DCC across the 2 Axes of Abstraction

Murkdice wrote about what games are about based on what they have rules for and what they don't have rules for. It's an interesting ludological article, though I'm somewhat skeptical of the suggestion that anyone seriously claims 5e isn't about combat specifically because most of its rules are for combat, though. There were some cool four-sector charts in there so I wanted to do one for DCC, and in the process I had a few thoughts of my own about what the axes of abstraction actually tell us.

Go check out the original article. There's more charts!

It's a bit more cluttered than Murkdice's examples but the point of that post wasn't to deep dive into any one game, it was to demonstrate an overall point about what games tell us they are about.

When you illustrate the point like this, it becomes clear that the things the game is about are the things it expects to become complex. This is true across the entire coded-free spectrum. DCC goes to great lengths to tell you about all the things it wants you to do but doesn't have specific rules for, so it's really a perfect demonstration of this.

DCC is about unpredictable magic because it has a lot of rules and charts to follow (making it complex), and DCC is about Questing For It because it leaves the quest-and-reward process open and free (making it complex). You can entirely throw away the axis of codedness and find that the number of rules a game has about a particular thing actually has no correlation to what the game is about.

It turns out a game is actually about what you spend time focusing on while you play it.

A d6 Skill System: 7-in-6 odds

This is a skill system based on old school x-in-6 checks which allows for effectively endless scaling. Obviously, 7-in-6 odds doesn't make much sense, but you're here reading this now so I owe you an explanation. It'll make sense soon.

This is intended for the sort of skills a Thief uses. Climb Sheer Surfaces sort of things - abilities that can't necessarily be attempted by everyone, or if they can, the skilled character gets an extra chance to do it beyond the normal level. I listed several more examples under the Specialist.

The original Thief skills table, a la Greyhawk (1975).

The basic idea here is to have a skill rating be a number from 1 to 6 that represents your odds of success. There are two problems* with this. The first is that 6-in-6 makes failure impossible, and the second is that 83.3% is hugely different from 100% so to stop it there feels like there is a lot more room for progression.

*Whether or not these are problems is subjective.

The twist is to not cap progression, but to soft-cap it instead. Rolling a 6 is always a failure, so with a skill of 6 you still only have 5-in-6 odds, but your leftover 1 rolls over to another die, so you need to fail 5-in-6 then 1-in-6 to truly fail. Thus, at a skill rating of 7, 2 points roll over. At skill 8, 3 points roll over, and so on. By skill rating 11, you hit 6 on your second die and carry the 1 again.

So that's how we do "7-in-6". 5-in-6, carry 2.

Skill Level	d6 Odds	Percentile Equiv.
1	1 in 6	17%
2	2 in 6	33%
3	3 in 6	50%
4	4 in 6	67%
5	5 in 6	83%
6	5 in 6 + 1 in 6	86%
7	5 in 6 + 2 in 6	89%
8	5 in 6 + 3 in 6	92%
9	5 in 6 + 4 in 6	94%
10	5 in 6 + 5 in 6	97%
11	5 in 6 + 5 in 6 + 1 in 6	98%

This works out neatly because, in essence, every 5th skill rating you get one extra attempt and the probabilities become more granular. Though it's absolutely worth noting here that a 5-in-6 is already high-level (equivalent in probability to a Master Thief!), so getting multiple roll-overs is ultra-high-level. Over 10, we're talking about less-than-halves of a percent. It scales infinitely but never hits 100%, though a skill rating of 25 means you need to roll a Yahtzee with all sixes in order to fail (that's 1 in 7,776).

Another really cool thing about this is that it maintains the existence of suspenseful moments at higher levels. A 5-in-6 doesn't feel suspenseful because you know you'll probably win. If anything, it falls flat when you fail an expected success. On the flip side, in this system, if you fail your first roll you now feel suspense on the second roll because this time it feels like you really can fail. In fact, for the first few levels above 5, the odds are really high that you're going to fail the second roll, but you might just scrape through - that brings back some of the suspense from early levels (albeit less frequently, which makes it more memorable when it happens).

Notably, skill rating 14 is the point where your failure rate is approximately 1% (actually 1-in-108). Each 5th skill point is a notable breakpoint where your failure rate halves between levels.

The elephant in the room here is that I haven't defined the actual progression rate for the skills. Oddly, I don't think this actually matters as much, but using the table above you can very easily convert odds up to 98% to their nearest equivalent. For my own games, I'm yet to nail down the exact progression I want.

Hexes with Depth: Overcomplicating the hexcrawl

Today's post is about something I tried that didn't work. It was a cool idea in theory, but it didn't produce the results I wanted.

My basic idea was this: add a second dimension to hexcrawl terrain types. Rather than simply having plains, hills, forest, deserts, swamps and mountains you now have differing intensities of each. Forests become sparse forests, medium forests and dense forests.

I was hoping this would provide a bunch of extra descriptive variety while traversing the hexmap without adding any real noodly details to keep track of. One end of the scale is the most featureless, least difficult to traverse version of a terrain type and the other end of the scale is busy, intense, and difficult. You have three times as many types of hex but still only have to think about the same number of types of hex you were already using.

The problem ended up being that there were three times as many types of hex.

You see, I like a hexcrawl where the players can get lost. If you aren't actually exploring, aren't figuring things out on the fly then there isn't really much point in doing a hexcrawl. Being lost is a part of the experience that I want to create. Traversal itself being a challenge and the possibility of ending up somewhere totally unexpected are awesome and fun.

With a lot of different types of hex, it became too easy to pinpoint one's exact location on the map simply based on the visible surroundings. There was no being lost in the woods, because there are some sparse woods this way and some dense woods this way. There's now only one hex anywhere in the vicinity you could reasonably be in. It became completely trivial, which made the whole process feel like a waste of time.

I ended up throwing the whole idea out in favour of fairly bland hexes with spread-out points of interest to navigate between.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is somewhere between "keep it simple" and "make sure you playtest". If you don't, it's easy to get lost.