Asymmetrical Resolution Systems

I’ve been wondering a lot, while working on my VDS-base hack (one that actually stemmed from What You Fight For, my first complete VDS hack), about how in most games resolution for different actions is the same.

For discussion purposes, I’ll take ICRPG as a base, but the same is true for VDS and a bunch of other games. I will be using the “base” forms of these actions, and before anything I want to state these are not a flaw of these systems.

Let’s say I want to attack with a sword, whoever my character is. Roll d20 + Attribute, meet or beat the target, roll Effort.

Now I want to heal someone with a spell, drawn from the faith I have in some divine power. Roll d20 + Attribute, meet or beat the target, roll Effort.

Or I want to cast a Fireball, having studied magic formulas for years on end. Roll d20 + Attribute, meet or beat the target, roll Effort.

I find this… mostly OK, to be honest. I understand the design purpose behind it. You only have to teach the game once and the player can then pick up most any character and play it instantly. This is great, right?

But at the same time, I find myself seeking out different mechanical resolutions for these actions. How exactly can “hoping for a small miracle” resolve identically, mechanically, to “manipulating the forces of the cosmos to conjure a spell”?

So I’ve been thinking about asymmetrical resolution - that is, different things resolving in different ways.

Leaving aside ICRPG, let’s take a dice pool approach, similar to VDS Skills. Get you dice, roll them, get N or more dice above a certain value.

But what if some things resolved by getting just one die on the value, against a die rolled by the GM on the spot? What if some others resolved with the player being able to literally fiddle with the dice, “fudging them inside the rules” one number up or down to get the results they want, instead of simply rolling them and hoping they’re high?

Would this be a turn-off for players?
Would the probabilistic inequality between different resolutions be a problem?
I know it’s a lengthy and somewhat weird topic, but I’ve debated it with myself so far and need outside input on this. I appreciate y’all who reply to discuss this.

TL;DR: Would it be cool or a turn-off if a system presented different ways of resolving things that, in other systems, are resolved similarly?

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This is a very interesting topic, and I don’t know that I have any strong feelings either way, but I’ll begin with this premise:

We use dice to determine outcomes in games. Generally, that means some fictional, narrative question is presented, a cross-roads in the story, and we use the dice to decide how that question will be resolved. Will this fireball succeed? Will my healing work? Will I avoid the boulder? Will my thrust or slash cut the goblin? In some way, the dice mechanic used to resolve these questions doesn’t matter, as long as it’s easy to remember and use. I generally fall in the camp that more complexity is bad, as a focus on mechanics over story beats takes the player out of that great fictional head space. So, to that end, I want the dice rolling to be so simple and streamlined that it literally exists on a back channel in my brain, and more of my brain is focused on the story beats, threats, and outcomes to those threats.

Of course, this doesn’t have to be all rolling with dice either. In Ghost Mountain, the gambler draws cards from a deck against the DM, while other characters roll dice. In its simplest form, there’s still a check to see if success or failure occurs. So, there, you see two different resolution mechanics working in the same game, each with a slightly different feel. And, it works.

So, does it matter if the dice mechanic is different for each character and/or each roll is tailored narratively to each character? I don’t think it does. The key to me is whether you can skin it in such a way that the resolution mechanics are simple and easy to apply. Maybe you create a system where everyone rolls a different type of die depending on character class. That would be wild, maybe more mental lift on the DM, but each player would know his or her own mechanic (thieves roll D4, fighters roll D6, or something like that).

But, at the end of the day, my personal preference would probably be to stick with certainty and uniformity (again, because I don’t want mechanics to be the star of the show; I want them to fade into the background, so I can focus on the story and fun). I also would want this uniformity as a DM, just so my poor brain would know what is happening at every moment. Beyond that, it probably would also help other players cheer on their friends, if everyone at the table is speaking the same mechanical language, so to speak. That being said, it absolutely can work (e.g., see Ghost Mountain).

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For me, I think it all depends on the design goal. As Alex pointed out, various games do have different mechanics for different scenarios/situations and they work (Ghost Mountain, Savage Worlds, Mazes, EZD6, etc etc). So that’s at least evidence that it’s not a total turn-off, otherwise folks wouldn’t play those games. Thus, if we know it can be done effectively, the next logical question is: when should it be done? And my answer is: whenever it better accomplishes the design goal.

I view all mechanics as implementations of a design goal (implicit or explicit). For example, a design goal of Deadlands (Savage Worlds weird west setting) is to make the player feel as if they’re gambling with demons in exchange for magic power. The way they chose to implement that if by using a deck of poker cards to literally play poker with a demonic power. It’s super thematic and accomplishes the design goal well, imo, which is why it works even though it’s very different from any other mechanic in the game.

So to answer your question more directly/personally, I’ve played several games where there were different mechanical subsystems, and so long as they reinforced a design goal of the game, it was not a turn-off in the slightest (and in many cases, enhanced the game).

Awesome question, thanks for posting!

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One other thing I’ll add: one other form of asymmetric mechanics that I very much enjoy is between PC and GM. In this case, the PCs have a unified, consistent mechanic, while the GM has a different set of systems. Great examples include Dragonbane (at least where “monsters” are concerned) and The One Ring, where NPC stats look totally different than PCs. And there I assume the design goals were to make monster types more dangerous/dynamic and to ease GM burden, respectively. But again, I’d maintain that they’re so enjoyable because they reinforce the design goals. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I apologize for the late reply!

I can totally see your point. We see many systems add complexity to mechanics for complexity’s sake, without bringing benefit of fun or novelty to the game.

The way I see asymmetrical resolution being used is more in the vein of Ghost Mountain’s cards - to give character to a facet of the game that, to convey the fantasy being created at the table, can be different, without interfering with the flow of the story.

Simplicity definitely should be a design goal (it’s quite hard to get people to play a game if they can’t understand the rules!), but to me flavor is the star of the show. If one can make asymmetrical resolution simple and flavorful, that’s gold right there. That’s what I’m chasing.

Reading on what you and paul commented, fortunately I’m not that far off the deep end. My intent is to make things all characters can do uniform, and have their unique bits be the ones with the different rolls.

And @paul, from the get go, my aim is to make things as easy for the GM as possible. Having to manage all the knobs of running the NPCs and the world along with your players running their characters isn’t easy, so rules-wise I want the GM to just cruise through, definitely not needing to go in as deep mechanically as their players.

Thanks a bunch to you both for the replies!

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