Theory

[icycalm]

For no other genre will you see such deep discussion topics and such thoughtful, articulate players as you will see in the discussion I adduce below.

Isn't that proof enough that this is the ultimate genre?

I have a thousand and one proofs that GMRPGs are the ultimate genre, but this is one of the strongest ones. It's irrefutable. The smartest players will of course prefer the smartest game, and the guys quoted below are clearly the smartest players.

Gamers who play traditional genres don't even have discussions at all. WTF is there to discuss about a game where you roll on the floor for 100 hours while bumping against invisible walls and being fed bad anime every 10 minutes??

Jesus christ what other genre do you know whose players habitually engage in discussions that blend psychology with number theory?

This is the supergenre (or ubergenre if you're German).

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/c ... th_how_rng

Any creative folks ever have trouble with how RNG can just... unmake a story? Or advice on how not to let it get under my skin?

Good evening folks. This is going to partially take the form of a rant but I have to get it off my chest.

I posed a similar question about six months ago at the start of Abomination Vaults run for our group. Despite numerous factors going for him, my character had notoriously bad luck to the point where the competent character I was roleplaying was completely separate from the flailing idiot that missed 80% of attacks in combat and had yet to meet a fear effect he couldn't critically fail. It got to the point where halfway through the Abomination Vaults I had him killed between sessions in a short story since I could control how he ended rather than stepping on a banana peel, crit failing a balance check and falling down a flight of stairs.

And that's the important part I want to highlight: I love writing. It gets me invested in a character, and it lets me explore things that I don't have the improv skills to do in session. It was my short stories that turned our oneshot beginner's box adventure into a full Abomination Vaults run, and it was a hard decision to make to let my character go; but it was worth it to let him go on a high note. The GM was sympathetic and made a suggestion: Have the character's fate be a mystery and have him come back in one of the climax battles as a support to tie up the story of AV.

So he came back in the second to last battle, and he died the way he lived: by crit failing his saves, getting hit by every single attack afterward and then executed after just his second turn, and accomplishing nothing.

Which leads to my question for everyone: How do you portray a character as being competent when they consistently and repeatedly fail in character? Out of character how do you as a player keep it from disrupting your enjoyment for the game? How can you stay invested in a character when at worst you're one very bad roll away from death? To the folks who write in this community, how do you handle things like this?

I'll take any advice at this point. I love roleplaying characters, and I had a hard time getting into character with the replacement I made at the halfway point of AV because I felt I was piloting 'generic replacement #1 of 5' instead of a person delving into the vaults.

In a d20 system, you're never going to be successful at everything you attempt. You should imagine your opposition being just as skilled as your character, because a level 7 fighter should be able to competently kill a level 1 peasant regardless of circumstance. Rolling low on an attack isn't missing, it's narrowly being dodged. Getting tripped constantly isn't your character being a clown, it's the enemy being scary enough to do it.

Yeah, many failures are really just someone else’s success. A hero isn’t less heroic because their powerful foes sometimes succeed in defending themselves. Even if it’s tempting to go for the cheap joke.

I think sometimes the issue comes up outside of combat because the GM allows a roll that doesn’t actually matter and can’t think of a better consequence than embarrassment for failure.

I've always felt like this same mindset is what makes some people find high level boss encounters frustrating in 2e.

Where some people complain about it making them feel weak and ineffective when bosses can consistently shrug off most spell effects and critically hit most PCs with ease, I've always felt like it's awesome when the party is able to work together to bring something down that is clearly so much more powerful than them.

That same encounter that makes some people feel like the three stooges reminds me of the final fight against Thanos where everybody has to stack their various grapples, stuns, slows, etc. on top of one another to ever have a chance of beating him. (Not the best example, but hopefully it gets the point across.)

I don't think it's just a case of framing... but I do think it's mostly a case of framing.

You might have to learn to roll with the punches with that one. You like to write and you wrote competent character but the dice had other ideas, that's a perfect opportunity to introduce some dynamic character depth. The dice tell a story too.

A friend of mine in my group is just like you, his character is cursed. He built his Ranger to be a precision sniper specialist but he often can't hit the broadside of a barn. He didn't make any build mistakes and did everything he could to improve his hit chances, the character was just cursed. So what we did is turn it into part of the narrative. Everyone at the table noticed this character always rolled terrible for ranged attacks and in combat in general, but he was an absolute BEAST at tracking and Perception checks and other things a Ranger should be doing. So we came to the conclusion that he wasn't an incompetent Ranger, he had performance anxiety. The fights made him nervous and made him miss his shots, and that ended up integrated into his character since he was always the cautious one of the group. He wasn't a coward or anything, he just couldn't perform under the pressure. So we let the dice tell that story.

