To Roll Or Not To Roll, pt 2

Image by Mike based on last week’s illustration, which was by PIRO from Pixabay(and cropped by Mike).
Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“.
In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms.
In a nutshell, the dice represent all the random factors that can contribute to or determine success or failure under normal conditions.
GMs usually apply a modifier, either to the roll or to the target (depending on the game system) to bias the influence of these random factors so as to incorporate abnormal or unusual conditions.
Why Not Roll?
First, let’s establish that there are occasions when you don’t want to demand a die roll.
- The PCs enter a room. They have only to walk across to the far side and open the door; there are no obstacles and the door is not locked. The floor is softly carpeted and provides plenty of grip with no risk of tripping. Do you really want the PCs to roll?
- A PC is looking through a filing cabinet in search of a specific file. The files are clearly labeled, he filing cabinet is not locked. The PC speaks the language used in the labels, knows how to read,has plenty of light, and there’s nothing wrong with his eyesight. Do you really want to make the player roll?
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- A character with the equivalent of a Master’s Degree in Mathematics needs to add 2 and 2. Do you really want the player to roll to get the answer, “4”?
These are trivial demonstrations of ability. Demanding a die roll in such situations incurs all the negatives that come with a die roll – disruption of the narrative flow, delays in progressing the game – for absolutely no benefit, and raises the question of how you can plausibly interpret the outcome if the player contrives to fail the roll.
There are other occasions and reasons for not requiring a die roll, but these examples are enough to establish the general principle that demanding a die roll for everything is not necessary.
What It Means Not To Roll
In a nutshell, it means that you are satisfied that none of the random factors concerned will be enough to override a specific outcome. Success or failure are inevitable, no matter what the PC says or does. The third example offered above is particularly significant, because it establishes that what may be difficult, or require a die roll, from one character can be so obvious and simple that a more skilled character should have no chance of failure. So it’s not a general question, it’s a specific one relating to a specific character in specific circumstances.
- If you need a 2/- to hit (or a 19+), roll as usual.
- If you need a 1/- to hit (or a 20+), ‘critical’ effects are off the table, but roll as usual otherwise.
- If you need 0/- to hit, or 21+, (but will still hit on a critical), ‘critical’ effects are not only ruled out, but a successful hit will do minimum damage – once. After that, automatic miss.
- If you need 1 worse than that (minus 1 or less or 22 or more), even that single success is excluded, and automatic misses are the rule.
- A similar regime (with maximum normal damage instead of minimum) applies to attacks at the other end of the spectrum.
Automatic Skill Checks
If a character has a certain level of expertise, it can generally be assumed that they have a certain level of fundamental understanding of the subject, and some questions are just so obvious that no roll should be needed.
This implies that the mere fact of having a particular skill can be enough – give the player any obvious information that they need to make future decisions and simply move on.
Beyond this obvious application of the theory of dicelessness, there is a gray area that GMs should be cognizant of. As stated earlier, there is an inherent cost to interrupting play while a player makes a die roll, as the mechanics drag them out of their state of being immersed in play. The pace of the game slows, the emotional intensity fades, and the game world is made to feel more artificial and less real. Almost always, these effects are neutral or negative in nature, and so to be avoided unless necessary.
On top of all that, there is a positive impact on the perceived reality of using the mere presence of a skill of sufficient ranks as a decision point within the logical structure of an adventure – essentially providing a concrete manifestation of the characters being a part of the game world.
And, finally, taking the randomness out of a skill check can simplify the plot structure, making the whole adventure simpler and easier to prep.
Automatic Stat Checks
The same logic applies to stats above a certain value. Consider a heavy weight that has to be lifted – you can either demand that players roll a stat roll and total the amount by which they succeed, which is a lot of palaver for a simple situation, or you could assume that people know how to use their strength to lift and simply mandate that they need a total strength between them. The latter choice has the advantage of permitting the simple use of ratios to calculate the effects of a lever, should the PCs decide to employ that approach to the problem.
There are similar situations with respect to virtually every stat, although some of them are a bit more tenuous in justification. A PCs charisma is 20 and the NPC with whom he is bargaining has only 8? While you could employ opposed rolls if the negotiation is serious, but if it’s routine, assume average rolls in advance, precalculate the outcome, and simply announce the results; don’t let the game get bogged down in minutia.
Automatic Detections
Whenever players make perception checks (a.k.a. ‘Spot’ checks in some game systems), they describe them as ‘spot the painfully obvious’ checks, and there’s a lot of truth in that description, or at least there used to be. These days, I try to make something that’s ‘painfully obvious’ evident to the players without a roll – though I will sometimes use a die roll to determine how long it will be before the character observes the ‘painfully obvious’ fact if that’s relevant.
