This post is part of a series that tackles the reading review of a yet unpublished RPG called Silvervine. Please note that this game is still in development, my review is part of the pre-playtest feedback. Last time I tackled Character Generation, now it’s time for the 1st (of 3) posts on the game’s Crunchy bits: Basic Challenge resolution.
This post is massive (more than 2000 words), impatient readers are invited to skip to the conclusion at the bottom…. 🙂
Basic Mechanics:
All right, Silvervine’s crunch rests mostly on one key mechanic: the rolls for success/failure that applies to all kinds of challenge.
I’ll quote directly from the text:
- The character’s relevant and supporting attribute determine the number of d10 to roll.
- Any dice rolled at 8 or above is considered a success.
- Any relevant skill the character has lowers the number that has to be rolled on the dice. A skill of 1 in a relevant field will make a 7 or above a success.
- If you get the required number of successes, as set by the Game Master or situation, then the action is successful.
The attributes are Strength, Reflexes, Perception, Knowledge, Spirit, Toughness and Appeal.
An attribute score of 2 is average and 7 is considered supreme.
Instead of going into details of the mechanic, I’ll create an example not in the book and walk through it, adding my thoughts in italics.
So if a Beefy (STR 4), Very Tough (TGH 6) character wants to break down a door by tackling it real hard, I start by adding the main ability score (STR) that comes into play + the most appropriate supporting attribute (TGH). This gives the player the number of dice to be rolled.
The book says breaking a door is STR+REF but I disagree and decide to rule otherwise… that’s what GMing is all about no?
Let’s say the door is one of those Iron-reinforced fantasy Dungeon door…
The system asks the GM to set difficulty of the roll: The target number to roll and the number of successes needed to succeed. The game suggests setting the target number to 8 and play with the number of successes to determine difficulty.
So the target number is set to 8 and the number of successes to break down a study iron-reinforced locked door should be…
The required number of success chart found in the book is not all that useful because it doesn’t define what’s the true difference between Complex, Difficult, Hard and Incredibly Hard. There is a humorous one liner about people’s reaction if you succeed (Hard= 6 successes = “Hercules is impressed. He might need a Sidekick”).
This type of fluffy crunch tends to annoy me because as a GM, I expect clear examples of feats that represents the difficulty.
Another thing that confuses me is that while the rules doesn’t encourage doing it, a GM is allowed to play with either the target number or the number of successes needed to set a challenges difficulty. This makes setting difficulty more of an art than a science if you aren’t a Math major.
(Continued from before the italics) …Complex, which means 4 successes.
So the character now has ten d10s and needs to roll8 or more on at least 4 rolls.
Now I tell the player this info. The player then checks his character sheet for relevant skills, powers (called focuses) and story element that could help him succeeding.
A relevant skill lowers the target number to 7, 6 or 5 depending if the character has 1,2 or 3 levels invested in the skill. If he has a higher skill, he gets an extra dice per point above three.
So the player tells me he has a 1 level in Architecture, I agree to lower the target number to 7. He also reminds me that he was raised by Dwarves and has spent countless time around such doors. I give him a circumstance bonus in the form of another dice (for a total of 11).
Note to John: I may have misunderstood the extra die thing. Do you need to have purchased a focus that comes into play to get an extra die or are pre-established story elements sufficient to get the bonus?
So now the player rolls eleven d10s and needs to get 7 or more at least 4 times.
I’m not a math-head so I really don’t get how difficult such a roll is because this is more complex than the 3d6 or 2d10 bell curves of Gurps and BESM respectively.
Let’s say that the player rolls 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 5 so that’s the exact 4 successes needed.
At that point I ask the player to describe to me how he went about bashing the door and how it turned out knowing he succeeded, the player is encouraged to make this as cinematic and entertaining as possible.
End of example
This challenge mechanic can be applied against a set difficulty (Player vs environment) . In opposed challenges 2 characters roll against one another against a set target number and the one with the most successes wins.
It can also be used in extended challenges (multiple rolls to hit a much larger number of required successes) or in group rolls (multiple players role against a larger set of required successes).
