Player preference on Visibility of dice rolls

Another option, of course, is removing the dice rolls entirely—remember that most players won’t play any particular game more than once, which means most people won’t perceive a 67% chance of success, they’ll perceive a 100% chance (if the roll succeeded for them) or a 0% chance (if it failed). Even in a parser game where actions can be retried indefinitely, it just tends to become frustrating to roll the dice over and over until you succeed.

This is the option Loose Ends (also based on Vampire the Masquerade) goes with. Every action either succeeds or fails, deterministically. The skills on your character sheet just unlock new options: maybe the “intimidate the cop into letting you past” option always fails, but the “use your power to manipulate mortal emotions to make him fear you” one (only available if you have that power on your sheet) succeeds.

This means we only had to write success or failure responses for each action, not both, which was nice!

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