Roll or Trust?

[muhaha8]

Grak summarized my thoughts very well. But for the sake of argument, I will say that some of the world's best eating contest champs are skinny little guys and gals. It's weird. So the big, burly manly men, and the fat guys who show up, are often beat out by these little shrimps. Kind of ridiculous.

[Nikodemos]

Despite my obvious bias (The role gods favor me over all others) I prefer roll fights for two reasons... aside from the common complaints attributed to trust fights. First I would note the role fight's tendency to turn a sure thing on it's head. I believe a random chance at either failure or success keeps things fresh. Most importantly however, I find that roll fights keep you on your toes. An attack that unexpectedly fails provides the opportunity to craft a unique response on the spur of the moment. You begin to design your emotes in a fashion that allows for either event and presumes nothing. Boring reactions are a simple result of haste and poor design.

[Kimaira]

I'm in favor of roll fights myself, mainly for the thrill. I won't know what will happen to my character in the fight, and I shouldn't, in my mind.

Also those stating that roll fights usually get dumped down, nah. Just write good emotes in between the rolls and you'll have more than few memorable fights to remember.

[Valicor]

There's only really a simple way to put it. Coming from the mouth of someone who RPs fights on almost a daily basis, Trust is the basis for everything.

If you're not humble enough to accept realty when your character is defeated, then you're not as competent a RPer as you may have thought. It ties into humility, being humble, and being realistic. Sure, nobody likes to lose a fight, but it's just got to be accepted.
Trust fights are so much better, in my opinion, because of your freedom. Freedom for option and creativity.

Roll fights can be fun and enjoyable, but that's the real advice I put out here;
If you have trouble ending trust fights, or you don't like trust fights because of how they don't end, take a long thought on if you could do anything differently, to make the RP more realistic and involving. And if it's really not your fault, then fine, let it not be your fault. Maybe tell the other person the truth? Help improve them as RPers?

So....yeah. I prefer trust over roll.

[Loxmardin]

I very much agree with Valicor. I mainly do roll fights when that's the preferred style of my opponent or when I need to trudge through a large scale fight at a decent enough speed (where there's just too many people involved and too many other factors to really do it successfully with emotes alone).

Even then, I try to make the most out of the roll fights and try to make my emotes realistic to the situation. You can do a lot with rolls without dumbing the fight down or "losing when you shouldn't" or anything like that. Dumb luck has a place in everything, as does a complete lack of luck. Your character might just be having a bad day, slipped up once at an early point in the fight and never regained their balance properly. Perhaps they were taken completely by surprise by their opponent! Be creative with the roll fights; it'll make it more fun for everyone.

... I do prever trust, personally, though!

[Aadora]

I have a personal hate for roll fights. Because 99% of the time when I am in a trust fight, I lose every roll. And it makes me feel like crap going through an event on a character that has trained almost their entire life in using the light, and has fought for thousands of years and comes in to fight against a small group of Scourge... and literally can't even hit them nor dodge or block their attacks.

Seriously, Argent Crusade event on my draenei paladin. I went through the entire event without rolling a single successful hit or dodge. Okay, so I did get one...

But that brings me to the second issue with roll fights, specifically in events rather than small RPPVP fights, and this is just from my experience. People running events don't usually tend to care about your rolls. You either hit or miss based on their roll versus yours. And a lot of the time even they decide what happens from the hit. That very same event I got a single roll, and what happened? Oh I hit the zombie, and it lost an arm... and then started swinging at me. Another guy rolls for his attack who has been hitting the entire event. He gets barely higher than I did (And yes I mean versus the person running the event) and apparently he gets to blow the heads off of three zombies with a single bullet.

So there are times like that, specifically in events where what happens is decided by other people, where I don't like roll fights. I know it's pretty much the best way to keep multiple people in check, but I still don't like it.

But then it comes to small fights, like 1v1 or 1v2 or 2v2 or whatever.

The issue I have with roll fights on this scale, is as a lot of people say, it's not at all fair. You may as well fight it out through the actual ingame PvP mechanic, because who your character is IC and what they do IC doesn't mean ANYTHING.

I won't make the usual argument of bum with absolutely no experience whatsoever beats a military commander veteran. Instead, lets look at the RP perspective.

Your character could be a great fighter. Could have years of experience. But that doesn't matter if you as a player are unlucky. (And yes I believe in luck.)

You can have every single possible advantage over your opponent. But that still doesn't matter because it's all based on chance.

You might have the best weapons, the best armor, and the most experience of how to use them... but it doesn't matter if the system's /roll feature doesn't roll high for you.

These are supposed to be IC fights, fighting as we RP. But honestly other than tagging on an emote of what we 'try' to do, this isn't the kind of RP I come here for at all. I don't come here to base all my character's actions off of chance. I come here to create a character, give them a specific set of skills, and put those skills to work wherever I desire/is possible.

But roll fights, they complete undermine the entire point of our characters having any bit of skills at all. It doesn't matter if you are a skilled warrior, or a spell user, or an assassin or an archer... because when it comes down to it in roll fights, it's all about randomly generated numbers.

[Brutalskars]

I use rolls primarily, just out of habit and years of dealing with rolls is part of it. But also since I run a lot of combat oriented events, I look to all my real world combat training and the like - most fights devolve into chaos. Thus I look to the fury of Nuffle as an interpretation of the chaos of battle.

*The Blood Sacrifices the Nuffle must begin*

[WingedReaver]

Definitely trust for me. Valicor and Aadora basically said everything I had to say - a Blood Knight Master who's gained her rank shouldn't be beaten just by some lucky rolls while training with an initiate. Not much to add, since Valicor and Aadora said it all.

