Halceon

Making games, rarely finishing


That going thread about dice in RPGs has reminded me of the whole concept of pre-decision randomness and post-decision randomness. Cards are (in most cases) pre-decision. You have your random bit and then you apply your brain to make the best of what you have. In most games, dice are used as post-decision. You make your choices, move your pieces, declare actions and then see if they succeed.

In a broad sense, pre-decision leads to feeling like your choices mean something, but also like your hands are tied more often. While post-decision keeps your options open, with the tradeoff that your perfect tactics may be undone by bad rolls and then you might as well not have tried.

There are, of course, ways to do either while mitigating the unwanted effects. My favorite is probably guaranteed outcomes. Ok, so your game has combat and it involves rolling to hit or even rolling to damage. Cool, cool. How about on a "miss" it makes the following attack easier for everyone? Instead of doing 1d12 with your maul, maybe you can do 6+1d6 instead?

Anyway, spendable resources is my new favorite complicating factor.


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