No dice: rules mechanics for non-random combat

I’m often having a go at dice in digital gamebooks. It's a legacy feature, like having section numbers displayed. Might as well have the reader rub out text with their thumb. (Hey, that might actually be a cool thing on an iPad. Not in e-gamebooks, though, thank you all the same.)

Assuming a gamebook has skill checks and combats (and that’s an assumption worth challenging) the question remains: if not dice then what?

In an earlier post I talked about the combat mechanic in Inkle’s digital adaptation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery books. This is similar to the system used in classic boardgame Apocalypse – and seeing as Steve is a hardcover boardgamer, and such a fan of Apocalypse (née The Warlord) that he published it in 1980, I wouldn’t mind betting that he came up with that.

The way it works in Apocalypse was that one territory attacks another. The attacker hides a number from 1 to 6 (not exceeding the number of units in the attacking territory) and the defender makes a guess. If the defender guesses the number right, the attacker loses that number of units from his territory. If the defender guesses wrong, he loses one unit from his territory and the attacker gains a reward (a segment of missile) for use later in the game. Also, if the defender’s territory is now vacant – that is, if he just removed his last unit there – the number the attacker selected is how many units he gets to move in and take the territory. A high number is good for holding the territory, but the defender knows that so it’s a will-he-won’t-he puzzle.

Nick Henfrey and I used a similar mechanic in our Lord of Light boardgame for Games Workshop. Oh, you don’t remember that one? That’s only because Workshop lost interest in it a few minutes after our first meeting. Nick and I didn’t get the memo, so we completed a rather good boardgame and if anyone would like to publish it (perhaps with Kirby concept art) the email address is right there in the sidebar.

Rather than waste a neat game mechanic, I recycled it as the Spiral of Gold, a pastime of the Magi in The Battlepits of Krarth. Here’s Grandmaster Klef explaining how it works:

The being spreads his hands over the surface of the table. As he draws them back, fourteen gleaming gold coins are revealed - seven in a line in front of him, seven on your side of the table. Beside each line of coins rests a six-sided die. All the coins are showing heads.

‘I am called Kief,’ says the mysterious being. ‘I am Grandmaster of this game, which the True Magi called the Spiral of Gold. Pay close attention as I explain it to you.

‘We play in Rounds, called Spirals. In the first Spiral I shall secretly select a number on my die, placing it under my hand with the number I have chosen uppermost. You do the same. Then we reveal and compare our chosen numbers. Suppose that I have the higher number. In this case you would lose some of your coins - equal to the difference between our two chosen numbers. I do not get the coins you lose; they just vanish. All right, so in our example you’ve lost some of your coins. I wouldn’t lose any, but the number I displayed on my die is the number of coins I have to flip over from heads to tails. So if I displayed a 4 and you displayed a 3, you’d lose one coin and I’d have to flip over four of my coins from heads to tails. 

‘We then start the next Spiral by recovering – that is, if either player has any coins showing tails, he can flip one of them over to heads again. Then we select numbers as before, and play proceeds until one player has no heads showing at the end of a Spiral. Then he’s lost.

‘There are three other rules you must remember. You cannot choose a number on your die that is equal to or greater than the number of heads you have showing. That means that we can each put any number from 1 to 6 on the first Spiral, since we start with seven coins, all heads up. But if at some later point in the game I had only five heads showing, I’d have to choose a number from 1 to 4. Secondly, if we both choose the same number then that Spiral is a draw and neither player loses anything. Lastly, when you have to lose a number of coins you must take them from the heads, not the tails, among the coins you have left.'

All of which goes to show you can have a combat system (or any conflicting skill resolution) without going to the fuss of having virtual dice rattle around on the screen of the phone, tablet or PC you’re running your digital gamebook on. If Jamie and I get around to doing digital versions of the Blood Sword books, that's how we'll work it.

Tin Man has a brand new shine

Lately this blog has been focussing more on print than digital. That's not because I've lost faith in ebooks, just that Fabled Lands LLP is in the process of bringing all our gamebook back catalogue back into print, so page sizes and printing costs have been occupying our attention.

And mostly I think that if an interactive story is going to work in digital form, it needs to be written for that medium. In my digital version of Frankenstein (available for Android now as well as iOS), the interactivity is designed in the form of a conversation with the narrator. The relationship would not be nearly so convincing in a print version, where you'd get to see his Trust and Empathy variables.

So it's interesting to see some revolutionary new changes being hinted at for Tin Man Games's forthcoming Fighting Fantasy titles. Rather than just convert the old text to digital form, Tin Man are giving the books a thorough overhaul (with the authors' blessing) to make them suitable for digital format. Among other things, this means getting rid of nostalgia features like the dice (hooray!) and making the books a lot more visual.

There's some speculation that this revamping is in response to Inkle's recent app-daptation of Steve Jackson's Sorcery, but I suspect the seeds of what Tin Man is doing now were planted earlier, in their visually rich Judge Dredd gamebook app.

