RPG systems that are actually fun as games.

[Sigil]

Sometimes I joke that I don't think I've ever played a good RPG, but I'm only half joking when I say it. I've sort of come to terms with the fact that most people that play RPGs don't seem to want the same things from an RPG that I (or I think the Gaming Den at large) does. Most people seem to be there almost exclusively for the roleplay, the part where you sit down with your friends and tell a story together, but they're either not good enough at or confident enough in their ability to just sit down and have an improv session, so their system of choice just serves as a framework to facilitate that. I think this is why people at large seem to be just fine with games that the common consensus here would identify as bad games.

You can have fun playing a bad game just like you can enjoy a bad movie, especially if you gather 4 of your favorite people to play it with you, but what do I even mean by a bad "game"? Simply that it's a game that, when stripped of it's themes and story to the point where it's just the pure mechanics of the game isn't fun to play in the same way that a game of uno, a round of poker, or a chess match might be. Would you ever play just d20? Where you stripped all the names of creatures and abilities away and you were just running combats where it was "Unit number 32 moves to square A12 and activates ability 4c"? I sure wouldn't, I'd rather play tetris or connect 4.

If we want to make an RPG that's actually good as a game I think we need to try and make it fun to play at the lowest level possible in the same way that it's fun to run around in Mario 64 even without actually working on any sort of progress towards beating a level, and for RPGs the lowest level you can go is the resolution mechanic. In d20 (and indeed most RPGs), the resolution mechanic is just "You roll some dice and see if the result is bigger or smaller than some number", sometimes there's player agency in deciding whether to roll or not but no agency involved in the actual act of rolling. Classes and other character abilities often add in agency, such as by letting a player decide to reroll sometimes or by otherwise subverting the resolution system, but this feels to me like trying to patch in fun on top of a boring system and we should try to make these things part of the system itself. I think there are at least two ways you can go about this: You can make the resolution system have an element of gambling/wagering or you can have the resolution system be about solving small puzzles that the system generates.

For wagering, there are a few models I can think of that seem to apply:

• The chance to get a result you want, which is what we have now in d20, but there's no player agency involved at the point of execution.
• The chance that a result you already have now could be a better result if you decided to regenerate it (rerolling a die or discarding and drawing a card for example).
• The chance that a result you have currently is better than an already generated secret value and deciding how to act on that.

For puzzle solving I don't know that I can think of a discrete way to break it up into different systems, but I think you want to have very low levels of randomization or even none, and the players just work towards using the resources available to them in the best way they can figure out.

You can even combine these two methods to have a system where, for example you might have a dicepool that you roll in advance and you decide where to spend those dice, hoping that you're using your dice in a way that lets you beat secret target numbers so that you accomplish as much as possible and don't fail any of them.

Finally, because this is a multiplayer game, you can introduce an element of bluffing, where one or both sides of a wager are trying to fool the other into thinking they have better or worse values than they actually do.

I can think of two videogames that each fit one of these models well.

For wagering I'd look to Dicey Dungeon as an example. Characters in Dicey Dungeon have a dice pool they roll each turn and a board of actions that can accept dice with varying values in different ways to activate them. Some actions can be used multiple times a turn, some only once, some require you to spend multiple dice on them that add together to hit a certain value, some just require you spend a fixed number of dice on them regardless of the result, lots of them have maximum or minimum values that you can use in them, and there's a lot more variation than that. The different classes in dicey dungeon have different methods available to them to reroll dice, and characters gain access to a larger dice pool as they advance in level.

For puzzle solving I think a good example is Into the Breach. Into the breach is already a tactical RPG where you control a team of three mechs you level up through a campaign. The player always knows exactly what the results of an action they take is going to be before they execute it, and the only randomization is in the form of what opposition the player will face in the campaign and where enemies are going to spawn each turn.

I don't have an idea of what exact system I'd like to see an RPG use, but I do think if you want to make an RPG fun in and of itself as a game it needs that fun to start at the lowest level of the system possible, and I'm interested to see what other people here think of it.

[OgreBattle]

D&D is a mish mash of wargame rules that Gygax & Arneson were playing

So designing a 2020 RPG that's fun to play can begin with looking at wargames/skirmish games that are currently fun to play, and maybe video games if the mechanics can be done in a way for human calculation

[Thaluikhain]

Well, GW's Inquisitor didn't quite make up it's mind if it wanted to be an RPG or a small scale skirmish game. So if you call it an RPG, and if you take away the RPG bits, and if the skirmish rules actually worked...few ifs there.

