played against an Attack, Feint does nothing, but if played against a Defend, Defend does nothing.

During our first game of Mouse Guard we soon learned that this setup creates a simple First Order Optimal Strategy - just always Attack. Attack vs Attack or Defend gets you closer to resolving the conflict, Attack trumps Feint, and Manoeuvre often isn't useful enough to trump dealing damage to an opponent. Attack, Attack, Attack!

FOO (First Order Optimal) Strategy

Towards the end of the game this has ended up being such a simple and optimal strategy that for our next game of Mouse Guard we had to switch the rules to give Attack a hard counter not to devolve every conflict of any type into "press A to win if you press it faster than your enemy".

Cortex and marginally useful SFXs

Recently our group picked up the modular system Cortex. We only played a few sessions of it so far, but one thing that stood out to me was how "starchy" (boring) some of its special powers were.

First of all, Cortex is another mixed-die system that puts a big emphasis on making pool of dice and manipulating your dice. So if you're Iron Man, you can have say, Eccentric Billionaire at D10, Ganius Scientist at D12 and Mk1 Iron Man Suit at D6 and roll those all together to do something.

On top of that, one module you can use in Cortex are Power SFX (special effects). Those are some extra powers your character can use that are tied to a Power Set that can alter the game a bit. So for example you can be Tony Stark with Iron Man Power Set, and one of your SFX could be "Immunity" where you spend a Power Point to negate a specific attack, simple enough.

However, a lot of those SFX are boring dice manipulators. For example - Focus lets you take two dice and turn them into one bigger die. Boost lets you shut down one power to increase the die on another die. Dangerous gives you an extra small die to roll, but changes the size of other dice. Multipower lets you use more than one dice from a given pool but they all are decreased a step or more. Versatile lets you split one die into two or more smaller dice. The list goes on.

I've ran some numbers and a lot of these powers are marginally useful. Say, turning 3D8 into 2D8+2D6 with Versatile gives you an average roll that's 0.42 higher, but gives you 0.45 smaller Effect and 0.2 more Hitches. Without going into what those are, those numbers are marginally useful. Sometimes the numbers increase marginally, sometimes they decrease, but from what I've seen it's not a big effect overall.

Unfortunately to get those numbers I had to spend a few hours programming and debugging a Cortex dice simulator. It's hard to make an informed decision as to whether a power is useful or not without a chart, and trying to play a game well that's filled with unknowable probabilities would just be the case of blind luck.

One way or another - the stat-focused SFX and similar mechanics can be one of two things - either boring because they don't change much about the roll, or having an optimal way to play it, in which case you're not engaging with the mechanics, you're solving a math problem. Either way the mechanics become irrelevant because they're either "use them always", "don't bother with them ever", or "use them under specific circumstances". Since Cortex is based on complex math with no glaringly obvious answer, I honestly can't be bothered to use these SFX.

Honourable mention - Exalted, Paranoia Combat

Honourable mention in this category should also go to Exalted. I won't elaborate much on it since this section is already getting long, but there are two things that are worth mentioning that make this epic game of sword and sandal capital H Heroes boring: Paranoia Combat and Minuscule Incremental Charms.

Paranoia Combat was a strategy from 2nd edition Exalted where the optimal way of winning the Rocket Tag combat was to turtle up and play in the most boring way possible.

Minuscule Incremental Charms were special powers you could buy with XP that would give you just small bonuses to rolls or change tiny things that were rather boring in themselves. Things like Triumph-Forged God-Body that gave you double-9s on Athletic rolls instead of double-10s, or Wyld-Forging Focus that started wyld-shaping at a higher phase. All of those were such small tweaks that they might not be worth the mental load, and weighing their effect vs XP cost would be a small math problem in itself.