The game also has 2 options for Extraordinary successes (The always-appreciated Critical!).
If all dice come up as successes you get to reroll all dice and add the additional number of successes to your pool (which affects some challenge metrics like damage and such).
Alternatively, a player who rolled enough successes can try to ‘push his luck’ and roll one more dice. If he succeeds, he gets to a new series of rolls as above, if he fails he loses 1/2 of his successes.
This is quite an interesting critical success mechanic! The gambling choice is very juicy indeed. This his my favorite part of the game’s crunchy bits so far.
Basic Mechanics Conclusion:
While I find the mechanic original, the thought of adjudicating target numbers, number of successes and then having players point this skill and that helping factor is giving me a virtual headache. As a somewhat lazy DM, I’m much more comfortable with D&D’s/Gurps/BESM’s target number +/- circumstances bonuses.
But I’m sure some people will appreciate this system more than I. I’m also a bit leery of having to do such calculations for all rolls especially for NPCs. I feel that players must trust me when I tell them that a NPC has a circumstance bonus that gives him an extra dice.
Robin Laws aside: I believe that Silvervine sits on the ‘More control for the GM’ side of the game-style scale where the mechanics, while based on very detailed options, are vague enough that a large ammount of GM fiat is needed. Compare this to D&D 3.X where the focus and tightness of the rules favor player control of the game’s mechanics.
However, I can see myself enjoying this as a player as I know I would enjoy digging my character’s sheet and backstory to get all kinds of juicy bonuses. And the resolution is very ‘Axis and Allies’ like where it’s fun to throw a bunch of dice in a box!
Combine this to the funky critical success rules, and I can envision myself having a blast rolling a ton of d10s
Halftime Conclusions
All right I’m about halfway through my review, I plan to tackle the non-combat specific mechanics, then combat and a lastly write about setting. Still, I’ve already have a good idea on my general stance on this game.
I would totally be a player of this game. As I have discovered recently, I’m a story-telling, psycho-dramatist player. From a player’s standpoint, Silvervine would be perfect for me. I create the exact character that I want.
Then the GM tells me what happens, and handles all the game’s metrics. When a challenge arises and once I know what I have to roll, I can shop for cool bonuses based on my character design. I can even fast talk the GM for some freebies! I get to roll a ton of dice (which I like to do) and the GM gives me the spotlight to describe what happened as I see it.
That I dig totally… As a player.
However, as a GM, I don’t think I’d want to have anything to do with that game. The challenge mechanics is too complex for a guy like me who likes eyeball difficulty rapidly. I also find Char Gen too developed to allow me to create mooks on the fly (a bit like Gurps did for me… by the book, balanced Adventure prep was arduous).
I must say that it’s the 1st time I ever came to this conclusion (Yay as player, Nay as GM) with a Role Playing game. I’m curious to see if the rest of the game will reinforce my stance or convince me otherwise.
Thanks for reading.
John Arcadian says
Hey Phil,
Yeah you are pretty much right on with how it works, on everything except the circumstance bonus. There isn’t a way built in way to just add a dice because of something in the character’s backstory fluff. Something in the character’s backstory crunch, definitely. The way we envision it, with the player narrative and thematic aspects taking center stage is exactly what you say with the architecture example.
The player says “Hey I’ve got XXX skill, will that come into play, I think so because . . . ”
The GM says “Yeah I’ll go for it” if it makes sense.
The Game Masters main responsibility with setting the difficulty is with the R# of successes. The standard difficulty is ALWAYS 8, which gets modified by the characters skills, so the Game Master only has to worry about how many successes he or she requires. 2 to 3 is pretty easy to hit for most people. 4 to 5 is hard if you aren’t skilled in that area. 6 to 7 is hard almost all the time. 8 is nearly impossible until higher levels, but I’ve seen some creative people.
A GM might say STR TGH, 4 successes. Now the rest is in the player’s hands. 4 dice for strength, 6 for toughness = dice pool 10. So if the player rolls and gets four dice at 8 or above, SUCCESS!
