Rolling for Roleplaying: the Virtual Roll
Player: “… and after enumerating the logistical problems, I finish up by explaining that if the King invades now, he’s just repeating the same mistakes that doomed Badon IV when he marched into these very lands two hundred years ago, a fatal error that brought his glorious reign to an ignominous end.”
GM: “Ooooh nicely done! Now roll your Diplomacy!”
Player: “… I roll a 3.”
You’ve seen it happen. A player says something really interesting, really moving in character when trying to use a social skill, but cannot back it up with dice to save their life.
The first urge as GM is just to say “well forget the numbers, that sounded good to me, it works.” Good call, but the downside is that then you are just ignoring character stats entirely, which penalizes players who maybe aren’t so eloquent or pithy but still built characters who are supposed to be charming masters of discourse.
A better solution would be to combine roleplaying and character stats, taking the best of both worlds. How would you do that? How about assigning a virtual roll based on how good the roleplaying was, then apply character abilities to that virtual roll just like normal? Let roleplaying replace the dice instead of having the dice replace roleplaying.
I’ll use d20 as a specific example, but the concept should work for any system that uses dice to resolve social interactions.
The Virtual Roll
When a character roleplays a social action that would normally require a roll, instead of the player rolling a die the GM assigns the result of the die roll based on the roleplaying (“your speech was good enough that we’ll say you rolled a 15”). If you want some consensus democracy you can let the whole group decide what the virtual roll should be, or even just let the player assign their own score — it all depends on what kind of group you have (insert social contract here).
The default is a 10 (aka taking 10) even if you don’t roleplay at all or have nothing interesting to say. This is important because the goal is _not_ to penalize people who aren’t up for roleplaying. You should only assign a number below 10 when the player uses an argument that is particularly bad for some reason (like threatening the king, or unintentionally citing a bunch of mistakes he made recently and is still sore about).
Assign a number that seems right to you. A 15 is nicely done, and a 20 is reserved for really impressive roleplaying (naturally). You shouldn’t have a hard time coming up with the virtual roll, because you’re already used to thinking in terms of these scores — years of gaming have given you a keen sense of how good it would be to roll an 18, for example.
Now that you’ve determined the virtual roll, just proceed to add skill ranks, ability modifiers, etc to the roll and resolve the results as you normally would.
Let’s take a classic diplomatic example:
A PC knight tries to convince a weary king to join the war and save the besieged city. The character has a moderate Diplomacy score, but the player is making really good arguments, bringing in the King’s past, the plight of the people, rah rah rah.
After some consideration everyone agrees the knight did a very good job, and the group decides on a virtual roll of 16. He has a Diplomacy +6, so he gets a total of 22. Not bad.
To make things interesting let’s say another player is against the idea, and her character is trying to point out all the flaws in the plan, how it will mire the country in an unwinnable war, etc. Her priest has very sharp social skills, but the player is just saying “err, I tell him it’s a bad idea. It will go badly. Really badly.”
The priest doesn’t throw in any roleplaying, so she just takes 10, but her Diplomacy is +11 so she gets a 21. Or since she isn’t roleplaying, you could just have her roll as normal.
An interesting side effect is that you even though you aren’t penalizing people who don’t roleplay, you may encourage people who normally don’t roleplay much to do it a little bit more because of the small incentives. A player can say nothing and get a 10, but maybe if he says just a little bit, tries to get in character just a smidge, he could get an 11 or 12 pretty easily.
Is this enough to encourage some players to roleplay a bit more? Maybe, maybe not.
Why not just use bonuses?
But wait, you ask, why not just give a bonus for good roleplaying? Isn’t assigning a 16 about the same as giving a +6 bonus? No! A bonus changes the possible range of success (i.e. in this case you can a get a maximum 26 instead of a maximum 20 before factoring in your stats), whereas assigning a roll doesn’t change the range at all since you still can’t “roll” higher than a 20. And let’s face it, no matter what kind of bonus you assign the dice are still pretty random.
But what if you like the random? Well in lots of cases there is still randomness on the NPC side of the roll. If the PC rogue is just trying to deceive the NPC king, you are still rolling for the king’s ability to sense deception. There are also whacky things you can by making part of the die random and part assigned (using a d10 instead of a d20 and calling the other half the assigned score part) but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student.