My own gripe about dice is not in the clattery cubes themselves - bonkers as those are on the screen of a digital device. It's that when I'm reading an interactive story on iPad, I don't want to be bothered with the mental arithmetic of adding dice scores to combat skills and subtracting defence levels and then dividing by... Sure, the device can do all that for you, but it was never a great part of gamebooks, it was just a necessary evil. At any rate, it fitted with the pace of reading a print book, but feels like steam radio in the era of e-readers.

Putting more graphics into the apps also makes sense. After all, how many text adventure games are released these days? Unless framed within the structure of a novel, interactivity is always going to be more convincing in the context of immediacy that images and audio provide.

I'm also hoping Tin Man will do away with all the "turn to 273" legacy stuff. I should just tap on the option and be taken to the next section. Well, we'll see. It's a bold move, as I see they've already got a comment on the blog saying, "You changed something! How dare you!" (I'm still bracing myself for the snit-storm that'll come when diehards see that the new edition of The Lord of Shadow Keep now has artwork by Harry Clarke.)

The first of the new-style Gamebook Adventures is Appointment with F.E.A.R. and it's due to be released in October.

Does interactive fiction need randomness?

I've made no bones (ha ha) about not liking dice in digital gamebooks. I’m not talking here about randomness in general (we’ll get onto that) but yer actual spotted cubes. When I’m playing a print gamebook – or, as is far more likely, playing an RPG – I don’t find the action of rolling dice especially disruptive. It’s tolerable, anyway. But when the book is on a screen, interrupting the flow of the story to show some animated dice clattering around just strikes me as inflicting brutal and unnecessary harm to any sense of immersion.

This is a personal view, however. As a designer, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be dice. Some gamebook nostalgia buffs like having them, and if the implementation isn’t going to cost too much then why not offer the option? But it should be an option. Someone who has never played a print gamebook will, quite rightly, find the use of dice to make no sense whatsoever. It’s like having animated turning pages and rustling paper sounds. Only worse.

But if not dice – if we want to move onto a new generation of gamebooks without dice – what are our options? (And incidentally this is a good point to mention that the evolution of gamebooks is also the subject of a series of very interesting posts on the Mysterious Path blog.)

That opens up the whole question of randomness. In a face to face RPG, typically when I hit a foe with a sword I might do 2-12 points of damage or whatever. In a computer RPG, on the other hand, the amount of damage is usually fixed for a given weapon, opponent and combat manoeuvre. Here’s why. If I can see my lucky or unlucky dice roll on a tabletop, and feel (utterly unsuperstitious though I am) that I was in some way responsible for that roll, I can accept it. But if I get into the same fight in a CRPG and lose because lousy numbers are generated, I’m not going to keep playing. It’s the device that made the roll, not me. I want victory in a videogame to be about tactics, reaction speed and choice of weapon, not blind luck.

In a digital gamebook it’s not likely to come down to reaction speed, nor indeed to the simple stabbing at controller buttons that satisfies us in most videogames. How do we play to the strengths of the medium? One way is to reason that, reading a gamebook being a cerebral sort of activity, maybe the fights can have a more cunning rule mechanic. This is what Inkle and Steve Jackson (the UK one) have done in the Sorcery app. You pick an attack strength, so does the opponent. The higher number inflicts damage, but also fatigues the attacker so that he can’t put as high a number next round.

This fits with the sense you get when playing a digital gamebook that you are laying a story behind you as you go. In the case of Sorcery (or Frankenstein) that’s explicit in that the sections of text are stitched together. You could show that text to somebody else and they could read it as if it were the novelization of your adventure.

I like this because it’s how we perceive time. The future is fizzing with all these quantum possibilities, the past is fixed in one shape. But hold on. If we are indeed creating a novel-like experience as we play, doesn’t that beg the question of how much prominence should be given to fights and other tests of skills, whether randomly or strategically decided? I’ve blogged before about how fights are tricky in fiction. I can’t actually remember the last novel I read that had a fight in it, and I’m willing to bet that even in A Song of Fire and Ice you don’t get very many – and that they aren’t ever described blow by blow unless (a) a lot hangs on the outcome and (b) there’s something clever, dramatic and unexpected about how it plays out.

The thing is, how much fun is it to read, “You strike at the goblin, but he parries. He ripostes and you react too slowly. His sword lays open a long gash in your arm.” It doesn’t matter if, instead of generating this stuff procedurally, you have Jeanette Winterson writing it for you. It’s just not interesting. Which makes me suspect that, in the context of a digital gamebook, it isn’t interesting to play either.

Some will say at this point, “But I like picking my main weapon, my armour, deciding when to drink the healing potion, selecting a combat stance.” Then, honestly, you need to play The Witcher, which does all that stuff with a lot more excitement and eye candy than you’re going to get in a medium that is principally prose.

That’s not to say gamebooks have to drop the gameplay aspect. You can have “interesting choices” in stories. 007 games his showdown with Oddjob – much to the delight of my eight-year-old self. And do you know how Conan defeats the peerless swordsman Mikhal Oglu? Pure gameplay. The tactic is so surprising and brilliant, in fact, that Roy Thomas doesn’t even need to show the ensuing fight. There’s no randomness there, of course. The smart choice trumps all others.

