So a lot of my work is the inspiration for my Gaming, one of the Risk Management concepts that affect my understanding of Game Probability is Actions that Address Risk.
So growing up a lot of games was : Roll => Fail you just FAIL or => Succeed and succeed. And any simple observation of real life is that
- Failure is not always an INSTANT and DIRECT feedback.
- We can Retry, Failure means taking Longer and Spending more than Expected or Others.
- Success may simply be not making the same amount of Failures as the Other Party OR not the same Degree of Success.
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- That Degrees of Success/Failure is the nitty-gritty of everyday life. That: if we are trained and conditioned to it – We see things not in the Success or Failure of the DICE, but the degrees of success and failure and how it looks in THE BIGGER picture.
- Someone who’s managed to FAIL a little less than Everyone to succeed over all has been primed in our intuition and allows us to Feel Gratitude and Hope.
- That we count our SMALL WINS, we succeed in small things and we Count the margin of Success even if the scope is small and meager – again our Sense of Hope and Gratitude is primed for us to get that optimism where we can.
- Rework, Technical Debt, Workarounds, are Key Concepts in Understanding Margin of Success and Failure in the Context of Overall human experience.
- We may have to do a lot of Rework, like writing our book, doing our job, etc… some tasks are really uncertain and requires so many Tries.
- Troubleshooting is an exercise of REWORK as we go through a LIST of possibilities over and over again in a Problem to Eliminate all possibilities and discover its root cause.
- We Take ON Technical Debt if surviving or getting the small wins we need allows us to TRY AGAIN. AGILE or Adaptive Life Cycle project management is securing Funding or Wins that validate the Endeavor by delivering usable solutions to the End-user but GAINING more and more technical Debt – with the strategic goal that we deliver Enough Wins to survive and utility to the End User that the system is NET POSITIVE for the end-user even if a different perspective there is a much better way to do something NOW that we Know (Hindsight bias).
- Workarounds – the temporary fixes that give us technical debt and add more and more to our load is part of the RISKS and challenges.
Sadly it was Trial and Error that taught me how to Use a Risk management system – that a RISK management system boils down to ACTIONS to affect Probability. No one explains it that way – no one explains the Cost-Benefit of Risk Management – they often explain it as an Absolute – that Accepting a RISK is never an option – its one of those Empathy Exercises that show why there is a system of POVERTY – when I realize I have actions and resources (like Credit, a Car, a Home) that reduce uncertainty to my outcome I look superior to a person who doesn’t have these resources but if I remove them I feel immediately the suffering and uncertainty of others.
Does the GM or Gamer need to know the Probabilities: NO.
What is the Outcome or Benefit in Knowing the Context?
You can measure the Outcome or Benefit in what Actions I can take knowing this Information. You can measure information by the ACtionability.
I know I can narrate a Success, Failure, or the Huge Gap in between success and failure and how it relates to the Character, stakeholders, the Party, the NPCs because I know the Context of Risks, Uncertainty, and Systems affected. I can tell a story that shows the Actions of the PCs affect their party and the world around them.
On the Extreme end (as a control), Run a game without any Consequence or Impact on the world and measure how satisfaction of the Players or the GM feels when nothing affects Anything. a NPC does not influence a PC and a PC doesn’t influence the world.
Now run a game where the Decisions of the PCs have an unforeseeable but TANGIBLE effect on the world. In the SPECTRUM of agency and affect on the STory and the world – which would you rather play? Which would you have fun with sitting with friends or fellow players in an afternoon or evening of storytelling?
How does my Doing X affect the Party, NPCs, the world, etc…? What is the context of my action in its probabilities? Am I the first or one of the many who tried? How am I different?
In the end of the day we want to enjoy the game – and some Actions (through knowledge of options) increase the Likelihood we will succeed with diminishing returns. that balancing act becomes easier when we know the factors better and can control some of them. We manage the risk of having an unsatisfying game with knowledge that has diminishing returns.
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