Game design is about choice. Giving the players multiple choices, each of which seems the Best Choice.
Take Feats for example. There are some Feats that you’ll never take. Just never. You look at them in comparison with other Feats and the choice is obvious. Alternately, in the Bungie game HALO, the Master Chief (that’s you) can only carry 2 weapons at a time. And at every point during that game, you wish you could carry three. All the enemies respond differently to different weapons. Human weapons work best on The Flood, Covenant weapons work best on the Covenant, and you never EVER want to ditch the pistol… unless there’s a rocket launcher. Or the shotgun. And DAMMIT! I need three hands!!!
Game design is about choice. But you can put too many choices in front of the player, resulting in frustration. Frustration is not fun.
Choice/Frustration. Difficult balance. But when you find it, you’ve got it. Great game design.
“Going first” has long been a source of frustration for me. The Dice Gods hate me. No shit, I mean they hate me. Must be a family curse or something because when I go to visit my folks in Vegas, my dad don’t play craps, he plays blackjack. He loses at craps. He wins at blackjack.
And so, whenever it is time to “roll initiative,” I always come in last. I roll the lowest possible result. It doesn’t matter how many choices I made in designing my character, the dice betray me. Every time.
And so, how do we make going first less about arbitrary randomness and more about choice? How’s this.
When a fight scene begins, everyone decides how many dice they’re going to give up to go first. The number of dice you pick is the number of dice you lose from your next action. The person who gives up the most dice goes first, followed by the person who gives up the next highest number of dice, and so on down the line. Ties go simultaneously.
For example: Albert, Bob, Cindy and Dave enter a fight scene. Albert gives up 3 dice, Bob gives up 2, Cindy gives up 3, and Dave gives up no dice. Because Albert and Cindy both gave up the most amount of dice, they get to go first, losing 3 dice from their next action. Because Bob gave up 2 dice, he goes second. Then, Dave goes last because he gave up no dice at all.
You want to go first? It’s going to cost you accuracy. Speed costs accuracy. (I got this idea a long time ago when someone asked me how I’d do a wild west rpg and Unforgiven was on my mind.)
A few kickers.
First, the bidding of dice is secret. Nobody knows how many dice folks are giving up to go first. (If players want to metagame and decide among themselves who should give up how many dice, I approve. It’s called “having a plan.”) Dice are revealed at once.
Second kicker. Giving up dice at the beginning of a fight scene means you have to think about what you’re going to do. You have to think, “Ok. I want to attack that guy over there with my sword. I’ll roll nine dice. I can give up three of them for a speed.” Of course, no plan ever survives direct contact with the enemy, so what you end up doing will, more than likely, not be what you intended to do. Giving up dice blind at the beginning of a fight means you’re betting on getting to do what you wanted. You counted on attacking, but end up doing something else… but you’ve still got to lose the same number of dice.
Choices. That’s what game design is about. Making players measure choices. And forcing them to improvise when plans go wrong.