[Blade]

I think it's a bit bullshit.

As you wrote, most people play RPG to have fun telling stories together. That's actually what set tabletop RPG apart from other games. There are board games where you go into dungeons to kill monsters and loot treasures, but if you decide to do this in a RPG rather than in one of these games it's because you want to do it by telling the story together with your friends, not by moving miniatures and rolling dices.

So the rules should indeed offer a framework to tell the story rather than just be a boardgame with "you can tell a story to make it more engaging" footnote. I'd even say that if your mini-game is too good in itself, it will probably detract from the whole "tell a collaborative story" concept. People will just approach it as a puzzle to solve and the roleplaying aspect will probably be forgotten.

To me good rules aren't rules that would make a good boardgame. Good rules are rules that help create the stories the players expect to play in the game.

[Pedantic]

I don't know that the resolution mechanic is actual the point we need to move down to for this kind of analysis. The D20 roll or whatever roll is just appending the phrase "...with an X% chance of success" to whatever actions players are attempting.

There's some merit in evaluating where those percentages should generally lay, what a high-risk play should look like, whether some moves should be high/low risk for different characters and so on, but the real meat of good game play is the quality of the decisions players get to make in the first place. We want to start with "what actions can I take, and what can I expect from their outcomes?"

Dice rolls, in that context, are basically an occasionally invoked push your luck mechanic that's overlayed on the broader tactical choice of picking which skill usage you think will most advantageously change the current board state or which ability/spell to deploy. Push your luck mechanics can totally be a fun risk/reward point and are a good zest to add in (especially if players can reliable make choices between high-success lower impact abilities and lower success higher impact abilities) but the real fun gameplay comes from the decision making.

The appeal of the RPG (or what I thought was the appeal, before my hobby was revealed primarily to be a vehicle for niche improv troupes) is the unbounded game-state. You have a lot more possible inputs than most board or video games, and thanks to the adjudicating presence of the DM, you can rely on getting a new, valid game-state back after you put any given input in. The whole thing that makes RPGs interesting is a relentless cycle of "here's a situation, make a decision, here's a new situation modified by your decision" that can theoretically continue forever, providing endless opportunities to try and make good and interesting decisions.

With that understanding, it's not about how you roll or don't roll dice, so much as how many actions are well codified and well understood by the players involved, and how many interesting permutations of the game state can take various actions from the players and produce meaningfully new and interesting results.

[Sigil]

I think it's a bit bullshit.

As you wrote, most people play RPG to have fun telling stories together. That's actually what set tabletop RPG apart from other games. There are board games where you go into dungeons to kill monsters and loot treasures, but if you decide to do this in a RPG rather than in one of these games it's because you want to do it by telling the story together with your friends, not by moving miniatures and rolling dices.

I agree that the part where you tell a story is what sets a tabletop RPG apart, but every RPG is still presenting itself as game to some degree, and I think it's that game part that's bad in them, not the story part. If you're going to bother having a game, I think that the game part should at least be fun.

To me good rules aren't rules that would make a good boardgame. Good rules are rules that help create the stories the players expect to play in the game.

I don't think the idea of having rules that are fun in and of themselves has to be mutually exclusive with having a system that encourages good stories.

I don't know that the resolution mechanic is actual the point we need to move down to for this kind of analysis. The D20 roll or whatever roll is just appending the phrase "...with an X% chance of success" to whatever actions players are attempting.

The appeal of the RPG (or what I thought was the appeal, before my hobby was revealed primarily to be a vehicle for niche improv troupes) is the unbounded game-state. You have a lot more possible inputs than most board or video games, and thanks to the adjudicating presence of the DM, you can rely on getting a new, valid game-state back after you put any given input in. The whole thing that makes RPGs interesting is a relentless cycle of "here's a situation, make a decision, here's a new situation modified by your decision" that can theoretically continue forever, providing endless opportunities to try and make good and interesting decisions.

I'm not completely wed to the idea that you have to move the fun all the way down to the level of the resolution mechanic in order to have a good game at all, but it feels to me like if you were successful in doing so you could layer your other rules on top of that in a way that built off of that core mechanic so you wouldn't have to have the degree of added complexity with each additional system that we have with D&D for example, but you could still get a variety fun and interesting results out of it that facilitated storytelling. It feels to me sometimes that the sheer amount of rules in D&D is kind of a cover up for the fact that below that is a system that's just kind of... boring.

