Parselings, and Stacking the Dice

Parselings has a early millennium action-webcomic aesthetic and tone, where players take on the role of the titular Parselings; ordinary folk who have become infected with strange ink-like entities that bond with their hosts and tattoo words on their bodies. Caught between humanity and dark linguistic monstrosities, the Parselings use the magic of these words to heal or harm the infected world.

The world of Parselings is deeply thematic, drawing on ideas of mutual aid, internal versus external definition, freedom versus self-control, and the complexities of communication when others may have already labeled you differently than you label yourself.

And the game is dense.

First of all, the game delights in its large glossary; your characters don’t have mana, they have “syllables.” You don’t earn experience points, you earn “script.” It alternates quite rapidly between cute, tiresome, and clever.

The system itself is far from simple; your character has eight “images” divided into four categories, each represented by a card suit. You have aptitudes, articulation, tricks, coherency, and derived stats. You have multiple tracks for different kinds of hit points that result in different kinds of damage. You use Words to create Parses which require Aspects and Augments, and a minimum cost of one Syllable point. If you’re not careful, your character may become an Incoherent. The corebook is 221 pages long, and it is full of information.

If it sounds like I’m down on the game for its complexity and purpleish prose, I am not. Complex and purplishly prosaic is my jam. (You have been reading the rest of my posts, right?) Besides, the difficulties of working with a new system are not unique. Almost every game uses its own terminology and there isn’t anything worse about learning to call stats and skills “images and aptitudes” for Parselings, than “attributes and abilities” for Exalted.

What fascinates me the most about this game, however, and is well worth a discussion, is its mechanical system for checks; the Choice system.

First thing’s first: it uses a deck of cards instead of dice. Nothing too shocking there, I should think. Dice have always been a point of randomness to spice up the game, so what does it matter that a system uses a different randomizer? A deck without the face cards is no different than a d10.

Well, it is a little different.

See, a deck of cards is a dependent randomizer, while dice are in-dependent. What does that mean? It means that when I roll a die, it doesn’t matter what other dice I’ve rolled, that die is going to have the same probability distribution for all its sides. I could roll a die two hundred times and come up with a 3 every single time. Improbable, but possible.

For a deck of cards, however, if I draw a two of clubs I cannot draw another two of clubs. By virtue of drawing a card, I have affected the probability of drawing the other cards. I am now less likely to draw a two, less likely to draw a club.

So how does Parselings use cards? Well, remember how I said each stat had a suit attached to it? If you want to, say, swipe keys from a guard’s belt, you could make a “Finesse-Larceny” check. You add the stat and skill together — let’s say the combined score is 5 — and then draw that many cards from your deck. Because Finesse is a club-suit stat, if any of those 5 cards is a club, it counts as a success. If the number on each club is over 5, it counts as one success, while if its equal to or under 5, it counts as its own number of successes. (a 3 of clubs is 3 successes, a 5 of clubs is 5 successes, etc.) The more successes, the better you do.

There’s more to it — you can “push” your cards if you have a diamond in your hand, there are rules about discarding vs shuffling vs removing cards, and face-cards are damaging conditions that can mess up your draw — but those are the basics.

An interesting system, but still not exactly what I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about Output Randomness.

Dice rolling is Output-randomness. You try to kill the goblin, but you might not. You try to woo the crowed, but you might not. You try to win the game, but you might not. In most RPGs this is the cost of doing business.

Card games like poker are Input-randomness. You don’t know what cards you’ll get, but once you do, you can do what you want with them and no die roll will stop you.

But the card-check system I described above is still Output-randomness, isn’t it? Your success is dependent on what cards you draw, not what cards you play or use. What’s so different about this system?

The lynchpin of the Choice system is that you don’t use a standard 52 cards; you create your own deck. You start the game with 15 cards of your choice, any number or suit you care to use. In essence, you affect your own dice’s probability. And Parselings isn’t the only deck-building RPG; Praxis Arcanum has its own deck-building mechanics, for example, as does Don’t Wake Up!

The book itself explains its reasoning quite well: “[in fiction] the odds are not equal for everyone. The decks are always stacked in one person or another’s favor…I have found that dice systems seemed to swing wildly in the favor of luck and pure statistics.”

And they do. To be fair, so do shuffled cards; but the difference is that this system allows the player’s choice to influence this Output-randomness. Do you build a deck with a lot of low cards, ensuring that you have a greater chance of getting two or three successes on each pull? Do you go heavy on one suit, meaning you can get a lot of successes on one kind of stat, but not many on the others? Diamonds can be used as wild-cards, but at a cost. Do you lean heavily on that or not? In stressful situations, it costs resources to reshuffle your deck — do you want to plan on doing that often, or rarely?

Dice in RPGs tend to be an esoteric and arcane mechanic. We hate our dice as much as we love them. We plot and plan our numbers, shifting them as high or as low as we can, depending. We look at our character sheets and squeeze out every ounce of probability we can to make sure when the time comes, we can do what we need. In the end, when all our plans come to naught, we personify our dice and either send them to dice-jail or put them on pedestals.

The fact is, succeeding at an RPG is heavily based on luck. A hefty chunk — almost a majority — of most RPG systems is designed around adjusting die-roll probabilities, whether though skill bonuses, luck-points, or “wild dice.” What Parselings does with building your own deck, other RPGs do by adding bigger and bigger numbers to our dice until we reach an 85, 90, or even 95% chance of success.

Of course, never 100%. We could never have a game where you couldn’t lose, could we? I mean what would that even look like, a game where you always succeeded?

Can we go further down this rabbit hole? Of course we can! Next time, we’ll take a look at deterministic game design.