New Year’s Resolution Mechanic: Taking Your Time

This is a joke for everyone except Warren to get

Prismatic Wasteland has issued a challenge to come up with a new mechanic for basic task resolution in RPGs. While I appreciate crossovers, ping pong posting, and pretty much anything that promotes active blogging, I also must state that I find this whole premise downright disgusting, and take great personal offense to it.

So anyway here's my submission to the challenge. It's not a good one. Overthinking simple stuff is rarely fruitful for a pea-brain like me.

This post is in four parts. First, I have to rant for a bit about theoretical bullshit for context. Second, I finally explain the rule. Third, I talk a bit about what inspired it and what I like about it. Fourth, I have an alternative to my rule that's much less fleshed out.

Dice rolls and time

Many (most?) RPGs have some words about when and why you roll dice. There are some notable exceptions, but the vast majority of them use the same general rationale. My preferred way of phrasing it (since I find that many others tend to have a couple blind spots) is:

 When you attempt an action which: 

1. Has a non-trivial chance of success,
2. Has a non-trivial chance of failure,
3. And has meaningful consequences,

...then it's time to roll dice.

The first requirement is often left out because many designers (mistakenly) assume it's self evident. The second one is the most often included ("outcome is uncertain" is a common alternate phrasing). The third is often phrased as something like "where the results are interesting," which is the thing I want to focus on here. "Interesting" is often even elaborated to specifically mean, y'know, dramatic, fun, non-boring. Those games want to focus on only ever bothering with the things that make the game spicy. But the reason I prefer the more measured-sounding "meaningful" is because of that very concept of time.

Yeah, you might fail at something on your first try. But if nothing changes between your first attempt and your second, then what's stopping you from just re-rolling? There's an assumption that, given enough time, there becomes no significant chance of failure. So you just say "after a few minutes of working on it, you succeed." This is an important skill to develop as a GM.

But if you're trying to run a challenge-oriented game about victory or failure, then it might be a problem if you find yourself constantly eschewing dice rolls and just allowing constant assumed successes. It's a symptom that maybe suggests your game has insufficient pressure. Maybe there should be something changing between each attempt. There should be more things that justify dice rolling, more dangers, more consequences.

And of course, the most common consequence to failing an attempt at something is "you waste some time." It's not exactly interesting, but it absolutely can and should be made meaningful. As long as this passage of time is tied to something that matters, whether it's a random encounter roll, a torch burning lower, or a countdown to doom, then a die roll is warranted. In the dungeon where there are wandering monsters, every individual attempt at picking a lock or disabling a trap probably calls for a die roll. Because even if that failure isn't dramatic, it isn't meaningless.

If you ask me, all of this is sufficient as it is. I've never felt the need to complicate things further. If you have enough time to do something right, you can just do it. But if the time wasted by each failed attempt brings you one step closer to doom somehow, then roll each attempt. And there should often be a source of doom. Easy-peasy.

The one lingering problem a lot of folks have is that it can suck to roll and reroll and reroll and reroll each subsequent turn. It might be theoretically appropriate, but it's boring. Can we summarize it?

D&D 3E / Pathfinder has this thing you may have heard of called "Taking 20." It's an attempt to compromise on this. Acknowledging that there might actually be a meaningful consequence to the time cost of failing at something, but also preferring the swift elegance of the DM simply declaring "no dice roll needed, you just do it," they came up with this option. If the only meaningful consequence is "time passes," then you can "take 20" on the roll. You automatically succeed, but it takes you twenty times longer than normal. So if you're trying to, say, climb a tree, then you could either roll each individual attempt and possibly succeed in as little time as 1 minute, or you could take 20 but automatically eat 20 minutes of wasted time failing and failing and failing.

I never liked Taking 20. Like I said, I feel like the basic dice rolling rationale is already sufficient. But I have a different idea that does something similar. An idea that also asks, "can we have fewer dice rolls but still make the passage of time a relevant factor in basic task resolution?"

Taking Your Time

There is always a "base time unit" for any action that would call for a die roll. For casting a spell, this might be 1 combat round (6 seconds). For searching a room, this might be 1 exploration turn (10 minutes). For crafting an item in your workshop, this might be 1 watch (4 hours). This is the bare minimum it would take to succeed at the thing.

When you're attempting an action like this, you also declare how long you're working on it. Every additional time unit beyond the minimum grants a bonus.

