Game Ideas Un limited: Auspicious

  Some nights I sit down to play and the first roll of the dice is bad.  Then I'll roll another bad roll, and another--and at that point I figure I'm doomed, it's going to be a bad night.

  I wish I had the opposite experience more often.  I know players who do, who get on a roll as they say and just keep coming up with good numbers.  That's an experience I don't usually share.

  This is almost certainly another example of that confirmation of superstition we discussed a while back in Numerology:  our own tendency to notice that which confirms our beliefs and expectations and to ignore that which does not.  I have had nights on which after a bad start the dice warmed up and everything went extremely well; I've had other nights on which an auspicious beginning turned into a nightmarish end.

  Auspicious--that's what we call it when something good or bad happens which we, usually retrospectively, identify as portending what is to come.  The auspics, the portents, the omens, all words for the same idea, tell us that things are going to be good, or bad, based on something little at the beginning.  Games aren't really like that.  The odds of rolling 45 or better on a hundred sided die are going to be the same every time you roll it, and although there will be quirks here and there, over the long haul those runs of luck will even out into fifty six successes for every hundred rolls.  Gamer superstition aside, three bad rolls in a row do not warn of a bad night, and three good rolls do not set a pattern.

  What, though, if they did?

  This was the idea that came to me.  People do believe in luck, and they believe in omens, portents, auspics, all the subtle signs that tell which way that luck is going to go.  Could you design a game in which that actually was true?

  This is how I would do it.  Every time you rolled the dice for a check, success would give you a bonus--one point on a percentile system, a fraction of a point on anything less.  Every time you rolled a failure, a penalty would be assessed in the same amount.  Note how this works.  Let's suppose you have a 50% chance of success.  After three successes in a row, you would have a 53% chance of success at the same roll.  Your early successes tip the balance; the more successes you have, the more likely you are to succeed.

  I'm not, I should specify, talking about short-term skill improvement.  I mean that if you successfully cross the narrow bridge, you're more likely to hit the dragon.  This bonus applies to everything you do, and is earned from everything you do.  The same is true for the penalty.  If you missed the shot on the troll, your odds of leaping across the chasm to escape are that much less.  Bad luck, in this instance, really does snowball; good luck similarly builds on itself.

  You would need a reset button at some point.  My personal preference would be that everything gets cleared to zero when the character spends the night asleep in his own bed (or similar safe zone).  That should prevent someone from building an infallible bonus and keeping it forever, while allowing bad luck streaks to continue for an entire adventure segment if desired.

  What intrigues me is the choices players would make were they aware of this adjustment.

  At first, everyone would play it safe--do things for which you have to roll, but your chance of success is strong, so that you're likely to build up some good luck.  People who get streaks of bad luck right at the start will make comments like, "I should have stayed in bed; today just isn't my day"--and they will be right.  As the bonus builds, people would take more chances; one or two failures against a lot of successes isn't going to shake the world any.

  What I really expect, though, is that the player who has been on a long lucky streak and built up a substantial bonus may take incredible risks, attempting things at which no one could imagine succeeding, because his bonus is high enough that he's turned no chance at all to worth the risk.  This could create particularly colorful games, as the heroes say they feel lucky and make the impossible jump or the incredible shot or the amazing escape.  Luck really is on their side--they have built up a luck bonus from all those successful rolls that they've had already, and relied on it to do the remarkable.

  How would you justify it?  The easy way would simply be to say that the auspics are true, that luck really does exist, and it's determined by the rolls.  A less magical way would be to suggest that success builds confidence in the character, such that he believes he can do things and dares to try with high expectations.  Either way, success creates success, and failure creates failure, and it may feel more realistic than you might expect.

  It would be interesting, instead, to turn the entire system on its head--to reward failure with bonuses and punish successes with penalties.  This would have the effect of making people's luck run out, and conversely of leading to dramatic upturns.  I'm less certain how workable it is, though, particularly as it would have the tendency to be self-cancelling:  the more you succeed, the less chance you have to continue succeeding, but the more you fail, the more likely you are to succeed next time.  That might be a positive feature, as it would tend to cause significant reversals of fortune during play.  On the other hand, it would also cause all chances of success at everything to shift to fifty/fifty ultimately, regardless of where they began.  After a couple hours of play, the best and worst characters would both be in the middle on most rolls.  So this idea would require a bit more tweaking to make it work right.

  In my column Faith and Gaming:  Justice I suggested that a referee could create a world in which justice was encouraged by giving incremental bonuses for constructive deeds and incremental penalties for harmful ones.  In game design you can give bonuses for whatever you want to encourage.  There is something inherently logical about encouraging the belief in portents in a fantasy game, or even in a slightly fantastic magical modern one, and a system like this might just do the trick smoothly.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.