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I Hate Dice
Following yesterday’s post on evaluating randomness in your game, I have a confession to make: I hate dice.
In theory, the rolls of dice should, over a long enough time line, average out. After all, everyone has the same chances of achieving the same quality roll every time they pick up the dice and throw them back down. However, most people do not play games over a long time line, most play for about five hours every weekend, if that regularly.
Worst yet, not all die rolls are equal in their importance - a d6 may be just a d6, until you’re rolling stats or health points and the outcome will affect your character for the rest of their life.
To complicate the issue further, these rolls can have long term effects on party balance. A character with 16s, 17s, and 18s for its attributes will be forever better off than one with 10s, 11s, and 12s. The same applies for health points - two characters might each roll 1d10, but if one gets a nine while another gets a one or a two there is a sudden significant and permanent difference in power levels between the two characters, for no reason other than a single die roll.
What options are there to remedy these problems?
Stats can be generated with a point-buy or array system instead of random generation, granting all the players the same range of potential.
Mechanics which require some randomization for outcome determination can throw chops, or switch to a diceless system.
A simple solution is to realize that dice and other randomizers are put into place to control the ebb and flow of a game, and to leave those elements where this is successfully applied alone. At this point, allowing dice pools or re-rolls eliminates much of the problem by taking the pressure off of a single roll, allowing results to be much more successfully averaged.
Does anyone else feel this way about dice? If so, how do you deal with it?
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6 Responses to “I Hate Dice”
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This issue branches pretty quickly based on the importance of game balance. I don’t usually think of it as that important, barring extreme cases. This is why I usually let players simply select the stats and skills and so forth for their character, as long as no other participant minds the results.
For resolution, I find that randomness is not a huge problem when handled well. There are two major factors that contribute to this: Roll dice only if all potential results are good for the game and describe failure in an appropriate way. That is, character failing is not an excuse for making that character look like an incompetent moron, unless you are playing Star Wreck or something. PC failure means that random environmental factors make things harder, not that the PC fails miserably.
In games where the PCs are supposed to be competent, at least.
Tommi Brander’s last blog post..To not railroad
In general, I share many of your frustrations about randomness.
My biggest one, though? Why do we trust randomness if our purpose is to tell a compelling story?
Stuart’s last blog post..Creepy-crawlies that want to suck your brains out through your eyes…
One of the solutions we had for the randomness and permanence of a bad die roll was to implement Luck points. Every six levels, you rolled 1d6 Luck points, to be used whenever you needed to re-roll a die, be it during battle, rolling hit points or rolling a saving throw.
The second option to the Luck points was that you could require the DM to re-roll to hit or damage for an evil, to avoid certain death. You couldn’t use it for your fellow party members or friendly NPCs, but it was another opportunity to not die.
Stuart - Good article! Thanks for sharing, it’s one I hadn’t seen before and there’s some good stuff in there.
The place I really hate the randomness is right during the beginning in character creation. I give players a pool of points to create their characters (in systems that support that option) and I fix the amount of health their characters gain. I generally lean toward the more heroic end, but not so heroic that the characters have few challenges. For D20, I use 32 point build and RPGA hit point acquisition.
For reference, RPGA hit point acquisition is on the high side, 3 hp for a D4 and 2 points off the max for each hit die above that. That generally gives about 80% of the total hit die. That way, the PC’s are less likely to die from some random critical hit.
After that, I let my players know that, in general, I will let the results of a die roll fall where they may. At times, I have fudged a die roll when it would result in a total party kill. Even if things look bad, and the result of pure bad luck indicates a death, I will look out for the players and try to find ways they could potentially survive. But still, I only go so far, and the PC’s will have to endure their players decisions, good or bad.
I will say though, I’ve been lucky to have players who didn’t want to “charge the machine gun nest”, as it were, that much. So I generally don’t fudge often.
TGN,
I like the idea of using the RPGA hit point system, and I might well use that the next time I run a game with a hit point system.
I think you also hinting at something without saying it directly, that pure bad luck isn’t always a bad thing in itself. In many cases it can add to the drama or story.
“Even if things look bad, and the result of pure bad luck indicates a death, I will look out for the players and try to find ways they could potentially survive.”
This is also a good point - after reading it I realized that I myself am less likely to fudge results to keep a party member alive or stop something horrendous from happening if there is something that the players could have reasonably done to avoid it.