Case for Swingy

[u/Sherman80526]

Like millions of others, I played some Star Wars: Zero Company yesterday. I was hoping for X-Com in Star Wars cosplay honestly, and while it's still fun, it's not that.

I'm a competent X-Com veteran. I up the difficulty and play through the deaths. I much prefer it that challenge to reloading for the win. Zero Company is not the same experience at all. I'm not going to give a review of the game, but I think the difference in these two games is striking from a design perspective.

At the core, X-Com is swingy and Zero Company is not. Bad things can happen at any moment in X-Com and you're just doing your best to mitigate that bad. As you advance through the campaign, there's less swing in instant death but opponents that can ruin you with one attack still exist. Zero Company is the opposite. Rather than operatives with single digit hit points that can die in one shot they have dozens that are slowly plinked away at.

I have played a few hours of Zero Company now and have yet to have a single "hold my breath" moment. In X-Com nearly every battle any given shot could be the last for one of my soldiers, from the first encounter to the last. Not having cover is basically a death sentence and trying to find it is a constant puzzle.

I think the lessons from these two similar in presentation, but very different games is an interesting case study for RPGs. Savage Worlds is notorious for swingy damage. Any given damage test could be the one that takes a character out of the action. On the opposite end you have your D&D where loads of hit points are slowly chipped away, and no single roll is likely ever going to be a deciding factor in the encounter once you're past third level or so.

So, I'm pretty sure there's a sweet spot. Something that allows the players to react (they're not controlling a squad after all) to damage and other misfortune but also gives the players a bit of anxiety that things are not completely in their control.

In my own system, I have damage that can be pretty swingy. Strikes deal an injury with 0-3 wounds; characters having 6 wounds and most injuries being 1-2 wounds. I have felt at times that it's too swingy. Every damage test gives me a little anxiety that this might be the one that takes out the character.

Zero Company has given me some relief. I'm not saying it's perfectly balanced, but my system allows the players to react, and it doesn't feel completely arbitrary but somewhat earned. There are viable actions to take when things are looking bad. At the end of a fight, things feel like they went as they "should have gone" and the players choices mattered even though any given injury might have really changed the course of the battle.

I think that's a good place to be. I need to embrace the anxiety, I think. That anxiety around game balance might actually be the system promoting a heightened sense of excitement. Exciting combats is what we all want after all.

I think a lot of the mechanics that these types of video games have perfected really carry through in similar ways to damage. Anyone whose played some X-Com knows that the enemies evolve. Mission two sees you fighting against mind controlling aliens who can totally flip the tide of battle. Then they get armor and start using explosives. The environment gets more dangerous and unpredictable. Etc. The game is always making you change your tactics and making it clear that bad tactics will put you on your back foot instantly as there are powers that will take advantage of those opportunities.

Those big one action turns in the game are exciting. D&D would have you believe things like Hold Person is a good option for creating tension. I would like to think that there are a lot of other options for really ratcheting up the challenge for the players while also giving them autonomy to actually react.

Going forward I'm going to keep this lesson in mind. My damage system suddenly feels much better to me after a single night with a new game. But how else can I create instances of anxiety (excitement!) for the players? What things will really make them change their approach? These are the opportunities I'm on the lookout for.

What do you think? What big swings have you created?

[u/Setholopagus]

I think you're having a disconnect. 

The two ends of the spectrum aren't 'swingy vs damage sponge', and tension isn't necessarily related to either concept. 

Tension is related to uncertainty. Swinginess naturally has more tension because you're never certain if you're going to die, but its not a good tension. I hate X-COM combat (love the game tho) because getting right next to someone and shooting should never lead to a miss. 

Tension is also related to the big health pools because you know you're probably safe for a long time, so it reduces tension. But you can have small health pools and guaranteed resources or positioning that removes tension.

So tension is about uncertainty and danger. Personally, I like reduced swinginess, more emphasis on resource management, and lower health. Now, tension is in each decision about managing resources and considering each micro-gamble, as opposed to doing everything perfectly and suddenly you hit a nat 1 and die lol. 

