Screwed By The Dice
-
A while back, some friends and I were playing our weekly gaming session of Dungeons & Dragons. We were just getting into the Paragon Tier in what has turned out to be the best campaign ever for our gaming group. We’d come to a dramatic turning point where we were going to assault the Duke at his own castle. We knew we couldn’t accomplish it alone, so we wanted to enlist the help of commoners from other towns and villages that were being heavily taxed and persecuted. The other players and I worked very hard at traveling from village to village enlisting what help we could.
In the end, our group moved with almost a hundred commoners to enter the town. My character was leading the group as we slowly tried to trickle in quietly through the city gates and past the guards. In the moment of truth, I had to make a roll at the end of a session for how well we did. Success meant our men moved quietly into the city and positioned themselves well for an attack on the Duke. Failure meant the Duke would be forewarned of our plan and able to either bolster his defenses or flee altogether.
I grabbed my glittering silver 20-sided die and gave it a toss.
A natural 1…
That roll finished off our gaming session that night. The other players looked at me with frustration. We literally had spent several hours concocting our plan and then enacting it. Normally, I think it is great for a dungeon master to leave on a cliffhanger at the end of a session. But this wasn’t like leaving the session on a cliffhanger. This was like striking out in a playoff game, or crashing your car into a wall during a race. It wasn’t the end of the game, but for whatever reason it sure felt like it.
It’s not the player’s fault. It’s not the game master’s fault. Randomness is part of roleplaying. I absolutely love the mechanics of dice. It’s probably in my top five of reasons why I roleplay. For whatever reason, I love to roll dice and await an outcome, good or bad. I went home that day. Instead of looking forward to the next session, I couldn’t get it out of my head on how our best laid plans were destroyed by a die lousy roll.
So what can you do when you’re screwed by the dice?
I don’t know why that particular bad roll, out of all the bad rolls I’ve done in almost two decades of gaming, seemed to bother me. It took me a while to realize, “Hey, it doesn’t matter what you rolled. You’re going to have fun no matter what if you let yourself.” It probably sounds like a bunch of self-help mumbo jumbo, but it is true.
The dice will only ruin your game if you let them. I realized that dice are only in the game as a way to resolve what may or may not happen in a given situation. Dice don’t play your character. Dice don’t tell the story for you. Bad rolls will only ruin the game if you let them.So what happened that next session? Did the Duke catch wind of our plan and run? Did he reinforce his castle guard and overwhelm us? Did he summon fiery death from the heavens above and one-shot my natural one rolling ass? Naw… none of that happened.
I made one fatal mistake in believing that the dice would negatively affect the outcome of the next session. I forgot that the game master is more crafty and powerful than the dice. The Duke knew we were coming and he waited for us. He didn’t run or bolster his defenses. He just went about his normal business. The battle was spectacular. The dice didn’t ruin the session.
I guess I really can’t fault the Duke for being confident. I mean, who would be afraid of me? Everyone knows I suck at rolling dice…
Leave a Comment
October 20, 2009 at 9:50 am
The dice can always roll poorly, but a good GM is not bound by the rolls of the dice. In your example above with a bad roll, maybe the commoners suddenly get cold feet and panic. This is completely plausible if the commoners were willing to risk everything for a little more freedom and they realize how much they have to lose. The players then have an opportunity to rally the common folk to fight against the duke’s tyranny.
Failure turned into opportunity.
October 20, 2009 at 11:41 am
@ SirGryphon – Yeah, it was one of those situations where I worried more about the die roll than the GM. He knew it bothered me and the other players. He didn’t destroy the game with it. Like I said, it was a great fight once we got to the NPC.
October 20, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Perhaps a better cliffhanger would have been to postpone the dice roll to determine the outcome of your activities until next session thereby giving all the players the anxiety over the roll…
Good to see your GM making the most of a bad roll without destroying the game for you in the process.
October 20, 2009 at 4:21 pm
We have a ‘cone of destiny’ in which players toss their 20 sider when they would not know the outcome of a roll immediately. This way the DM can use the randomness and the players go forward not knowing, for example, if they were quiet enough or not. There are conflicting opinions about hidden rolls, but I find using them judiciously is beneficial. Your example may have been a good example of such a use.
October 20, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Samuel, my condolences on a dire roll (I know the feeling all too well), but at least your DM made the most of a bad situation. I’m still a little foggy on the purpose of a singular player roll in this scenario. Something as complicated as forming a revolt would make for a great skill challenge, IMO. Just a thought.