In my case, I like just using simple advantage. So if you're searching a room for secrets, you can roll 1 die if you only take 1 turn, 2 dice (taking the better) if you take 2 turns, 3 dice for 3 turns, etc.

Now, it sounds like you should probably always take as much time as possible on any given task to maximize the chance of success. But there are two tradeoffs.

Firstly, interruptions inflict a penalty. You can attempt to quickly finish the action, but you roll with one less bonus than you should have given the time you spent. So if you've committed to 3 turns for searching the room, but a monstrous random encounter bursts in on the third turn, then you can quickly roll with only 2 dice instead of the full 3.

So now you're thinking, why not just roll one separate time for every time unit? How is this different from just rolling once per turn? Which brings us to the other downside: re-attempts are at a penalty. A single die roll represents you putting your best effort at something. If you try and fail at something after committing time to it, your next attempt starts off at a disadvantage. Each subsequent attempt deepens that penalty with an additional disadvantage to start off with.

So say you spend 3 turns searching a room. You roll 3 dice and somehow still fail. You can try again, but if you spend 1 turn searching this time then you roll with a disadvantage (2 dice, take the worse). It would require a minimum of 2 turns on this attempt to make a flat, unmodified roll.

Rolling lots of individual attempts will make it harder and harder and harder, so it's better to take your time on one focused, optimal attempt. But you have to judge how much time you want to risk on that optimal attempt, how many advantages it's worth earning. Spending hours on something guarantees success, but there was always a chance you could have done it much quicker. 

Why on Earth did I come up with this

This is a houserule I made while running Under Hill, By Water, Josh's cozy RPG about playing as hobbits who don't want no adventures, thank you. This game uses the old school X-in-6 method for rolls, and almost all rolls made will only be a 1-in-6, which is pretty pathetic odds. This is a design choice that raises the bar for dice rolls to have a high chance of failure, not merely "non-trivial." The assumption goes that "if you're rolling a die, you're already in deep shit."

That makes sense for an old school dungeoncrawler where the situation is often perilous. But this is a game about hobbits, for Pete's sake. The text still provides the usual instructions about "don't bother making rolls if there's insufficient risk" and all that, but... then we'd never roll anything at all. You could throw out half your character sheet since you'd never use it.

As I explained, I like games where "time cost" qualifies as a sufficiently meaningful consequence to justify dice rolling. It doesn't always have to be about danger. Typical D&D actions are best measured in seconds or minutes, but this is a game where action usually takes place on the scale of hours or days. "Do you want to spend your morning up until lunch working on crafting that new saddle? Or would you prefer to spend all day working on it for a better chance of good results?" No, that's not the same kind of drama as risking a random monster encounter or something. But the calendar is a pretty big part of this game. When you're trying to prepare everything for your birthday party or you're sewing the perfect dress for the Harvest Festival, every day that passes matters. And I like this mechanic because it helps us to eat up a lot of time and push the calendar forward much faster than you usually see in D&D.

Alternative: Shifting Time Scales

This one is inspired by a system-agnostic ruleset I wrote for running computer hacking in RPGs. It's never been tested, hence why I'm only offering it as a reluctant alternative.

It's the same as before, but instead of going "1 round, 2 rounds, 3 rounds, etc." for each successive bonus, you move up a whole timescale. So if the minimum time unit for an action is one 6-second round, then to instead roll with a bonus then you have to spend one 10-minute turn. To roll with two bonuses, you spend one 4-hour watch, to roll with three bonuses you spend a whole day, etc. This eats up even more time, and it honestly has pretty big diminishing returns.

Why this version instead? Well, because even if the passage of time is made meaningfully consequential, sometimes the amount of time difference between one attempt, two attempts, three attempts, etc. is itself negligible.

As an example, let's talk about lockpicking. The amount of time it takes to pick a lock can vary a lot. It can be done in as little as a few seconds! But very often, it'll actually take several minutes. So when you're in a dungeoncrawl, operating on the scale of 10-minute exploration turns, how much time should each attempt take? If you say "1 lockpick attempt takes 10 minutes" then you negate the chance of a player succeeding quickly and having plenty more time leftover in the current turn, which should reasonably be possible. But if you say "1 lockpick attempt takes 10 seconds," then a player could get 60 attempts before there's finally a meaningful time cost incurred.

Compromise; player chooses if they'd rather make a risky attempt to succeed quickly with plenty of time leftover, or they take their time to get an advantage but they spend the whole turn on it. Why not just keep making tons and tons of quick attempts in a row? Because each one incurs the re-attempt penalty.

-Dwiz