A guest article by Boris R.

Poker Machines by William Picard

Image by FreeImages.com / William Picard

If you think that slot machines and RPG games are complete opposites, you’re wrong. You can enhance your game world by taking a lesson from slots and increasing the unpredictability of your game.

Pure Luck

Let’s talk about Slot machines, also known as fruit machines and poker machines. These have been a staple attraction of Casinos and other gambling establishments since 1891, when the first was patented, but have changed drastically since the Internet came into our everyday lives. Nowadays, your favorite gaming establishment, your favorite game, is always close at hand. And I can’t be calm about that fact, I am beside myself with excitement.

Slot machines are extremely simple. There is no need to follow a certain strategy; you put in your coin and pull the lever. Everything is solved by destiny and you never know if the next attempt will be a winning one – or a losing one. This is exactly the thing that I love most about slot machines: pure luck. You can never be sure about the results and it brings even more excitement into the process. When our parents were young, they had to go to special places to enjoy the slot machines. I’m glad about the fact that casinos are now online; it gives me the chance to entertain myself whenever and wherever I want. You have the chance to tempt fate and see the unpredictable result!

My brother from Germany often loves to tell me: Als ich 18 war, spielte ich spielautomaten kostenlos mit meinen Freunden (translation: “When I was 18, I played slot machines for free with my friends”) Now I can claim that I have continued the family tradition: since I turned 18, I started playing slot machines with my friends just as my brother did. Today we have one more hobby in common: RPGs. And there are some surprising similarities between the two. Interesting, right?

How are RPGs related to slot machines? Well, let’s take a look…

Social

First, they are both social. There is no better way to enjoy your free time than to play an RPG with your friends. I Especially like RPGs with dice of different types, like Dungeons & Dragons and a high probability of different random events. That’s what really spices up the game for me and makes it even more realistic – as real life is always unpredictable!

Affordable

Secondly, they’re cheap. Well, not all them, for sure. But once you are really into RPGs you can invent your own system together with your buddies. I am pretty sure most of you have tried to do it yourselves. It’s always dirt cheap when you do it yourself. In the meantime, you can always get one set for the entire group since you always play together – and that makes even expensive games a lot more affordable.

Making Your Own

RPGs, unlike slot machines, are totally customizable. Once you’ve created the campaign of your dreams, you can make it even better: put your favorite heroes into the brand new surrounding and see what will happen. Turn your favorite movie into a game and explore the roads not taken.

Rules Are Not Enough

Of course, you need rules. For home sessions, you don’t need to write a whole rulebook with detailed descriptions of every aspect of your game, but you need something every player can rely on. But rules are not enough. A Videogame is all rules, all buried under the surface where you can’t even see them. Yet Videogames rarely make an even passable RPG.

Most video games have a serious drawback: the lack of stories behind the facade. The standard game has restricted storylines programmed into it, with little or no flexibility in their execution – and no capability for change by the GM.

In RPGs the situation is completely different. The narrator can change the story on the fly dozens of times, rewarding players with the most unpredictable twists and turns in the plot. And to bolster their creativity (and prevent subconscious bias), the GM can use random generators, based on dice or cards. Unpredictability makes the gameplay way more interesting for players! It’s one thing that RPGs have in common with slot machines – you never know what will happen, you just have to wait and see.

Congruence

There is more to both slot machines and RPGs than meets the eye. At first sight, slot machines are based on the pure luck, while RPGs demand the skill of strategic building by both players and GM. Yet, if you look closer, there are underlying principles common to both, like probability and statistics, and RPGs are more random than you think, while Slot Machines are bound by the laws of probability – if they were not, Casinos could never rely on them making a profit.

Blunting the Whimseys Of Fortune

It may be surprising, but understanding how slots function, and why they are popular, increases your RPG mastery.

Many sites propose meticulous planning, but the more precisely you plan as a GM, the more susceptible your games are to disruption by wild mischance on a critical die roll or unpredictability on the part of the players. Paradoxically, the more randomness you have in your games, the more precise your control can be; over many avenues of randomness, the tendency of probability is to the center, the average. Increasing the randomness in a controlled manner makes the game as a whole less random, burying the truly disruptive outcomes behind a layer of probabilistic noise.

The main thing is to add more randomness into the game, in a controlled manner, by adding dice or cards. Just imagine the ocean of options that you can present and explore! Life is anarchy with a trend – and that’s a great philosophy by which to direct a game. Mastering this technique brings an excitement to the game by having a plot that leaves room for random events to disrupt the lives of player characters.

An education in spontaneity

Last, the randomness of slots, when applied to RPGs, make you a better GM. It boosts and stimulates your creativity to whole new levels, keeping the game loose and fun without bogging down in excessive seriousness and grimness. The need to do so on the fly teaches you to communicate more effectively with others and not to be ashamed of your ideas. If this is your approach, keep going, you are on the right track!

There are many surprising connections between the two apparently-unrelated pursuits. And that’s why I love both of my hobbies equally.

Control what you need to control and let dice dictate the rest – an interesting idea, and certainly a very different approach to my own (I treat luck more as a Sorcerer’s Apprentice who can barely be trusted to wash the floor correctly); but that doesn’t make it either invalid or incorrect.

But it would be remiss of me not to include a note to the effect that Campaign Mastery encourages the free enjoyment of responsible gambling.

If you think you may have a problem, even if you are unsure, seek professional help. It’s usually free and completely anonymous.

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