Yes, rolls make it 'fair', but tend to be very, very illogical.

[Maulbane]

Warning! This post contains instances of:
ᐊᐅ

So, I've spent the past two years or so doing nothing but 'trust' (a SC2 RP community. It had a roll system, but it was rarely used - I may have seen it done once or twice for things like sight checks, but those were only in private RPs and more of a novelty). It's actually a bit head-spinning, and one of the things that I'm going to have to acclimate to here in CotH - I hold a simultaneous resentment and a grudging understanding towards it. To elaborate, I hate it, but I also realise that in many situations it's simply required.

The dislike stems from a few major points. The first, and easily the most important, is that it objectively strips a character of their development and identity. They become an avatar rather than your actual character. Now, it's important to note here that I'm fully aware of the role that "luck" purportedly plays when dice rolling is used, but there's a point where luck ends and distance from reality begins. An earlier post in this thread explains my stance very well, however - that in a situation where there the odds are inescapably slanted "text" fighting would ideally be used. However, I feel that even in situations where fighters would be level enough to justify fortuna's arm having any significance there, should be enough trust that peoples' emotes won't be dumb, anime-styled, impossible or any mix. I'll throw an example.

[Kneely McBlondHair suddenly flings the handful of dust she'd kept handy at her captor, who'd been hubristically towered over her]

This has zero possibility of being dodged, outside of the realm of prestige classes (which itself plays into my stance on this - depending on the class, they may be able to do things standard people cannot (but I think prestige classes are gone anyway)). The naughty captor would inevitably get sand in his eyes, because that's how sand works - there's a reason people equate grains of sand to stars in the sky. He would, as a result, be in an extremely vulnerable position for the character's justified retribution (after all, he is a captor. Captors suck). Hell, depending on his race and biology, he may die in a flurry of well-placed gut stabs, seconds after the sneak attack. Oh, but wait, he's wearing (body) armor! Tough armor, taken from the hills of IKidnapPeopleForALiving. She had this in mind, though.

[Kneely presses her advantage, going for his sweaty, stink armpit - the sign of a true captor. Were she to succeed, she'd stick him right in his dang axillary artery]

[Captor AbsentFather, by no virtue of his own, would narrowly miss the strike, instead having it graze him across the forearm during his frenetic movements]

I'd go on, but it'd be extraneous since everyone already knows how it works. and I just realised I've made little point as to the real reason people roll - fear. People are scared of losing their characters, or that the person they're RPing with will refuse to fairly consider what's going on when making emotes. It's true, it happens. But at the end of the day, this is a closed community. There shouldn't be any excuse for people being scared to, well, RP with eachother, especially with the entry processes in place. The character warning system is almost ubiquitous here, and equally widespread are the OOC signing of waivers for almost anything - hell, I even got a CW just for drinking some beer that had some stuff that could mess him up in it.

The benefits to your character and your own immersion are far beyond the risk of having an OOC spat, especially when not having to worry about the inevitable vagaries of 1-100 fights, including bullet dodging, instantaneous "rolls" out of the way of incoming weapons moving at some 30 ft/sec. If your character gets into a situation where he/she can die, that's all there is to it - you just have to let things run their respective course. If you truly can't come to an agreement, and arbitration is out of the question, then that is the time when dice rolls come into the mix.

You didn't think I wasn't going to say anything positive, did you? I'm not that much of a negative nelly. Rolling has its place, but I think there are only two instances when it should be an accepted norm, rather than the default. The first is, as explained, when people just can't come to an agreement - it happens. The second is during larger-scale combat events, in which case they're already probably running tabletop style battle systems, which is actually totally fine.

However, I'd point out that during the old retaking of Stromgarde (the final event, specifically), players were given free reign, allowing to free-mote any NPCs they wished. No absurd transgressions occurred (in fact, I had my character take a crossbow bolt through the hand for good measure). Of course, there's a real guilty pleasure in rolling for me, which I think everyone relates to - the suspense of knowing what's gonna happen. Something about throwing your character to the winds of fate is exciting, but it's a game-y excitement, like playing slot machines. However, there's something I've omitted (mostly because I'm a vile person who loves to straw-man whenever I can), which is the stuff you can add on to roll fights to make them immensely fairer (never quite reaching the level of being able to compute stuff yourself, but close), those things being modifiers and the ilk.

As an example, just yesterday during the pre-dreadmarch event, I decided to give my character a -20 to any of his rolls (including movement and sight). This was because, in my silly Forsaken's endless quest to be as ironic as possible, he'd donned an old, rusted set of Stormwind infantry duds, infinitely larger than his atrophied lil' body. It was funny, but had IC ramifications. He couldn't see properly through his visor, his bone-y feet slipped around in the boots, his cuirass often got caught on his shoulderpads, restricting any arm rotation from the shoulder. On top of that, he got caught away from the rest of the pack, with two attack dogs simultaneously being rude to him. At that point I'd given my character for dead, but he was saved by a friendly feller who dispatched of the dogs for him. Thus, the application of modifiers and more complex rules (criticals, thresholds (used by the GMs at the event to good effect) different health levels (mimicking their morphology), modifiers, multiple rolls or initiative for faster chars) can make rolling less silly (in my eyes).

As a closing note, before I inevitably apologise for makin' this long-winded post, I'd like to say that even on a community notoriously filled with youngsters (ever played SC2? The RP was 90% matchmaking games (god did I mention b-net sucks), 10% people who I'd been lucky enough to find in matchmaking games and friend) quite a few people were able to text-fight, even if it was just one/two-liners.

In closing, I apologise for making this long-winded post.