Robin Laws’s Gimme Rule

I think that many a DM actually does this in one form or another. I think the criteria for a “gimme” varies widely with play style. It is true that sometimes the criteria is inconsistently applied–thus the DM calling for a roll by default.

I’m one of those people that prefers the, “roll for it, then roleplay the result” style. In a well-designed system, I’m perfectly happy with characters missing so-called “routine” rolls. (Just not 5% chances to hit yourself with your own weapon, or anything that bad.) I *like* the sudden twists and turns in the story that result.

I’m more likely to give a “gimme” for a foregone conclusion–even in combat. That is more of a time-saver than a way to control the story, though.

I think games are about player choices.

Fun dice rolls are ones that are caused by player choices, and the players can make further choices that affect the odds and their wager. Each roll has a chance for success (the odds) and a negative result if the roll fails (the wager) — like losing time, money, hit points, spells, etc. Dice rolls that aren’t based on any player actions in the game, and that don’t allow any choices that could affect the odds or their wager — these aren’t as much fun and slow down the game.

(CJ) In a well-designed system, I’m perfectly happy with characters missing so-called “routine” rolls. (Just not 5% chances to hit yourself with your own weapon, or anything that bad.) I *like* the sudden twists and turns in the story that result.

I tend to be the same way. Part of what appeals to me about gaming is that if you look back on a session, you can see where the quirkiness of some die rolls — and the quirkiness of the players — influenced events in unexpected ways.

(Stuart) Dice rolls that aren’t based on any player actions in the game, and that don’t allow any choices that could affect the odds or their wager — these aren’t as much fun and slow down the game.

This is part of why I like Burning Wheel‘s “let it ride” rule so much. The idea is that if a PC is sneaking into a bandit camp to steal something from one of their horses, the player should only roll once — even though many games (and/or GMs) might be inclined to make getting into camp and stealing the item two separate rolls.

This is part of why I like Burning Wheel’s “let it ride” rule so much. The idea is that if a PC is sneaking into a bandit camp to steal something from one of their horses, the player should only roll once — even though many games (and/or GMs) might be inclined to make getting into camp and stealing the item two separate rolls.

I’d only have two rolls only if as a result of the first success, some new choice was presented to the player — risk escaping from the camp by also trying to free the prisoner they find tied up with the horses, and the players didn’t know about — that’s an interesting choice, and an interesting second roll.

The best time to role dice is when you can think of an interesting result for success and an interesting result for failure. One could argue that’s the only time you should roll dice.

Boht of your points are good ones, Stuart and Jeff — but I don’t see them as being the most common line of thinking. My guess is that that’s why Robin wrote the article: because a lot of GMs aren’t used to thinking in those terms.

This idea is a band-aid for a system which puts skill checks in the wrong place.

Anyone who uses it wants a rules system that places skill checks and junctures in the story. Nearly all of the game systems we have now place the rules check in such a way as to try and simulate reality, by giving difficult tasks a chance of failure.

These approaches aren’t compatible. If you use this rule, you should be demanding, investigating or designing a rules framework that is designed for storytelling from the ground up.

Observing discrepancies like this one is the first step to doing just that. I cannot count the number of times my wife has commented on the pointlessness of skill checks that are either rerolled until they succeed or derail the game by their failure. Robin’s article provides a useful insight into the reasons for this and alternatives to it, but bringing up the example of improvisational theatre.

This is so common sense I’m surprised it’s even being discussed.

(Abulia) This is so common sense I’m surprised it’s even being discussed.

I agree with you for the most part, but I’ve run into plenty of GMs who don’t take it as far as Robin’s article suggests (and some who don’t use it at all). Also, many games provide some basic guidelines along these lines — you don’t roll to open a door, or drive your car (unless it’s in a blizzard, etc.) — but don’t address skipping rolls in other situations.

That’s why I find it to be interesting ground for discussion. 🙂

Say yes or roll the dice… (who was it who coined that phrase?).

My recent gaming has definitely adopted this style more and more.

Grant – I partly agree with you, but one need not look into just new games to see this. Way back in the late 70s and early 80s, D&D was often run this way. We had no skill system (with the exception of a few thiefly skills, and bits and pieces of other skills). When anything wasn’t covered by the rules, the GM just came up with some probability (roll a 20 on the d20 and it succeeds, or roll a d20 against your dexterity, or whatever), or did just say yes. Now in the early days, we may not have been thinking about things in exactly the same terms (of only roll dice if there is both an interesting yes and no result), but I think subconsciously we did.