[deaddmwalking]

I disagree with the premise. You can use 'playing Jenga' as a resolution system, and it certainly has an element of risk/tension/reward and can be fun all by itself. But pulling Jenga blocks, while it might be fun, is DISASSOCIATED from the mechanic it is supposed to represent.

Rolling dice for no reason is minimally entertaining; but rolling with something on the line can be. When a player invests resources, like accepting a penalty for additional effect of a success (like Power Attack) rolling can be fun.

There are individual mechanics that can be 'fun' to one degree or another, but speed of resolution is also important. In the original Deadlands, casters (called Hucksters) drew playing cards to form a hand; the higher the hand the more powerful the spell effect they could create. A mechanic like that CAN be fun, but it helps that they spent some time and fluff connecting the mechanic to the game world (Hoyle's Book of Games serves as the foundation of magical theory in-world), but the more you interact with the system, the less entertaining it can be.

I do agree that trying to make action resolution entertaining can be good, as long as it ties into the other elements of the game that are fun. Ending the 'roleplay' to resolve a Diplomacy session through Smash Brothers means sacrificing the 'fun' of the RPG and substituting 'fun' from a different game.

[Sigil]

I disagree with the premise. You can use 'playing Jenga' as a resolution system, and it certainly has an element of risk/tension/reward and can be fun all by itself. But pulling Jenga blocks, while it might be fun, is DISASSOCIATED from the mechanic it is supposed to represent.

This is a really weird way to disagree with me, because the two paths I explored were "Maybe we should roll the dice differently" and rolling dice is a thing we do already and is exactly as disassociated from any mechanic it represents as rolling a d20, and the other one was "What if we pretty much just didn't roll dice".

Rolling dice for no reason is minimally entertaining; but rolling with something on the line can be. When a player invests resources, like accepting a penalty for additional effect of a success (like Power Attack) rolling can be fun.

That's kind of the point of the original post yes, that there are things you could do to alter the way you roll dice to resolve that would make them at least minimally fun.

I do agree that trying to make action resolution entertaining can be good, as long as it ties into the other elements of the game that are fun. Ending the 'roleplay' to resolve a Diplomacy session through Smash Brothers means sacrificing the 'fun' of the RPG and substituting 'fun' from a different game.

I still don't understand what you're on about because pretty much everything I explored is still "What if we did the part where you roll the dice a bit different". I don't know where the fuck you're getting smash bros from, it's literally just something you made up.

[Whipstitch]

Good rules are rules that help create the stories the players expect to play in the game.

I actually feel like this is where story RPGs have gone wrong and become too deterministic. Without fail all of my most cherished gaming moments come from situations where everyone ceded enough agency to each other and to the system's outputs that we were genuinely surprised where the game ended up in the end. Basically, story games often trade away too much novelty in their pursuit of creating fan fiction.

[Foxwarrior]

Into the Breach

I'm not convinced that Into the Breach would be nearly as fun if used as part of an RPG. Puzzles like that are pretty sensitive to input conditions, and an RPG combat system should be able to fit a wide variety of starting scenarios without collapsing, since there are so very many ways to find yourself in a fight.

resolve a Diplomacy session through Smash Brothers

To follow in the flippant footsteps of the inventors of the terms "Big Bang" and "Walking Simulator" you're going to need to get pithier. Resolving combats through Smash Brothers could actually be pretty good... if the DM could whip up a scenario with different enemies and scenery in a few minutes, control several NPCs at once somehow, and there was appropriate pacing/pausing for mid-combat dialogue.

I actually feel like this is where story RPGs have gone wrong and become too deterministic.

I agree, but think you're derailing the conversation.

[Pedantic]

I'm not completely wed to the idea that you have to move the fun all the way down to the level of the resolution mechanic in order to have a good game at all, but it feels to me like if you were successful in doing so you could layer your other rules on top of that in a way that built off of that core mechanic so you wouldn't have to have the degree of added complexity with each additional system that we have with D&D for example, but you could still get a variety fun and interesting results out of it that facilitated storytelling. It feels to me sometimes that the sheer amount of rules in D&D is kind of a cover up for the fact that below that is a system that's just kind of... boring.

