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Last Sunday night, I was the guest on Geekerati Radio. We talked about games and narrative, topics lodged firmly within the Gameplaywright wheelhouse if not also sown broadly about its idea farm. You can listen to the roughly hour-long discussion at blogtalkradio.com.

One of the interesting things that the show’s host, frequent GPW commenter Christian Lindke, asked me was to what extent the dice mechanics of Feng Shui contribute to its ability to express a satisfying story. Feng Shui‘s central mechanic, in case you’re not familiar with it, is to roll two six-sided dice, one of which generates a positive number between 1 and 6, the other a negative number between –1 and –6. The two results are summed, and the sum added to a skill total that varies in a range from 5 to 15 or so (for player characters, anyway). Obviously, much of the time, the dice effectively cancel each other out and the skill number stands as the overall test result.

Christian’s question, as we explored the idea, was whether I thought predictability enhances narrative.

It made me think back to an experience using GURPS as the engine for a pulp genre campaign game. I remember, at the time, being impressed a how well GURPS‘s 3d6 bell curve rendered the dispatching of low-stat grunts by heroes very predictable, while at the same time making an array of truly death-defying feats with high target numbers particularly hard to achieve. This struck me then—as now—as firmly in keeping with the pulp sensibility.

A game with a broad range of unpredictability in test results, on the other hand, can make it very difficult to tell a story that makes any sense as a story. For a low-level D&D character, for example, the d20’s overwhelmingly broad range of equally probable results wholly trumps skill values ranging from +1 to +5 or so. Even with skills at which these characters are most proficient, the random factor is overwhelming.

This isn’t quite fair to D&D, given that target numbers can be adjusted with relative ease to manipulate the probability of easy tests being successfully carried out. But it’s still the case that the random factor is a much greater part of a D&D skill check than a Feng Shui skill check, and this fundamental difference seems to color their suitability for narrative play quite a lot. And it’s hard to imagine a good story qua story—the kind of narrative that someone without an ownership investment in one of the characters would be interested in hearing—having massive unpredictability in whether its protagonists overcome relatively easy obstacles or fail to do so.

High predictability in RPG tests makes me think of the story-game community’s interest with the “Yes, but…” GMing technique. According to this idea (which I’m aware I’m presenting here as a much more inflexible dogma than it is actually taken by anyone), the GM avoids contradicting player statements about what their characters do, instead offering complications that are dramatically commensurate when the declarations get dodgy.

“I step up and slay the dragon with my sword.”

“Yes, but the dragon’s acidic blood melts your blade, and his death throes maim you.”

This player-driven capability to determine what happens in those narrative-centric games strikes me as similar (to a point) to traditional dice-driven mechanics where there is a high degree of predictability in test outcomes.

Predictable dice systems do seem to have a certain synergy with highly narrative games. But on the other hand, to suggest the truth of such a thing, one must account for the fact that the predictable narrative is also the deathly boring narrative. But-but, even though some of the best developments in narrative are surprising, even shocking, at the same time, it’s critically important that they make sense given what has gone before. “Surprising but inevitable” is the ideal to which storytellers aspire.

The bell curves of Feng Shui‘s system, and GURPS‘s system, emphasize predicability while also allowing for highly unpredictable outcomes in a small percentage of cases. In Feng Shui, results of 6 on either die “explode,” for example. The hero always has a chance to miss even the greenest mook. These possibilities, when wedded to a skilled GM’s ability to extemporize an explanation for the unexpected event, can make for truly excellent game-stories that accommodate the need for predicability in most cases but unexpected results in small doses. But when the GM is forced to justify senseless outcomes on a round-by-round basis, it quickly becomes clear to everyone that the game is generating something other than a satisfying narrative.

What do you think? Does predictability enhance a game’s narrative quantities? Fight against them? Operate on an unrelated axis entirely? Do tell!