brain vomit

[aboutseven]

I've been visiting this website for a while but this is the first time I've posted anything. Here are some ideas i've been having, I'm interested to see if anyone has any thoughts. Roleplaying games have always fascinated me not so much because of the roleplaying aspect (in fact my experience actually playing is limited to the occasional casual adventure with my brother), but rather because of the process of creating a representation of reality (fictional or otherwise) that balances accuracy with simplicity. And in some ways this post is motivated by a private vendetta against dice. In other ways it's brain vomit. So if you like dice, take what I have to say with a grain of salt. If you don't, maybe this post will incite a discussion about creating a functional dice less system.

Most RPG's resort to dice as an action-resolution system. This is an accepted practice. I want to question it. Read on if you dare.

Say we're playing a classic d20+ability+skill+whatever system. You roll a die and add your character's modifiers while your opponent does essentially the same thing. It's the GM's job to make sure your opponent is a fairly even match for your character, because if success is certain, the fun is lost, as it is when you are sure to fail. But what exactly does an even match mean? If you're rolling a die, it means a fifty-fifty chance. So where's the fun in that? Are we all just gambling addicts? Risking loss in the hope of gain? Maybe. Just an observation. What do you think?

Another thing: what aspect of reality does the roll of the dice actually represent? The easy answer is chance. But is chance a force of reality? Is it the case that sometimes a certain situation can go one way and at other times the same situation could go the opposite way? Of course not. But then again it wouldn't really be the same situation anyway.
A better answer than chance would be that the dice represent the variables of the situation that are out of our control. However what variables are those exactly? If a given character is fighting an opponent with equal ability, then we are reduced to a fifty-fifty chance and ALL the variables would appear to be out of our control. Its left to chance. If the opponent wins, what happened in the game that led to that victory?

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I tend to overlook the roleplaying/storytelling aspect. Perhaps the invention of an explanation for the way the dice landed is where the fun lies. Perhaps dice are to adult roleplaying games as what force of personality was to my childhood sword-fights? What do you think?

Another aspect of most RPG's I've struggled with is the skill check. Using lock picking as an example: rolling a die and adding modifiers for a pass fail conclusion does not accurately represent picking a lock. Theoretically any adult human could pick a lock as long as they have the right tools and a willingness to stick with it, even if they have zero previous experience. All that varies is how long it takes. Some game systems do try to represent this fact, but they do it sloppily, with repeated dice rolls (each roll of the dice representing more time passed). "Time is the great equalizer." What do you think?
To give another example: In a skill check to convincingly tell a lie, it is considered to be your bluffing ability against their perceptive ability. Is this an accurate representation of reality? Or is it a lazy oversimplification? If we were really getting into character we would know whether we could convince that person or not, and we would either know or not know what to say to convince that person. And then we would role play it. It's taking consensual reality to the next level: consensual fantasy.
I suppose this would have to be accomplished using some sort of doublethink. You're in-character, enjoying the roleplaying aspect of the game, and then suddenly your character has to lie for some reason. So you express to the GM the intention to do so, and then step out of character. Together, you, the GM, and perhaps the other players discuss whether your character could in this situation convincingly lie. Then step back into character and role-play it. A rational discussion has just provided the same service as dice in a potentially much more realistic way. Could this work? What do you think?
Of course whether this concept is even appealing or not depends on whether we are fundamentally gamblers or role-players, and each of us has to determine that for themselves.

Finally, the description of a character using attributes, abilities, characteristics, or whatever you want to call them has always weirded me out. It seems like an oversimplification created with the interest of dice in mind. In reality most of us have a pretty good sense of our own ability level and can realistically compare it with our perception of the ability level of others. Additionally, what GM is not contriving an adventure with the ability level of his player's character's in mind? Doesn't that take the point out of having a discrete ability score at all?
Here I always think of Socrates asking people to pin down what is meant by a certain quality. What is bravery? What is wisdom? Nobody can ever give a conclusive answer, and that is because these qualities don't exist outside the situations in which they are used. In roleplaying games we solve this problem by creating a clear purpose for each of this qualities (apply your strength modifier here, your charisma modifier here, etc.). But does this accurately represent reality?

I honestly don't know what the purpose of this post was, but I would be interested to see If it would be possible to engage collectively in a reality using rational discussion to agree on the outcome of a particular action, as opposed to force of personality (as presumably was the case when we were kids- I know it was for me), or the roll of the dice, which just seems lazy.

Please don't take this as me roasting the classic dice-based system. It will always have a place in my heart. I'm just curious as to what you all think.

