[RPG Theory] The Folly of the Saving Throw

[stevekenson]

One curious aspect of RPG design and play is the idea that everything—every hazard or danger—should be, at least potentially, survivable. You get a saving throw, soak roll, resistance test, or what have you. There’s always a chance, even if it’s a slight one. Thus you have RPGs defining saving throw DCs for things like cyanide (or fictional toxins defined as the deadliest in the world) and damge values for molten lava and nuclear blasts. Now, of course there are genres of fiction (notably comic books) where such things are entirely surviveable by characters with the right powers, but for others is there really something so wrong with having “instant kills” in the game, much as there are in real life?

One brilliantly humorous example of this is the Fire and Brimstone “supplement” (subtitled “The Comprehensive Guide to Lava, Magma, and Superheated Rock) that makes fun of this attitude in RPGs by offering the simple “rule” of: if you fall into lava, you die. Similarly, if you’re jettisoned into space, or dropped from 30,000 feet without a parachute... you die. Is there really a point in calculating and “reality checking” the amount of damage involved per second (round, minute, what have you)?

Similarly, a colleague and I were discussing modeling certain poisons with all sorts of resistance and “attack” rolls and whatnot and I asked: Is this really necessary? Aren’t the effects of a given poison on a given metabolism (as measured by a game trait like Constitution, Stamina, or the like) pretty clear-cut? Barring some kind of medical intervention, many poisons are simply lethal; your Stamina score is just a measure of how long you have to live, or how long medical attention has to arrive before it’s too late. In some cases, the answer is “not very long.”

Am I saying the GM, like nature, should be sometimes cruel and merciless? Perhaps, sometimes. After all, what really creates dramatic tension in fiction is the potential for death at the hands of such dangers. The hero dangles over the lake of lava, but doesn’t fall in and somehow manage to suffer only half damage long enough to swim ashore. The heroine nearly drinks from the poisoned goblet; she doesn’t take a hearty swig but somehow manage to make her save vs. poison.

Ah, but what about the heroic resistance, the one-in-a-million avoidance of certain death? Well, in some heroic genres that should certainly be an option, but I think it would be easier to have an overall “avoid certain death” mechanic than to define every means of “certain” death in detail and build a slight (and often different) chance of survival into each one.

There’s a great deal of derision directed at “killer Gamemasters” who dispense death without mercy, and “railroading” plots that have certain moments where the heroes have no way out, no chance whatsoever, but I wonder whether or not those things add a certain excitement to the game. I wonder if they help to break down the notion that player characters are somehow entitled to their survival and success simply by virtue of being “important,” the kind of “everybody wins” mentality that encourages a “fairness” wherein no one is challenged, and nothing is ever really at risk.

Comments

[xomec.livejournal.com]

Excitement comes from the suspense of knowing you might die if you fail a roll.

Oh, I agree entirely. Unpreventable doom has no dramatic value. However, the thing with the suspense of knowing a character might die because of a bad roll is, sooner or later—just according to the law of averages—you've got to follow through on that threat, or else it becomes hollow.