Living with Lady Ten-Sider

Matthew McFarland

(Note: Not all games use ten-sided dice, of course, but most of the ones I play do, so I decided to use that particular breed of polyhedron for the title of this essay. No slight intended to fans of other systems; it just sounds better than “Lady Polyhedron.”)

We’ve all seen it happen. Your character is good at something. Not just good; he’s got no business whatsoever failing to do it. Your GM asks for a fairly routine roll, you throw the dice…

…and fail.

It can be tempting, in situations like this, to complain long and loud. After all, dice are meant to simulate probability. If, in all probability, your character would succeed at something, then why roll the dice? And if the dice come up indicating failure, and that derails the story because of one stupid little glitch, that’s bloody frustrating. Add to this the aura of bad dice-luck that surrounds some gamers (and everybody’s got someone like this in their group) and you can see how diceless games came about.

But the dice can be a tool for greater Storytelling potential. The trick is to know when to let Lady Ten-Sider have her way and when to ignore her. And that, of course, is the topic du jour.

First, a little reiteration: You are not bound by the dice in a role-playing game. In miniatures game, where there’s a clear objective to meet, then it makes a bit more sense. But in a game where the only objective is to tell a good story, the needs of that story must come before the die rolls.

Every role-playing game I’ve ever read admonishes the Game Master to ignore a die roll if the result flummoxes everything. In White Wolf nomenclature, this is called “the Golden Rule”: If you don’t like it, change it (and that applies to game systems in addition to die rolls). One of the main reasons I keep a screen up when I’m running games (it sure ain’t to shield my notes; no one can read my writing anyway) is so that I can check my rolls before revealing the results. That means if a fight (which is where Game Master’s rolls tend to matter the most) that’s mean to seriously challenge and/or injure the characters gets too easy because I’m rolling like crap, I can cheat. The reverse is also true; if the weak little goat-monsters are handing the characters their heads, those goats can experience a sudden change of luck, even if I’m still rolling all 10s.

Now, I’ve played under some Storytellers who refuse to fudge rolls, saying that it’s not fair to the players or that in “real life,” things happen randomly and there’s no cosmic being changing the results. I’ll address both of those concerns.

First off, “fair to the players” seems to me to assume some competition between the GM and the players, and as I’m sure I’ve said in other essays, that’s not the case. We’re here to have fun, and if a die roll would cheapen the whole experience by snatching a player’s thunder out from under him, that’s not fun (at least I don’t think so). So, presuming that the objective is to have a good time by telling an engaging story, it’s actually less fair to the players to let such a roll go through without fudging it. Whether or not you choose to let the players know that you’ve fudged a roll is your decision; I’ve never had a player ask.

As far as “real life” goes, this is not real life. This is a game and a story. In stories, things happen because the story demands them, not because random events interject. Sometimes, random events and dumb luck can make for interesting story arcs, but that’s different than a villain taking an extra hour to defeat because the GM scored a billion successes on one dodge roll. Role-playings should, in my opinion, be dramatic and interesting. Sometimes realistic fiction is dramatic and interesting, sure, but that doesn’t mean that high fantasy (where “reality” works a little differently) isn’t. Don’t ask Lady Ten-Sider to simulate reality. She can’t. All she can do is pick a number from one to ten.

Even if the Storyteller isn’t bound by dice, the systems are there for a reason. So when should the GM ignore them and when should she use them? I’ll make a player roll the dice under the following circumstances:

• Combat. Here’s the big one, of course. Combat is a highly fluid situation, and enough can go wrong or right nearly randomly that dice are about the best way to go. However, this is also the situation in which fudging dice rolls is most often necessary, simply because there’s so much at stake. On another note, if two PCs fight, I’ll almost always stick to dice results.

• Prepared. If a character’s up on a high wire and will certainly die if she falls, I won’t usually ask for a roll. I don’t care how certain I am that she makes it — if I’m not prepared for the consequences of the roll failing, I won’t ask for the roll. The same is true of success; if I think a character really would not know something, I’m not going to give the player a roll to see if the character knows it. Even if the probability is strongly against the roll succeeding, it’s just numbers, and you never know when a number’s going to come up. Better not to chance it.

• The story won’t suffer. Sometimes, you can be quite prepared for a roll to fail (or succeed) but there’s no need to make the roll at all. For example, my character in this Exalted game made a habit of jumping from tree to tree (he’s Haltan, for those in the know) and quite often just leapt off a branch and bounced from limb to limb until he reached the ground. Now, that’s not a stretch for him, because he’s as agile as a monkey, but it’s still probably challenging. The Storyteller would be well within his rights to demand a roll from me every time my character jumped out of a tree. But he doesn’t. Why? Because we know I can make the roll. If I didn’t make the roll, it wouldn’t be any kind of reflection on my character, it would just mean that the dice don’t like Matt (which really isn’t anything new). Worse, it would slow the game down. The Storyteller might be quite prepared for my character to hit the ground, but there’s no need in the story for that, and so it’s safer to leave the dice out of this. Conversely…

• Success or failure directs the story. During the first session of a Dark Ages: Werewolf game I ran, the characters were just about set to jump into a moon bridge and zip to another location (it’s a little like a wormhole in space, for you non-Werewolf people). As it happened, there was a weird effect going on that would have flummoxed the moon bridge and landed the characters scattered in the middle of unfriendly territory. I gave them all a roll to see if they sensed the problem. One character did, and she stopped the others and they decided to hoof it (or paw it, as the case may be). That meant that they would eventually reach the problem area, but they’d be together and prepared, and they’d find things out in a different order. The direction of the story depended on whether or not they made that roll, but there was possibility in either.

