| 6 |
| CHA |
| 5 |
[Diplomacy] You roll a 5 (required 9). Failure.
You try to ask the seadogs why they need a ship, but their short-tempered leader seems uninterested in having a conversation.
Grey seadog: "Quiet! Boom, knock 'em out!"
Ring-tailed seadog: "Nighty-night!"
The last thing you remember is blinding smoke engulfing the boat, your legs feeling weak, and your eyes, heavy...
You wake up to the seemingly distant noise of a metallic door. Your joints are a bit sore from sleeping on the cold dirt floor, and it takes you a moment to shake off the grogginess, but you feel otherwise unharmed.
While the rest of your party stirs awake, you take a look around, and find yourself in what seems to be a dungeon. You see verdant moss growing on the cobblestone walls, and piles of hay strewn about the room. Tarnished bars guard the only door and a small window on the opposite side, overlooking the sea.
Apple Basket: "Everypony alright?"
You call out that you are fine, but when time passes with no reply from Moonflower, you turn to meet her big, teary eyes.
Moonflower: "My hat..."
You quickly realize that all of your equipment has gone missing, with the exception of your sidereal bag. In an attempt to cheer the young bat pony up, you pull her into a big hug, but alas, it is cold comfort to her now capless pink mane.
Apple Basket: "Land's sake, those creatures are the unfriendliest bunch I've ever met. Where do you reckon they took us?"
Before you can make a guess, a slamming door echoes through the hallway, followed by the sound of something heavy hitting a few stairs, then being dragged along the ground. A few seconds later, the brown seadog from earlier appears in front of your cell, lazily carrying a wooden bench behind her.
She slowly takes a seat on it, facing you, and begins to watch silently through the bars, likely standing guard. Or sitting guard, as it were.
Enter a comment
and tell her that we’ll get the hat back.
we have to travel all the way from Hoofington to Yggdrasil again and we would also leave the boat, Moonflower’s hat and some other stuff behind. So we should only use that option if worst comes to worst.
"I want to try to talk this out.
- Ok, make a Charisma check.
- Ouch, 5.
- They knock you out, take all your stuff, and put you in jail."
And we still have most of our stuff.
Using this event as a standard, what happens if we try to break free and fail our check? We get killed? Tied up and sold into slavery? And if we succeed this one check, conversely, does that mean we beat everyone up and get free?
As it was already mentioned, I cannot afford to drag encounters across dozens of posts anymore. Instead, I've decided to increase the average length of updates, making commands more consequential than ever before, and allowing the story to continue progressing at a fair pace.
In the case of battles, commands will no longer affect a single action, such as the swing of a weapon. Instead it may determine the adopted strategy, such as going on the offensive, or attempting diplomacy, where the roll for success then affects the overall outcome. That's the theory, anyway!
As for energy and hunger, they are hidden values used to add a simple layer of authenticity to the characters. They prevent players from adopting typical video game behaviour, such as not sleeping for a week, or drinking dozens of potions at once. Having double the energy means your character can do a lot more each day than the average creature before getting tired.
Ultimately, my objective as the quest master is not to defeat the player; I'm here to tell a story. I might throw you a lemon every once in a while, but it's up to you to decide whether you'll bite into the sourness, or use it to make lemonade! ... Or attempt to flirt with it.
As always, thanks for the feedback, and may luck be on your side!
Thank you for providing a detailed answer. This event did leave me with a sour taste, as it still sounds pretty abrupt and arbitrary to me, but that certainly won’t keep me from continuing to follow Trailblazer’s adventures with interest!
Now, I never claimed to be a good storyteller (what with half of the story being decided by dice rolls), but I think a little adversity can help make players more involved. After all, if nothing bad ever happened, what choices would you get to make? Don't worry, though — knowing Trailblazer, I'm sure we'll be back to making best friends in no time!
So all in all, with all of that combined + the accelerated resolution due to the weekly schedule, it makes things seem all the more arbitrary, since not only is the situation at the mercy of the d20, but failure (or success) can mean pretty much anything from “Not much has changed, you’re good” to “Resounding failure/success.”
I hope I don't simply sound salty or that I'm looking down on all your work. It's just a feeling I've had for a long time with D20Pony, and I've wondered several times why there's not a more detailed system, with variable difficulties and degrees of failure/success (for example), as opposed to the players just suggesting whatever and letting Celestia take the wheel.
d20 Pony is an ever-expanding universe where players get to choose what to do next. These choices are not limited to a predetermined list, and so, they cannot be predicted by the quest master. On a technical level, this means that only content that has been part of the quest so far currently exists within the database. Nothing is designed in advance.
With that in mind, in order make actions or encounters story-friendly (i.e. no gear checks, level gating, or other such tropes), I have chosen a difficulty system that would not require any form of balance, thus eliminating the risk of having to revise old content. This system affects the weight of the outcome, rather than its chance of success. In other words, failing an easy roll may be of little consequence, and succeeding a difficult roll may not guarantee perfection.
Yes, this does mean that in two different situations, "You roll a 10 (required 10). Success!" can mean two different things. And yes, it is going to feel very arbitrary when that happens. But, at the end of the day, quantifying the difficulty of any given action is inevitably arbitrary, so the result is all the same.
(On a side note, most actions require a roll of 10 or higher because Trailblazer's base attribute scores are all 10s as to maximize freedom in terms of equipment and customization. Experienced characters can earn passive abilities that increase these scores during related actions.)
I hope this clears up some of the confusion, and remember that success is a journey, not a destination!
This is confirmed by the fact that most of the items we’ve accumulated have seen little to no use, mostly gathering dust in the Sidereal Bag unless there somehow happens to be circumstances where they can be used.
With that in mind, wouldn’t it be simpler to run it as a system-less CYOA, with you dictating what happens depending on the players’ ideas and your inspiration? Why use a system at all if it’s just a smoke screen?
In the end, it feels less like an adventure, and more like us bumbling through whatever happens (usually with lewd purposes in mind), and you making up events based on a liberal amount of pure chance.
Again, I’m not saying “Your story is bad and you should feel bad!”, but the whole D20 system seems like a lot of frills for little effect.
As the quest master, the point of the roll for success is to complement the player's command with an outcome, rather than letting me entirely decide whether the action succeeds or fails.
Know that I never scale difficulty in a way that makes a command or its outcome trivial. Even if the result seems unexpected, it still takes both the action and its roll for success into consideration. And before I perform the roll for success, I always come up with a different idea for each of the possible outcomes of the selected command, as it is important to me that illusion of choice does not exist.
With that said, some actions may prove more effective than others in certain situations. This concept was hinted at during Temples & Titans 2016-06-19, in which flirting with a trio of tendrils did not end well, despite a critical success. Or it ended very well, depending on your perspective! Either way, the action itself was nevertheless successful.
And certainly, while all of this may seem superfluous from a reader's perspective (due to most of the process being hidden), it still dictates that the vast majority of what I write be based on player input. Every little thing we do is likely to have an effect sometime in the future, one way or another.
Take the alchemist's random quests in Amblerta, for example. They didn't just get us bits, but also lead us to a night with Tonsoria, a free boat, and an additional party member!
I believe I have said my piece and that taking the argument further would be rehashing the same topics, so I sincerely thank you for taking the time to humor me and to provide detailed answers to my queries and complaints. I duly, honestly appreciate it!
And as I said, I will of course keep following and contributing to Trailblazer’s adventures!
Thanks for reading, and I'll be looking forward to more commands!
Pretty sure this one is just the left dog from last week.