I don't think the resolution mechanic is meaningfully the game though. Take higher level D&D where you rarely solve non-combat problems through dice rolls. You mostly spend spells, buy items, or get to deploy a passive character ability to circumvent narrative obstacles, and the game is in trying to ensure manipulate the situation between yourself and your goal to ensure you get the narrative obstacles you expect and can handle.

Looking at the mechanic of dice rolling itself is....I don't know, too glib? Like, the board game space is very full of say, worker placement games some of which have no actual mechanical distinction in how you place workers, but are very different in the gameplay that emerges because of the decisions you get to make with that mechanic. You could have two games where you place 4 workers a turn, workers lock out the space their put on, and there are 3 non-worker resources you acquire and spend.....and still end up with a very different quality of decision between the two.

[Dean]

If we want to make an RPG that's actually good as a game I think we need to try and make it fun to play at the lowest level possible

This is certainly true and probably the greatest point of mismatch between an average designer and the people playing RPG's. Light games have seen a lot of success entirely on the back of them not being terrible and onerous to play. Light games don't have to be shitty, heavy games don't have to be good. But when both light and heavy games are kinda shitty, like rn, the light games are gonna do better.

[Stubbazubba]

I'm also gonna push back on the idea that the resolution mechanic is a meaningful game system in an RPG. Look at the CRPGs that ape D&D/d20 almost entirely: early FF games, KOTOR, DDO, etc. The mechanic is deciding what to do in context, in those cases from a menu or mouse/keystroke, and how precisely success or failure is determined is so inconsequential that it can be partially or totally obscured, a black box, in those games, and so long as you know how likely success or failure is, then nothing else about the engine matters.

That's actually a feature in a relatively rules-heavy game; your real mechanics are the special abilities and general combat/interaction rules, i.e. the places where you make choices from the perspective of the role you are playing. Anything else about dice manipulation or deck-building or Jenga-block-drawing takes you away from playing your role.

But since the premise of the thread is we're ignoring what makes role-playing games role-playing games and just making the mechanics "interesting," I'd still say you are barking up the wrong tree by looking at the resolution mechanic: rolling a die and comparing it to a target number is a great resolution mechanic that gets out of the way quickly and gets back to tactical decision making. RISK does not need to draw out each round of battle with flashier dice mechanics and more nonsense, because the choices that make the game "interesting" all happen before you roll the dice, including the biggest choice of all: do I attack (again)?

The glut of narrative games that turn each die roll into a negotiation or elaborate improvisation based on four different inputs necessarily make the rest of the game less interesting, both because you experience the rest less since you spend more time haggling over each interaction and because the rest of the rules cede so much agency to that resolution process that they can't have much depth.

Even in the context of just wanting to have fun with every interaction, you are just brainstorming ways to add some extra tension independent of context: what does a wager or puzzle system have to do with the rest of the moving parts, why does it add value to draw that out instead of moving expeditiously to an actually engaging decision point?

OgreBattle is right: you want to make a "fun" RPG ruleset? Port over a fun wargame or turn-based video game. The combat mini-game is as low as you should be optimizing for fun: adding layers to the gears that make up that mini-game will just slow it down for theory's sake. Always ask "what game am I playing?" Are you playing a wagering game? A puzzle game? If not, then keep the wagers and puzzles on the periphery, a garnish, not the meat and potatoes.

[Sigil]

I'm also gonna push back on the idea that the resolution mechanic is a meaningful game system in an RPG. Look at the CRPGs that ape D&D/d20 almost entirely: early FF games, KOTOR, DDO, etc. The mechanic is deciding what to do in context, in those cases from a menu or mouse/keystroke, and how precisely success or failure is determined is so inconsequential that it can be partially or totally obscured, a black box, in those games, and so long as you know how likely success or failure is, then nothing else about the engine matters.

I feel like the difference between the examples you've given, even though they're based on D&D/d20, is that in those games you're not being asked to do the rolling yourself. The player doesn't directly engage with the resolution mechanic itself and the computer does it for you in real time. In DDO you're even directly controlling your character with WASD + Freelook, the dungeons in DDO have literal jump puzzles in them sometimes. If we could have a tabletop game that somehow instantly resolved action for us in real time yeah that would be an upgrade, but as things are the players are required to constantly engage in resolving actions manually in combat, sometimes it's even what they spend _most_ of their game time doing which is why I want that part of the game to be fun and engaging.

That's actually a feature in a relatively rules-heavy game; your real mechanics are the special abilities and general combat/interaction rules, i.e. the places where you make choices from the perspective of the role you are playing. Anything else about dice manipulation or deck-building or Jenga-block-drawing takes you away from playing your role.