Gaming mechanics for profit

Most RPG mechanics that you can game for profit I've come across were focused on being able to farm XP, or at least streamline the way you earn XP. While not a problem in itself (who cares if the party got more XP if they're having fun doing it - you're not competing with anyone), it can start to become a problem when it draws too much attention away from doing things in the game and having fun and onto "brrrr the number goes up"

Chronicles of Darkness - punch me in the face for XP

I've covered this one before in the "Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system" article, so I won't repeat much here. Basically, in Chronicles of Darkness you can basically earn XP by being beaten up a bit at the start of every scene, and some systems like Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition even call out a similar way to farm magic XP.

In a similar vein, the systems also let you earn XP by a number of other ways, like turning fails into botches. This can create some animosity between players when someone is invested in some scene going well, while other players are there to mess things up just to farm up some extra XP - "I failed to impress this character, I opt to botch it instead and make them hate us. Too bad they knew something about your lost sister, guess we'll never find what they knew!".

DOGS - Growth vs Consequences optimisation

Another entry for DOGS, this time about maximising the rate at which your character growths, as opposed to optimising how they grow.

DOGS is a system where you Grow when you suffer Consequences as a result of a conflict you had. To become stronger, you have to get into conflicts, get beaten up a bit, etc. However, Consequences can also have lasting effects if they are bad enough - if you roll too high on them, you may even have to step down your stats, essentially netting you zero, or potentially giving you some net negative sessions. Once again, there is a mathematically optimal way of playing:

Which is basically to get a 3D4 Consequence - it has the best chances of being a net gain. You get such small Consequences by essentially keeping non-violent in conflicts, which to an extent is a "mechanic as a metaphor" for the system.

Mouse Guard and farming Checks

Mouse Guard is a system where you grow your character by practice - aka the more you use a skill, the better you get essentially. As with any such system, the first way of farming it is by doing things all the time, which can encourage you to hog the spotlight. This can be a bit of a problem, but then there is more.

The game is broken up into two parts - the GM turn and the players' turn. During the GM's turn (which lasts about half of the session, not "a turn"...) you can earn "Checks", which you spend during the players' turn to do things and make rolls. You earn those Checks by using your Traits against yourself ("I am Small, therefore I have problems lifting this large log!"). You can use a Trait against yourself once per roll, which means the more you act and roll on GM's turn, the more Checks you can earn to act more during the players' turn.

Moreover, during a conflict you can easily earn a lot of Checks if you play in a very boring way. Essentially, during a conflict you pick actions to take - Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre. When you Defend, you essentially try to recover your HP. Since the conflict only ends when one of the party's HP goes down to zero, if you turtle up you will be rolling for a long time, letting you earn Checks for every roll. In a lot of cases you can also earn a lot more Checks during a fight under specific circumstances - breaking a tie in enemy's favour or giving an enemy more dice in a vs conflict. So if you play like a turtling asshole and have enough dice, you can in theory earn a lot of Checks.

This strategy has one counter though, Feinting makes you unable to roll Defend. You can try anticipating it though by throwing an Attack that trumps Feint into the mix to make your opponent have to Defend and recover. It's not perfect, but it can work...

While that turtle Defence is an extreme example, I have played in some sessions where a less extreme form of Check farming was involved, which later resulted in pretty neat things being accomplished during the players' turn.

Conclusions

There are a number of games out there that rely on math obscurity to give a sense of depth or agency. However, solving the game mechanic from a mathematical sense is only so fun, and once solved the complexity is replaced with an optimal way to play the game, which isn't fun. Making the math behind it harder is not making the choices more meaningful, just the decisions harder to make informed. Try pruning such mechanics from your game if possible.

Similarly, there are games that can be exploited by players to gain some disproportionate amount of XP and what have you that detract from the game by rewarding boring play.

Or in other words - if you are designing a new game system, try asking a math nerd or a game developer to break it. They might do the math and show you how balanced your system can be, and you can guide your players to playing the game well with that math as well.

