I have bought one superhero game in my 30+ years of gaming – Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. It’s just not a genre I’ve been into in the past, but it was the darling RPG of the year and everyone was raving about it. I jumped on the bandwagon, encouraged by the narrative game play that the game promised. And it delivered to some extent. The problem that I began to notice as we played more and more of it, was that so much of the game’s time was spent by players building their dice pools.
This was the first time I really stepped back and thought about the two distinct parts of a role-playing game. The “game” part (mechanics) and the “role-playing” part (story).
We all know this, but I had always considered games in terms of how “crunchy” they were and MHRP was not a “complex” game so would not be termed crunchy but players still were spending a lot of time building their dice pools and then deciphering them. I was frustrated by how much time we were spending on these mechanics. I guess because MHRP is supposed to be more narrative-focused the time spent on the “game” part of it was more noticeable than in past RPGs.
A short while later, I tried out Dungeon World (my first exposure to the Apocalypse Engine game mechanics). Here was a game system which consists pretty much of “roll 2d6 and if you roll 7-9, you succeed with consequences, on 10+ you fully succeed and on a 6 or less, you fail and the GM makes a move.”
I’m oversimplifying, but essentially, that’s it. The game system is so simple that in game play I was astonished at how quickly, but with a great deal of depth, the game moved. Rolls were quick, but results could be complex within the story. Not within the game. We spent our time on how the story developed, not pulling together which dice to roll and then interpreting the results.
There is a strong push in RPGs toward more narrative games and here were two “narrative” games, but in one, we spent a lot of time out of the story, focused on the mechanics and in the other we spent most of our time in the story and only a short time on the mechanics.
And this led to my new analysis of games, not based on “crunch”, but on how much time is spent on the “game” and how much is spent on “role-playing.” It’s not that I want to get rid of dice mechanics, in fact my gaming groups and I both enjoy rolling dice and want some crunch to build unique characters with, but we don’t want to spend more time that we have to while playing on the game mechanics so that we can focus instead on the role-playing and the story development.
Blades in the Dark Playtest
This leads me to last night’s playtest of Blades in the Dark. It’s being kickstarted right now, I’m backing it and was excited to try out, as it promises to be a very narrative game.
We had a good time, created characters and played through two missions. We loved the setting and the set-up of a group of thieves in an industrial fantasy setting.
Unfortunately though, it uses a dice pool mechanic and that killed it for all of us. By the end of the night, we were sick of having to pull together another dice pool. It felt like we would start to develop the story, telling what we were doing and then were dropped out of the immersion as we started the discussion around how many dice could be used.
Even the “devil’s bargain” mechanic, which granted you an extra die in return for giving up something or some ill effect and sounded exciting and fun, was tiring. Every time a roll was to be made, the GM had to come up with some offer to the players. There are suggestions, which helps, but unlike in an Apocalypse Engine game where “success with consequences” only happens on a 7-9, this is required on every roll, as players are always (justifiably) curious about what they can do to get an extra die.
I’m very disappointed as I was very excited about this game and was even thinking of putting this into the regular game rotation, but no one wants to continue using this game system. I might use the setting, as it’s quite good, but we’re left cold by the dice pool mechanic.
I’m curious if this is just us or whether other gamers have developed the same analysis of game vs role-playing in their RPGs?
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
There is part of me that feels guilty that the Cortex system has never really worked for me in any of the incarnations of it that I’ve played but Marvel gave me the most problems. There was a disconnect between the mechanics (Particularly the SFX) and what that meant for the action that I could never quite wrap my head around.
When I GM it is pretty much always supers and I will admit up front that I am something of a High/Low GM. Whenever someone wants to do something not explicitly handled by the rules, I have them roll. If they roll high then I usually let them get away with it. Sometime I make them pay me a point of whatever the system is using for bribe the GM.
That’s too bad to hear about Blades in the Dark. I used to love games that had dice pools, such as Shadowrun.
Interestingly, I haven’t played a game with dice pools for quite some time, I wonder how they would stand up for me now.
It might be worth trying a dice pool game again to see if you have the same experience? I have to admit, in thinking back over the games I’ve played, I can’t recall many that were dice pool games, so perhaps it’s just my own experience bias?