But how much do we want the gameplay to be visible? If the Game of Thrones TV show had on-screen bars showing characters’ declining political influence stats, would that make us more engaged, or less? One of the reasons that role-playing isn’t more popular is that most people don’t have the kind of mind that can see “Strength 14” on a sheet and turn that into an intuitive feel for the character. Storytelling has rules, as anyone who has done improvised storytelling will know. It’s just that those rules are a lot more implicit, interesting and subtle than THAC0.

In short, if we want more people to read gamebooks, we need to de-geek the mechanics. Mostly that means hiding them altogether, as in Frankenstein, where I do have stats (Trust, Empathy, and so on) but the reader never gets to see them, only their effects. And, if you can’t see the stats being applied, there’s no point in randomness. It’s simply no longer relevant to creating an engrossing interactive story.

Thanks to Farrin N. Abbott of CopyCatFilms for the intertitle card.

Do gamebooks need dice?

You could start by asking why dice rolls were ever part of gamebooks in the first place. Actually, we need to go a step further back, because dice were not a feature of the first really popular gamebook series, Choose Your Own Adventure. So let’s rewind to the mid-1970s, and the Fantasy Trip solo series which is probably what rules-heavy gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy evolved from. The purpose of books like Death Test by Steve Jackson (the US one) seems to have been to help newbies get the hang of TFT if they didn’t have a group of fellow players. So the whole idea there is to replicate the experience of a face-to-face role-playing game, and dice are just part of that.

Okay, but why are there dice in role-playing games? Because RPGs grew out of tabletop wargaming. And why use dice there? Because sometimes the unexpected happens. Because sometimes the Athenians force the Spartans uphill. Sometimes you hear a click and it’s: “Misfire! Kill the son of a bitch.” (Which, incidentally, I would never have credited if I hadn’t played Avalon Hill’s Gunslinger.) Sometimes a level 1 civilian throws a roof tile and it kills the level 12 general.

I like my RPGs to have dice. Yet I prefer those game sessions where dice are never rolled. Paradox? Schizophrenia? No, it’s the possibility of dice that I think is essential. Much more than a means of showing that the unexpected can occur, and thus ramping up tension, dice are democratic. The umpire (GM if you must) can’t just say, “You’re taken prisoner,” because I can resist arrest, hide, grab a chandelier chain and swing over the guards’ heads – or try, at least. And it won’t be the autocratic authorial whim of the umpire that decides if I succeed or fail, it’ll be the dice, referenced against the skills listed on my character sheet. That’s what stops role-playing games from getting as arbitrary and unfair as the points system at Hogwarts. In the shared storytelling experience that is role-playing, dice are the court of appeal that stops one person from taking over the whole narrative.

Yes, but… in the case of a gamebook, there’s no question about who wears the authorial pants. I can’t just stick a pin in the map and say I’m sailing off to explore the uncharted wastes. I have to take the quest I’m given and stay on the rails that the author has provided. The only function of randomness here, it would seem, is to increase the sense of threat. That single orc or militiaman might kill me, especially if I’m already wounded from an earlier fight. Just have to grit my teeth, roll the dice and see how it turns out.

The risk here is that I might get unlucky and die, and that’s in nobody’s interest. From the gamebook author’s point of view, that makes a very unsatisfying and anti-dramatic story – I climbed the wizard’s tower, snuck past the spider-god, swiped the jewel of power, evaded the poisoned traps, but then got killed in an unlucky fight with a mugger on the way back to my inn. And I’m not happy because I now have to go back and start again – or ignore the bad dice rolls, which is equally unsatisfying as it breaks the spell of immersion. In that case I won, but only by cheating. Suddenly, the jewel of power is starting to look like paste.

Incidentally, notice that the big climactic fights in gamebooks are almost never left to the dice. There’s an item or clever tactic that you have to use. That’s because the author is aware that the flipside of an unlucky death – achieving victory by a sheer fluke – is equally unsatisfying. Think of the final showdown in movies like Galaxy Quest, Kung Fu Panda, or Jack the Giant Slayer. It’s never about a lucky roll.

In M A R Barker’s Adventures on Tekumel gamebooks, unlucky dice rolls rarely spell death. Usually it’s a fate worse than that (for the character), but something much more satisfying (for the player). In non-interactive stories, the perception of coincidence is often the jumping-off point for adventure. Bran Stark’s life might not have been nearly so interesting if he’d taken the stairs. When seat-of-the-pants role-playing gets into this territory, it is better - more thoroughly credible - than any other form of narrative, bar life itself.

But, unlike RPG umpires, gamebook authors can’t allow interesting offshoots from the central story to spawn indefinitely. That’s why we get the ultimate fail: the death paragraph. Not death by attrition, mind you. Be so careless as to let yourself to get down to one hit point, and you deserve to die from the puniest of mantraps. By death para, I mean the choice that will kill you even if you were in perfect health. And that is only put into a gamebook to block off a route the author didn’t want to have to write – so he or she gives you the illusion of choice, only to inflict the ultimate punishment (an authorial raspberry) when you take it.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at what place, if any, randomness has in the modern world of digital gamebooks.