Related Articles:

• Categories of XP Systems
• Meat and potatoes of RPG powers
• Manage your game's mental load
• Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system
• Net negative sessions

Sins of RPG Actual Plays

So you want to do a TTRPG Actual Play / Stream / Whatever? Here are some things to avoid and tips on how to make your content enjoyable for your viewers.

I'll try providing examples of various do's and don'ts if I'm able. These are meant to be for educational purpose only, and are not meant as an attack on the linked materials. It takes a lot of effort to produce high-quality content, a lot of these are amateur recordings, and everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes a good-sounding idea can turn out to be poor in execution, etc.

This advice can also be very specific to recording / streaming and might not always be applicable to normal games. So while you might learn about a thing or two that could be useful regardless, take things with a grain of salt.

As for my qualifications, I've been a part of a weekly RPG Podcast for about four years now, and I've listened through a few actual plays with a critical ear.

With all of that out of the way...

Don't name yourself after specific games

I've seen this one a few times - the group would enthusiastically name themselves based on a specific RPG system, or their first campaign and later it would be hard to rebrand once they move onto a different system or campaign.

ExalTwitch for example still doesn't seem to have a parent "brand" after that campaign ended and they switched over to Changeling: The Streaming. Both names are also very system-specific. As I understand their RPGClinic used to be a separate show by the same host, meaning that's three different "products" without an umbrella way to refer to the group.

Swallows of the South similarly leaned heavily into their campaign name, and now they are running their second game, Arms of the Tide, still without some other name to call themselves.

On the flip side you have groups like RollPlay, which has done shows like Swan Song, Far Verona, Mirrorshades, etc., each falling under one parent entity, while being its own show.

Overall sound quality

Probably the most important part of any actual play - sound quality. It's the most important thing to get right. If you don't have a clear audio, people might not have the patience to stay for anything else.

There are a few key things to look out for:

1) Eliminate background noise. Nobody wants to listen to things like loud fridges, fish tank aerators, computer fans, etc. Some of it can even be nauseating to listen to for a longer time.

For example, check out this Colonial Marines Actual Play. Skip to anywhere during the episode, listen for a few seconds, then pause and notice that humming sound just go away. That's one example of background noise you want to avoid.

Luckily, programs like Audacity let you remove some of this noise. We start all of our episode recordings with "30 seconds of silence" used for this purpose and it helps a lot.

2) Use push-to-talk, but avoid "on/off" sounds. If you're connecting for an online game, you will have to choose whether to use push-to-talk, or other microphone activation methods. Push to talk is generally the best since it's more deliberate - you know when you're on, and you know when you're off.

However, sometimes when you use push-to-talk, you might be creating a crackling sound when you start and stop your microphone. For an example, check out this episode - about 4 minutes in onward whenever Gary / Mirage talks, you hear the snap on snap off sounds, and that's really annoying. It's probably due to an analog push-to-talk, but it's something worth looking out for regardless.

3) Audio clipping. This is especially important when you're talking into some headphones - if you talk too loud, especially with some extra software audio boosts, your audio will clip and sound just awful. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see this video:

#1 - your gain is too high

4) Set your microphone up correctly. You can be talking to your microphone from the wrong side, you could have a wrong type of microphone for your needs, or you could even be recording from a wrong microphone (especially relevant to laptops with built-in microphones!). In general, watch this video:

5) Don't put your microphone on the table. Find a way to set it up somewhere where you won't be rolling or putting your things, ideally on some boom stands / arms, maybe even in a shock mount. Otherwise your audience will get the experience of putting their ears to your table and hearing every tap, slide, roll, etc. like they'd have their ear to the table itself:

42:55, putting down a cup in front of the microphone...

6) Disable notification sounds. We all have some sort of notifications that bug us every now and then - Discord, Slack, Facebook, other websites, system sounds, what have you. You don't want to have those on your recording - they are not only distracting, but can also make your audience think someone is messaging them. Disable all of those when you record.

In our Congenial S01E04 the first 20 minutes are an example of what to avoid.

This should cover the basics, now for some more advanced examples...

