Pedro Pablo Calvo posted a link to how Fate deals with players feeling their characters are incompetent, and how to counter that.
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/what-do-during-play#making-failure-awesome
As I understand it, the bottom line of this advice is that character skill is constant, and the roll represents circumstances beyond their control.
If that’s in the spirit of the game, why have the player roll for the world? If the character is not the variable, but the world is, shouldn’t the GM roll that?
That also means, thematically, that assistance and group actions and devil bargains and all the rest are not affecting the character, but instead affecting the world around the character (whose performance is standard.)
This changes how I would discuss the game mechanics with players. “Your dice rolls are not about you, they are random because they represent how effectively the world (fate, luck, context) conspires to thwart you.”
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/what-do-during-play#making-failure-awesome
But only insofar as dice are involved. Like a setup action to change effect level, or to take a consequence for someone else, those are still in the realm of affecting default character performance. Things like taking stress to get dice is what’s changing the world, not the character.
My understanding of Fate is that you have narrative control over both your character and the world, so I’m not sure it’s really an issue as far as the game mechanics are concerned.
Also, I’m not sure character skill is ever really constant in most games. Hell, in real life competent people make rookie mistakes all the time–even at the things they’re good at.
Yes, but for one, we aren’t talking about Fate–we’re talking about advice aimed at Fate but in the context of Blades in the Dark. We’re talking about how a Blades in the Dark GM presents the world to the players, which does have flex for narrative involvement in players affecting the world through narrative suggestions non-mechanically (except through impact on fiction-first play.)
Whether or not character skill is constant is a big part of how this advice lands. If you say “bad dice rolls are because your skilled character was cheated by the environment” then you mitigate players feeling like their characters suck. But then, too, that means the dice roll was never ABOUT character skill, right?
If players want to feel really bad-ass (i.e., win a lot of dice rolls), could one not solve this by giving double points at character creation and saying “you’re a bunch of veteran scoundrels”?
I don’t see why it’s an either/or proposition. Sometimes you fail because your attempt sucked, sometimes you fail because mitigating factors screwed up your intent. I think it’s important to have all those fictional avenues open in the game–I feel like that’s intentional from a game design standpoint.
I don’t think Fate and Blades are different beasts in this context.
Slade Stolar I think that’s a good solution if the players have the notion that they will be playing bad-asses straight out of the gate.
Slade Stolar That would be one thing you could do, especially for one-shot games. Or even remove the cap of no more than 2 poitns in an action at generation, so you could have 3 or more for the things you want to be good at.
Jack Shear It could be a useful suggestion to GMs that one tool for managing player morale would be if players are taking it hard that the dice aren’t falling their way, you can focus on environmental factors instead of character mistake. Especially with the caveat that this is one way to interpret rolls, among several, and the GM and players can choose among them.
Sometimes it really does matter if Blankenship triggered the alarm, or if there was a crowing rooster next door that drew the guard’s eye to his effort.
It’s another venue for conscious or unconscious GM bias to emerge too, so GMs should keep a sharp eye on that to make sure Jim’s character’s failures aren’t always because his character is a clown, and Lisa’s character’s failures aren’t always because of bad luck or fate conspiring against her.
You could always turn it around to the player too, right? “Okay…that roll went badly for you. Why? What happened?”
Jack Shear Yes, I touched on that.
I imagine being able to project the blame into the setting instead of the character would mollify some players with consistently bad rolls.
Sure. I mean, on some level I think you just have realize that in playing a game there will be days where you will roll poorly and things don’t go your way. I played a super competent paladin in D&D who managed to miss all his attacks eight rounds in a row once. Was frustrating, but you live by the dice you die by the dice. Short of taking chance out of the equation that’s just a thing that will happen, statistically speaking.
There’s an item similar to this in the GM Best Practices section, “Make the scoundrels awesome, even in failure.” IIRC, it came directly out of a thread here a while ago.
Jason Eley Good catch. The GM Best Practices stuff is really good.
Which basically loops back around to “blame the environment/context/fates and not the character.”