I agree with the broad sentiment here. You still need good and fun class/ability design layered on top of your core system, but that's not what I'm criticizing about RPGs.

But since the premise of the thread is we're ignoring what makes role-playing games role-playing games and just making the mechanics "interesting," I'd still say you are barking up the wrong tree by looking at the resolution mechanic: rolling a die and comparing it to a target number is a great resolution mechanic that gets out of the way quickly and gets back to tactical decision making. RISK does not need to draw out each round of battle with flashier dice mechanics and more nonsense, because the choices that make the game "interesting" all happen before you roll the dice, including the biggest choice of all: do I attack (again)?

My impression of Risk personally was always that it was a really boring game that's only made any fun at all by playing it with people you like, and I don't seem to be alone in that opinion. Would Risk be worse or better if the battles in it were, in any way, interesting at all?

Even in the context of just wanting to have fun with every interaction, you are just brainstorming ways to add some extra tension independent of context: what does a wager or puzzle system have to do with the rest of the moving parts, why does it add value to draw that out instead of moving expeditiously to an actually engaging decision point?

You'd still want a way for any system to be able to quickly resolve trivial challenges, I just think moving the the part of the decision making process down into the part of the game that the player is constantly being asked to engage with over and over again, would be beneficial.

OgreBattle is right: you want to make a "fun" RPG ruleset? Port over a fun wargame or turn-based video game. The combat mini-game is as low as you should be optimizing for fun: adding layers to the gears that make up that mini-game will just slow it down for theory's sake. Always ask "what game am I playing?" Are you playing a wagering game? A puzzle game? If not, then keep the wagers and puzzles on the periphery, a garnish, not the meat and potatoes.

Same point I made above, even turn based video games are resolving things for the player and not ever asking them to interact directly with whatever resolution system they use. I don't even think all of the ideas I had in the original post would even necessarily slow the game down. I don't see how, for example, rolling a dice pool in advance and then picking results from them throughout a turn is even necessarily slower than rolling a die each time you have to do something, it might legitimately be quicker while giving the player more agency.

[Chamomile]

My impression of Risk personally was always that it was a really boring game that's only made any fun at all by playing it with people you like, and I don't seem to be alone in that opinion.

Risk Legacy fixed Risk without touching the core resolution mechanic at all. Risk's problems were almost entirely in length of play and a lack of higher-level mechanics to engage with, with a complete game frequently taking 4+ hours and yet never evolving past making the same basic decision of how much risk you want to take to try and bite off some more territory. Making the resolution mechanic more involved would only make things worse. Now the game takes longer, but you've still only got one resolution mechanic, which means it's still going to get worn out before the end.

I don't see how, for example, rolling a dice pool in advance and then picking results from them throughout a turn is even necessarily slower than rolling a die each time you have to do something,

Decisions always take time on average. Sure, there's probably some specific turns where the choice is so obvious that grabbing a die from a pile is faster than rolling one, but if the gameplay mechanic is actually prompting interesting decisions, it will necessarily take longer, because those decisions will require thought.

[deaddmwalking]

Rolling the dice differently is one thing, and trying to make dice rolling fun is something else entirely. Dice are used because they allow quick resolution with minimal fuss. There are lots of ways you can do task resolution - up to an including simulating many things in real life (ie, you want to pick the lock in the dungeon, let's see how long it takes you to pick this lock in real life).

If you think that picking the lock is supposed to be the part of the game that's fun, I'm not sure that you and I agree. I think you could MAKE it fun, but not sure that you'd want to make that a major focus. In a general sense, if playing your character is the appeal, getting back to the in-character interaction as quickly as possible should be the goal. A die mechanic works best if it is quick to resolve and easy to set task DCs in a reasonably satisfying way.

D20 usually fails not because rolling a d20 is boring, but because the task DCs end up being unsatisfying.

If one person has 1d20+4, and one person has 1d20, clearly the first person is 'better'. But how much better? When the person with a bonus loses (and they will), how often is that appropriate. The fact that your 3 companions without any ranks are almost surely going to beat your roll causes a disconnect with expected results (the person with the most skill should do best) and reality (iterative probability means that 20 unskilled people are going to roll a 20 at least once, beating the skilled person often).

From that perspective, evaluating dice isn't about fun (which is highly subjective) and instead about whether the outputs match the flavor of the game.

