What Dice Are For

When should dice get rolled? (Although, if you are Chuck Norris, you don’t roll — the dice arrange themselves into the number you want.)

Wizard of Adventure Gedece offers us this excellent advice:

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I’ll explain a little what the concept of dice rolls are for me now that I GM’d Fate and PBTA, though they are also valid for other games. I didn’t realize it till I read those manuals.

  1. Don’t ask for rolls if you don’t understand what success and failure look like.
  2. Fail forward is a way to implement failures.
  3. Failure does not mean the same thing every time.
  4. Don’t repeat dice rolls till they get it right.

To explain a little.

The purpose of 1) is to avoid rolling for everything. If it’s not interesting and the players didn’t make it interesting, it’s a side note. No rolls required.

The purpose of 2) is to keep the action moving when something critical fails. Plan for those failures, because they will happen in crucial spots.

The purpose of 3) is to keep things interesting. Changing the outcome of failure is a great way of keeping things interesting for your players.

The purpose of 4) and a little demonstration on 3) is to avoid those places where, for example, a thief tries three times to open the same door while nothing else happens around.

A failure could mean the door is above his current ability, denying the contents on the other side.

It might mean you open the door unexpectedly and fall into the room while noticing the big boots of an enemy that was looking to see what the noise was about.

It might mean a patrol decides to pass through the spot, and either there’s combat or the players manage to avoid it. The patrol gets into the room, opening the door with a key, and now it’s unlocked but potentially dangerous.

This looks far more interesting than letting three dice rolls of the same kind for the same thing without something happening.

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Amazing advice, Gedece!

I especially love the nuance with #2: “Fail forward is a way to implement failures.”

If a GM has trouble saying no, penalizing characters, or figuring out how much penalty a failure should incur, use the Fail Forward technique.

The method avoids a hard no, which puts some GMs off. It still acknowledges and implements some kind of failure to acknowledge the result. And it gives players some kind of path forward to keep The Infinite Game going.

Check out this article on Devil’s Bargains for a Mad Lib that also works great for Failing Forward.

Thanks for the great tip share, Gedece.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
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