Why I Roll Dice

[RANT]

When looking last night for the video from John Wick that I remembered, I watched this video. And it got stuck in my brain for a long time. I think I have figured out what bothered me, and I will clarify it in a general way that I think many of you can relate to.

What really bothered me about the John Wick video is the discussion of the whiff factor. He talks about how he doesn't want to get to the end, after making all the preparations and all the struggle, and get to the big bad boss only to pull out his sword and... miss.

Now there is a game design issues right there, but not the one John Wick describes. One of my personal criticisms of the D20 system is that it presents an undistributed spread of 20 outcomes, and that if you are going to use a 20 sided die it needs to be a roll-under mechanic so that you can benefit from the 5% distribution setup of that. Adding a big honkin modifier to a huge outcome range like that creates fubar math and then causes statistical issues throughout the whole game structure behind it.

But let's set that aside and assume that the game you are using is giving you a fairly realistic success distribution. Your character was 80% likely to hit the enemy, and he happened to land in the other 20% in this case. Then there is not a game design issue there, there is a control issue there.

You see, this is a ROLEPLAYING game. In a roleplaying game, you are a character and you make decisions as that character and you only have the capabilities of that character. My character can't use your special abilities just because I think it would be helpful to me. The entire reason for all these tomes of rules is to define precisely what it is that your character is capable of doing. Then you become that character and you make decisions as if you lived in that world and were that person.

So ultimately, your agony over having failed at that extremely unlucky moment is irrelevant. Just like your agony that you failed at something in real life is irrelevant to the outcome. The real world doesn't care about your pain. It dishes out results regardless of how you feel about them. I dropped my new cell phone on the first day of using it, caused a crack on the screen that endures to this day. Does fate care about my agony at that moment of failure? Nope. Did I carry on with my life and endure the pain? Yes.

Your failure at your supposed moment of triumph means that your story has just become a tragedy, instead of an epic.

And I can hear John Wick in my brain saying "but I didn't want the story of my character to be like that". Well, tough. I didn't want my life to be exactly the way it is. I wanted to be a billionaire, travel the world, hobknob with the rich and famous, take in the Australian sunset and then jet over to Bali for a night of partying before taking the red-eye to have breakfast in the Azores. I wanted to be svelt, tanned, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Life didn't deal me those cards.

Lady Luck doesn't care about me. Or you. And that's why I use dice.

The purpose of dice is to simulate that harsh and uncaring hand of fate. It is that very real physical limitation on what you can and cannot do. Because you are making decisions as that character, as a person who faces the very real restraints of reality on your behavior.

And you can talk all you want about the millions of ways that dice can be used to simulate that, but you cannot take that role away from the dice. If you remove that power from the dice; it stops being a roleplaying game. It becomes a "whatever the fuck I want" game. I can't just reach over and take $1000 out of the bank in Monopoly, any more than I can take that power away from the dice in an RPG.

This is not about game edition. This is about the fundamental nature of what an RPG is and why dice are used.

If the success or failure of your character is not based on some model of the universe, represented by dice, but instead represented by what YOU want, by how YOU think the universe should treat them, then you are not roleplaying a character, you are roleplaying an author. Go write a book.

[/RANT]

I would be remiss if I did not also cite this epic blast from the past by James at Grognardia, which still has a lot to teach today. I recommend you read it if you liked this post.