Word List
By: Claudio, Cleedee
Tags: Diegetic Randomness, Rpg, English

Word lists were one of the first things I imagined to resolve conflicts using Diegetic Randomness.

The most common conflict resolution system in RPG uses dice rolls to determine whether an attacker hits a hit on an opponent or whether his skill is sufficient to solve a problem at that very moment. My proposal is to use a word list instead of dice rolls, playing cards, among others. These words or expressions would be inserted in the narrative and would produce a random result through an explicit or implicit bet.

The word list comes as a solution to resolve conflicts, inserting pre-defined words, present in these lists, in the conversation between the participants of the game, to produce randomness. We can, however, do more than that by creating a list while the narrative takes place to resolve a momentary uncertainty. Let’s use an example to make things clearer:

[Master] — You hear the sound of the door being opened and the room you are in is a little more lit by the light that comes in. Being behind crates, he doesn’t see you right away. Footsteps are heard and now you know that he has entered a little more. What do you do?

[Player] — I intend to watch him and find the right moment to hit the piece of wood I have in my hand to hit him on the head. For that, I try to expose myself just a little, enough to know where he is looking.

At this point, the master assesses that there is a small chance for man to see the small movement that Veronica is making to see him. It would be a chance in four, that is, 25%. He then imagines how to diegetically create randomness to solve this. The technique he chooses is the word list and takes advantage of the description that the player previously made. He will ask the player what the shape of the piece of wood is. It creates a list with the following words: cylindrical, rectangular, triangular and square. Now he chooses the word rectangular and if the player responds saying that the piece of wood is rectangular, the man finds Veronica.

[Master] — You see the man looking in your direction. You hold a piece of wood. What is his format? Square, rectangular, triangular or cylindrical?

[Player] — She took a piece of wood that was part of the crates, so it’s rectangular.

[Master] — You hear the man’s voice: “I see you, get out of there and put your hands in a way that you can see them!”

As you can see, the example word list was created during the scene. However, there are situations where having a predetermined word list is very useful. We can conduct a violent physical conflict using diegetic randomness with the help of a list of words.

I am currently working with the well-known concept of difficulty levels to define the size of the word list. How does it work? Think of a list of words with four elements, as in the case of the above example. The list was created with four elements because of the 25% probability that Veronica would be located in that room while she moved to see the man. So, let’s say that each level of difficulty is also represented by your chance of being overcome.

We have a balanced difficulty that would be 50% and we can use the word list, only the first two for the bet between the player and the master. For this to work, it is important that the master indicates in the narration the difficulty perceived by the player’s character.

Based on a list of words with a maximum of four words, we can vary the probability as follows:

If a GM chooses a word for the player to make a mistake (out of 4), we have a 75% chance of success;

If a GM chooses a word for the player to make a mistake (out of 3), we have a 66% chance of success;

If a GM chooses a word for the player to make a mistake (out of 2), we have a 50% probability of success;

If a GM chooses a word for the player to get it right (out of 3), we have a 33% chance of getting it right;

If a GM chooses a word for the player to get it right (out of 4), we have a 25% chance of getting it right;

So, we can name these levels of difficulty: very difficult (25%), difficult (33%), balanced (50%), moderate (66%) and reasonable (75%). Use the names you think are most appropriate to get the message across.

Knowing the difficulty, we know the number of words on the list that we can use in the bet.

Two words for BALANCED;

Three words for DIFFICULT and MODERATE;

Four words for VERY DIFFICULT and REASONABLE.

My current list for fighting is arm, flank, leg and belly. So, if the difficulty level of a combat for the character is Moderate, both player and GM know that they will use only the first three words on the list during betting rounds. We are not going to speculate here on how we got to the difficulty level and whether it can change during combat. We can leave these discussions for another time.

How can betting rounds take place?

At the beginning of the fight, the master describes that the character feels that the fight will be moderate for her (has a small advantage), justifying the impressions that the character observes by fiction.

Then the master mentally chooses (and notes for transparency issues) one of the valid words and describes his character’s intention. Then, the player must describe his character’s intentions, inserting the valid word that he decided to bet. If the GM chose the flank and the player bet on the belly, he would have won the bet and something bad will happen to the GM’s character.

This bad thing depends on the intention described in the narrative. If it hurts, we have the question of how to determine the amount or quality of that damage. It could be as simple as a hit and a player would endure four hits before dying, for example. But it can be somewhat variable, so there remains the challenge of finding a solution within diegetic randomness. I am testing solutions for that too.

My studies to create a game supported by diegetic randomness are being documented on this page (in portuguese language). I intend to bring my research to Medium to expand the proposal and see that new ideas and solutions can arise from the dissemination of knowledge.

The word list and, in general, diegetic randomness, can be used on your current game table, as in the example given in this article. You can find more examples here.