I personally really like it! I really love it when games have a ‘gambler’-type class, where the skills you can use any given turn are shuffled around and determined by some level of random RNG.
Dice rolls are not something I see often in IFs, which I think is a shame, because I feel like they really add an extra element of tension and higher stakes to any given situation. Whenever I played Breach: the Archangel Job, I always felt on the edge of my seat and it helped me really get immersed in the action and story in any given action scene. It wasn’t just my characters living a high stakes moment, I was living a high stakes moment too, and I knew that I had to play as optimally as possible to minimize any potential bad luck that could occur. That any decision could lead to something going bad or getting worse if I was careless and fucked it up.
And then on the flipside, when a mission went perfectly well–not just because I got lucky on some stat rolls, but also because I knew I had played optimally–it felt a lot more satisfying that just the run-of-the-mill stat checks you see in most other IFs. I really did feel like a professional badass and experienced thief/cop/whatever who knew what they were doing and played perfectly to their outs.
Personally I prefer consistency when I’m reading and re-reading IF. It’s one thing if I make a bad decision and face the consequences. But I don’t wanna fail something I feel I should’ve succeeded or not get an outcome I’m specifically going for because I happened to roll bad.
Haven’t played it yet, but I’ll put it on my list.
That’s makes sense, may be part why I liked Studies in the Dark, since it’s never a simple success/fail dichotomy. In FitD you have four leves of success. And even if you completely botch it the story is still moving forward in some way.
I never save-scum. At that point I might as well drop it and go do something else. I give the author the benefit, if they decided to implement a random mechanic I trust they can keep the story interesting even on a fail. Sometimes that trust proves to be unearned.
I get that. I feel like strict stat checking can be boring, you just pick the one you know you’ll succeed, on the other hand sometimes that’s just what I want. I guess the operative keyword is balance. I don’t want to roll for everything.
Another problem of flat checks is when the wording is misleading to which stat is going to be checked. Or when you disagree with the author on the threshold for success.
But the worst is that you eventually get stuck always picking the choices related to the same stat, because anything else would be too risky. This prevents you from exploring other options. But if the stats become mere probabilities, every so often you can pick the 45 one instead of the 65 one, and explore the story more.
That’s something I was just thinking about, and I think that for me the right balance is to implement dice roll mechanics when it comes to skill checks for combat, exploration and stuff, but not for stuff like conversation and relationships.
Even persuasion, intimidation and general charm I’m a little bit iffy on, because there’s plenty of people that are considered charming or intimidating because of their looks, and not because of their actual skills in those domains. So maybe that could be more just a more ‘passive’ option based on the dialogue choice you’re picking? Or do it like Whiskey Four, where your actual appearance affects how intimidated/charmed people are by you.
I don’t even think it’s the angel thing, because you don’t know that at the time. IIRC, the angel stuff isn’t even in the trilogy.
Gandalf works because he’s a great and powerful wizard, and you don’t see him die. You see him topple off of a cliff fighting with his enemy, but that’s that. Could a normal man survive that? No, but could a wizard? Maybe. So when he comes back it doesn’t feel cheap. IMO if you had seen the Balrog decapitate him or something, then the later resurrection would feel cheap. Like, imagine you see him definitively killed and then he comes back and goes “lol I was actually an angel all along and god sent me back to continue my work”. It would be awful.
Similarly, if Boromir never died ‘on screen’ but just went “You run, I will hold them off” and the last you saw of him was him alive and fighting impossible odds, then I think a subsequent return to the story could be made to work. Surviving that is unlikely but not impossible, and it’s that faint chance that makes it workable. You can ask me to believe that a heroic warrior like Boromir held them back for as long as he could and then made a daring escape. You can’t ask me to believe that they died and returned .
IMO it’s extremely rare that an explicit death and resurrection works. I can’t think of one off the top of my head unless it’s in a series where it’s explicitly permissible. Steven Brust’s Dragaera books, for example, or D&D settings where Raise Dead is a well known thing.
I hate it when RNG can lock me out of story paths I want to go down, because when I am replaying a game I typically want to go down a specific path. Either a new path to see what’s there or an old favorite path just to reread the story, but I have a specific thing in mind for that playthrough.
Accordingly, I do not like it when RNG can swing me off of that path, because that ruins my entire playthrough. Like, if I go into a game wanting to romance a certain RO and then I botch a charisma check necessary to do that, the entire run is scuffed and I might as well restart.
I wonder, since the CSG community likes ROs so much, if randomness in relationship isn’t a major cause of dislike towards it. But I do agree with that. I don’t think rolling a dice for everything is good. And I also think there should be mechanism to mitigate randomness, so there’s still some tension, but it’s not entirely unfair.
Random dice roll simulations affecting outcomes doesn’t really appeal to me in this sort of game, which is odd since my favorite and most similar hobby (ttrpgs) are kind of infatuated with the concept and I enjoy it there.
