The Aid Another Problem
For some time, I’ve been chewing on the problem of player character cooperation. The basic version starts with D&D, wherein PCs mostly take turns doing stuff.
Cooperation in this sense comes from the actions of each player ultimately contributing to the success of the party, but the only areas this works in are like, combat and puzzle-solving.
In combat for example, each PC contributes to resolving the problem of, “these guys are trying to kill us.” I hope it’s easy to see how uh, easy is it for each player to contribute individually to the success of the party.
Puzzle-solving is the other area where each player contributes, often by bringing player knowledge and acting as a sounding board or supporting the brain storm. Combat has a clear-cut procedure, puzzle-solving is largely free-form. Outside these two situations, it’s difficult to see cooperation work the way it can, or ought.
Aid Another in the d20 System is like a patch over a gaping hole in the rules: how do other players contribute to a dice roll that’s led by one player but benefits everyone?
When you’re trying to break down a door, everyone benefits from getting the food open, but only a few characters can work on they problem. In the event you can’t get the door open, you have to what, try again? What do you do about the investment of time and effort the players put into getting it open? Wasn’t the entire party depending on the door being open?
I recently found an SRD for the detective/mystery rpg Gumshoe, which proposes some novel solutions to certain problems that occur in our favorite games. When the outcome of a dice roll is important to the progress of the game, don’t make the progress of the game dependent upon the success of the roll.
I think this is part of the basis behind the “fail forward” mentality, but it’s also a pragmatic approach to solving a frequently-occurring problem.
Classic D&D of course has an answer to this, in the form of wandering monsters. You want to try again? Sure, just keep in mind that any noise you make might attract unwanted attention.
So, where was I going with this?
Cooperation mechanics. Not every instance of failure of a group can be answered with wandering monsters. Sometimes you need a different dice procedure, and that’s what this is about.
I realized the error in trying to assume first for individual player rolls, then trying to figure out how cooperative rolls should work: classically, the game is cooperative and you should assume first the players are trying to work together–THEN figure out how individual rolls might succeed.
So the first thing I did was discount combat entirely, because combat is dependent upon the success of individual rolls. No, combat must be a subtype of some other dice-rolling procedure, not the basis of others.
In Gumshoe, players have a resource (dice pool) that is gradually expended as they make dice rolls. When the players all want to benefit from the roll of a single character, they each contribute from their pool while the one player rolls. Each player who can’t or won’t contribute causes the difficulty of the roll to increase.
Elegant in its simplicity.
Sometimes you want multiple players rolling though, and not every situation is resolved with a single skill. Like in a heist, sometimes you need one person to distract someone at a party whole someone else hacks the electronic security while a third person sneaks in and grabs the loot. These things might have to happen at the same time.
And that’s where other dice procedures become necessary. At least, a basis for a complex skill check–something more effective than say, 4e’s Skill Challenge procedure “succeed X times before accumulating Y failures.” No, we need something more robust than that.
So, I’m working on something. I have some ideas and I’m putting together some different uh, premise-things. I have some terminology borrowed from music that I think fits the idea, like “concert” and “harmony.” Thinking of players working together with different skills in music terms.
I mean, I refer to myself as “music illiterate” because I don’t have much knowledge or understanding of the field of music, and some of these terms and concepts seem like a good fit for the thing I’m describing… I just don’t know what most of them mean. In music.
Hey, welcome back to blogging!
Figuring out ways to adjudicate characters helping one another at a task in games that don’t use dice pools is always a challenge. In the system we’re using now, we’ve tried a handful of things, but haven’t settled on anything, because it’s usually so situational. Like, two people moving a heavy thing could give either advantage or automatic success, but what about two people trying to unlock something or disarm a trap?!
Here’s my thinking: if there are a few simple formats for cooperation with clear applications and catchy terms, then players can see them, use them, and apply them to new situations.
The idea of using musical terms, is they’re already in use and already relate understandably to types of cooperation. So if you try and describe characters working “in concert,” it prompts questions like… “okay, who’s conducting?”
That’s a good point. Some bigger tasks, it definitely makes sense to have a ‘foreman’ type character (like when we planned the farm or tried to set up the day to day business of a thieves guild), and being able to influence the outcome by being good or bad at it (for instance, we handwaved the fact that my thief almost certainly could not have come up with the surveying plans and multi-phase iterative design process of a plantation).
You’d probably want to nail down what would change a handful of factors – the ones that spring immediately to mind are:
– granting a + bonus to a roll (conducting)
– granting advantage to a roll (harmonizing)
– allowing extra rolls or rolls for each character (vamping?/refrain?)
-allow characters to roll against the best stat of all participants (???conducting?)
– reducing the time it takes to accomplish the task (tempo???)
– mitigation of the failure of attempting any task. (???)
It’s stuff like this that makes one see the value in those systems that use # of successes to determine outcome.
More than just the effects of dice rolls (and number of dice rolls), I want to look at how the dice are being used and what the rolls are supposed to represent.
Sometimes you’re going to have different skills being used as part of the same task. Combat is super-granular where individual rolls tend to mean whether creatures and characters succumb to swords and spells.
For an example of what I’m talking about, consider that you roll attack to hit. Is that all? You’re only ever rolling attack to hit. And you only ever roll damage to deduct hit points. One attack roll, one damage roll.
Compare this to 4e, which occasionally instructed players to make multiple attack rolls sometimes, and a single damage roll. You’re rolling attacks against multiple enemies but you use a single damage roll.
That’s a relatively simple example, and an even simpler type (many attacks; one damage roll). There are some examples of incorporating other, non-attack rolls into combat, often through grappling. That uses opposed Strength checks (as pertains to the edition).
But skills are “bigger” than attacks, they’re more abstract. Like, “attack” might be considered an entire subsystem based around a singular “combat skill.” It’s different when you want to use multiple skills in concert.
Take a couple of fairly straightforward skills you find in lots of systems: search and sneak. If you search, fine. Roll your dice and see what you find. If you sneak, fine. Roll and see if you remain undetected. But what if you want to like, search sneakily? Or if you want to sneak observant-ly?
It should be possible to choose a skill as an operator, and another as like, a modifier? When you have one player sneaking while the other acts as a lookout? It feels weird to split up the player actions when they’re supposed to occur simultaneously. You watch while I sneak?
So what we need is a syntax for creating these kinds of dice rolls. Sometimes you want one player to lead a stealth check while everyone else follows quietly. Sometimes you want to combine two skills at once to create a new effect. So, there’s trying to figure out what the basic permutations are that we want players to have access to, to model their actions.