That Which Governs Least, Governs Best
I came across a copy of Nemesis today, Greg Stolze’s adaptation of the classic Call of Cthulhu RPG to the “one roll engine” (ORE) mechanic he developed originally for a superhero game. I’m not in the market for a horror game, but I’m always interested in new rule mechanics, so I read the salient parts of the rules.
The basic intent is to produce two axes of variation from one roll of a set of (ten-sided) dice—in this case, the highest number rolled on at least two dice and the quantity matching that number. Singletons are ignored, and if you get no matches at all, you fail. So if you roll five dice and get 1, 2, 4, 4, 8, the final result is “two 4s.” Rolling 3, 3, 3, 9, 9 gets you “two 9s.” Rolling 2, 4, 5, 7, 10 is “nothing.” From a single roll, you get one number ranging from 1 to 10 (the “height”), and another ranging from 2 to n, where n is the number of dice (the “width”).
I found the potential for this dual result intriguing, but didn’t immediately understand what uses it could be put to, so I read on. Unfortunately, the examples provided look like Stolze didn’t really know what to do with it, either. As a default, he presumes the height is the measure of success, while the width determines the time it takes to get that result: an occult researcher with a pair of 10s would find a lot of information after a week’s work, while a set of five 2s would find a vague clue right away. That makes sense. Other ideas, not so much, especially when the activity doesn’t really produce two degrees of success. If the occult investigator above needed to find the information before some evil cult did its thing that night, speed is important, but if the investigator is operating at his leisure, the extra effort of rolling lots of dice at once and counting the individual results and trying to find something meaningful to do with the width is wasted. If you dodge a bullet—or fail to—it hardly matters whether you do it with a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second to spare, or whether you look really cool while doing so. Confusingly, if speed is the point of the exercise—a foot race, for example, or trying to snatch up the gun lying on the floor between you and your foe—then the width is the real measure of success.
Like me, Stolze is an incurable rules tinker, perpetually looking for better ways to simulate the adventure environment, or at least novel ones. He is particularly attached to dice. Some of his ideas include the hunch (set a roll aside for your next use, good or bad, simulating your character’s sense that something is about to go right or wrong), the flip-flop (reversing percentile dice), the matched roll (magnifying the result, good or bad, when the digits of a percentile roll match), simultaneously using a positive and a negative die, and the ORE system described above.
I just wish his ideas worked better at the table. Dice and die mechanics, and even mechanics generally, are widely considered a necessary evil in role-playing games. Overly involved mechanics can become a distraction from the narrative structure which is the whole point of role-playing games. Players can get so involved with applying complicated rules, or accumulating bonuses, or trading plot cards, or separating the 1s from the 6s in a fistful of dice that they pay more attention to numbers than to what those numbers mean. Some players don’t mind such distractions, but most of us do. Stolze’s creative dice conventions produce a little more information for a lot more fiddling. A straight sum, compared to a target number, usually is all the variation players need.
Suppose the occult investigator were rolling percentiles, as in the original Call of Cthulhu game. If he needs to roll between 1 and 30 to find a clue, while a roll between 31 and 100 is a failure, then a 2 would mean he finds a really good clue, or with a lot of time to spare, according to the needs of the plot. A 28 would mean finding just enough information to move forward, or finding it with mere minutes to spare—no time to pick up that shotgun at home before heading to the graveyard. You don’t get two entirely different scales of success, but usually one is enough to fill in the gaps, with a lot less hassle. Like the bullet-dodging example, usually all you need to know is whether the action worked or not; there’s no need to say, “You dodged the bullet! Uh… and, uh… you look really cool doing it!” Or “… and you suddenly remembered where you left your car keys, too!”
Friends who know my tastes in RPGs know I love Greg to death, but I love him for his plot hooks, the really twisted people and situations I can spring on my players for a visceral kick. The hobby is aging, and we’ve got dice rules that work. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. At this point, the solution to whatever shortcomings dice have as story-telling tools can only come from a complete replacement by another mechanic, as Stolze does with a token-trading system of plot control in his lowbrow comedic “…In Spaaaace!”
That mechanic is brilliant, and deserves more attention than it’s getting. But that’s a story for another day.