To see what I mean, let's look at the gradation of actions:
Nonactions
These are things like talking, walking across a room, or looking around for something obvious. Generally you should not have to roll to be able to do these activities. These are the sort of actions where you don't meet any sort of opposition or difficulty in accomplishing the task. In many system these are almost free actions. Talking usually is unless someone gets long winded, while movement is often treated as something additional to whatever your actual action is.Automatic Success
These are thing like someone crushing an egg in their hands, a Mage sensing vulgar magic, or digging a small hole over the course of week. While there is some possible difficulty to these actions, failure is an uninteresting and unlikely option.Note this is relative. A normal person might have to roll to lift a couch while Superman would not. These are the cases where the Game Master (GM) or Storyteller should just say the Player Character (PC) succeeds and move on with the action.
Simple Roll
Here we reach the simplest of actions requiring a roll. The specifics vary by game system but in the Storytelling System this is typically rolling a number of dice equal to Attribute + Skill with the goal to get a success on one or more dice. The difficulty of an action can be represented by adding or subtracting dice.The possible outcomes can be a Success, an Exceptional Successes (5 or more successes), Failure, or a Dramatic Failure. Dramatic Failures use to be the rare outcomes of cases where the dice pool was zero but with the GMC update players have the option to turn ordinary Failures into Dramatic Failures in exchange for experience.
I actually like this system a great deal verses simpler Pass/Fail systems or even the gradientation of results of Apocalypse World (AW) which has results of Failure, Soft Success, and Hard Success. It might have been the people I played that game with but AW's Failure felt like WoDs's Dramatic Failure while Soft Success was a bit worse than its Success. It felt a bit more like a spiral to doom, which is a style I don't enjoy in the long term.
Apart from the specifics of gradation, I like the idea of bribing PCs with experience to accept worse outcomes. The idea of having agency over one's failures is an appealing concept.
Contested Roll
A step up in complexity from the simple roll, here we have active opposition between two characters. This could be a quick foot chase, an arm wrestle, or a battle of wits. Typically in the Storyteller System, both players roll and compare results. I've always had issues with ties with this system as it isn't always clear who the defender is (and thus who should win the tie). I still don't have a good answer to this issue except perhaps to say the struggle continues another turn (or other reasonable period) and then have the characters' roll again.An interesting subset of this action type that I encountered in 7th Sea had both characters roll against a static difficulty. Then you compared who succeeded and who failed. If both fail then the struggle continues. Otherwise either the winner or if both succeed then the one with the higher result wins. I found it to be interesting. The additional complication is probably not worth the extra complexity unless you were to penalize one character or another for specifics of the situations. But there are simpler way to handle it.
Extended Roll
Here we get to the kernel of my dissatisfaction. Here we have an extended action, one which takes minutes, hours, or days to accomplish. The important feature here is that we need to know how long it takes to accomplish the task.In the Storytelling System, this is done by repeatedly rolling until a certain total number of successes is reached. Each roll represents a certain time increment.
While this initially seems fair, it can quickly become boring. For example, the group is under time pressure to defeat an evil spirit. So as their first step they research the history of the spirit, looking for weaknesses. In the context of the story this is the first part of the three part process of defeating the spirit. Once they know its weakness they still need to obtain it and then use it. The research time is important but might only fill up the first half or third of the time in-game.
So how to handle it? From a story perspective, you might leak more information with each success and also remind the PCs at each interval that the spirit is continuing to hurt or kill people. That helps but doesn't address the mechanics.
The key part, mechanically, is determining the margin of success. We need this for determining the logic of the story (Did they research all night? Are they now tired? Has the spirit killed again?), to help build tension (Will I make this roll so that the spirit can be stopped before it finds its seventh victim?) and to highlight the skill of the PCs (Dr. Occult masterfully researches the demon's weakness and happens to know where the first ingredient is).
The problem I think is the number of rolls. When you are making 2 or 3 rolls the time passes quickly. Add in some incremental information or events and it is not unlike a typical combat. But like a combat, particularly one without much range of action, it can get boring fast. After 6 or so rounds things begin to drag, like fighting an army of orcs in a tight hallway.
One system that seems to hold promise was in Fate, where the PC makes a single roll and uses the margin of success or failure to adjust the time scale it takes for the task to be completed. While I don't want to go to that extreme, something like that might be helpful.
For now, here is my proposed replacement for the current Storytelling System rules when dealing large numbers of necessary successes (twice or more the PC's total dice pool): take the normal time increment and multiply it by 3. Then have the PCs roll as normal. Now each roll will yield successes equal to the PCs total dice pool plus one for every success past the first. A failure yields successes equal to the pool minus 2. Dramatic Failures yield no successes towards the total. All other rules from the GMC update apply.
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