Edit: I got another one with me. I played a Rogue that rolled consistently terribly at Perception checks despite having the background of a treasure Hunter and specializing in having a keen eye. Everywhere else he did okay but he just couldn't roll to notice anything, he could plan around something as long as it was easily noticed. So I said he had pretty bad ADHD and leaned into that. He would often space out or busy his hands with something and lose focus, playing with his gear or doodling in the map he kept and would fail to notice things because of this. It wasn't that he wasn't perceptive, it's that the dice decided his attention span was incredibly narrow.

Similarly, you could roleplay the arrogance. As a character who has spent their life succeeding at everything, their constant failures would bring them to a place where they try to understand why they keep failing; either in one direction where they’re humbled and learn to rely on their friends, or the other, where they double down on their own competency and continue to insist that they’re “better than this.”

When it keeps coming down to perpetually poor dice rolls, the numbers are against the idea that you’d constantly fail. Eventually you should even out to average, just based on the law of large numbers. That expected (and likely) regression to the mean should help fuel some narrative version of character growth.

This is why my Kitsune monk is now known for eating books and scrolls (a dog eating the homework joke) due to all the critically failed knowledge and perception checks, and it even became a minor plot point. The dice gave me lemons, so we made lemonade. Helps that it's a less serious campaign as well.

I'm also the sort to enjoy seeing how badly my characters' plans end for them on failure, so far most of my favourite moments have come from failing something in an amusing way, such as not being able to tell that someone is wearing very obvious and bad disguise thanks to a nat1.

So this is a multidimensional problem. We'll go from most significant to least significant.

First and foremost, PF2 is a game predicated on the idea that the dice have a role (or roll, if you like) to play in the story. If that consistently gets you down, you might just prefer a different form of creative expression. You might prefer the full control of writing by yourself, or the focus of a narrative-first game.

If you insist on playing a mechanics-forward game like PF2, you need to be flexible about your character's abilities. The dice present a story-telling opportunity, one that you miss out on when you get pissed that you failed to save against fear again. If that happens once, it makes a story about a person struggling to overcome something in their character. If it happens three times, it's a character note. The key is to treat bad die rolls as adding nuance to your character rather than as wrecking your character concept.

And third, when you focus on your die rolls as "your failures", you are ignoring the much richer storytelling potential of seeing them as someone else's successes. That Big Bad sure was fierce, wasn't he? Why, even Kevin pissed himself! It's a good thing he had Sheila to back him up, right? Skol!

Finally and in summary: this sort of frustration comes from a mismatch of expectation with situation. You don't control the narrative. You can't predict everything that's going to happen. You're not the main character. These are the lessons that let one truly enjoy roleplaying in a mechanics-forward game like PF2.

Track your rolls, I expect you'd be surprised.

I play tabletop miniatures games where hundreds of dice are rolled every game. You are far more likely to notice dice failure than success, to the point I am now actively ignoring bad dice rolls.

I’ve seen characters like these a few times. I don’t know what better advice then learning to play with failure at the forefront. In a mechanical sense, you can learn to capitalize on as many things as possible that don’t rely on your rolls. Movement, flanking, relying on your teammates to succeed where you fail. In a roleplay sense, create a story for why they fail and learn to have fun with it. Laugh at the failure, make jokes around it, keep each failure interesting. They might not get a redemption arc for them to finally succeed, so you definitely have to get creative. Or, like you did, sometimes the characters just have to die, or be retired. That’s their fate. Their failures ensure incredible successes for your future characters. Unless it’s you who’s unlucky, which I would say is a more rare problem, but I’ve definitely seen that too...

I have just decided to never explain how I am doing anything till after I roll.

Honestly, I think it was the wrong call to kill the character because unless they were built extremely poorly that's just cognitive biases at play. Which we all fall prey to so no shame, me included. But being aware of them helps, although it definitely doesn't make one immune.

I was specifically thinking of cognitive biases like gambler's fallacy, perceptual salience, negativity bias, apophenia, confirmation bias and many more. Humans, me included, suck ass at intuitively parsing statistics. We have evolved to find patterns, avoid loss of value or view. All of which shits the bed when confronted with actual randomness.

But to make failures more enjoyable I recommend just embracing it and RP it. Rolling a failure can also just mean that the opponent was just that good, it's their DC you roll against after all in saving throws. So if an important character aspect is them being competent then just RP it as the enemies giving full attention to hitting you then dodging successfully.