Audio balancing - music

If you want to add music to your game, make sure it doesn't overpower your voice audio. People are here to listen to your stories, and the music should be secondary. This can be especially problematic if the song in question doesn't have a consistent volume but swells over time. For an example of this, check out Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade: Episode 3, 10 minutes in.

Audio balancing - voice

People have different default speaking volumes - some talk quietly, while others project their voice, especially when they get excited. You should compensate for this so that more or less the sound level of everyone recorded would be on a similar level - you don't want to have one person be too loud while someone else is too quiet for comfortable listening.

This could be achieved in a few ways. First of all, if you are recording an online game, you can usually adjust individual volumes and balance things that way. If you are recording in person, you can achieve something similar if you have multiple microphones, each for a different person and balancing their levels.

However, if you want a cheap solution that we used for our one microphone setup, here it is. Use distance to the microphone as a way of adjusting volume. Put the microphone on one side of the table and sit the quiet people close to it, while the louder people should be seated further away from it. This will have a similar effect as the other options while costing you nothing.

Avoid sharp sounds

A personal pet peeve of mine. Sharp sounds pick up REALLY well on microphones, so if you're doing things like putting glass beads in a glass bowl, rolling dice on a glass table, eating food on plates with utensils or using a tambourine for a dice tray, your audience will hear that really well, to the detriment of everything else.

On a similar note, if you're using music in your games that are on the higher pitch spectrum, make sure to play those a bit more quietly and don't play it for a prolonged period of time.

Examples of what to avoid:

• Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade: Episode 1 and the "tambourine-assisted rolls" - every time a roll is made it's painful to listen to.
• ExalTwitch Day Eight, 2:11:00 in - the GM plays a character that talks in whispers, their theme song however has a lot of very long, vibrating, high-pitched notes. Couple that with audio balancing that might be a bit off and have the character be in the scene for awhile and your listeners can get a headache (I have!)
• ExalTwitch Day Eleven, 1:06:00 in - the cast uses glass beads for essentially mana points and they keep them in glass containers. Usually everyone is very careful about moving them, but sometimes you move a larger amount and hear the glass-on-glass noise. This one is not a particularly bad example, but I couldn't find a better illustration. Imagine what a careless group might do in this setup with dropping more glass beads into glass.
• Our Amp Year One S01E05 - 21:30 in one of the players decides to microwave some food and then proceeds to eat it during the recording with utensils from a plate. The microphone picks it up quite well. The episode also features a player being sick or having allergies and just inhaling it in sharply, which is also rather audible.

Songs with lyrics

Humans are good at picking up human speech out of even loud environments. What is harder though is picking up one person talking over another. For this reason it's best to avoid playing songs with lyrics in them - you will be drowning your own self out with these. Generally save those for your intro / outro and use them very sparingly during the game.

After-effects

Sometimes you might want to spice up your recording with some after-effects. While these can be nice if pulled off well (see Swallows of the South Prelude: Episode Six, 27 minutes in for a good example), they can be a detriment if you sacrifice clarity for the effect (see Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade: Episode 4, 23 minutes in for an example of an effect that makes a character illegible). Try erring on the side of restraint unless you know what you're doing.

Anachronisms

One part of enjoying an actual play is getting immersed in the game and its world. This is especially important for heavily stylised games like Exalted, Warhammer 40k, or Legend of the Five Rings. One surefire way of breaking that immersion is introducing things that don't belong in that world, or even clash with it - anachronisms.

Swallows of the South Prelude Episode Four gives a good example of this around the 19:53 mark, where in a sword and sandal setting of Exalted characters use the threat of a bad Yelp review on one another...

Bringing up the missing PCs

It's somewhat expected that some players will miss a session every now and then or have to leave the game entirely. Sometimes you know in advance and can plan accordingly, while at other times you won't know until after the fact, that's just life.