Cinematic d20
And then there’s the big question: why just social skills? What about applying a virtual roll to other things the players do? Sure, if the player works out a cunning plan to build his fortress where the marshes run up to the fork in the river to make it hard to storm, assign him a high virtual roll for his War Architect skill. Attentive readers may even now be considering how to use this idea to make decision-driven Spot checks without giving up on having some characters more perceptive than others.
How far can you take it? Try running a bar room brawl where you assign virtual attack rolls based on how interestingly players describe kicking a stool to trip someone up or swinging from a chandelier to tackle a ruffian. Or assign virtual saving throw rolls based on clever descriptions of exactly how the players avoid the fiery dragon breath, or magic rolls based on florid descriptions of mystical mumbo jumbo. You can even mix it up and let some people roll, some people roleplay, as you prefer.
Can you really transform D&D into a cinematic story game just by changing this one rule? Try it and see.
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I recently came up with the idea that the dice do not actually decide IF it happens, but HOW it happens – in the big picture that is.
Few GMs would set up a fight where success depends mainly on the rolls – success is implied, and the rolls decide the cost. poor decisions by the players might lead to situations that only lucky players will survive, but generally I think nobody likes group wipeout due to some really low rolls.
That’s why I think a single die roll deciding about the king’s invasion plans is a bad idea in the first place – unless this decision is irrelevant anyway because either the GM already decided about war and peace (if the character convinced the king not to invade, the story would introduce the next escalation step making invasion unavoidable) or the group will move on and not be concerned with local warfare.
You also wouldn’t make a single die roll “fighting skill rank +D20 against enemy DC” to resolve a fight, because otherwise you also had to think a lot about handling low rolls against weak opponents,
More generally, I think that “social skills” in RPG systems, strange as it might sound, were initially intended to be balanced with fighting skills.
The guy with the charisma would get the group better prices and rewards, which in turn made better equipment available…gather information would make combats easier by revealing information about the enemies…some fights and some tolls could be evaded by convincing/threatening, and so on.
This might be especially true fur published adventures and video games, but I think this in turn means that “social skills” as defined in the core rules are a poor guideline for ingame social interaction beyond as mentionned above:
Either you play some open world where above invasion might take place or not, and the players can influence the course of the world – but then I’d say there’s nothing wrong about it if such campaigns are better suited for eloquent players that like ingame commitment. In this case, you might even remove or rename “charisma” as a stat.
Or you play in a world that is essentially a frame for presenting a story interlaced with some sequence of challenges, i.e. mainly combats, and outside challenges, you spend time and effort preparing for those challenges. I it doesn’t really matter if you convince the king not to invade, I see no problem in random rolls (if you explain failure) – life just isn’t fair, and the best arguments might prove futile, so I guess the main point is to avoid failure being boring (“the king just does not listen to you…uh for no special reason”).
I know this is ancient news by now, but I’m only just catching up on your blog, and while I’ve resisted the urge to comment before, I find I can’t now, as this is a hot-button issue for me (social rules vs evaluating described social interaction).
Put simply, while I understand that it seems like a shame not to reward a ten minute impassioned speech, targeted carefully to the proper audience and delivered with the passion of a skilled actor by the player, the more subjectively you assess that, the less worthwhile social stats and skills become.
The system, as you describe it here, has a couple of logical conclusions to me –
#1) There is a natural party Face in any gaming group. No matter what, no matter how much another player designs for social interaction, there is a player who, given that same character, would be better at social situations. If he isn’t the primary social character, it will at best mean the party is worse off in social situations, and at worst mean that another player who took a chance and made social interaction their “thing” can be outshone by this player despite having +8 bonuses over them. Given the same build, anyone can be the front line fighter, or the rogue, or the magic user, and do about equally well. The Face, on the other hand, is a +10 better social character given the same build as the most shy/least socially adept player.
#2) As someone who is not good at social interaction IRL, there is a strong disincentive for me to create a character with social skills, much less the party’s social character. I’ve had “I’ll adjust your roll based on how you play” and “I’ll try to adjust my reaction with your bonuses” games before, and it doesn’t spur me to new heights – it tells me that my character will never be as effective because he’s holding the anchor of my slow-thinking and social faux-pas.
As I see it, the biggest problem is that we’re using a player’s actual skill at convincing as a metric for determing a character’s skill at the same thing. When you say “I run up and viciously slash the orc, letting my momentum carry me past him and widen the wound”, you’re using words to describe nonverbal action, and we roll dice, and everyone is generally happy. Sometimes you get a bonus for verbally describing a physical action well. When you say “I verbally maneuver him into a corner, and leave the impression that if he fails to agree, he’s a coward”, you’re encouraged to “play it out”, even though no DM would ever hand a player a stick and ask them to illustrate the running orc slash in the same medium as it’s supposed to be happening.
