(01-29-2017, 06:21 AM)Nebbs Wrote: I will roll if they must, but often the outcome is odd, like the old lady beats up the knight... "live by the dice, die by the dice", and once you start using them it leads down the whole dice/character-sheet mechanics, which would cover the OP's gap in rolls as well as hundreds of other mechanics. Though the Fate-14 stuff looks like a nice compromise for a character sheet and I must try that.
The question of outlandish results comes up quite a bit when discussing the use of dice. It's most common in pure RNG systems that are nothing more than /random, high-roll wins situations, but it can happen even in systems that have character sheets delineating specific abilities.
There are a number of ways to handle the unexpected, none of which have much to do with any particular system and more to do with how the dice are interpreted:
- Incorporate the circumstances and environment to explain why, in this instance, the unlikely victory happened. Not only is this more interesting than combat on a flat battlefield, but it means that the defeat of the more experienced character isn't because they were necessarily less competent than normal, but because something happened that neither party expected which gave the weaker combatant the edge.
- Use a fail-forward approach to describing bad rolls, in which a character succeeds at a task, but in so doing has some unexpected complication that makes the circumstances worse despite the success.
- Include some sort of meta-mechanic that characters can use to improve their rolls automatically based on their core competencies. Fate-14 does this with Fate Points, but that's only one system among many.
- Related to the above, take less of a strictly realistic simulation-style approach to the interpretation of the rolls and adopt a more narrative approach: In most circumstances, the old lady would be easily bested by the knight, but this knight is the one that killed her son, and she knows it, driving her to fight well beyond her capabilities.
Verad Bellveil's Profile | The Case of the Ransacked Rug | Verad's Fate Sheet
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
