Sunday 5 April 2015

Using dice as reminders (or as choice-limiters)

Player: "Oh, crap! I forgot that my character could have used that special power!"
Game master: "Let's call it even -- I forgot that I was supposed to be penalising you for difficult terrain."

Does anything like this sound familiar? There are certain situations that, for some reason, cause us to forget about modifiers. It seems to happen when we are focused on the results of a roll and it can be really annoying. My friend and I are designing a dungeon crawling game in which characters have special abilities and magic items but, for some reason, we never remembered that they were there until a battle was finished. How did we solve it? We added a reminder system into the dice themselves. In our case, we replaced one of the blank sides of each die with a question mark. Whenever one of these faces appeared, a player could use their special power. I am also toying with similar mechanisms for various boardgame designs in which instructive icons printed on the board fail to remind players of their options. 

I found the use of a special (reminder) die to be so successful that I adopted it for my role-playing system. Alongside the basic attack die, a player simultaneously throws a die that has a few icon-based faces. This die tells the roller whether or not they can modify their attack with a special feat. This has pros and cons, but I think it works well on balance.

Pros:
Of course, this prevents a roller from ever forgetting about a special ability, but that's not the only reason to adopt such a mechanic. It also allows the game master to pump up the special attacks so that they actually do something really cool. In some role-playing systems, characters can attempt special attacks (e.g. a targeted strike) but, for the sake of game balance, they need to suffer some kind of penalty (e.g. a reduced chance to hit) so that this ability is not used all the time (another way to reduce it is to limit that special attack to once per battle or some other such anti-thematic nonsense). By simply allowing the player to use an ability on randomly determined occasions, you can get rid of the niggling balancing mods and, perhaps, even beef up the special attack so that it may provide a significant alteration to the battle. A third reason that I find a special attack die useful is that it can provide clear cut decisions for the game master. 

As an example of this, my special attack die is a six-sided die that actually has two active faces. One indicates primary special attack and the other indicates secondary. Most monsters (and characters) only have primary special attacks and the secondary face is ignored when it appears. Many monsters, however, have both. A crocodile, for example, rolls its victim in its locked jaws (if the regular attack die indicates a hit) when the special die indicates a primary attack, and it uses a tail sweep if the secondary side appears. This helps me to create flavourful battles without having the players concerned that I am picking on them by always using the monsters' special abilities. I am considering the inclusion of a tertiary face on the die, with only occasional monsters having such abilities. Giving characters secondary and tertiary abilities is tempting, but I find that it slows things down too much and reduces the excitement of using special abilities, since there are several characters attacking every round. In cases where there is only one monster, however, multiple chances of special attacks should work well.

Cons:
Perhaps the greatest feature of many games is that they give the players ownership of their decisions. If those choices are too obvious or mandated, then it is much less interesting. A player may feel frustrated that they can't use a special attack whenever they want to do so. Likewise, a game master might feel limited in their creativity. The way that I deal with this is in my role-playing system is to always allow special actions if the players really want to use them, but to only apply the typical limits if the die turns up blank (i.e. the special face removes penalties and stipulations). As far as board games go (such as the dungeon crawler that I mentioned earlier), players are much more willing to accept themeless balancing rules than they would in an RPG. In our dungeon crawler, however, we still try to maintain theme by suggesting that the special attacks are only applicable when the opportunities present themselves (which, it turns out, happens one out of every six rolls). 


Perhaps these machinations seem overbearing or unnecessarily complex for your game design. If that is the case, then ignore them. If, however, you find your players forgetting to use certain abilities, then give it a whirl. Please let me know how it works out for you either way.

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