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Targets
We’re playing a game. I want to sneak past the goblin guards into the necromancer’s camp. I grab my dice and ask you what I need to roll to succeed. How do you choose that?
This whole thing, setting a target number, has been out of favor with a lot of people (including me) recently. It seems needlessly finicky, slows down play, and doesn’t serve a great purpose.
The thing is, I was wrong to say it can’t work. When done right, it’s a totally workable system. Problem is, few games do it right.
The things that’s missing from a lot of setting target numbers in practice is that a good target number always reflects the circumstances first and foremost. The problem that I’ve fallen into is setting target numbers by thinking “okay, that should be hard for that character to do, what’s a hard target number for them?”
That’s where, in practice, target numbers fall apart. We’re no longer talking about a fictional situation, I’m just picking a number based on my sense of pacing, my judgement of how much I want you to succeed. We just stepped back from playing a game to being one person telling the other person how much they want them to succeed.
When target numbers work they’re reflecting the world around them. That number is set specifically because of the fictional circumstances, not to make the task a certain difficulty for a certain person. Some games elegantly let you set target numbers from the fiction (see: Mouse Guard) and that works fantastically. When I talk about not liking target numbers it’s not liking the way that I often end up using them in practice, as a way of saying “you should be this likely to succeed.”
Interesting. Can you explore why that feels wrong? Do you experience this as a problem from the GM’s chair, player’s chair, or both?
As a player, the only time I’ve noticed this is when the GM has pacing considerations in mind, but had the wrong impression of my character’s capabilities. He upped the ante, and it lead to a TPK (a little weird for BW).
Pacing is a major responsibility for the GM, does it seem inappropriate that the ease or difficulty of things should be a mechanism to control pacing?
As a GM, I find it’s nice to have target numbers to fall back on as a backup to my authority. Assuming players are in comparable scenarios repeatedly, having a good table of difficulty factors potentially makes the world more consistent and learnable for the players. (Rather than the players merely learning about my attitude to pacing.)