On the subject of “hidden rolls”, this is an issue of trust. If the group trusts their DM, then hidden rolls shouldn’t be a concern. But if they don’t, in essence they think the DM is out to screw them at every turn or railroad them, then… well, there you have it. IMHO, if your group doesn’t trust you to make hidden rolls, then you’re not doing your job as a DM very well.
October 20, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Good point on the skill challenge vs. single roll for this type of activity Rook. I recently picked up 4e quickstart rules (yea, so I’m behind the times) and have been intrigued with the concepts of skill challenges as outlined therein. A situation such as this that has so many possible inputs would make for a great challenge.
The best part of a challenge mechanic as I see it is that it eliminates the hazards of a single roll failure of this type.
October 21, 2009 at 7:05 am
There’s a saying that I’ve heard bandied about in the religious community: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”
I think there are some good points that we can take away from this situation. As Rook and Kevin mentioned, a single roll of the dice shouldn’t make or break a situation in a game. It should certainly influence it positively or negatively, but it shouldn’t break it. Something that complex and that invested so much time should require a series of skill checks (DMG2 provides pages of great examples). If your series of checks all failed, well, that’s just probability working against you.
What you were feeling was the frustration of loss of time and effort due to a single roll. And that does stink.
Another point is that it’s important to let players fail, even if their plans are grandiose and complex, if the dice don’t allow them to succeed. Rolling a “1″ and then having a GM pad the numbers on an obviously high DC task would make the win feel false.
October 21, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I have had a hard time getting away from dice rolls over the years. As Sam said, I too like to roll the dice and see where they may fall. I guess I feel that if the DM always lets the players succeed when they put a lot of effort into planning something, then they will always come to expect to get their way, always have their plans succeed. What fun is that?
Now, I know that it can be a let-down when you do get a good plan together, and then a die roll screws it up. That does suck. It makes you think, “Well, why would I put in the effort next time?” This is why I would like to start doing a different approach. I’ve heard other people do this, and I want to start: Half the time, after good planning on the part of the players, you can still have a roll for success. However, instead of it being a pass/fail, make it an automatic success. The die roll is there to simply see HOW successful the plan is. It’s still a success, but to what degree?
That’s something that I need to work on.
October 21, 2009 at 2:02 pm
That’s, more or less, the approach that D&D 4e takes with extended skill checks. If you fail them it doesn’t derail the game but the PCs are hindered in some manner… loss of healing surges due to exhaustion, loss of trust by an NPC, etc. etc. The game moves forward but the PCs’ lives are made more difficult.
I’m a little hesitant about the idea of a great plan automatically succeeding. The plan might work in real life but it’s not the players’ plan, it’s the players’ plan filtered through the PCs. And while we like to think that PCs are “better” than us (stronger, faster, smarter) they may actually not be depending on their stats.
October 21, 2009 at 9:37 pm
I’ve adopted the philosophy of embracing game mechanics or replacing with elements to fit my game. If the plan had to succeed, and as a DM I wanted the players to succeed (maybe they really thought through a great idea), then I wouldn’t have bothered rolling. If failure is really an option, then I roll.
Fortunately, 4E has moved away from the ’save or die’ mechanic. It’s still there, but you have to fail 2-4 times before it happens. DMs have tools at their disposal to utilize this for nearly everything.
In the post example, I’m assuming that the DM set up an elaborate skill challenge, and you managed to blow the last roll (failing the challenge). If he had it come down to one roll, why didn’t he set it up as a challenge? That would have allowed a few blown rolls rather than just one.
Still, it’s a positive sign that the entire session was not for naught. It’s just that your next engagement might be more difficult or you all have further challenges ahead. You’ve got a great DM there as he’s not allowing one blown roll to totally derail your plans (just make things more interesting).
October 26, 2009 at 3:40 am
While I have not had this much be determined on the roll of a dice, it does make interesting gaming when the dice fail.
I let the PCs plan a prison break, I gave them information and tools then left them at the table while they planned. Plan involved crashing a rented speeder into the prison to create a distraction so the rest of them could break in through the backdoor. I asked the player to roll a collision check.
They failed.
Given that buildings are rather hard to miss completely, I ruled that the player player was thrown from the speeder, knocked unconcious and takehn away in the ambulance. Yet the plan still went on, and they got away.