[Onix]

Hey aboutseven, welcome to 1KM1KT!

This is classic game designer motivation here. You know what you've not liked in other games, have an idea of what you want, now the question is, how do you get there?

Diceless games have the challenge of avoiding being predictable, which is why we're mostly addicted to randomizers. It makes the unfurling story less predictable. The RPG system is therefore essentially a way to tell the story in a way that the players cannot know the outcome. If I know how the tale is told, you have to be a really top notch story teller to make it interesting to yourself and others. By making it less predictable there is always a question of "what will happen next".

Now I've written a functional diceless game that makes it difficult to predict the outcome of an event. So it can be done, it's just mechanically different and has to use different sources of unpredictability (usually the other players).

Skill checks are all about can you accomplish the task in a given amount of time or without triggering an undesirable outcome (breaking the lock or tools). You're right, if there's no time constraint, and there's no bad result from making a mistake there's no need for a skill check. This is something starting GMs tend to get hung up on because they think they have to always apply a check, even if the PC will have to roll 100 times in a row to eventually get it right. It's boring and if I wanted to just roll dice I could be playing craps and making money.

A second aspect of what you're asking about with skill checks is in the case of social conflicts. The system you've mentioned is common but it is by no means the only one out there. I can point you to my own alternatives because I've put a bit of thought into modeling social interactions.

In the newer rules for The Artifact, losing a social conflict puts pressure on the one loosing (stress) and lowers their ability to continue the argument/resist requests/take taunts/etc. The player decides how to deal with the pressure the character is experiencing and when to end the conflict by various means.

In SPF you can talk a character out of the story, effectively removing that character from the narrative. It only makes sense because I'm not modeling real life, I'm modeling a written story.

If you want a fully functional system without attributes, look at . There are other examples but it requires a bit of abstraction to resolve who has the authority to do what.

The reason attributes or other gauges of a character's ability are useful to a player is because they often allow multiple aspects of a character to be brought into a conflict. For example, in a fistfight, speed is important, skill is important, strength is important, and how tough you are is important. You might have a gauge of how you stack up in any one of those things, but it's exceedingly hard to gauge them all at the same time.

I'll give you an example. A nerdy kid is getting picked on by another kid. The bully is not a big guy, only 5'6" or so but he's the boxing champion in the school. He's fast and accurate. The nerdy kid is 6' and reasonably strong but slow and has a very high tolerance for pain. How does the fight go down? Who's going to win? The answer in this case is neither. The nerdy kid is too slow to meaningfully connect with the champ (bruised up his arms from blocking though). The Boxing champ can't hit hard enough to take him out even though he lands most of his blows. This is a real life example so it's not just me making things up.

In summery, I think the purpose for your post is that you're going to make the game that does what you want the game to do and post it for us to check out.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Welcome to 1km1kt.net, and thanks for introducing yourself with a though provoking essay.

Generally speaking, dice are present due to Information Asymmetry, Simplicity, and Story.


Moral hazard is a case of information asymmetry, and a matter of taking risks because costs are externalized. In turn, negotiations are flawed, because the parties do not have equal access to information. For example, the current banking crisis is because consumers didn't know how banks were investing and probably should not have trusted people engaged in "credit default swaps".

Dice are there to force failure.

As a less charged version - consider a table top wargame. The players have perfect information, better control and intelligence than any real general could hope for. They know exactly how far a unit moves in a given period of time (no fuel shortages, mechanical breakdowns, drivers getting lost, and so forth), can see where the opponent is at all times, doesn't suffer from fog, night, or out-of-date reports. However, the theoretical 6mm tall man driving those plastic tanks does look through dust clouds, does deal with varying quality of shells fired from a gun warped by the heat of firing, while suffering a head cold with stuffed-up ears that prevent him from hearing the radio properly.

Those dice and probabilities represent the difference between what you can do, and what your avatars can do.

It also works in the other direction - I don't know enough about picking locks to pull it off nor does my GM. The character can do that, but there is variation in locks, and timing, and possibly gaps in his knowledge as well - dice are to factor chance, off-days, and difficulty of execution.


All game design is a trade off between ease of play and realism of simulation. There is actually quite a bit involved in conversation, from what you say and tone to facial gestures, to first impressions based on your clothing and the area around you.

Another wargame example- many games will assign different speeds to vehicles on the battlefield. Most will have a set up where a M4 Sherman moves six inches a turn, and a PzKw VI Tiger only four.