One thing that may not be obvious is if the player wants to try some trick to avoid a combat or other obstacle, or to make it easier, and the GM assigns a probability of success, we still have an interesting yes and no result (the no result is the obstacle or combat is not bypassed or made easier – the yes result is that the PC does something cool).

Where this started to break down was when GMs started thinking about things more an more, and started requiring multiple successefull rolls to actually succeed. Sometimes this was a result of trying to hide the fact that the GM didn’t actually want success to occur. Other times it was out of some mistaken attempt to be “realistic.”

And as we demanded more “realism” games responded by adding more and more skills. But the games didn’t properly examine the impact of these skills and how they would be used to create exciting game play. So we get more and more roll until you fail, or until the GM thinks you’ve worked hard enough to succeed.

In my own gaming, I’m reducing those skills. Skills to have a use in defining the character better, but the mechanics should support exciting game play and not frustrate the GM and players.

I think it’s also worth noting that old school tactical combat with it’s numerous rolls doesn’t go against this idea. The effect of success and failure is well defined, and a good combat system even offers a few different maneuvers.

On reading Robin’s article, I do have one thing to quibble over. That is the idea of when giving a gimme and the player still wants to roll dice, of letting them roll for some color. This is just another meaningless roll. I think it would be prudent to ask WHY the player wants to roll and not accept the gimme. It might be worth asking the player why they feel they need to roll? What is the penalty for failure? Maybe the player sees a cool possibility for failure the GM doesn’t see. Of course it may just be the player saying “Gee, I’ve got this skill on my character sheet, and we never roll for it.” So one thing to do is keep track of things like this. Either provide more situations for the skill to come into play with a roll. Or get rid of the skill (but allow it to be color).

Of course color is always important, but it seems like you shouldn’t generally have to roll for the right to introduce color.

Frank

I agree with Robin that a failure that would stop the flow of the story shouldn’t happen, but lately I’m moving towards a very free form of GMing, where I have some vague ideas of what might happen, and mostly improvise, run with it, and turn whatever the dice roll into exactly the result that the story needs.

If something needs to happen to make the story succeed, it’s really actually part of the premisse of the story. But at the same time, I’d advocate being open to any strange twist that the dice or worse, the players, may throw at you.

I thought that was you, Frank — that’s part of why I liked “Frustration with non-combat abilities in a gamist combat RPG” so much.

Martin wrote: do you ever find problems that crop up — specifically, with expectations as far as how often rolls should be made, and what kind?

My problem is mostly that somebody does something and I find myself thinking: he does something, he should make a skill roll, which in retrospect turned out to be completely unnecessary because it doesn’t really change anything about what’s happening in the story.

Sometimes I realise that skill rolls always involve the same couple of skills, and I wrongly decide to ask for skill rolls in other skills that don’t really need one. You have a language skill? Great! You understand what the native is saying. Don’t bother rolling.

So basically my main problem is that I don’t go far enough in this. And that’s because when you’re improvising, you need to decide in a split second whether an action requires a roll or not, and for that decision, you need to know if it’s actually going to have any effect at all, and that’s something you often only realise just after the action has taken place. In retrospect, the roll didn’t do anything, or you should have asked for a roll and missed an opportunity to have something fun, exciting or dangerous happen.

Generally, I still ask for way, way too many skill rolls. They’re in the jungle, malaria is a known danger, so I let them make a Vigor roll to see if they get infected. What am I gonna do? Kill someone over a roll? Pause their expedition while their comerade recovers? Let’s face it, suffering from malaria just isn’t much fun. Kill an NPC with malaria (that’s what they’re for) and move on.

An added note: One of my favourite game systems at the moment is Fudge. One of the main reasons is that it has two ways of resolving combat: traditional round-by-round
trading blows and accumulating damage (although the damage system is actually much more realistic than most), and narrative combat, where the players say what they do, you choose an appropriate skill for them to roll, and improvise from there.

For example:
GM: Suddenly you’re ambushed by natives with blowguns!
A: I dive for cover!
B: I take cover behind a tree and return fire.
C: I jump to a low-hanging branch, swing towards the natives and land on top of the leader!

GM: A, roll Dodge.
A rolls: Fair. Is that good?
GM: Sure, you’re not doing anything else, so you quickly dive for cover, avoiding the undoubtedly poisonous darts flying around the others.
GM: B, roll Firearms.
B rolls: Great! Yay!
GM: Alright! You kill 3 natives. Darts hit the tree real close to your face, but you’re unhurt.
GM: C, roll Acrobatics.
C rolls: Good. Is that good enough?
GM: For what you’re trying to do? Well, you grab the branch and swing into their general direction, but you don’t land quite on top of their leader, but you manage to hit someone with your foot. You’re hit by a couple of darts, and now you’re Hurt, away from your buddies and surrounded by a lot of natives. Fortunately some of them die to B’s shooting.