The problem arises on how to deal with the missing characters plot-wise. You could try to explain why they're away, write them out in-universe or the like, or just ignore the issue entirely. The latter is our default go-to choice as it keeps things simple and moving and avoids one issue that tends to drag some games down - character bringing up the missing PCs.

Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade Episode 03 is the first episode after one of the characters, Kleefin, leaves the show. That marks the start of the trend of Kulak, another one of the PCs, reminiscing about his missing friend and bringing the fact that he's missing to the forefront of multiple episodes.

A similar situation happens in Swallows of the South, when after Prelude: Episode Three Rizzo gets written off. For seasons Godwin keeps bringing him up, how much he misses him and how much he doesn't like the new PCs that were introduced in comparison to his missing best friend Rizzo. This ends up alienating another of the PCs, Ariston, for no reason of their own. By the time Rizzo comes back, another one of the original characters gets written off - Ajax, which also doesn't help the situation.

In general, unless you have some some good story to tell about the absence of a character, it's best to not bring them up too much if at all. Asking "where's Poochie" is usually not an interesting question for the audience if there is no actual answer.

Name drop your characters a lot

This one is especially important when you're starting a new game, but is a good rule to follow most of the time. Name drop your characters, a lot. Use them when talking to a PC, use them when describing what your character does, etc. Eventually people will learn the names and learn to associate them with your voice, but it takes awhile, especially if someone is new to your podcast and doesn't know the entire cast yet.

The first episode of Congenials for example does a poor job of this - even though I know some of these people, it still took me an episode or two to be able to tell which character someone is playing and who is doing what.

Conclusions

There are a lot of things to get right when it comes to making actual plays. Listen to your material with a critical ear, listen to other actual plays to pick up their slip-ups.. Learn from the mistakes and aim to improve.

Net negative sessions

Recently in our group we have have played with some "Dice pool and mOral predicament based Generic roleplaying System", or DOGS, a more setting-agnostic version of Dogs in the Vineyard. After the session, the characters have regressed to be weaker than they started, and all due to how the system handles character advancement. So I figured I'd discuss this topic.

Now, character deaths are outside of the scope of this blog post. While they usually also result in a net negative session, they occupy a somewhat different category of issues. Losing a character means you reset back to a starting character, losing XP means you can regress below a starting character.

DOGS and gambling with your XP

Advancement in DOGS works like this - when you are in a conflict, you spend your dice back and forth. When you are forced to spend 3 or more dice at the same time (due to being hit by a strong attack), you get Hit and take Consequence dice. The number of those dice is equal to the number of dice you had to spend at one go, and the type of dice depends on the type of conflict you are in (for example D4s for stuff like talking, D6 for chasing, D8 for beating someone up, and D10 for trying to kill someone). At the end of the conflict, you roll all of your Consequence dice. If you rolled any 1s, you experience Growth (your character improves), but if the total of the two highest dice exceeds 7, you get Long-Term Consequence (your character degrades, or worse).

If you're rolling D4s, it's generally not too bad - you are more likely to roll at least one "1" than have a pair of 4s, but as soon as you hit the D6 territory, the odds are against you! We had some players that hit both Growth and Consequences at the same time a few sessions in a row (meaning they were shifting dice from one place to another), and a session where two characters just suffered Consequences and nobody advanced one bit.

Sure, showing character's lateral growth can be interesting to an extent and somewhat thematic, but tying character progression to a random dice roll feels like a system is asking you to game it.

New World of Darkness and losing dots

New World of Darkness differs from its successor, the Chronicles of Darkness, in one crucial way - it has linear XP cost, rather than flat XP cost. Due to that, it's a very minmaxy system. It also lacks a very neat system - the Sanctity of Merits.

In nWoD, you can invest your XP into things external to your character - Merits in forms of Retainers, Contacts, etc. A 5 dot Retainer can cost you 30XP, and you can earn 1-4XP per session roughly. So that's about 8 sessions invested in one (very powerful but still mortal) person. If they happen to get into a firefight trying to protect your character and die, that's a large investment down the drain. At least with Sanctity of Merits you'd get the XP back, but that concept hasn't been invented until the CoD system.

