art by Nika Benediktova
So.
Let's talk about representing accuracy in tabletop games.
Whenever a game is about the concept of shooting or hitting things, a need to properly represent the concept of seeing and hitting a target in an effective manner arises. Because these actions have to take into account random elements in the player's environment such as movement of the target, movement of the player, strength of the player's stance, turn of the wind and many, many other elements, it makes sense to represent those factors as a random chance. Specifically, hit chance.
Enter the most common method of representing hit chance: the dice roll. It's an initially expedient method of doing so. You just note a number that the player must roll under or over to achieve success and allow the player to roll the dice.
That said, this basic implementation is lacking as the concept doesn't take into account the attacker's ability to influence the different random factors involved in hitting an item. Instead it makes the attacker feel divorced from the action, as while all of their training, focus, and preparation is often times represented as a numerical addition (+1,+10 etc), their ability to adapt in the moment to poor circumstances doesn't fee quite as represented. Especially when the dice keep rolling rolling ones and twos when the user needs 10s and 15s
Well if this is a problem, how do we counter it? The answer (in my opinion) is to add agency to the action. In other words grant the player the ability to respond to the whims of the dice, or employ a randomization method that naturally grants player agency.
For instance, if we want to keep the dice as the primary means of hit resolution, we can grant the player the ability to increase or decrease their rolls by spending a limited resource after the roll has been made. The Fate System user a methodology akin to this, where players define traits before play that they can call upon to improve their roll chance. Throughout play, the DM is encouraged to grant player "fate points" whenever they act upon those traits in a way that enhances the story. When a player makes a roll they are unsatisfied with, they can spend a fate point to re-roll or re-write the situation such that they turn the negative into a neutral or advantageous situation. The players must deploy these points with care, as without them, they have to take whatever the dice give them. Thus the player feels more
responsible when the dice come up low, as they determine whether they have enough fate points to spend on the roll, and when they can spend them.
For a diceless hit chance resolution, consider using a deck of cards. In this scenario, players can build up a hand of strong numbers throughout play, which they deploy when needing to deal with different situations. If drawing and hand reconstruction are properly restricted, players will be forced to make hard decisions about when to deploy their "plus 14" and when a "plus 2 or plus 1" is better applied. This works particularly well if there is a mixture of successes made by playing over and under values.
Consider another type of chance resolution, in the form of a grab bag. In this scenario players can affect their random chance by adding success and failure tokens into the bag. If players are allowed to collect success tokens to add to the bag in case of high difficulty scenarios, or tokens to spend after a failure has been drawn to turn it into a success. This works best if the success and failure tokens have varying levels to them, so that failures are not so easily dispelled as to make them trivial.
In any of these cases, the idea is to grant the player more control over something that thematically suggests that they should have a non-trivial amount of control over it. When the player can expend effort to improve an action attempt, it feels like they have more agency in the play and promotes a more positive play experience. It also makes them feel less cheated when the randomizer keeps coming up low for them.
At least that's the theory. I highly encourage all you designers out there to explore this concept and see what it does for you. And if you've encountered these kinds of systems before, I'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments.
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