Procrastination is killing me…

I have a great article trying to get out of my head, about the importance of theme to a game. Problem is, I want to give this article the thought it deserves. Given that it’ll probably weigh in at about 600 words (unless I end up making it a 2-parter), this means I’ll want to spend about 2 hours getting it right. And since I just remembered at 11:15 that I need to get tonight’s article out… I’ll try to remember to go to the coffee shop and spend some quality time there writing tomorrow.

(And if I start letting the deadlines slip for articles, I’ll end up mothballing the entire blog in a month. I’ve gotta pretend I have discipline or I just fall apart.)

So tonight, you take what you get. I was discussing RPG systems on the ride home today. I was bemoaning the other drivers’ lack of skill (“Where the hell did you spend your skill ranks, anyway? Profession: Masturbator?”) but this got me thinking of a weakness of RPG systems: the unfortunate ease of failing easy tasks.

Driving to work every day is a task for which no sane GM is going to require a roll. But let’s say I want to make it to work in 30 minutes (the usual time is 45). This is going to take some talent, because I’ll have to go 85 on the interstate, do some creative interpretations of yellow lights on city streets, and some artful weaving on both. In this system, sure, the GM is justified in making me roll.

Now, I’m 25 and have never killed a goblin, so let’s say that in d20, I’m a 1^st-level Expert with a maxed Drive skill, for 4 ranks, and have a 15 Dexterity, for another +2 modifier. Even though there’s a roll involved, this is still a pretty easy task, so the GM sets the DC at 10. Seems reasonable enough? The trouble is, even with my +6 modifier, I still have a 15% chance of failure. It’s not a safe drive, but geez, I can do better than that…

At this point, I was going to launch into a tirade about how White Wolf’s new World of Darkness system is a lot better. Then I did the math… oops. Giving myself a 3 Dexterity and 2 Drive, I have a 17% chance of failure. White Wolf makes it just as hard to do easy things, unless I whine to the GM for a bonus modifier for special equipment like my lucky driving sunglasses. (You laugh, but the book suggests—in earnest—bonuses to Resolve rolls for a WWJD keychain.)

The moral of the story is that in every system, failing easy tasks is… well, too easy. To resolve this, I suppose that you’d want to think of “failure” not in terms of “your skill broke down” (and I crashed the car) but instead “you didn’t get what you wanted” (I couldn’t manage to shave the time I wanted off the drive, so I ended up late anyway.)