Similarly, your character can lose their Morality due to being exposed to trauma or the supernatural. You start at Morality 7, but if you lose it and try to buy that 7th dot back, the linear XP cost will set you back 21XP for that single dot. You are out 6+ sessions worth of XP to get back where you started.

In Chronicles of Darkness, flat XP costs means you don't lose too much, and Sanctity of Merits refund you any Merits you lose. At worst you might lose about 1 session's worth of progress due to Morality loss, which isn't too bad.

Conclusions

People are pretty loss averse. The pain of losing something outweighs the joy of gaining an identical thing. Having your character suffer a setback that reverts their progress back multiple sessions can be an unpleasant experience, especially if you measure yourself against other players that didn't suffer the same adversity.

Related topics:

• Categories of XP Systems

Plot Elephants

Sometimes when you play a TTRPG someone introduces a seemingly small element into the plot that ends up changing the game and unintentionally grabbing a lot of attention to itself. They are Plot Elephants, because you just have to acknowledge the elephant in the room when it appears.

Let's talk about some examples.

DnD's Amulet of the Planes

Amulet of the Planes is an artefact that lets you transport yourself and nearby creatures to another Plane of Existence you know. If you fail a roll, everyone gets scattered across that Plane and possibly every other Plane. So basically you have a pocket device from Sliders with notable chance to scatter the entire party across the multiverse each time you use it.

It is a powerful artefact, but one with a pretty high chance of throwing en entire adventure haywire. So either you make the point of  avoiding using it, figure a way around its limitations, or YOLO it and ravel in the chaos to the GM's dismay. It's not really the type of artefact you just go "oh cool" and forget on your inventory sheet.

Taking20 listing Amulet of the Planes as a campaign-breaking item

"It doesn't matter what your campaign was about, it is now a plane-hopping campaign"

Exalted's Dragon Kings

In Exalted there is an old race of creatures called the Dragon Kings. They are creatures of perfect resurrection - their souls retain the memories of all of their previous lives when they are reborn. Couple that with them being one of the most ancient races of the setting and being heavily intertwined with the highest deity of the setting and his Exalted heroes, introducing a Dragon King into the game opens up a large can of worms.

Dragon Kings!

First of all, they have been around when the land was ruled by titans and a lot of them would probably have first-hand experience of their cruelty and how the world was put together. This history goes strongly against the cosmology put forth by the biggest faction of the setting, the Realm, but also many other players like Autochtonia, etc. They have dangerous knowledge.

Secondly, they've lived through multiple apocalypses and many of them could know of a number of ancient tombs filled with treasure and weapons from the height of the Deliberative. If anyone would know where some mad warmonger keeps their stash of doomsday weapons, it would be these guys.

Thirdly, depending on how you play them, they might be a terrible influence on some of the Exalts, particularly Solars. Our GM likes to portray them as sycophants, and there is no easier way of making a character do horrible things than to inflate their ego with flattery and tales of how they once were the rulers of the world. If their word was law and they could do no wrong, how can this time be different? They deserve to subjugate their enemies after all...

During the Congenials Season 1 Episode 7 our GM introduced a ghost of one of the Dragon Kings as a story hook for one of the players and it absorbed most of the attention from the party. The Solar wanted to cleanse its soul right there and then, the Alchemical wanted to extract the heretical history out of their head and mess with its reincarnation so they'd have a knowledgeable companion, and the Dragon King wanted to whisper honeyed words into the Solar's ear. That character alone sparked a large deal of debates for the players, both in character and out.

SWN's True AI

In Stars Without Number Revised the players can choose from a few key character classes - Warrior, Expert or Psychic. These are all pretty standard and pretty balanced between one another. However, in the Deluxe edition, you can also pick a fourth option - to play a True AI.

