Just going to throw this out here without comment:
When solo roleplaying, what if instead of trying to figure out a target difficulty for you to roll against as a player, things were reframed as you setting your player roll ahead of time as the difficulty for the "GM" to beat if she wants to stop the player from achieving a result?
So, I make my roll, and then that becomes the difficulty for the GM to beat. It's a bit like the Cortex system if you've ever played it or read about it.
I don't know the probabilities, but intuitively, I think one side effect would be that the player would have more chances of succeeding.
Thanks all for the input. They have clarified some things for me. I'm really just musing as I haven't tested any of this yet, so maybe it isn't a hot idea after all.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of shifting target number setting to the player appeals to me because I like things to be, as much as possible, player facing.
Maybe opposed rolls would not work so well, as Jerry Colhurst suggested. Maybe the swinginess could be minimized by taking the idea futher: What if you shifted the static difficulties +Ray Otus mentioned to the player side?
I can very easily see it done for a player facing system like Trollbabe where the player stat is also the difficulty number, and it's basically static for the duration of the adventure. in a system like that, maybe it's more of a matter of framing the challenges in similar terms to what +Todd Zircher suggested: "Can the evil mage defeat mighty Rheta in magic combat?" rather than "Can Rheta best the mighty evil mage in magic combat?" In other words, how well or badly the world handles what your PC throws at it?
I think that maybe this would make for a more active PC, as it lessens the expectation that the "GM" will throw something at you. Instead, you're throwing your PC at the world.
One of the questions here is, though, what would your incentive be to give a lower difficulty to a test? And if you have an incentive for making things harder on your PC, couldn't you just do that without flipping the Player/GM script? (The answer to the last one could be, again, wanting to wear the Player hat more often than the GM hat.)
Also, though I'm very intrigued by the thought, I am not sure how you could best do something like this for a system like GURPS or D&D without drastically changing the system. I have some thoughts, but they either involve "Trollbabyrizing" those systems to a degree, or limiting the resources of the "GM" side to better balance things so that the PC side can truly provide a challenge.
Alex Yari I think opposed rolls do work well in some systems - in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, the GM has a Doom Pool that they roll against PC actions when no NPCs are providing active opposition. Game mechanics interacted with the Doom Pool in different ways - some heroes could get large bonuses to rolls but would inflate the Doom Pool too.
ReplyDeleteFate Core might work well too - 4d3 distributions fluctuate less than 1d20 distributions.
(The Doom Pool is also present in Cortex Plus Heroic Roleplaying, the setting-neutral version of MHR which features in the Cortex Plus Hacker's Guide).
I rather like the idea as it suits my style of play. I tend towards writing with dice at the best of times (and ignoring them completely when I get inspired with a story arc.). The effect of this is that whilst I usually have a main character, I don't often have a PC. I play as the GM, with a table full of NPCs, that I am controlling, both heroic and villainous.
ReplyDeleteThis approach would give me (as GM) a randomising mechanism in the field of story development, rather than tying me down to one PC with a collection of sidekicks, feeling like I'm playing a pen-and-paper version of Dungeon Crawl on my computer. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's your thing, of course.)