Most of the time, though, I will only make the player roll if there is some subtle nuance that might not get noticed.
If there’s a sound in the forest but no-one makes their perception check, is the sound really there at all?
A blind spot in most game systems revolves around an implementation of non-visual senses that ranges from the incomplete to the inadequate.
So your rules have both ‘Listen’ and ‘spot’ mechanics? That’s great, now tell me how you determine how adequately a character can find a gas leak, or a bottle that has been tainted with something creating the odor of rotten eggs? Tell me how good the character is at determining that the recipe contains a typo in the amount of Turmeric to be added? But a lot of game systems don’t even go that far.
Using automatic detections can solve a lot of these problems, especially if you rule that such a detection only becomes automatic after a certain amount of time and if the character is actively trying to locate the source of whatever they are perceiving.
Auto-Saves
If a character is able to take cover, throwing themselves flat, should they still have to make a Reflex Save in D&D? Some GMs will say yes, because it’s all about how well they execute that maneuver. Others may say no, because so much of the randomness has been taken out of the question.
But the significance goes deeper; a ‘no’ answer means that clever tactics can result in an automatic success, while a ‘yes’ answer says that tactics are secondary to how well you roll. Those are powerful statements to make within a game; one enhances player agency, while the other promotes blind luck to a superior position over such agency. The choice is between encouraging players to invest more deeply in the campaign or telling them that paying attention and making good decisions doesn’t matter, discouraging player participation.
FORT saves
Consider, then, the FORT save, sometimes a Health check or even a Disease Resistance roll – the mechanics are essentially the same, even if the names and details change. Here, once again, there is a profound implication to the simple choice – if you permit a saving throw when a character has a very high stat basis for that saving throw, it says that immunity is a matter of luck more than of resistance, and sufficient exposure eventually results in failure. No roll, perhaps accompanied by a temporary negative modifier to some tasks and activities, bypasses the resulting myriad of rolls; you are either healthy enough to cope with the disease, or you are not.
An alternative is to choose the no-save option but permit saves after a period of rest to throw off the illness, or reduce the negative impact. This combines the best of both choices, o it deserves serious consideration. With serious illnesses, perhaps the choice is between the disease getting worse or getting better – escalation or recovery.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to PCs and disease. The first is that these are PCs, heroes all – they should not be subject to mundane illnesses, only to magical or super-diseases. The second is that these are people first, and it is more heroic to overcome adversity, so they should still be subject to mundane diseases but these should handicap, not incapacitate.
Personally, I can never consider the question without remembering an early issue of spider-man in which he had to save the day whilst suffering from a serious flu, or maybe it was a head cold, and that it made the challenges of being a super-hero even more difficult. That memory puts me squarely into the second group.
Factoring into these questions is the simplicity of cure spells in some game systems, and the potential in the future for people to be immunized against illnesses like the common cold, or right now, for the flu. The latter argues that the GM should feel more free to inflict illness on the PCs because it is so easily overcome; the second is more about how ill victims become, as everyone should know after all the pandemic education we have received over the last few years.
WILL saves
These are some of the most poorly defined saves or checks in most game systems. I’ve seen them used for concentration checks, for determination, for focus (i.e. setting aside distractions), for innate resistance to external influences or against mental control specifically. Although these are undoubtedly similar, they are emphatically not the same.
Autosaves in this department essentially create a threshold for the character; below the threshold, there is so little risk of effect that you might as well not roll, avoiding the negative consequences of interrupting game flow; exceed it, and you are in danger. Dealing with those dangers in narrative form gives the GM more control over then, but at the expense of players feeling like the GM is manipulating a character that doesn’t belong to them. And that can be exceptionally problematic.
A hybrid approach seems to offer the benefits of both with the liabilities of neither – a threshold, which – if exceeded – gives way to a traditional saving throw.
But there’s another side of the coin to consider.
Back when I was just a player in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, my character was Paulo Lumierre, a master hypnotist. Because I had designed the character carefully, under most conditions in which the character had a moment to prepare, he had 24d6 of mind control to utilize. The way this power works in the Hero system is that you roll the indicated number of dice and compare the total to the Will score of the opposition; if the result is greater than or equal to the Will, you have some effect, if double it, you have more, triple equals more again, and four times gives maximum effect.
So, 24 dice at an average of 3.5 each gives an average result of 84. Most normal people had a will of 10, most villains and PCs had 20 or less. An exceptionally strong-willed target might go as high as 25 Will. On an average result, then, I would get maximum result almost every time, and even against the ultra-strong-willed, an average roll would get me three levels of success. Since the character was designed to be as effective as he was supposed to get with just one or two levels of success, there was virtually no need to roll at all.