[OgreBattle]

In any case, if you have a system that's bad, at least a bad mechanic that's fast to resolve goes by faster than a bad and slow implementation.

Like if numbers are really off in Shadowrun, people will complain because it's multiple steps of bad numbers while a bad AC number in D&D passes by in one roll. Too many HP's in D&D takes multiple turns while too few takes one.

[Foxwarrior]

I thought the point of the topic was "what if instead of a system that was bad, we had a system that was good?" so we're supposed to try to avoid bad mechanics that are fast and bad mechanics that are slow.

[Stubbazubba]

I feel like the difference between the examples you've given, even though they're based on D&D/d20, is that in those games you're not being asked to do the rolling yourself. The player doesn't directly engage with the resolution mechanic itself and the computer does it for you in real time.

Yes, that was my point, the actual experience of operating the resolution mechanic is the least important part of d20 games, it is there purely to turn interesting inputs into meaningful outputs, not to be a deep experience in and of itself.

In DDO you're even directly controlling your character with WASD + Freelook, the dungeons in DDO have literal jump puzzles in them sometimes. If we could have a tabletop game that somehow instantly resolved action for us in real time yeah that would be an upgrade, but as things are the players are required to constantly engage in resolving actions manually in combat, sometimes it's even what they spend _most_ of their game time doing which is why I want that part of the game to be fun and engaging.

I get the logic, but I think making the resolution mechanic a deeper experience harms more than it helps the combat mini-game or any other mini-game.

Either it doesn't add any meaningful decision points and just increases resolution time (e.g. a puzzle or FFG's silly dice in their SW/WH40K games), or it becomes its own sub-mini-game embedded within other mini-games (e.g. playing cards from a hand, splitting points between offense and defense, or pre-rolling results to then wager on) which necessarily restricts the mini-game to modeling things that sub-mini-game can handle. There are games designed around the latter that can work, but their scope is necessarily narrower than one with less of a bottleneck RNG.

My impression of Risk personally was always that it was a really boring game that's only made any fun at all by playing it with people you like, and I don't seem to be alone in that opinion. Would Risk be worse or better if the battles in it were, in any way, interesting at all?

I don't think you grasp what making things interesting means. You need to do some more analysis. "Interesting" is not just stapling on mechanics that have more complexity and depth so you have to engage more with it. Take Duck, Duck, Goose: the core engagement of DDG is the anticipation of seeing who gets Goosed. It's the building tension as whoever is "it" goes around the circle saying duck, getting closer and closer to you, and the tension peaks when they tap your head. If they say "duck," the tension is entirely released. If they say "goose," it is still mostly released, you're just up and running to decide who will be "it." But most of the time, the person who was "it" before has a pretty big advantage and "it" passes to the new person after an exciting few seconds. We get back to the tension building - which, btw, all players feel and not just one person - as the new "it" is going around ducking other people.

Now, you could add layers to that chase "resolution mechanic." You could say instead of trying to outrun "it" who has a head start, the two of you play a game of checkers or answer trivia or do an obstacle course race to determine who will now be "it." That would be far more engaging and far more fair than just the act of trying to catch someone who has a head start on a short sprint. That would change "it's" tactics significantly. It would also kill the game because the core engagement is not the race between "it" and the goose, the core engagement is "it" going around tapping heads. Delaying the return to the core engagement is anathema to Duck, Duck, Goose.

Similarly, the core engagement of Risk is deploying armies to take territories in pursuit of whatever strategy you have chosen. People will spend many minutes weighing risk and opportunity as they decide which territories to reinforce and which to attack. The battles, just like in DDG, are resolved in seconds. There are no extraneous choices for "interestingness'" sake, the battles get out of the way so you can get back to strategy. Risk gets boring because you spend a significant portion of the game without anything meaningful to do in the strategic level, not because the battles are too short or too straightforward.

You'd still want a way for any system to be able to quickly resolve trivial challenges, I just think moving the the part of the decision making process down into the part of the game that the player is constantly being asked to engage with over and over again, would be beneficial.

You're not moving decision making from one place to another, you're just adding more decision making on top of what's already there. That will just pad out how long it takes to play and, frankly, exhaust some of your players: not everything has to be tactical to be interesting. Some folks actually quite enjoy the experience of rolling physical dice. Either way, you want the flow of your game to go back and forth between cognitively intense decision making and relatively quick and mindless resolution, so the brain gets a break.