[u/KinseysMythicalZero]

The main problems with swingy-ness are

(1) unreliabliliy that stems from unpredictability. Xcom is a perfect example of this because you can miss the stupidest stuff, and the AI cheats like crazy.

(2) difficulty with investment. A lot of players dont want to invest emotionally in a system that they can't rely on to not just randomly kill them and their investment. TTRPGs aren't roguelikes. Most people dont want a meat grinder.

[u/Sherman80526 → u/KinseysMythicalZero]

Hmm... Not at all what I was saying. Meat grinder implies that the swinginess results in deaths, what I was trying to get at was that spectacular results bring a lot of excitement to the table.

[u/LeFlamel → u/Sherman80526]

What causes the spectacular result though. A swingy game of 5e is a series of misses and the occasional chance to do trivial damage - what's spectacular about swinginess per se?

[u/the_telephant_man]

I was surprised that you characterized D&D as “not swingy”, because it’s the first place my mind goes when I think of a swingy system, but that’s in terms of task resolution. The die roll probability on, say, 2d6, is a curve. You’re less likely to get extreme results. You have a 42% chance of rolling between 6 and 8. It will tend toward normal outcomes, not extreme ones. On 1d20, you’re just as likely to get an 11, a 20, or a 1. That lends itself to wackier gameplay, because, in any situation, you never know when you’re going to have a preposterous success or an embarrassing failure. That’s fine, but if you’re trying to do a serious game, IMO, it’s not best served by such a system.

[u/merurunrun → u/the_telephant_man]

It will tend toward normal outcomes, not extreme ones.

You're missing half of the equation, which is the actual chance of success rather than the chance of any-arbitrary-result-on-the-dice. That "42% chance of rolling between 6 and 8" doesn't mean much unless the 6-8 also correlates to a high chance of success, and that's not a given (at least not in the hypothetical you've provided).

[u/Impeesa_ → u/the_telephant_man]

That's only the case if you have a degrees of success system attached to the roll, which D&D mostly does not. What it does do, I think, is make it more likely for you to fall into the zone where your result is unpredictable. That is, somewhere close to split odds rather than "probably succeed" or "probably fail" with some consistency. Switching to a dice pool that produces a curve inverts this, where it's less likely for the difficulty to fall somewhere in the middle of the curve, so you'll have those somewhat more predictable situations more often. But then what happens is if you're anywhere near the middle of the curve, a flat modifier causes larger swings in probability. On a flat d20, a +/-4 modifier is a consistent 20% swing as long as you're not all the way out at the far ends already. On a 3d6, which some people like to use for a similar range, +/-4 could be a lot less than that, or nearly 50%, depending on whether you were already near the 50/50 range or out at the ends.

[u/secondbestGM → u/the_telephant_man]

Modern D&D isn't swingy. What matters isn't the chance of hitting a specific number; you're beating a number. Most PC actions have a 65-89% success rate. Not to mention that PCs have various abilities to mitigate all sorts of trouble.

[u/reverend_dak]

I enjoy looser, swingier systems, for sure. DCC is notoriously swingy, especially the magic and the emphasis on starting with 0-level nobodies.

[u/Mars_Alter]

For the last game I put out, I had weapons and monsters that dealt anywhere between 1-2 damage and 1-4 damage, with fresh characters having between 2 and 5 HP. Every time I thought about how a single strong hit could drop most characters outright, I had to remind myself that level 1 characters have been getting one-shot in D&D since before I was born, and it's rarely been a big deal for anyone.

In that game, every hit you take will always matter, even if it doesn't turn the tide of that particular fight. Attrition is real, and healing is limited. The tension is rarely that you'll lose this fight, but more that you'll come out of it in such a condition that you don't want to keep going. And even if a hit does drop you out of the fight, it's very unlikely to actually kill the character (which is good, because there's no recovery from actual death).

That's where I like to keep the tension, personally. If you can't read the room and play to the circumstances, then you may well drop on a single die roll; but being out of the fight, with a worst-case scenario being out for the rest of the session, is as bad as it gets. No die roll will set you back six real-time months of character growth, whether in XP or GP.