Evening, Nerds.
When I started this blog months ago, I don’t really think I had an idea in mind. I have been playing and running Tabletop RPG games like DND for a long time, basically 18 years at this point; it has been the current that has been constant through my nerd-hobby career and I thought to myself “I know this stuff, so anything I write will be good”.
It wasn’t.
My other articles were pretty weird. Not bad, but just pointless basically; so I’m gonna aim to change that with this article!
Today we’re talking about how games like Dungeons And Dragons play with dice, and what that means for the game itself.
The term “Crunch” normally refers to the aspects of the game that rely on the ruleset, the mechanics; basically everything that isn’t talking between characters or describing one’s actions. In practice this means using random number generators, usually dice, to determine whether a particular action you have described succeeds or fails.
In previous articles, I’ve talked about how important this part of the game is. In my opinion, it’s the only thing that turns an improvisational play-acting experience into a game – the threat of failure that’s not in the hands of the person who is deciding what they want to do. It takes the agency away from the player, thus allowing that person to encounter unknown and genuine experiences that would never have come to pass had they known exactly how that interaction had gone down. It’s awesome, and the secret sauce of TTRPGs.
With that hefty definition out of the way, we can consider the implications of this in the most common way it is used:
One dice, many targets – mere illusion?
This method centres around a single type of dice to attempt all skill rolls. Dungeons And Dragons uses a D20, Call Of Cthulhu uses a D100 (two 10-sided dice; one representing 10s and one representing 1s). Whichever method is used, systems like these typically list a number of “skills” – that ask the player to put the task they are attempting to perform into a narrow context and roll “against” a number, or target, they must hit above or below. Achieving this target means success; not doing so means failure – sometimes by degrees of success, sometimes as a zero-sum exercise.
The beauty of this system is that it gives the player the feeling of granularity when it comes to the abilities of their character: The player has a list of, say, ten skills; naturally they are going to be good at some of them, and bad at others. Normally you get to choose the ones you’re good at, and ones you’re bad at. Naturally you’ll be better than other players, or NPCs at some of those skills – and the definite nature of that difference (15 in persuasion is better than 10, therefor I’m better at persuasion than Mr 10 persuasion) naturally allows people to feel as if their character represents what they want to be in the way they want to do so.
The downside to this system is that all of them seek to achieve the same goal in the simplest way: Roll dice, hit number.
I always end up asking myself the question – does this really present enough agency to me, the player, in the game? Or is it the most cynical way a game can present this mechanic, merely giving you the illusion of differences in your skills?
If we take a look at a simple D20 style system, each skill point (which provides a modifier of +1 to a test) represents a difference of 5%, with the chance of critical success (determined at 5% also, if we take 20 as a critical), meaning that each point you spend in DnD, or any system like this, increases your chances of success linearly.
This inevitably produces problems inherent in the system, like monsters needing to be tougher as players get better at things, or level up to unlock more powerful abilities; meaning that really, mechanically, you end up chasing a sort of status-quo, while having to let your players “feel” like more powerful heroes, without boring them to death with easy victory.
The chance of failure approaches zero as the players get more powerful – which seems only natural; but we need to remember that the spice of the game is the randomness of the system and the chance for spectacular failure – meaning any system that tracks skill points and sets targets for players to hit on a dice will naturally decrease this magic ingredient as the game progresses.
Maybe this is why one-shot adventures work so well in these systems mechanically, because the long-term effects of this war of attrition aren’t felt nearly as much. As a DM of some long term campaigns, I can tell you that the systems like this really lurch on three legs once you hit higher level play. Most monsters or situations need to be fudged in some way to make them interesting to players that have +9 (or an increase of 45%) to every roll. It sort of feels like games where the bosses are artificially difficult because their health bars increase exponentially.
While being an easily approachable and teachable system, I face the idea that having players who have +9 to everything against monsters or situations that have +9 to everything cancels everything out, and you end up just playing on the illusion of your power as a mighty hero rather than representing that idea in its truest sense.
Call Of Cthulhu tends to approach this in a slightly different way; first off, the number of skills you have a high proficiency in are far lower, with a large number of skills giving you a base level of success which tends to be very small. This forces the players to accept that they are not going to succeed very much throughout their sessions – which really works for a cosmic horror game, which relies on the players nihilistic acceptance of their eventual insanity – but faces the same problems at higher levels.
There are of course myriad alternatives – there are ten thousand ways to skin a d20, but any deviation from an accepted ubiquity means relegation to the niche and low levels of adoption; normally the death of a system which might have opened doors to people who do want that genuine feeling of agency, or to chase that feeling of the heroic adventurer.
Maybe the ascendancy and success of these systems in the commonality might suggest that it really doesn’t matter. Maybe a good yarn is more than the sum of a number of dice rolls, and maybe if every success or failure rested on a coin-flip, we’d love playing the game just as much.
Or maybe the illusion represents part of the draw anyway. If you crafted a system, where each attempt at a skill check came out to a 50 percent chance, but was coated in a crunchy layer of mental abstraction, would it “feel” more immersive than a coin flip? Maybe.
So how do we solve this problem, if it really is a problem at all? Well, I’ll be exploring some possible ways to do so in upcoming articles, but for now I think we’ve plumbed the depths of semantic introspection enough for one day.
Fact of the moment: Space apparently tastes like burnt steak.
Thanks for reading, have a goodun.