The roll is more about whether or not it works out, and after the fact you ascribe failure where you will, but probably not to the character’s efforts.
The action rating represents luck more than the rogue’s ability, hence the dice. Raising those ratings has little to do with the character’s ability, and more to do with bribing the world to be more compliant somehow. You could say the special abilities are skill, and the action rolls are about cultivated luck somehow.
After all, the action ratings don’t affect fictional positioning explicitly. Everybody is good at shooting, but someone with Hunt 3 has less bad luck when taking the shot.
Eh, I’m overthinking it, which can sometimes be helpful but isn’t here. The take away for me is that if players get frustrated by constant thwarting, blame the environment and luck more than having their characters attempts be a cause/effect situation.
Andrew Shields Yeah I’m still not seeing why it has to be one or the other? It doesn’t seem like it has to be a binary thing.
I agree with you that it is stronger if the action rating is a combination of ability and luck, and you can sort of inflect however it turns out. However, since the GM advice was invoked, I am responding to that.
“Blame the circumstances–not the characters–when creating consequences or complications.” That’s pretty explicitly non-binary.
It’s binary only when there are consequences or complications. It’s non-binary when there aren’t consequences or complications on the table.
I’m not sure I get why character skill is divorced from circumstances–part of being skilled is knowing how to handle changing and challenging circumstances. So yeah, when things go wrong it’s not because they suck–it’s because they encountered things they didn’t count and and didn’t know how to circumvent immediately with their skillset.
IMO, taking care of the psychological part of the game is really really important, especially when you succeed (you do it) with a 4-5 result (trouble attached).
Don’t blame the PJ’s, praise them for their performance anytime you can: Congrats. Only a real scoundrel could have approached that closer to the manor house without being seen. If you go further you will risk to detection. Let me describe the situation…. (4-5: Controlled).
Pedro Pablo Calvo Right, the actual roll represents the same thing whether you do it or there are complications in that ability, experience, and luck have all lined up toward a certain outcome, the rules and GM advice just seem to indicate how you frame the results in the fiction.
Another way this is addressed in Blades is in when you call for a roll. Since the scoundrels are positioned such that their efforts are opposed by powerful, dangerous enemies, it’s obviously not incompetence when they fail. If you cross swords with that Red Sash duelist and roll a 3, well, you knew there was a risk right? They’re a deadly swordsman. Your “failure” isn’t incompetence, it’s one of the possible outcomes we expected here.
Problems arise when you start calling for rolls when the PCs aren’t actually contending with a serious challenge. Then, a failure seems weak or incompetent. If a PC roughs up a shopkeeper, and you demand a skirmish roll, and they get a 2, and you inflict harm because the shopkeeper punches them in the face… that’s super frustrating for a player who expects to be a badass scoundrel.
The reason Blades doesn’t have a super explicit trigger for the action roll is so each group can tune it to their taste. You decide what constitutes a “risky obstacle” and thereby determine the cinematic level of awesomeness for the PCs — what things they must roll for vs. what they simply accomplish.
Yes, the groups I run for do feel pretty cool with the stuff I let them do without rolling for it.
That starts with the information they can gather before a heist, and continues in the nice touches here and there, and the bang they get for their buck. Like, one successful Prowl roll and the guard across the room, or walking down the stairs, is down and out.
There’s an easy fail-safe for this, too. If a player rolls a miss, and everyone goes, “What? How could you mess that up?” then you know that calling for the roll was not correct, and you can rewind and do it differently (maybe a fortune roll to see ‘how well’, or they simply just do it — the actual obstacle lies elsewhere).
I don’t know why I’m even typing this out, as I feel like I’ve had this conversation a hundred times and I’m not even trying to persuade anyone at this point, but more to try and help understand why some people get frustrated.
John’s perfectly reasonable response that I’ve gotten a number of times is “This game is not for those people then.” And when I game with strangers, I don’t know if this table will be those people or not.
I guess this explanation is for people who are going to run the game for a new group, and may run into this issue, so they can see that crack–the dividing line between the people most likely to enjoy the game and those who will perhaps not.