In SWN, a True AI is not just a normal robot like R2D2 or C-3PO (that would be a Virtual Intelligence character "race"). A True AI is Ultron:

True AI in a nutshell

Straight away at character creation you can take the murderbot frame (Omen) and be able to rip and tear way above your weight class and tear through even ship hulls:

This is your starting PC.

Yes, the one in the background that looks like

Michael Bay's Megatron

If you have a ship with the correct modifications, you can run it by yourself by level 2. If you had a hacker in your group, by level 3 they are outclassed by your innate hacking skills. At the same level you can control almost 3000 drones and it only gets crazier from here. By the time you're at level 9 you can teleport, rewind time, dictate how events will unfold in the future, and retcon almost any level of preparation out of your hat ("why yes, I did bury a spare spaceship with months of life support and power armour on this desert planet for this exact eventuality"), so you're outclassing a lot of psychics (oh, and unlike them, your powers can't be countered or detected by psychics).

All the while you have a lich-like phylactery which makes you a lot more immortal than anything in the universe, and you can swap your shells to get high bonuses to specific things ("need a medic? I can be a medic in 5 minutes. Need a mechanic? I can be one as well").

In-universe, the value of a True AI far exceeds what any player or even entire planets could earn, and they are also extremely dangerous if they turn malicious. Heck, in-fiction True AI have to have breaks on them to dumb them down to human-level thinking. Otherwise, these "unbreaked" AIs turn extinction-level-entity very rapidly.

So the moment a True AI gets introduced into the game, you're dealing with a large elephant that needs addressing. If it's a PC, they can make the game interesting very quickly (especially since SWN encourages the GMs not to "keep the PCs poor" and so on). If the PCs find a True AI, they can get either very rich, or very dead, depending on how things roll. Heck, RollPlay's SwanSong was a game about dealing with unbreaked AIs and the nightmare even one of them can be.

EvWoD's Ceasing to Exist Approach

In Exalted vs the World of Darkness Sidereals have a Charm called "Ceasing to Exist Approach". It lets your current self stop existing while you take on the life of any person you want, whether they are human or supernatural. The past reweaves your new existence into itself to fit you, so if you are a vampire prince's daughter you have the backstory to back it rather than appear out of thin air. You also get a lot of dots in Backgrounds, meaning you can have a lot of potential influence as a character - you could be a high-ranking member of the vampiric society and a millionaire at the same time, etc.

The thing is, when you end this power and go back to being yourself, that other story doesn't vanish, just the person goes missing. Suddenly the prince's daughter is missing, or a politician is nowhere to be seen, or what have you. Their stuff is also there, and since you know their bank account passwords or could arrange some other transfer to your old self, you can bootstrap a lot of interesting stuff to yourself. You could for a moment create a Bruce Wayne-like figure in your town, complete with an Alfred, tell them what's going on, then come in as yourself and enjoy your life of luxury and a hyper-competent and loyal butler.

So the Charm is very powerful, but also has strong drawbacks that have vague consequences. You could use it to bypass a lot of problems ("our target is locked up in his doomsday bunker? Good thing he was his loyal butler by his side! Disappears!"), which can make the game a bit boring and very frustrating for the GM. It's also a very expensive Charm, so it's a Plot Elephant - either the game is about hopping identities and you make the investment, or you just spend a good chunk of XP on something you don't want to use or can't utilise.

Sidereals Ceasing to Exist everywhere...

Conclusions

When introducing elements into your game that are very strong, have a lot of knowledge to share, or have the chance to derail the plot, you should be prepared for what you're getting into. Once a Plot Elephant is in the game, your whole game could revolve around it, or be shaped by it. This of course can make for some excellent stories and even entire games, but if they weren't meant to be the focus, they can take away from everyone's enjoyment. Teleporting someone into the Elemental Plane of Fire might be a fun joke once and getting your party back together from across the multiverse might be an interesting story, but both can be frustrating the second and third time around...

Respect and acknowledge the elephant in the room...