A scene today has led me to think: maybe it would be good to have a roll/nodraw vs command, where if the result is a draw, it silently rerolls until it isn’t a draw, and just shows THAT result. There are a lot of vs rolls where a draw in the scene doesn’t really make sense or isn’t useful, and sometimes the RNG draws repeatedly.
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Thanks for the suggestion. I don’t have any plans to implement that at this stage.
Draws serve an important narrative purpose—the race too close to call, two performances receiving similar marks, an argument driven into the ground with no resolution, etc.
Even in cases where you absolutely positively need a decision, it can be helpful to know the specific steps that got you there. Did Bob get a critical success? Were they tied for ten rounds before Mary finally broke through? You may also want to give modifiers along the way or enact a specific tiebreaker based on circumstances. (Combat for instance favors the attacker because hits are more dramatic than misses.)
So I understand the desire, but I think this is something best left in human hands.
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I agree that it can be, but I think this still does leave it in human hands – one would have to choose to roll with the /nodraw switch, so would be saying that in this given case, you absolutely want and need a decision one way or the other. One roll last night drew five times in a row before getting a result; that’s six lines for one roll, and twelve for people who were also on the rolls channel. A draw was not useful there, and in that case it also really didn’t make any difference how many rolls it took to get there, beyond spam and frustration for the ST. Several others drew in big blocks of rolling by the ST for all characters in the scene, and he then had to go back in the list, find the draws, and reroll them at least once.
If one wants to know how many rounds of draws happened before a breakthrough, or give modifiers to later things based on number of draws, one could just roll exactly the same way as now. No one loses anything. People would likely still use an un-switched roll most of the time because it’s shorter to write and they may not care about or may indeed actively have use for a draw. But the ability to also say that it is not an option in the current case would be of use.
Anyway, that’s my argument for!
On the surely miniscule offchance I haven’t swayed you to my way of thinking (cough), would that be the sort of thing that someone could write as a plugin, or would trying to add in a switch on roll via the plugin system break something in the existing roll code?
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Plugins are designed for new screens / new commands. You could plug in the handlers for a new switch, but it would require a manual code modification to ‘wire’ it in to the existing dispatching for the ‘roll’ command and the existing web portal dialog box with roll options.
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