If the Game Master allowed the architecture to come into play, the player would need four dice at 7 or above, etc.
Oh and you are absolutely right, we definitely consider it the Game Master’s prerogative to say what two attributes come into play. A STR TGH might fit your idea of it more, while STR RFL pulls my idea of how it would happen more.
I’m hoping you’ll find that the enemy ratings section helps you with the creating mooks on the fly, and I’m highly glad of your critical reviews. They help us pare down issues, or see how outside parties perceive things.
Graham|ve4grm says
Ugh.
Please let me never have to play this system.
Besides the trouble with adjudicating target numbers that you listed, most people don’t have 10, 12, 14 d10s laying around.
In all likelihood, “rolling a ton of d10s” will turn into “rolling one d10 over and over and over…” in most cases.
Which will mean that in order to do anything, the player will have to roll 10 times to see if he succeeds.
Including the time to decide target number, number of successes, and any bonuses, this just sucked all the cinematicness out of the scene, before the description was even attempted.
Honestly, the successes mechanic works well. But please, for the love of Mike, use d6s. People are much more likely to have 10d6 available than 10d10, meaning they’ll be able to do this in a single roll, taking way, way less time for every action.
ChattyDM says
You know who have tons of d10s?
World of Darkness players… which I think Silvervine could cater too.
John: Thanks for the Clarification. However, I would definitively remove the table that suggests that you can play with the target number before figuring skills. While the text does strongly encourage to set it at ‘8’ I was tempted in my door example to set it to 9.
Yan says
The thing I hate about the multiple dice system proposed is that it’s hard to have a gut feeling of the probability of success.
1 dice is the easiest and give you a linear distribution.
multiple dice added together give you a bell curve distribution
In this system you have multiple linear distribution added together which need advance understanding of statistics to understand the impact of lowering the needed score or adding a dice.
All tree system compared with Silvervine (D&D, GURPS or BESM) have a better system of randomizing in that, you can, at a glance, determined the chance of success for a given task.
John Arcadian says
“John: Thanks for the Clarification. However, I would definitively remove the table that suggests that you can play with the target number before figuring skills. While the text does strongly encourage to set it at ‘8? I was tempted in my door example to set it to 9.” I’m definitely tweaking this out to give a more clear picture of how it works. I’m glad you went over this section, because we haven’t come to it yet in our content editing stage, and it helps us pick out issues of clarity in the writing.
Really the only thing that the Game Master has to do to set difficulty is to set the R# of successes, but like Yan says it is hard to get a “feel” for how challenging a task is. Because the skills a character has actually makes the task easier in Silvervine, it is hard to tailor difficulty to a specific character. Setting the difficulty at what the GM thinks it should be based on the task alone, or how challenging they want the task to be for anyone trying it is just like saying “on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10”, and knowing that 6 or above will be REALLY hard.
Tommi says
Unless I missed something obvious, the probabilities are a case of binomial distribution. It can be approximated with exponential and normal/Gaussian distribution, given enough dice rolled. Each of the dice effectively counts as a weighted d2-1 or flipping a coin. It is easier to calculate than rolling an arbitrary amount of arbitrary dice and summing them, because a nonrecursive formula actually exists. Nothing advanced about the good old binomial distribution.
That said, I think it does have too many moving parts to qualify as elegant. One way of tweaking difficulties is sufficient, two are manageable, three tend to be excessive, more than that is an overkill.
I could easily run this game, given a solid table of example difficulties to extrapolate from or a guide for the normal skill and attribute levels of random people, which when combined with a bit of number crunching would allow me to create the difficulty table. I’d prefer that designers crunched the numbers.
ChattyDM says
Tommi is a Math major… 🙂
I agree with him and will repeat:
I strongly suggest that the #R table provides more empirical examples of what representative difficulties are at each level.
Then Setting difficulty, while still not my favored approach (I’m with Yan in that one)becomes easier to gauge for the DM and use.
Yan says
Agreed Tommi, my statistic math is rusty. But what i wanted to highlight, and you did it quite clearly, is the amount of variable to take into account.
