Seventy Percent
I’ve noticed something in RPGs that I call the “70% rule.” In almost every game, players have around a 70% chance to succeed at what they try, at least within their character’s defining cluster of skills. That value may vary a bit from game to game, higher for games of swashbuckling heroism, lower for gritty games where players need to hustle for every edge, but still the norm is somewhere between 65% and 80%, no matter how powerful the characters are in conception.
(The only exception I’ve ever seen—and I’ve looked—is Paranoia, a black comedy where most of the fun comes from the PCs’ dramatic failures. Even candidly silly games, like Toon, Teenagers from Outer Space, and Tales from the Floating Vagabond, embrace dramatic failure but still gravitate towards the 70% rule.)
This seems a little odd on the face of it: some genres portray hypercompetent protagonists like superheroes, angelic avatars, and elite special forces, entities who stride, god-like, among ordinary mortals. Nonetheless all these superhuman piles of invincibility, with 120% skill ranks and the strength to lift an aircraft carrier, end up at the same 70% chance of success that low-powered characters enjoy. The 70% rule is a product of dramatic necessity, a happy medium between a desire to accomplish (and expect to accomplish) vicariously heroic deeds and the need to maintain dramatic tension through the possibility of failure.
The absolute necessity that PCs fail from time to time for the good of the story drives both GMs and game designers to some awkward choices. Some examples:
1. Arbitrary immunity. Mercenaries who employ armor-piercing bullets soon discover that alien invaders wear special suits that work even against AP rounds. Champions characters with mental powers will inevitably inhabit a universe where supervillains have 20 points of ego defense.
2. Scaling challenges. When the PCs gain an experience level and all the benefits that go with it, the challenges simply rise by the same amount. Congratulations, Dungeons & Dragons player! You’ve reached level 3. You get 50% more hit points and wield +1 magical weapons. You will now face monsters that do 50% more damage and wear +1 magical armor.
3. Implausible penalties (or bonuses). It’s late afternoon, so the light is mediocre; apply -2. (Isn’t light generally mediocre?) The cop hates trouble, so he’ll respond to players at -5. (Don’t cops generally hate trouble?) The evil wizard shelled out extra money for really, really good locks on his disposable thugs’ footlockers; pick the locks at -8. Yes, GURPS, I’m looking at you.
4. Nobody is ordinary. The mayor of this sleepy little hamlet is actually a retired Green Beret who once saved the governor’s life, so he can call in a favor or two if he has to, including a National Guard strike. Oh, and his drinking buddy is a sympathetic Mossad agent in deep cover. Most of the amateur supplements, and a lot of the official ones, for Over the Edge give everybody 4d traits, despite the original rules’ insistence that Joe Normal probably only has a 3d trait, and that in something not generally useful for overcoming PCs. Half the people in Al Amarja can fight as well as a professional soldier.
5. Alternately, only the people who matter are ordinary, and everyone else sucks. Angels and demons from In Nomine are physically, mentally, and spiritually superior to the average human. But, because the 70% rule applies to PC angels and demons, ordinary humans have to be scaled down. Way down. To the point where professors have a 40% chance to answer questions in their own field, and professional athletes are lucky to catch a ball at practice, much less in a televised game.
To some extent, implausibilities like these are only reasonable, because they reflect the same reality of adventure fiction as movies, books, television, and comics. All of these are filled with inexplicably fragile mooks and inexplicably overpowered lead villains. But by a similar token, that kind of deck stacking is just as obvious, and just as dissatisfying, in a game as it is in the movies, books, television, and comics. When imperial stormtroopers, elite warriors of the galactic empire cloned from ultimate warrior Jando Fett, fire about a hundred bazillion shots down a narrow corridor at Luke and Leia, and they all miss, we roll our eyes. When every other bad guy in Metropolis gets his hands on a chunk of kryptonite, it gets old. When Johnny Quest socks a bad guy in the chin, who then topples backward onto two more bad guys, thus taking out three thugs with one pre-adolescent punch and allowing Johnny to escape, it’s stupid. When 70% of hacking attempts break military-grade security in the space of fifteen seconds, I reach for the remote.
Some people don’t mind, as long as it’s good, popcorn-munching fun. For others, strict adherence to the 70% rule draws the curtains too far back, exposing the fiction for what it is. GMs consequently need to be aware of their players’ sensitivity to the 70% rule. If they start griping about implausibilities like those above, it’s time to employ the 70% solution: sneak in a few more automatic successes. “You’re the greatest con artist in the western hemisphere. Of course he falls for it. Don’t bother rolling” “Now that your suspicions are aroused, the deliberate errors in accounting are obvious: Wallace must have skimmed 300 grand before he vanished.” “You carve your way through the goblins, who turn to flee. A score or more are dead by the time you chase them to the edge of the woods before you hear the unearthly wailing from within. A few of the surviving goblins cast wicked grins of expectation over their shoulders as they disappear into the underbrush.”