In real life, maximum speed is only good on a strategic scale to flank an enemy formation. In combat, all tanks move the same speed because they don't want to outpace their infantry escort, blunder into an ambush, throw a track, or impair their targeting with a rough ride. What should actually be accounted for is the ground-pressure (total weight divided by track contact area) and Horsepower to weight ratio for acceleration and un-ditiching. The Tiger and Sherman have about the same horsepower to weight ratio, but the Sherman is two thirds the weight and smaller, thus having lower ground pressure (and a more reliable transmission). In turn this means to move a vehicle there should be a cross reference between terrain type and weight to see if you can safely cross that area, or if you risk getting stuck, or can't cross the bridge because its only rated for 20 tonnes. If it is the wrong terrain, roll dice based on the driver's skill to see if he can find the firm patches to avoid damaging the machine, though first roll to see if the radio is working so that he knows you're telling him to do that, and then another to see if he agrees, or notices a mine-field the commander didn't...

...twenty minuets later, your piece of plastic moves four inches across a six-foot table. Provided of course, you bothered to learn these things about said tanks - and don't get into a shouting match about the optics systems.


Games use mechanics to tell a narritive. Both a starving kid in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Super Hero have hit points, but the number varies greatly between the two - making a single German soldier an existential threat in one case, and barely cannon fodder for the other. The probabilities and numbers assigned to certain actions determine the genre, the realism, the relative freedom from the consequences of dangerous actions. Action heroes are expected to wade through an army of skeletons without flinching, and thus don't have fear rolls. Normal people might panic if they get to work and realize they forgot to let the dog out.

We like underdogs and lucky breaks. The chance of failure makes success all that much sweeter. Unexpected results can allow the game to go off in new and interesting directions. Conversely, no weakness and constant success isn't always that engaging. So dice can add excitement as well.

[Rob Lang]

An interesting post - welcome to 1KM1KT! I normally just write that I agree with Onix and Chainsaw Aardvark but today I'm going to write something!

50-50 against foes
I think the 50-50 premise is flawed and therefore the thesis is rocky. In most RPGs - even the most combat heavy ones - there is choice and that choice is not a series of evenly matched foes. In 5 vs 5 fights, no-one will be equally matched because of the environment. The spellcaster artillery finding them surrounded will be of little use if their armour is poor. They might have to run. Making it 5 vs 4. If you find that the combat really requires no tactics at all then it might be that you're not finding the combat very interesting. The GM needs to fix that.

Skill checks - Lock picking
When designing a game, one must create mechanics in such a way that they support the feel of the game as a whole. You could create complex mechanics for picking a lock - which takes into account time - but then you're RPG is Lockpicking: The RPG. Cool, if that's what you set out to do but too much if you're designing a typical fantasy. Most game systems of medium crunch (a mix of complexity and depth) or more will have caveats for the never-give-up types. It is a simplification to roll more than once but not sloppy. It's a necessary shortcut else your game will be 500 pages before you get to the setting.

Skill checks - roleplaying
For those skill checks that require roleplaying, there has long been a debate on them. It's a good debate too. The roleplayer should try to give a convincing argument if they can. However, circumstance must prevail: roleplaying is about (having fun and...) playing the role of another character. A quiet/shy player may just like to have the feeling of bamboozling NPCs without the requirement of actually doing it in front of others. Other players might be happy to come up with flambouyant monologues, if that's fun for them then go for it!

Your solution of talking to the rest of the team is all very well but the mechanic is there to demonstrate how good a liar your character is. That number should be all that is required. You could roleplay the whole lot freeform but then you're not really using the typical roll vs system anymore - you're playing a more storygame game.

Character specs
It is a simplification but not just for the dice but for the player. How strong is the character? Very strong? What does that look like? How much stronger is character X compared to character Y? Well, he's very muscly and she's even musclier. Who can carry the most? Who can lift that car? Character specs are also there for the purpose of advancement, so you can see things grow. You can try using adjectives but at some point there's going to be a comparison required and then you're stuffed.

The other thing that character specs are useful for is comparison against non-humans. Without numbers you're stuck with adjectives that are very hard. How big is the Orc "Bigger than you...". That might be enough but when you're trying to hide in a crevice, you will want to know if that's going to work.

Generally using rational discussion
This is a branch of roleplaying game called "Story games" or "Narrative games" and there are LOADS of them out there. Tonnes. Hundreds. They're brilliant too. Story games are all about rational discussion and imagination and because of this there's quite often no GM at all. Check out story games (put "story games RPG" into Google), you'll be pleasantly surprised.