Had C rolled Superb, it might have worked.
They’re still in combat, so you can go for another round of narrative combat in which lots of things happen. (Perhaps A decides to do something, and B tries to rescue C.) If I considered this a very minor encounter, a single round would have been enough. C would have been Very Hurt, but rescued by B who kept on killing any natives who got too close, and eventually chased them off.

Generaly, Fudge is great for improvising, cutting back on the number die rolls and generally avoiding getting bogged down with game mechanics.

mcv: I’ve never played Fudge, but your extended example (thank you for providing that! :)) makes it sound quite interesting.

Improvisation is one of my strengths as a GM, so I’m always intrigued when systems are set up to quickly and cleverly accomodate improv.

Improvisation also seems to be one of my strongest points as a GM. It took a while to figure that out, because I used to create all sorts of complicated, detailed plots, or use a shrink-wrapped campaign (most notably The Enemy Within for WFRP), but I noticed that those campaigns never took all options into account, and often made very unlikely assumptions about what the players would do (and considering that TEW has been voted one of the best campaigns ever, I wonder how full of holes the vast majority must be).

At one point my players veered so far off the main road of the campaign (and in a way that really wasn’t all that unreasonable), I had to improvise a couple of sessions with very little real preparation. My players turned out to love it. Somehow it was much more fun, and we got much more actual roleplaying done.

And now again with fudge, which started as filler for a couple of sessions when our regular Earthdawn GM couldn’t prep, and for which my preparation consists mainly of reading a couple of pages on wikipedia, the players are having a lot more fun. So it looks like I’m good at this, or at least my group enjoys it more. I fear I’ll have to abandon my overly ambitious campaigns full of intrige and intricate plots.

(mcv) I fear I’ll have to abandon my overly ambitious campaigns full of intrige and intricate plots.

I don’t think that this is necessarily the case. Instead of abandoning your prep, shift how you prep — and what you actually prepare — to accomodate this strength.

This is actually something I’m still working on myself — identifying which aspects of prep I need to focus on, and which ones I can leave out, to play to my strength in improvisation.

I already have a fitting idea about how to prep my intrigue, plot and conspiracies the next time: I’ll just add lots of fun clues and leads to the game, and figure out later what it all leads to. Or I’ll let the players do the figuring for me.

Advantages: much less work to prepare, I’m making the same journey of discovery as the players, I won’t have to remember as many details, and I won’t get frustrated when they miss some vital clue or attach too much value to something trivial. Whatever they choose, that’s what works. (Unless I’m mean, in which case the first thing they choose is a big red herring, and the second thing works.)

Can anyone think of a disadvantage to this approach?

I’ve never tried having every clue be open-ended, but I can think of at least two disadvantages to having some of your clues work that way that might apply:

1. It’s a weird hybrid of a player-directed game and a GM-directed game. If the players figure out what you’re doing, everyone might wonder why you weren’t just playing a more player-directed game in the first place.

2. Unless you keep good notes, it’s easy to lose track of what clues actually led to — which can in turn lead to crossed wires, retconning and general confusion.

You might consider prepping a few ideas for where each of your clues is headed, so if the players are floundering — which they may, depending on your group — you’ll have a direction to nudge them in.

I’ll undoubtedly have some sort of idea about what most of the clues might lead to, but details about how the various events related to the various clues actually interact with each other, that can wait until it becomes relevant.

And in some cases, I may even use a clue because the clue itself is cool, and it may not be immediately necessary for me to know what that clue may lead to.

In any case, I don’t quite understand what you mean with your first point. How exactly is this a weird hybrid and not actually a very sensible way to play?

For point 2, my notes just have to be better than those of my players. Maybe not even that, if I draw all my inspiration from whatever they do with their clues. If they forget about a clue, then it obviously wasn’t very important. If they are intrigued by a clue, there’s probably something very interesting going on. I’d better add some more related clues to the game and start thinking about some details. Or maybe I decide they don’t have information to follow up on this clue, so they’ll have to continue in a different direction, until they find a new clue they can connect with that first clue. And because I know the first clue sparked their interest, I can probably count on them remembering it later, which wouldn’t necessarily work if I’d planned it all in advance.

Okay, I may have to write some stuff down here, but I’d have to do the same with any other appproach.