That, to me, is the main concern. Not much else in (tabletop) RPGs is limited by your own skill, because we accept the mechanics, but it’s hard to be more social in-character if you aren’t good at it OOC, and easy to be more social IC if you’re good at it OOC.
I’m big, and I have some training in swordfighting – but I can’t use my physical strength to make up for having a weak character with a “virtual roll” based on that skill, while more glib players can almost always use their gift of gab to make up for dumping Charisma and not investing in social skills.
Again, if the goal is to avoid the awkwardness of accepting “I convince him to agree”, then I suppose penalizing less socially adept players will do that – they’ll stop putting themselves in that situation when they realize more glib players can outdo them. But I don’t know if that’s your goal.
For me, it’s far easier to look at your example, and have it go:
“… I roll a 3.”
“You give your impassioned speech – Unfortunately, just as you seem to have the king convinced, an ACTUAL CHICKEN walks past the window, clucking. His Majesty is thoroughly convinced the gods are mocking his moment of doubt as cowardice, and charges out the door to make invasion plans.”
As others have mentioned, bring it in line with Explaining failure. You can’t “see” a social action any more or less than a physical one – just as you can invent a cause for failure in a surefire physical action, you can certainly invent one in social situations as well. Even if you accept that the players are describing the CONTENT of a speech 100%, they’re not describing their facial expressions, they probably haven’t explicitly ruled out a rumbling stomach, etc, etc. A social interaction is, trust me, no less fraught with random happenstance than a combat situation.
How about this — let them roll multiple dice. So, if the performance was quite good, they get to roll 2d20 and take the highest result. This keeps things within the same range, as does your method (avoiding the +6 = 26 possibility). It also tends to make the lower end of results much less likely while raising the average less. Finally, it has diminishing returns. Rolling 2d20 is MUCH better than rolling 1d20, but rolling 3d20 isn’t nearly the large jump from 2d20 that the first bonus die was.
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Re: #6
Interestingly I would be likely to do the exact opposite. If i know I am good at giving motivating speeches then build a character where that is his thing. If I had roleplaying negotiations with the king then build a taciturn fighter. ie put there points where I can take advantage of them, I know I am going to get good rolls on my diplomacy checks so I’d best have good diplomacy skill to back it up. I know I will always make poor rolls well I guess my character won’t be doing much diplomacy.
Perhaps that is my perceived problem with the suggestion it encourages niche play where players play characters with similar skills to themselves.
This is why I assign Hero Points. So that when the roll comes up short, the player can use his hero point to add to or reroll the tragedy.
The solution you provide really favours the outgoing (sometimes loudmouth), dramatic, veteran player and penalizes the shyer, newbie players. I mean this solution may work in your campaign but it may not in mine. You really have to know your players. Because if I’m playing in your campaign and I know that I’m really good at arguing, then maybe I wouldn’t throw any skill points into my character’s Diplomacy score, counting on the virtual rolls rule to get me through. And then that gives me more skill points for Tumble or whatever.
Even without the Hero Point, I would be more inclined to say that the character had some spinach in his teeth while the player was making the otherwise rather convincing argument. Or quite simply, the target is just too distracted or fed up with the characters when the discussion happens.
Hi there,
I’ve got a related solution in our Beast Hunters game, for exactly the same reason: it promotes cool, creative narrative input. In Beast Hunters, there’s another step involved. It works like this:
1) The Player proposes a maneuver and provides the description and roleplay of it
2) The GM offers a certain result (in this system, a number of AP), depending on the perceived quality of the input. The offer is calculated on a baseline of the character traits.
3) The Player either accepts the result or rolls the dice, adding in character traits.
The reason No. 3) is in there is so that, if the player disagrees about the result or wants to achieve something higher and risk getting a lower result, they can always still go to dice.