To get less than those two levels, I would need to roll a total of 50 or less, even against the most strong-willed of opponents; this works out to being so close to 100% chance that Anydice can’t measure the gap; 53 or more is a 99.99% likelihood of occurring. For less strong-willed characters, the chances of success were even closer to 100%.
This level of success was not an accident – at 23 dice, the shift from virtually 100% to 99.99% takes place at a total of 51; the extra dice simply gave me a little extra cushion (to achieve this level of success on an average roll, 50 / 3.5 = just 14.28 dice, but I was also factoring in the possibility that some targets might have defenses against mind control / hypnotism that would have to be overcome).
Why bother rolling? All I had to do was roleplay and stay in character.
So thresholds can and perhaps should run both ways. Beyond a certain threshold of effectiveness, there is essentially no chance of failure, and requiring a roll is all downside and no advantage. In such cases, I think it important for at least a couple of rolls to be made just to establish the reality in the mind of the players – whether it’s a PC or an NPC who is being so dominant – but then, go to a threshold and automatic success or failure when that is warranted.
Automatic Attacks
Just as Skill checks made the basic situation with Stat checks obvious, which in turn clarified automatic Saves, so Autosaves shed light on Automatic Attacks.
By all means, if there is any measure of doubt about the success or failure of an attack, die rolls should be used; but when no such doubt exists, why bother?
There is the need for a special caveat to that general principle when it comes to game mechanics like those of D&D / Pathfinder. When a critical success is needed to hit, or a critical failure to miss, my normal practice is to say that simply hitting the target is all the ‘extra’ that you are reasonably entitled to – but what if you are so far removed from potential success that this is your ONLY chance of success? And what of the situation in between?
My approach is:
This prevents improbable rolls from wasting playing time, while still permitting ‘hail mary’ passes. Since a fundamental principle at my table is ‘sauce for the goose is good for the gander’ – in other words, a rule that applies to PCs also applies to NPCs and vice-versa – my players tend to tolerate (if not accept) this approach because it is equally fair and binding to both sides. YMMV.
Fixed Damage
The variability of damage is much broader than that of attack rolls in most game systems, even if it doesn’t appear to be the case. It doesn’t matter whether or not your chance of hitting are 3 or less or 17 or less or 14 or more, excluding the effects in some game systems of critical hits, the damage done remains variable to exactly the same degree.
There are three basic models when it comes to fixed damage: the minor, the catastrophic, and the average.
In the minor model, the actual damage inflicted is trivial, little more than a metaphoric scratch, and when coupled with an automatic hit, signifies overwhelming numbers that are fairly helpless to be anything more than an annoyance. This is therefore an excellent means of simulating large numbers of weak opponents, especially within an ‘aggregate time’ combat concept (refer to part 1 if you don’t know what that means).
In the catastrophic damage model, the damage inflicted is close to the maximum possible for the attack form, and reflects a superior enemy who is unable to focus on one target exclusively. This interpretation holds true with both the aggregate time and instant time approaches.
The average damage model is the hardest to justify, in many ways; it falls in between and implies that there is something mechanically repetitious and precise about the nature of the attack that eliminates most of the variability. I have found it effective in situations in which the combat is being faked but made to ‘look good’ in order to persuade a third party, but those situations don’t come along very often.
But, when there’s going to be recurring damage round after round due to the environment, instead of rolling separately for each character each round, it can make a lot more sense from a practicality and playability standpoint to assume that the variability will cancel out and simply apply an average damage result right from the start. This is convenience and playability overcoming strict simulation considerations. So the average damage model has its virtues, too.
Fixed damage is probably most useful when it comes to damage inflicted by mechanical devices and other physical realities, because these naturally take out most of the variables, anyway. The other situation in which I would seriously consider fixed damage is for describing damage caused directly by the environment, because there’s not much that the character can do to avoid or vary that short of some sort of complete protection.
Constant Effects
These are a lot more common, or should be, than people expect. Any effect that is created by a device (magical or technological) is arguably more appropriately simulated with a constant effect value – so much so that variability really needs to be explicitly justified.
Again, devices and contrivances reduce the number of variables significantly, and that logically should impact on the variability.
There’s no blanket justification for removing dice from game-play (save, perhaps, replacing them with some other variable-generating mechanism like cards or coins). But there are a whole heap of specific circumstances that can justify taking specific rolls ‘diceless’.
Life In The Twilight
It’s possible to adopt a half-way house in between these two extremes, i.e. rolls with less variability than is usual. This is often even more realistic than not rolling at all, but it’s generally more effort than it’s worth, so I have chosen not to explore it in this article..
There will be no posts over the holiday season. So it only remains to wish everyone all the best for the holiday season. I’ll see you all early in the New Year!
— Mike
Background Image by Petra from Pixabay, Text created using CoolText.com, compositing and photo-editing by Mike.
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