The dice didn’t yank competency away from you: the player’s narrating their conflicts did, plain and simple.

1. Player does test and succeeds.
2. Your single helping dice (effectively a coin flip) was a weasel.
3. The player chose to narrate you being less than competent.

Personally? I have had LOTS of competent guys help me in my lifetime who, while totally smart and competent, were not any HELP at all — and that’s how I would have narrated it, to respect your character concept.

However, I wasn’t narrating that stuff, and most RPG players are stuck on the idea that ‘if your dice fail, you must look like a chump’, rather than realizing that failure can still mean you’re totally competent.

(And that’s ignoring the fact that it’s one bloody helping die and no indication of your relative skill at all.)

Could I have evangelized for competent-failure? Sure. I was busy teaching people the actual rules, though, so I didn’t have that kind of time.

In a proper campaign (the best kind of game for anything from BWHQ, in my opinion), there would have been a discussion about narrating to respect people’s concepts and letting everyone play their concept while still paying heed to the system. As it was, we just didn’t have the time, so your guy got narrated as incompetent.

Not the system or dice’s fault — success or failure doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with competence.

Finally — it wasn’t the system critique I was objecting to: it was your characterization of me as someone using GM Fiat, a method of play I loathe. I can’t for the life of me figure out what behavior of mine read as Fiat to you, but I assure you: I play the system, not authoritative decree.

The problem is looking like a schmuck even though you’re going to succeed, anyway.

In the two games I played, it didn’t feel like I was progressing toward a goal so much as spiraling away from it due to qualities that I rather thought my character didn’t possess.

In your game, Doyce (the better of the two I played, I might mention) the gruff veteran I played consistently failed at tasks I suspected a gruff veteran would at least look competent at… which is not good for my ego. Yes, we won in the end, but I couldn’t see how considering how often the dice yanked competency away from me!

The Guard’s can’t fail. I don’t mean they shouldn’t. I mean they can’t, mechanically, in the game. Period.

They always get what they want when the dice hit the table. They might suffer while they succeed, or there might be complications that come up while you succeed, but they always succeed. Period.

That’s how the game’s constructed.

But you are quite mad, Pete. I recommend you apply for membership in the Ludic Peripety Society. You’d do well there, sir!

Mad Mister Pete Figtree
ruthlessdiastemagames.wordpress.com

My wife tries to claim that I only need one box of ice cream to share with my little girl. Pfft.