But the virtual roll is a neat quick fix for an existing system. I’d still allow for a roll of the player wants to take the risk :)
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I’ve been doing this for years. Why? Because it the basis for Amber Diceless Roleplay. The rules for Amber pretty much state the character with the higher stat will always win, unless the other character changes the rules. Example of changing the rules cover things like throwing dirt in the other persons eyes, using inside knowledge to influence negotiations, or revealling disturbing or upsetting information to your opponent seconds before getting involved in a psychic duel. All of these come down to roleplaying, and the poor GM has to resolve how significant a bonus they infer. As a long time user of this system I would suggest adding the following three comments:
1) All your players should get great breaks occassionally, and if one player hasn’t had any good breaks recently you should be looking for a chance to reward him when he puts in the effort and tries to roleplay, which leads into (2)
2) Roleplaying ability varies from player to player. You shouldn’t be judging against some arbitrary measure, but against the players own ability. 10 should be your benchmark for no effort. 20 you should be your benchmark for something truely exceptional for this player, his best performance to date. To continue getting 20s your player would have to continually improve, but the interesting thing is, they do. A player who’s a poor roleplayer or a nervous roleplayer would have to do a lot less to get that 20, but for him or her its a big thing. They’ve put themselves out on a limb and risked going that bit further (than they’ve gone before). Reward this and next time they’ll go that little further.
3) Sometimes things just don’t work. Sometimes it just isnt your day and lthough you put in the effort it comes out wrong. You say or do something that in real life would be a blunder. I still reward the effort in these cases. Anything where the player puts in some roleplaying effort should be rewarded more fully than just saying ‘ I talk her out of it.” or “I persuade him to give us it.”
“I wonder if you comments here Learn to Explain Failure might be an alternative way of approaching it.”
I think it all depends how (pardon the phrase) random the conversation is. If it’s an unknown shopkeep, randomness and unexpected failure work fine — there could be all sorts of things that haven’t been considered that could come up, just as you say. We (the GM) don’t really know a lot about that shopkeep or how he might react.
The problem is more cases where the GM _knows_ the NPC. The more you know about the NPCs, their personality, the situation, the more predictable the reaction is for the GM (which is a good thing). Given all the background about the king, the war, and current events, the GM can be fairly certain what fits and what doesn’t. Random events can happen (“the king takes your friendliness for smugness — off with his head!”) but if random events overshadow thinking about the situation, it doesn’t reward smart roleplaying or close attention to the details of the game.
A physical action always has more inherent randomness, because we (the players & GM) can’t see how it’s really happening in the game world, because the players are only summarizing their character actions, not LARPing and the physical game world is imaginary (sure you run to cut the rope, but is there a puddle on the floor?). First-person roleplaying is the only part of gaming that “really” happens at the table — you do know exactly what was said [yes amusingly I noticed that my examples are summaries, not dialog].
Interesting stuff.
I guess it comes down to an intuitive thing, a feeling that this time it’s appropriate to roll, but in another circumstance a virtual roll is more fitting. Different tools for different jobs.
Another interesting point is that some games argue against rolling at all unless it’s important — the Dogs in the Vineyard logic of “say yes or roll.” Generally that makes a lot of sense to me, but without thinking about it the virtual roll went in the opposite direction — roll to resolve the trivial or random if want, but let the roleplaying quantify the big central stuff.
I like this idea, in principle, I hate it when the dice determine the scene. But I don’t really like the ways of measuring roleplaying numerically.
I probably could, but I worry when the roleplaying is not so good if giving low numbers might be discouraging (always giving higher than 10 is one solution). I also am not keen to poll the party. My experience in the past has been that it can have similar results, if people feel their performance was great, but others don’t it could produce some ill feelings.
I wonder if you comments here
Learn to Explain Failure
might be an alternative way of approaching it. The rationale is great, the role playing superb, but the die roll is low. Something must be wrong! The king must be getting bad advice (from his Wormtongue) or the guard has been warned that Jedis have magical powers of persuasion , so she is on extra special alert.
You could even role play the scene one of unusual changes of mind.
“For a moment the dealer seems ready to make the trade, then he pauses.. he glances at the colors on your shield, and pulls his coin purse back out of reach. ‘No’ he says, ‘I won’t fall for it this time.’
Of course, then as GM you need to do some scrambling to make that make sense. But it could be an opportunity to make the scene come alive in surprising and fortuitous ways.
Also, highlighting failures (of the dice) will ultimately force some roleplaying/character generation decisions. I can’t leave my diplomatic skills untouched and expect my natural acting ability to carry the day. If I am playing an uncharismatic character, statistically that will average out in play.
The circumstance bonus can come into play for extraordinary roleplaying, and might it be necessary to achieve the sort of conversions you desire (using diplomacy to sway the loyal court to your side)[assuming a big number is needed].