Thanks Amr! With some great fundamentals on what swinginess is artihmetically, what I'm going to be getting into on my end of the #TabletopChopShop is what swinginess transforms into wrt narrative in TTRPG's, ebb and flow, and heroic competence.

Let's get into it! https://twitter.com/ammourazz/status/1290778953402253315

If you've been following me for any significant length of time, you've probably heard me say my old chestnut: Narrative requires ebb and flow. If everything's funny, nothing is funny. If everything is serious, nothing is serious.

It's like being suck in one position for-->

too long in a chair. Your muscles cramp and stiffen, while others ache to be used. When monotony sets in wrt narrative, it can be exhausting. Whether it's the crushing sadness of a French auteur film about suffering, or the "can we get on with it from a comedy without substance->

curves on the road through our story help make it interesting.

Games (tabletop or digital) are a special beast though. While we have a general expectation of how things will go in a pre-structured story, anything can happen in a game bc stories are about characters making-->

choices, and you, the player, can make any choice. Forums are filled with GM's frustrated that players didn't do the thing they were "supposed" to do, owing to a cinematic expectation mismatched by the reality of a gaming table attended by a half-dozen creative souls.

Most folx can remember the first time they rolled a natural 1 in D&D when trying to do something awesome. Broadly speaking, you usually get two groupings of responses:

1) The group shares a laugh at the subversion of expectation

2) The player feels frustrated at the loss-->

of the cool moment, the pivotal, heroic intended strike.

In either case, the result is from a violation of expectation, and many times it's stuff of your first TTRPG story you carry back to your friends for years to come precisely bc it DID stand out from the experience-->

of sitting in an audience at the climax. This time, Aragorn slipped on a banana peel.

What this has to do with swinginess is that 'Narrative Elasticity', the magnitude of a story's sharp turns in a TTRPG, are often affected by the dice variance Amr's discussed.

If you roll dice in a Forged in the Dark game, there's a 5/6 chance something will go wrong (whether from a mixed success or outright failure). The hot potato of chaos is figuring out how to deal with each new calamity as it happens.

But you can reliably *expect* that things-->

will go wrong.

In systems using a d20, there are entire subcultures that have grown: dice jails, memes, custom dice with 'FUCK' instead of the 1, hexes and curses and lucky dice, legendary stories built around the acknowledgement of metannarative uncertainty.

For a glimpse into how ingrained uncertainty is into d20 systems, consider two examples of when WotC wanted you to be consistently good at something: The Fighter and the Rogue.

- The first is one of the only classes with floating modifiers to its rolls outside of feats via-->

its Fighting Styles in 5e. A trend in stark opposition to their broad absence. But they wanted to make sure the Fighter was extra good with that Longbow.

- On top of Expertise, Rogues get Reliable Talent, many times making it quite literally impossible to fail certain rolls.

Neither of this is to make a value judgment on those choices, but rather to point out what happens when there's a dissonance in what ppl have come to associate with D&D in particular (nat 1's where you miss the BBEP and crash through a five-story window, nat20's where you-->

kick a door into infinity) with the design goal of trying to assure that "this archetype's thing is being consistently good at X, and you should feel awesome doing it."

And the latter is a perfectly noble goal! This example is mostly to point out when a system's wider-->

when the swinginess of a game's overall infrastructure is at odds with a specific, microcosmic goal for some facet of it.

D&D presents swingy, elastic gameplay where Aragorn can slip on a banana peel, but these classes are supposed to be exempt. It's one of the places-->

the system shows its piecemeal and often conflicted attempts at being all-things-to-all-people.

Anywho! This thread isn't about D&D, but it would be foolish of me not to acknowledge that by its sheer size and ubiquity, how it can shaped expectations, breeding responses by-->

designers that specifically bucked those expectations.

When I mentioned the player who was frustrated when they lost their moment, it wasn't to poke fun at a spoilsport who couldn't take a joke (a hypothetical spoilsport at that).

Sometimes, you want to feel like an awesome-->

hero. It's nothing controversial to say that many play TTRPG's to get to be something they are restricted from being in real life. To defeat the villain and bring justice and land the final blow for the good and just.

If you come from a place of being downtrodden-->

and want that escapist fantasy, it can feel pretty shitty to have your Aragorn slip on a banana peel at your moment of triumph.

This (among others) is why I imagine I see so many TTRPG's with a section in the GM Advice chapter that says, "Don't make the PC's look incompetent."

This thread isn't about D&D, but that game for many years cemented the expectation that you could fumble and look silly and that was the status quo bc of the fickleness of the ol' d20.

That isn't what everyone wants, and crafting an experience where you feel like a competent-->

cool adventurer involves more than the flavoring of PC failures. It involves things like:
- Expectations of how often they can expect to succeed/fail
- Mechanisms for them to affect those odds to certain degrees
- Mechanisms for them to mitigate the consequences of their failure

The above are not hard-and-fast rules. I've admittedly taken a very bimodal approach to this discussion, talking about two extremes to illustrate the overall point. There are myriad points along this spectrum.

My point is this:

As Amr illustrated, there are many different design schema you can choose if you want to involve chance in your story (we haven't even gotten into diceless or journaling games).

When you choose one, you set an expectation for how much the narrative can stretch away from-->

proceeding in a conventional arc, and that says something about what we should expect in your game (high-lethality, low-lethality, swinginess, reliability).

All buildings need to hold up their walls and roof, but a wise builder varies the plan according to intended use.

/END OF THREAD.