I would also advise against RP that someone is universally competent in everything, instead being a specialist. That would be the skills you are expert/master or above in. A universal competence just means overpowered. If the PC is very low level then they also aren't mechanically competent yet. It's no surprise that it's reflected in the outcome then so I would advise against RP competency until you are at least a decent level. Whether that be through leveling up or starting at a higher level doesn't matter. If you fail a roll when the character is also mechanically strong that just means that the opposition was that good, which is also reflected in how Pathfinder handles natural 1/20 by it not being an automatic failure or critical failure unless the DC suggests that it's an actual challenge. The opponents are so strong that even an adventurer as skilled as your PC is challenged.

We all have a run of bad luck from time to time. It sucks, and you’re right, it can sometimes kill the RP. Here’s some things I do.

1. Hero points help mitigate a lot of the really wacky moments where I simply can’t, for the sake of character image, abide my character failing so spectacularly.

2. It’s all about presentation. A bit of on-the-spot writing can save a lot of dignity. You didn’t critically fail your save against the fireball because of incompetence. Instead, you were in the motion of dodging when a cowardly enemy who had been feigning death grabbed your ankle, causing a stumble. The gutless coward perished in the flames, but his last malicious action caused the hero to suffer grievous injury.

Remember, Gandalf may have critically failed his Grab an Edge reaction, but that’s not how it sounded when Tolkien wrote it.

Lol, I’m trying to do that sometimes. Like when my fighter with high Athletics rolled nat 1 at moving a log, I’ve described it as the log actually being hollow and full of ants, which he discovered the hard way :)

Skill proficiency = competence, roll on the die = fortune. If someone with a high proficiency rolls really low, they don’t fail due to insufficient skill, something interferes. Likewise, if someone with low proficiency rolls really high, it means they were really fortunate with this one thing.

The basic issue is something I've seen on a few podcasts, and with some types of players irl. You can't narrate away qualities that are up to a dice roll. Your expectations are what's causing the disconnect, because the character you have built up in your head is only subject to whatever forces you want to allow, while the character in the game is subject to the mechanics of the game, and you're trying to force the one to fit the mold of the other. Instead of pre-deciding your character has qualities like "supreme competence" or "immunity to fear," that should evolve naturally out of what the dice show.

Not super related but last session our gm just pitty passed a bunch of checks cause holy fuck the whole table rolled like dog shit all night long. Seriously 80% of our rolls were under 7 it was fucking wild. Dice jails were overflowing.

I would never do that. I would rather the whole world exploded in flames than do that.

Not sure why no one mentions this but... you may want to try playing non-d20 d&d type games. For example, in a game like Blades in the Dark, 'failure' on a roll is heavily encouraged (by the book) to not be the result of PC incompetence.

Ex: Expert knife fighter rolls a failure to attack a group of guards. It's not a 'miss, no damage, you can't hit a barn.' It's 'Jack the Ripper takes down most of these thugs but more keep showing up. They seem endless and no matter how many he knocks down, another moves up. Soon he's covered in hurt as some wild swings inevitably get through and hit his knee. Take level 2 harm, smashed knees and Jack's now in a desperate position. What do you do next?'

Sounds like a lot of bad luck on your part, which sucks but is inherent to any dice-based system, and d20 systems especially. Because even if you have a +15 modifier, if you roll a 3, the result is still going to be lower than someone with a +1 modifier who happened to roll a 19. This is why PF2e doesn't have opposed die rolls anymore.

PF2e tries to mitigate the randomness with Hero Points; use them liberally (and have the GM hand them out liberally). Also this is why spells like True Strike and feats like Cat's Luck exist.

If a Consistently Competent Character is a big part of the fantasy for you, you might consider playing a game like Blades in the Dark, which has a much more forgiving d6 dice pool system (there are many others, I just happen to know this one). But switching system is hard because you have to convince everyone else in your group to switch, too.

Sounds like you would maybe prefer writing a story together and not playing a game? Or improv theater?

Things like competence and immunity to fear are up to the RNG. If you declare in your character's backstory that they're the fastest gun in the Mana Wastes and can shoot the wings off a fly at a hundred paces, then the first time you roll badly on initiative or attack there's going to be a disconnect.

Avoid giving your character traits that are dependent on dice rolls to actually manifest during play. Lean more towards how they are likely to respond emotionally in various situations and how their backstory informs their current view of the world. The dice are not under your control; the roleplay comes from how your character responds to the events that the dice describe.

There are definitely games where you can declare that your character is a hyper-competent badass and play that character without the game mechanics getting in the way, but a d20 combat simulator is definitely not the game for that style of roleplay.