I think it’s because I like my choices to have weight in these games, and bringing dice in dilutes that. EG: Yeah, you may have chosen to sacrifice all of your scholarly and social opportunities to train with the blade, but you lose the fight anyway because the program has decided you rolled a 1! So you fail at what you have invested in and you will fail at the other things too because your skill is low enough in those that you only have a 5% chance of success. Enjoy restarting and playing through the entire game with no saves to see if you get lucky next time with the exact same decisions, rather than making subsequent playthroughs about exploring the impacts of different decisions!
Probably has been brought up here and 7 other threads, but…
No save slots
Especially in these games, they are basically an accessibility feature that should be included for all games. Mistakes happen, fingers slip, etc…
Or I just want to change a choice or two. Whatever, it shouldn’t matter the reason. The point is I don’t want to have to sit through selecting all of my choices again just to get back to where I was before.
I think it’s supposed to incentivize just finishing the playthrough and seeing what happens then doing it the way you want after but I am absolutely not going to do that. I don’t know anyone who has that kind of patience. Enduring a subpar outcome isn’t something I want to play through a whole game for.
Plus it hinders the experience when all the text I really enjoyed the first time is now a barrier to my accessing the part of the game I’m looking for. A slog to wade through is not how I want to remember these moments.
I think that could potentially be mitigated by adjusting the dice roll consequences and/or removing the worst consequences altogether depending on who you’re fighting.
So if you’re a sword master fighting a rookie, nat1 rolls are automatically null and void–or there’s no dice roll to be had at all, depending on the situation–because there’s no way you’d fuck up that badly against someone inexperienced.
Then if you’re fighting another sword master, or a monster of equivalent strength, then dice rolls work as intended with the usual nat1 chance, but even the worst fail rolls don’t immediately cause a defeat, instead just causing you more or less injury and giving you a bigger advantage or disadvantage depending on how the flow of battle goes. That way it comes off less like you’re just suddenly incompetent despite being proficient with the sword, but it also doesn’t make your enemy seem too easy to beat despite the fact that they’re supposed to be a credible threat as well; giving you a decent balance between more believable action and feeling satisfied in how your choices are impacting the encounter.
It might also help if some of the choices you as the player make in combat have varying DC depending on how tactical or careless you’re being. I.e, if you notice an enemy has a specific weakness and you purposefully choose to target that weakness, the success rate is higher (and maybe even outright guaranteed, if the enemy is hurt enough) than if you went for, say, something they were obviously stronger in.
True, but DnD tends to be the default since it’s such a well-established and proven-to-work system. Most people, even if they’re crafting their own story, will not necessarily want to craft their own system and repeatedly test it to make sure it’s balanced right.
I think randomisation can work well, but ideally it’s not purely random (ie, stats or bonuses etc can be applied to it), and it also needs to be very clear to players how difficult the dice roll is going to be before they take it. There also needs to be some kind of fanfare ala Disco Elysium or Fallen London.
The thing with both DE and FL, though, is that you can often repeat the rolls. ChoiceScript games tend to be more about consistently moving forward in the story, and it’s not like there’s an interface allowing you to go off and do something else and then return to try again. Including repeat options would likely throw off immersion, but not including them is likely to annoy players when they fail.
In FitD, you can resist a bad outcome (post-roll) or “push” yourself (pre-roll, increases chances of good outcome) in exchange for taking stress. When your stress meter is full, you take some consequence. Basically, you postpone the bad outcome in a more controlled way.
I’m very fond of Forged in the Dark, I’ve played Blades and Scum and Villainy and they’re both great! Lately I’ve been playing Last Fleet, a Powered by the Apocalypse one that includes a similar thing - you can spend Pressure for +1 to a roll, and when the meter is full you hit a Breaking Point, some of which are generic and some of which are playbook-specific.
It’d be tricky to replicate something like that in ChoiceScript, but in general I’m very keen on mechanics where you can sacrifice something to make a roll/check better.
Schliemann’s Ghost did it for his now-defunct Shadowrun game, for Edge. If you’re interested in doing something similar and not hvaing to figure it out on your own, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind showing you how he did it.
Pretty sure my dnd group hates me because I’m the cautious one who mitigates chance.
Meh. Kind of. Like if i have a good save system it’s not so much a bother. And it’s not a one off that surprises me. Or on the other hand where failure isn’t always a punishment.
Like the Lost Heir games are some my faves just because of how gamey it felt.
On the other hand i know i couldn’t resist the urge to be a prick and make a lot of banal things random if i made a story. Like rando ro sexualities, is the milk in the fridge expired, etc.
That’s so cool! I want to play Band of Blades. But I don’t have time (or a group).
I think a D100 roll under system would work well for a CSG. Probability is player facing and straightforward, and all stats are measured in percentile points. I think it works because CSGs already measure stats in the range 1-100 and it’s easy to understand your chances.
Lately I’ve been playing Last Fleet, a Powered by the Apocalypse one that includes a similar thing - you can spend Pressure for +1 to a roll, and when the meter is full you hit a Breaking Point, some of which are generic and some of which are playbook-specific.
I miss TTRPG’ing. 