Roleplay vs rollplay

Posted in RPG on 2017-07-02

Modern D&D offers two different tools to adjudication conflict resolution: describing your character’s actions, which is mainly adjudicated by the Dungeon Master, and rolling dice, mainly adjudicated by the rules. Each has their place, but that place is a topic of some debate.

I used to take dice very seriously, but my opinion gradually shifted to this: allow the players to deploy either skill checks, or description and role-playing, as they wish, because players will do whatever they find must fun, and that’s your ultimate goal as a DM.

A history of rolling for stuff

The blog DMDavid has an interesting series of articles on this topic, specifically how dice rolls based on ability scores evolved and supplanted the traditional approach of describing your actions.¹²³ These three articles are worth reading and I won’t re-state them here.

OD&D (1974) to AD&D

It’s generally considered that prior to third edition, D&D had no skill system as we would know it today. If you wanted to take a non-combat action like searching a room, you told the DM and he adjudicated the result using common sense.

But this isn’t precisely true. Various editions and common house rules offered ways to objectively adjudicate outcomes using dice. Thieves in AD&D (which we nowadays call rogues) had a percentage chance based on class level to move silently, hear sounds, and so on, but others didn’t. Strong characters had a chance to lift gates or bend bars.

D&D 3e onward

It was D&D 3e that defined skills as a standard way to resolve conflicts using dice. Nearly any non-combat action was a D20 roll with bonuses for ability scores and skill points, to meet or exceed a fixed DC set by the DM, and even the exact DC was often defined in the rules.

The result was that we no longer needed the DM to arbitrarily decide. In fact, the DM was effectively barred from arbitrary decisions, because the rules defined that player characters could have high ranks in skills were entitled to use them.

In fourth edition, the official suggestion was that all difficult actions must be rolled, and even a good description merely adds +2 to the roll. Now you could have a solution nerfed by random chance. 4e’s solution to this was skill challenges: multi-roll events that mitigated the chance of random failure but completely lacked any narrative meaning.

At its extreme, fourth edition’s focus on dice mechanics over the narrative experience turned D&D into a dice rolling game where none of your choices were significant.

The meaning of dice

Several sources have influenced my thinking on randomness as a design feature of in RPGs.

Dark Souls

During the run of D&D 4e came the videogame Dark Souls (2011), a phenomenal Japanese take on western mediaeval fantasy RPGs. This game almost had me give up on tabletop RPGs for good.

Dark Souls not only simulates the dungeon crawling experience of D&D, it does least three things radically better than tabletop D&D:

1. Player skill: Dark Souls is infamously difficult, but fair. When you succeed, it’s because you, the player, swung a sword or dodged an attack at the correct time. In D&D, you can only succeed by random chance or building your character effectively; this is why third edition players focused so highly on character optimization.
2. Learning: As a video game, Dark Souls can and will kill you repeatedly. In D&D, the core rules are that you aren’t supposed to die, if you’re doing it right. Because getting killed in D&D is highly random, it’s not fair to kill you by random roll; Dark Souls is only fair because it’s possible for you to take full responsibility for your own survival.
3. Tone: The theme of the setting, the ruins of a fantasy world overrun by undead who struggle to find any continued meaning, is radically more interesting than typical D&D. There’s no reason you can’t do this in a D&D setting.

It is appropriate that one of the themes in Dark Souls is people giving up in despair. While you can easily borrow the tone of Dark Souls for a tabletop RPG (in 5e, give everyone the revenant subrace on top of their normal race⁴), it’s impossible for players to attack or dodge more skilfully. The only ways to roll better are trick dice rolling, which is considered cheating, and metagaming⁵, which is considered against the spirit of the game.

The die roll gives you the physical feeling of physically doing something, but it’s RNG. It’s chance. What actually determines your success or failure is how optimally you built your character at the outset, and D&D 4e even took a lot of that away in the name of balance. And despite 4e’s insistence on tactical miniatures and rules with precise areas and distances, no decision I made in D&D 4e ever made me feel like I was more significantly more powerful for my choices in combat.

Dark Souls almost made me give up playing D&D because it tells the core story of D&D in ways a tabletop game cannot match. But eventually I realized that D&D has the ability to accept narrative solutions that go beyond what can be input into a controller.

IWBTG

I Wanna Be The Guy (2007) is a fan-made video game that predates Dark Souls and is entirely unrelated, but shares some of its design philosophy.

