I would like to talk a little bit, and hear your opinions, on something not too often mentioned when discussing action resolution mechanics and processes in tabletop roleplaying games. That is when during the process you do the roll. The endpoints on that spectrum can be called Go then Roll and Roll then Go. At their extremes
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Go then Roll is declaring your action (I attack, I investigate etc) followed by a roll to see how well you did that action. Example: I attack the ogre - roll d20+mod vs AC - on hit do d6 damage.
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Roll then Go often begins by declaring how you intend to tackle the obstacle (with finesse, by being offensive) followed by a roll and once you have the result of the roll you choose what is actually accomplished. Sometimes you even at this stage you say what your character actually does. Example: I directly engage the ogre with violence - roll [something] and count successes - spend successes on things in the scene such as dealing damage.
As with many other things my preference lies in the middle, a bit skewed towards Go then Roll. Most of my preferred systems lie there, Genesys and many (most?) PbtA to mention some. As I player I find myself more involved in my character’s actions and for longer. Less of a do stuff - roll - get result - hand over spotlight. It is a greater invitation to get engaged in the narrative. When GM-ing it is a bit the same, and more. Apart from dragging the players kicking and screaming into narrative responsibility (slight exaggeration) it is very insightful what the players/characters do after they have done their primary thing. After dealing damage do they got out of danger? Take the foe’s attention giving their mates space to recover? It just give me so much more.
Genesys does this by not only having success/fail in it’s roll resolution by also advantage/disadvantage. Adv/disadv can then be spent on activating abilities or changing (minor) things in the scene to mention a few options. Many PbtA have on some (many) moves “on hit choose one, on strong hit choose two” when when looking at what happens after the roll. Actually the PbtAs does this really well by presenting the result options in the same visual space as the roll mechanics, on the same move card. Visual design is game design.
Interested in hearing experiences, insights and opinions.
It depends on your medium of play, the members of the table, on how much trust there is, and on how crunchy the entire experience is allowed to feel. These days most of my D&D is in play-by-post discord servers, and I tend to stick to ones that are roll-then-go. It lets the player run the mechanics of their actions through avrae and find out successes and failures, and then describe how they do what they do. There is a strong onus on everyone understanding the game mechanics, and only engaging the DM in “can I?” Questions when pushing the envelope with improvised actions. The result is a faster (IMO) game with better writing (which starts to read like collaborative storytelling, especially if everyone uses a literary style).
In a go-then-roll world, the burden falls on the DM to “ratify” each character’s intended actions. “<Char> would try to do an acrobatic flip” would need a “The floor is slippery, and <char> falls flat on their face” followup, and this is just really slow in an async format. Inevitably, this is the most common way of sharing out the results of Perception and Investigation, though I appreciate pbp DMs who rely on passive stats and give things out in preemptively spoiler tags (that’s whete the trust comes in).
“<char> would try” is also a grating construction that feels terrible to read in general–it’s just not a common tense signature. That said, in a low-latency live game, where the DM can roll immediately after learning of the player’s intentions, go-then-roll(-then-go) is much more viable, and is probably preferable for new players who are new to the system.
That’s interesting. I play TTRPGs via play-by-post too, and the norm for me involves declaring your actions before the roll. I can see why you might encounter friction with failed rolls from your example, but usually the action is framed more as “<Char> launches themself off the floor”. That leaves space for the GM to narrate the result, succeed or fail.
Right, which maintains a disproportionate onus on the DM to intervene on every turn (both the monsters’ and the PC’s turns). Deferring success or failure to a bot (avrae) given a shared understanding of the rules allows the players to own their own narration (e.g. I decide how badly I faceplant after failing to jump the obstacle, rather than the DM doing it), and reduces the time commitment that DMing otherwise takes. The DM is already necessary during social and exploration pillars, where the go-then-roll is often required just b/c the check to make is not obvious (unless the DM makes prodigious use of spoiler text and passive skills). Roll-then-go in combat however is, IMO, superior for speed and player engagement.
Reactions need special care in roll-then-go, with strategies being necessary like declaring them ahead of time, retconning, or, my favorite, narrating what actually happened (e.g. to show how the pre-reaction narration was a fork in reality that didn’t happen the way it looked).
Let me elaborate a bit. I’m also playing a game where the GM encourages us to narrate our own successes/failures, but I still envision that as “Go then Roll”. Whether it’s the GM or player deciding what the consequences of an action, the PC has already committed to that action before rolling. Action > Roll > Result can all be decided by the player in “Go then Roll”.
I can’t speak for reactions since I specifically try to avoid games including them in PbP. Having to retcon or pre-declare them always felt clunky to me.