Same point I made above, even turn based video games are resolving things for the player and not ever asking them to interact directly with whatever resolution system they use.

Because they know what the core engagement of their game is and don't feel compelled to gunk up the play experience with other things in the pursuit of vague ideals like making task resolution more "interesting."

I don't even think all of the ideas I had in the original post would even necessarily slow the game down. I don't see how, for example, rolling a dice pool in advance and then picking results from them throughout a turn is even necessarily slower than rolling a die each time you have to do something, it might legitimately be quicker while giving the player more agency.

In Risk, all you have to do at the beginning of your turn is decide where to put however many armies you get. Often enough, that choice takes minutes, not seconds. Making a choice is not faster than rolling a die.

You need to do more analysis of what makes games engaging/fun. Simply stuffing more mechanics at every level ain't it, chief. Figure out what you think makes combat engaging, and then see what kind of resolution mechanic facilitates that engagement, don't arbitrarily insist that the resolution mechanic needs more complexity and depth.

[Kaelik]

The battles, just like in DDG, are resolved in seconds.

In the sense that you can measure 10 minutes of rolling in seconds this is technically true, but also very misleading.

Risk battles take for fucking ever to resolve. Even a small 9 vs 9 or something might require rolling for several minutes. Later on when people are turning in cards for 50 armies battles takes several minutes of tedious rolling as the best case scenario and cane last 15-20 if you end up with a lot of bad rolls or large armies.

[Trill]

If we want to make an RPG that's actually good as a game I think we need to try and make it fun to play at the lowest level possible in the same way that it's fun to run around in Mario 64 even without actually working on any sort of progress towards beating a level, and for RPGs the lowest level you can go is the resolution mechanic.

I think you have an off-by-one error in your metaphor.
Yes, in a game you should make the main thing you do from moment to moment (the Primary Gameplay Loop as Yahtzee calls it) be fun. Moving around in SM64. Shooting enemies in Doom. Coloring lines in Picross.
But your error is the following:
Resolution mechanics aren't on the same level as the Primary Gameplay Loop. They are one level below.

The primary gameplay loop in a game like DnD isn't rolling dice. As DDMW pointed out, you can take it away and have the game be almost the same. Try to do that with a PGL and you break it.
Rolling dice in an RPG is on the same level as moving and clicking the mouse buttons. Or tilting the analog stick on a controller. Or pressing keys on a keyboard.
Would moving around in SM64 still be fun if every move required you to play a game of Simon-Says? If running in a doom level required you to play tic-tac-toe for each change in speed or facing?
No. It wouldn't. Players would stop after a few attempts, because if that is supposed to be the main game, why aren't they playing the minigame as a stand-alone?

What are resolution mechanics used for? Arbitrating outcomes based on the situation and decisions taken.
That is the primary gameplay loop. Basically a game book. You are presented with a Situation X. What do you do?
And for most players that alone can be fun enough.
You are in a dungeon. The room has four doors and in the center of it is a dirty unkempt man smiling at you menacingly. What do you do?
(that's part of a playthrough of the Tomb of Xagyg that AncientHistory led)

Most players would be totally fine with just that.
The next layer up would be why you go from room to room: to find riches.
The next layer up would be finding riches to retire.

[Foxwarrior]

The primary gameplay loop for SM64 isn't "running around in an empty room", it's figuring out the jumps you need to do and trying to do them. Just like in between "tilting the analog stick" and "figuring out the jumps you need to do and trying to do them" there's "the basic actions of running and jumping", in between "rolling dice" and "being presented with a dungeon-themed hypothetical situation and deciding what to do next" there's "roll a die to attack. Check if it hits. When it seems like you miss, the party bard or cleric reminds you of a +1 you forgot about. Check if that hits. Roll for concealment. Roll for damage. Tell the DM how much damage they did, and wait for them to mark it down, hoping that they'll clarify whether it seemed like the monster has damage reduction or something."

[Stubbazubba]

in between "rolling dice" and "being presented with a dungeon-themed hypothetical situation and deciding what to do next" there's "roll a die to attack

No, I checked, there is nothing between "rolling dice" and "rolling dice."

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Refering to the original post, I posted in a mood once: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57283

Quick resolution that makes enough sense is the most important part of any RPG. It's the randomness that makes the game fun.

[Whipstitch]

as a minnesotan I now feel compelled to bring up the superiority of duck duck grey duck over duck duck goose.