In particular, IWBTG is difficult, but fair; there is high player skill involved, and no randomness. If you get killed, it’s because you made a mistake. Any given trap is always there, always triggered in the same way and with the same timing, which makes it possible to take responsibility for your own survival.

IWBTG’s creator is serious in his dislike of randomness. I once heard him criticize a fan-made IWBTG style game because, in a certain room, the monsters shoot and move with random timing. Kayin said that in order to be fair, monsters must be purely deterministic.

D&D cannot do that. By established tradition, for anything with a chance of failure, you roll dice. You cannot become so good at D&D to make it to level 20 without taking a hit. Consider how Star Wars Saga Edition ditched the wounds and vitality hit point variant because the average character would have been killed by a stray blast before they reach level 20.

Lindybeige

Lloyd of the excellent Youtube channel Lindybeige proposes that randomness represents that which is outside your character’s control.⁶

Suppose a master ninja fails an attempt to sneak past a guard, something he’s normally good at. It’s not because he messed up; it’s because he stepped on a twig, the guard happened to be looking his way, or a wild animal coincidentally caught the guard’s attention… any number of things.

If you fail at something easy, despite having a high bonus, it cannot really be your character’s fault. Something interesting must have happened.

A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming

A book called A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming ⁷ describes a certain traditional way to run Dungeons & Dragons without D&D 3e’s skill checks. It may amaze some current players that it is possible to play D&D this way at all.

The general idea is that before skill checks existed, you had to describe your actions and the DM adjudicated it. Instead of Search checks, you declared that you were searching the entire room, or a specific part of the room, and the DM told you whether or not you found anything. Instead of Bluff/Diplomacy, you simply role-played out the encounter.

In some cases the DM called for a roll, and this is what D&D 3e formalized into the skill check system. But often, under the old-school ethos, randomness is replaced entirely with narrative engagement with the world. In my opinion, that’s something you want to encourage: it implements a rare element of player skill into the game, and it increases and encourages engagement with the fictional world by tying it to success.

My own campaign

A single event in a third edition D&D session many years ago changed my perspective on dice rolls.

A player attempted to Diplomacy his way past a guard, and gave what I considered a perfect answer. However, the rules say you have a skill for this, and I asked him to roll, offering a bonus.

He rolled a 2.

Now, at this point I had two choices: have him fail, despite his perfect argument, which would discourage him from ever attempting to role-play; or admit he would have succeeded no matter what he rolled, in which case the roll had no meaning.

I learned the lesson that the prime directive of a Dungeon Master, even more important than accurately adjudicating the rules, is to keep the players happy.

What is most fun?

In Fear the Boot Podcast, episode 1⁸, an argument is made that for realism’s sake, a player who roleplays an excellent bluff or diplomacy should be denied his success if his character is unintelligent or uncharismatic.

I completely disagree with this argument.

Is the primary goal of your game to simulate realism? Do you walk away at the end of a session feeling accomplished if you failed the quest, the game was boring, but the events occurred most logically?

I consider it a problem when nobody wants to interact with NPCs or the world. In D&D 3e, Charisma is considered the weakest ability score, so that must people dump their weakest stat in Cha and their character, on paper, can’t Bluff or Diplomacy well. Yet one of my most memorable D&D events involved a character with 8 Charisma successfully convincing a Solar to disobey his god. The DM never asked for a roll.

I argue this: If an expert can uncharacteristically fail because the dice rolled a 2, so can an idiot succeed because he spoke uncharacteristically well. Character stats should open doors, not close them.

Roleplaying

Interact narratively with the world, not the dice! This is D&D’s strength. Video games may have advantages over pen and paper, but they don’t have a human Dungeon Master able to adjudicate in real-time. In a world of high budget video games, interacting by describing your actions is D&D’s killer feature, and it should be your goal as DM to enable this style of play.

Don’t force players to roll social skill checks. This limits social encounters to the party’s one high-Charisma character. Let everyone make their arguments. The same goes for other skills.

Conversely, don’t prevent players from using skills if they wish. Modern D&D gives players the right to take skills like Diplomacy and an entitlement to use them, and your prime directive is to keep the players happy.

Therefore, my balance is this: In any situation demanding skill, allow players to use either narrative description, or dice roll, as they wish. As they wish!

Footnotes