So even if the distribution of a bell curve of the 3D6 is gurps is more complicate to get, once determined it does not change. You that to have 10 or less is 50% and to hit a 18 is less then 1% probability. As a GM, I’m not adding dice to it I’m just adding an offset to a well known curve. The math of which I don’t care anymore.
So I would try to limit the amount of variable. Either play a fixed amount of dice or have a fix amount to determine success (use a variable number d6 dice for exemple with 6 being a success).
John Arcadian says
You’re right tommi, you can figure out the exact probability that a # of dice will be successful or not with binomial distribution. That is how we did our testing, and We did a lot of that to determine the averages when working out the R#.
Here is our work:
http://www.silvervinegames.com/uploads/Svg/dice pool probabilities.xls
That spreadshseet is up on the site if you really want to get into that much math at the Gaming table, and some people do.
http://www.silvervinegames.com/index.php/Svg/Downloads
I think it is a matter of confusion that Game Master’s would need to take into account every variable. Let me ask this: As a DM/GM do you ask what a persons total bonus to a d20 roll is? and do you raise the DC based on that?
Any multiple dice system does bring into play multiple variables, and that will get unwieldy if you try to incorporate it all to set a difficulty for the roll. I guess I’m asking is it necessary to do that in any game system, or do you go “This should be this hard, and let me find that on the scale of difficulty for the system” D&D’s scale of difficulty is 10 to 45 as the target number. Ours is 1 to 10 on the required number of successes.
I am going to rewrite that table, Chatty. I’ve actually rewritten most of that page already. Stuff like this is why we are looking for so much feedback in the editing process. We want to make sure it comes across to more than just our core audience. What do you think would make a good example for that table?
ChattyDM says
John:
I actually guesstimate a D&D’s player’s skill at the level he is at before setting DCs of various tasks (I usually aim at 50% success before buffs) but that’s because I play with the Oblivion “Scale as you level up philosophy”.
That’s my favored style, not THE best one… 🙂
As for the table, I’d say look at the PHB’s table for listen checks.
I’d show a physical and a Mental example for each
For physical feats it could be:
Easy: Punch through a glass pane
Average: Open a stuck pot of Jam
Complex: Drive a car against Traffic
Hard: Break 4 bricks with ypour fist
Very Hard: Pilot an airplane in a canyon while dodging missiles..
A team brainstorm effort could payoff here.
Tommi says
John,
No,I don’t usually analyse games in play to any great accuracy (unless a player asks or considers using some expendable resources like action points and I can do the math in my head), but I do want there to be clear guidelines for what difficulties I should set and they should make sense within the game’s context.
My preferred scale is to see what chances does an average unskilled character have, what chances a professional has, then a true expert, than a master or legendary figure, if all of those are relevant in the game.
A table that essentially says stuff to the effect of: Easy task is difficulty Ne and unskilled character succeeds around half the time at them, standard difficulty is Ns (> Ne) and professionals succeed at it half the time. Etc. Something to that effect.
It helps a great at at adjudicating difficulties of rolls in play, which is of utmost importance if the game should work without excessive prep.
Cayzle says
I wonder if the Silverline folks know that there is a Silverline Windows and Doors Company out there. Probably no biggie either way, but it did occur to me to mention it.
http://www.silverlinewindow.com
Probably someone has already mentioned it.
ChattyDM says
There is a D&D Bathroom fixture manufacturer close to where I live
🙂
Graham|ve4grm says
Also, the game is Silvervine, not Silverline, so I don’t think there’s a problem. 😛
Cayzle says
line, vine. What, I’m supposed to read carefully before posting? Do I look like someone who is a professional editor in real life?
D’Oh!
Graham|ve4grm says
From that comment, I’d have to guess… yes?
Windows 7 Ultimate says
I guess I’m asking is it necessary to do that in any game system, or do you go “This should be this hard, and let me find that on the scale of difficulty for the system” D&D’s scale of difficulty is 10 to 45 as the target number.