Thread by @rdonoghue, Ok, gonna talk about a thing I've seen kicking about. It's a [...]

Ok, gonna talk about a thing I've seen kicking about. It's a disagreement, not a criticism, so I'm not tagging the inspiration, just because I think the sentiment was good, and I'm not trying to crap on it.

Also, this is an RPG thing, nothing heavy,

So, let's talk about one in a million chances. Imagine that I took several tweets to cite Pratchett on this, and we'll now skip ahead to their much more stupid application, especially in fiction.

If we have a fiction where a substance gives 1% of people super powers, but kills the other 99%, and our non super hero takes on while fighting the final villain, I think we all know what's going to happen, right?

If you don't know, the answer is some bullshit.

There's no actual tension there. No story goes "And then he died horribly, as you could reasonably expect" unless it's explicitly doing it to be contrary.

So why was that "rule" (because it is a rule, even in fiction) in place?

Probably as a limiter - because more super powers would break the setting or something similar. The purpose might have been to create tension, but if so, it failed pretty badly in that. Most setting rules are spackle over holes in the setting drywall.

That's not a criticism, btw. Good stories are artificial by their nature - there is not actually any natural order to how they unfold. Good storytellers just make us feel that way. That they use tricks to do this, is honorable and generally excellent.

But the point is, the 1% chance is largely really boring in fiction because either it's predictable, or it's violated in a way that undermines its own credibility. There are ways around it (usually focused on how that chance is improved), but they take work.

But what about at the table?

That changes the math, right? It's like gambling! We get the thrill and payoff from hitting a longshot, right?

Well.....No.

I mean, yes, there can be a gambling thrill to it, but it's a terrible structure.

To take the scenario of the book, and say "ok, you drink it, and if you roll a 00 on d100, you get powers! otherwise - death!"

That is not going to be much fun in play unless you're playing something like Paranoia.

Yes, it would probably be awesome to hit that 00. But you're probably going to roll a 63, die, be bored and feel cheated.

Now, the very reasonable objection to that is a defense of randomization and the emergent gameplay it drives. To be clear, I am not objecting to randomization in general, just to a very specific structure of it.

The other reasonable objection regards player agency. Sure, it's a dumb risk, but if it's the player's choice, shouldn't we support them? Are we not *obliged* to give them the chance to throw their life away in an act of desperate heroism?

I am *profoundly* sympathetic to this concern, as I am the player most likely to insist on driving the ship with the unstable warp core into the belly of the enemy destroyer. Grand sacrifice and risk are *great*.

But they are also more than a roll.

And here's the thing - because we say 1% chance, we think that means 1% on the dice, because we forget that humans are very bad at math when their emotions are involved.

What's more, we know from past patterns that it *is* thrilling to get just the right result at just the right time and get a great payoff. So, clearly, I'm full of crap.

So I'm going to let you in on a secret.

Your brain works backwards.

That amazing, one in a million, super cool critical that you rolled that one time that you still tell stories about?

It became significant *because you rolled it*.

That is to say, if you proceed in the course of regular play without putting false one in a million chances on the table, you will instead find that the one in a million results will come to you, simply because the dice are rolled enough to guarantee it.

The trick is in interpretation - in the GM rolling with the results in a way to make it *feel* like you hit the lotto. They are, effectively, placing your bets after you roll, then presenting you with your winnings.

Which is to say: it can feel tempting to introduce high-risk, high reward abilities into play. Say, for example, a powerful spell that has a 95% chance of killing you after you cast it, because it will be a cool moment. But that is riskier than it looks.

if the ability was "you cast this and you WILL DIE"? Awesome. Clear expectations. Obvious trade off. Carry on.

If the tradeoff is "you will almost certainly die?" The simple reality is that our brains are pretty bad at coming to grips with that.

Either you will just ignore the chance of survival (in which case, why is it there?") or, more likely, you will overestimate your chances of success.

Because a lifetime of fiction has TRAINED us to do this.

There's a substantial sidebar to be had here which I will sum up as this: the other way to do this is to let players cheat. Give them currency of some sort that they can spend so the 1% chance is a guaranteed (if costly) success. This works too, but it's a whole other thing

To be clear, I am not saying not to give your players dangerous things, nor am i saying that they should not be facing the consequences of risks. What I *am* saying is that high risk, low probability *feels* like it's a shortcut to high octane excitement, but it's simply not.

Oh, additional addendum: If you're doing this for chargen? Like, for a funnel, or some other construct that makes the consequences of failure low-impact?

Go ahead and kill em 99% of the time. No problem.

Ok, so that said, what can you do instead?

The default answer is, of course, to amortize the risk. Spread it out over a large number of rolls.

This is, essentially, the D&D model. With a few exceptions, most individual rolls in D&D are fairly low stakes, with real difficulty determined by their frequency.

This works especially well to support fishing for moments of glory, because the dice will eventually provide.

Alternately, take a little bit more time to think about your consequences and how they impact. The problem with Death as a consequence is not that it's dire, it's that it's BORING. In most cases, Death means "Guess I'll play on my phone for the next few hours".

There are exceptions, of course. Paranoia leaps to mind. But in most games, even if the table is generous with replacement, Death means downtime. And that's before we get into issues like player investment and plots.

And, again, to be clear I'm not saying to take death off the table. It has a place. But be careful about being excessively cavalier about it, and be aware of its *actual* consequences.

Also, death is for chumps.

Seriously, if death is the worst consequence you can put in front of your players, then it's time to start thinking about *playable* consequence, because those can be so much nastier.

This is probably a megathread of its own, but I'll boil it down to this - risks don't need to be binary, and they don't need to end play.

All they need to do is make things *worse*.

And here's a peek behind the curtain.

If you can keep play going, it *will* eventually pay off.

Posit a system where you roll a d10. On a 1-9, things get worse. On a 10, you triumph spectacularly. Think about what the cadence of play is going to be like with that.

What's going to happen is that things will get worse and worse and worse and worse and then BAM SUPER CATHARTIC, INCREDIBLY SATISFYING 10 HOLY CRUD WE'RE AWESOME!!!

The real trick then, is to keep up the escalation and tension until the payoff comes.

This is hard. Not going to pretend otherwise. But if you're aware that this is the challenge - to keep play moving forward while escalating - it's a lot easier than doing it by accident.

Ok, gotta go nerf fight my kid. This may have made no sense at all to some folks, and I hope it's because you have already got such a natural mastery of tension that this seems unnecessary. But it's stuff I had to learn, so I share.

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