Plus: A major problem with the current carousing format, IMHO, is the way saves work. It does make somewhat good sense that a higher level character might automatically avoid bad events (by rolling beneath his/her level), but this doesn't scale when more difficult events are attempted. And why should a dwarf or halfling have a better chance of a successful carouse than anyone else (because of saving throws)?
Minus: The wikis don't seem great at back-and-forth, but it might work.
Plus: The interactivity and choice looks like a lot of fun
Minus: The mystery of results may disappear. There is a lot of anticipation in wondering what will come of your full result in the current scheme. Maybe the DM can present options before the roll is made? (Perhaps this is how it is already done.)
Minus: Higher failure rate in new system, as Oban points out. It seems carousing has largely become a "benefit your character directly" instrument. We tend to carouse for spells, for defensive constructions, for sophisticated armor, etc. Failing a carouse for a spell really sucks.
Quen, you have the advantage of us here: You've actually played in that system. I feel like there are less drastic steps we could take:
- Keep current system, but the universal Save vs Carouse is 12
- Adopt a 2d6 roll, make 2 and 12 criticals, and have everything else incur loss or bonus relative to the roll
- etc.
… but it depends on what you want to change.
I interlope! The unsolved problems of White Sandbox carousing are thus:
- what modifiers do you apply to the 2d6 roll? In Apocalypse World, where this is stolen from, most characters have a +1 or +2 to most things, and there are only four abilities which have wider applicability. In old-school D&D many PCs have +0 or -1 ability score modifiers and lots of carousing comes down to Charisma.
- what is the relationship between spending and success? Is it necessary to make the amount spent variable, once we move away from a purely Rientsian joy-of-unpredictability carousing system (as we already have at the point that we let players choose what to do when carousing instead of just "go drinking and roll on this big-ass chart"?)
- is it necessary to reward big city carousing with a bigger spending-die type? My sense is that since carousing happens off-stage, the Rientsian logic of this - to go to the big city you have to make lots of wilderness encounter checks - is diluted by off-stage handwaving. Likewise the idea that in a big city you can get into more trouble is hard to adjucate.
Naked Samurai, yes in theory one presents the choices - usually "10+ you get what you want, 7-9 you choose which of these good things matter most for you to get and which potential bad things you're willing to accept, 6- a bad thing happens." Making the bad things explicit makes it more of a game - "hmm I'll choose not to do that based on a strategic analysis of consequences" - and suits indie-game design theory about transparency and the like. I don't think it's as important to us - I want to research a new prayer even if it gives me leprosy, and won't want to plant roses even if it's logically the better choice - and it's a step I often omit because it's more work to think of the range of possibilities if I don't need to. A goal might be to develop a standard repertoire of carousing moves so that they don't need to be invented each time. See Dungeon World for an example of what this would look like.
what modifiers do you apply to the 2d6 roll? In Apocalypse World, where this is stolen from, most characters have a +1 or +2 to most things, and there are only four abilities which have wider applicability. In old-school D&D many PCs have +0 or -1 ability score modifiers and lots of carousing comes down to Charisma.
Tweaking this a little bit: ability modifiers in Apocalypse World run from -2 to +2; an ability of -3 or +3 is rare but does occur. Since ability modifiers in B/X D&D run from -3 to +3, nothing will really break. Usually in Apocalypse World the ability to roll is obvious from the fiction-as-established: Cool, Hard, Sharp, Hot, or Weird. So you might be trying to sneak into the enemy camp, and there's a lot of back-and-forth about the sneaky things you're doing, and then ultimately you roll your Cool to get in.
In D&D the ability to roll would likely be equally obvious, except that there's none of that back-and-forth: the carousing roll comes as a bolt from the blue. So that confuses things a little bit, as the DM's zany narration ends up providing the fictional cues that determine what ability to roll, rather than it resulting from player input.
One option: player tells DM, "I want to carouse with my Strength to become the circus strongman." And the DM runs with that. If the player proposes something without much fictional justification: "I want to carouse with my Strength to balance the royal budget," the DM might veto the request or do something distasteful.
yes in theory one presents the choices - usually "10+ you get what you want, 7-9 you choose which of these good things matter most for you to get and which potential bad things you're willing to accept, 6- a bad thing happens."
This is the general format, but there's a lot of customization here. I'd be happy to elucidate if anyone wants to shoot me an e-mail.
I like the new White Box carousing rules (insofar as I understand them) because they help formalize a really mushy, freeform system, and because they promote some cool back-and-forth decision making wherein both the player and the DM share responsibility for the results of the carouse. I'd like to test it out with whichever players would like to be guinea pigs for the procedure.
Because I'm a slow study to this, and some other Red Box players have asked the same big question ("How does this work?"), I took the liberty of creating a page describing the system so far here: Carousing Mechanics. Quen, Tavis: Please help shape it up into a reference document? Please?
Ok, I've culled the more regularized moves that I could from the original whitebox thread. I think I'll pause here for feedback/suggestions/edits from others.
Some of those moves (particularly the ones I authored!) are poorly designed. I'll have a go at tweaking them later. In the meantime, perhaps someone could set up a page or thread wherein we propose, critique and heckle some new carousing moves?