I haven’t run into cases where individual rolls were a problem. It tends to be more grumbling about streaks of rolls. A complication is fine. The sixth one in a row that has pushed the mission totally off course is where the miffed level rises.
One perspective is that complications are appetizers and dessert. Another perspective is that complications are the main course. If your experience is driven and shaped by complications more than by player intent, that can be frustrating.
For some people, the complications are the point. For others, they are twists and interruptions that obfuscate the point and, when their combined weight gets excessive, push player objectives out of reach.
I think the divide between satisfaction and frustration is rooted in whether players feel they can make headway towards reaching their objectives, or if they are pushing against a current that will inevitably drive them into escalating violence or “burn everything” solutions.
I haven’t had any players who were upset with complications and failures. I have had many players who were upset that complications and failures were the default assumption and center of the game play experience.
Me, I don’t care so much. I’ve run the game enough I understand what to expect, and in my experience when people get to play an arc, by the time they’ve had a few sessions their expectations adjust. Most of my games are one shots with strangers. So I keep running into the player frustration.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think a string of complications (or even failures) must — by necessity — “push player objectives out of reach.”
This is a thing that can happen in the game, given various inputs and techniques. It is not something that must happen, against everyone’s wishes, by some inevitable force or inescapable results of the mechanics.
The game has several dials to turn to avoid this. We’ve talked about them ad nauseum. I’m not tired of talking about them, but I understand if you are, Andrew.
I see, Andrew Shields. Thank you for taking your time to once more explain yourself. The key, as you say, is how complications are perceived by the players and how to make complications exciting for them.
I think it’s a difficulty stemming from expectations that levels out over time as people calibrate their risks better and the GM figures out how to work with the group.
This is, in my experience, a problem at the beginning that fades over time. So, I don’t have really strong feelings about it.
I do think it can be valuable to figure out where player frustration is coming from, and manage that. My session on Saturday, we were having a good time and the frustration was an undercurrent that wasn’t articulated until we were on break and I asked what one of the players thought of the game overall.
In general, my players agree I’m a big softy when it comes to properly battering their characters.
I am sensitive to the idea “Your players aren’t happy because you’re doing it wrong.” That’s my impulse to manage. I carry useful ideas out of these online discussions, and I hope they help other people too.
I’ll share a bit more here, since other (maybe new) players will see it. (I know you already know this stuff, Andrew.)
Each Blades group adjudicates three factors which have a big impact on play:
– Do we roll for this?
– How much action does this roll cover?
– Which consequences manifest?
Each of these decisions drive the game toward or away from a gritty struggle that chews up the PCs. As the game text says, you really need to just dive in and make calls, then see the effect they’re having, then adjust to taste. This is how you play an RPG (imo), since the possible combinations between game systems and group methods are too complex to fully predict in advance.
I know this sounds a bit like I’m saying “Stop hitting yourself!” — but honestly that’s kind of how I feel about this particular aspect of RPG play.
(Edit, I cross-posted with Andrew: One shots are hard in general, and definitely not ideal for Blades, for this reason.)
Yes, the fiction first, three positioning levels, and other elements of the basic system are really great for letting people say what they want to do and then mechanizing it. There’s a reason I keep running the game. =)
I try to “Don’t hate the player; hate the game.” And when you express your players’ discontent, I am nonetheless curious with details about you did, even if I don’t really think you are the cause (probably, you are the effect, and the cause is likely invisible to anyone but the designer who knows what was trying to be said). So please understand this is just about trying to see what happened
re: “…streaks of rolls. A complication is fine. The sixth one in a row that has pushed the mission totally off course is where the miffed level rises.”
I am curious what you mean by “streaks” here. And “[sixth] in a row”. I have to wonder, given what you described about player perceptions: how many different tasks did the six rolls cover? didn’t they progress to a different problem by the second roll (since one or two 4-5 results should be a success)? Hadn’t they finished the score (or gotten close) by the sixth roll? They should have received the gratification of success multiple times so I am curious if this was a more general statement about the streak or what