These, of course, are just the situations in which I make players roll. Your mile may vary, naturally.

After you’ve asked for a die roll and the result comes up somewhat unexpected, what then? Interpreting dice rolls is a big part of the challenge Storytelling, and doing it well depends largely on the system in question. Since I’m in no position to looking at the possibilities of every system out there, let’s just consider some generalities.

First, is the system and all-or-nothing gamble? Are there degrees of success and failure? For instance, in White Wolf’s system, you can roll any number of successes. One success means you’ve succeeded, but not well. Three means you did what you set out to do with no ill effects, and five means you’ve really rocked the house (so to speak). However, failure only has two striations: failure and botch. If you’ve failed, you just missed. Depending on what you were doing, you might be in a worse position than before, but not necessarily. The Storyteller might allow you another roll to correct things or just try again.

A botch, however, is bad news. In combat, you might stab yourself. In conversation, you might commit some unforgivable faux pas. Ordinarily, botches don’t get corrected easily; you might be able to do some damage control, but probably not much.

So what does this mean for the Storyteller? It means that there’s a great deal of variance for successes, but not so much for failures. And that means that you’ve got to decide what failures mean, how catastrophic they are, what kind of reparation is possible, and whether or not a second try is possible. For example, when I ask a player to roll to see if her character know something (say, an Intelligence + Occult roll to figure out what odd symbols mean) and the player fails the roll, that could mean the character doesn’t know or simply doesn’t remember. I’ve got to decide which is indicated, and therefore whether or not the player can try again. How to do this?

Well, consider the character. If the character is an Egyptologist and the symbols are, in fact, a corruption of Egyptian hieroglyphics, odds are that the character could recognize them, she’s just having a bad brain day. So, in that instance, sure, I’ll allow another roll (at a possibly increased difficulty). On the other hand, if the character is a New Age pagan who’s learned what little Occult she knows from mall bookstores, she probably doesn’t have the first clue what the hieroglyphics mean. In that case, the failed roll tells us that the character doesn’t know, and therefore the player doesn’t get a second chance (hint to players: If you nail down where your character got her schooling and what, specifically, that schooling indicates, Storytellers are likely to give you little breaks like this).

If the roll botches, then perhaps the character tripped and smudged the markings and now no one can read them. Or, if the Storyteller really needs those markings intact, maybe the character simply doesn’t know what they mean and that’s all (treat this like a failure rather than a botch, in other words).

Interpretation works about the same way for success. Consider how much information there is to be had, what the margin of success is, and how well the roll actually came up. If, for example, the player only got one success to read the markings, she might get the general gist but needs to more time to figure it all out. If she rolled five successes, maybe the character has seen markings just like this somewhere before and can translate the whole message in record time.

Regardless of how asinine a game system seems, there’s usually some logic to it. If you can figure out what that logic entails, interpreting dice rolls becomes much easier (if you can’t figure it out, I’d recommend switching games, or at least adopting some house rules).

When interpreting dice rolls, remember that there can be other factors involved in the outcome than just the character and the target. One of the defining moments in my development as a Storyteller came when I was leafing through the AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. In it, the author was discussing saving throws, specifically how if a character was chained to a wall and a red dragon can along and breathed fire at him, he could take half damage by making a save. The answer to that was the perhaps he found a chink in the wall that partially shielded him, or perhaps the dragon didn’t hit him full force. Reading that was a real eye-opener for me because it made me see that the world around the characters is just as important as they are. And that means that when setting the scene, you as Storyteller need to bear in mind that the characters should interact with that environment — so make it part of the story when interpreting the rolls. A character that suffers a botched roll in a bar fight might stumble over a chair, slip in puddle of beer, or even get cracked on the head by an irate bartender. A character whose player rolls maximum success on a medieval battlefield might grab a superior weapon from a dead soldier or knock her opponent back onto a spear. Lady Ten-Sider picks the numbers, you decide what they mean.

Finally, what if a dice roll needs to be changed, either because of player (or GM) error or because the results don’t mesh with the story? I, personally, don’t like to allow re-rolls. I don’t mind changing the results beyond the screen, but I do like to keep the illusion of rules alive (otherwise, why use dice at all?). However, if I tell a player to roll Wits + Drive and I really meant Wits + Brawl, or if a player forget to add a modifier in, sometimes I’ll ask for a reroll. Most of the time, I’ll err on the side of the player. For example, if the player only rolled four dice and should have roll six, but still got three successes, I’ll encourage her not to roll again as the probability that she’ll get a better result because of the two extra dice is pretty slim. If that same roll had botched, I’d let her make it again with the extra dice, because then she has a chance to avoid the botch, and it’s “fair” because she should have had those dice to begin with. This mean seem like a double standard, but it’s not: The underlying motive is for the players to have a good time, and that means not being a hard-ass about rules. If the player should have had fewer dice, perhaps because of wound penalties (which are easy to forget) I won’t usually ask for a reroll there, either. I’ll just remind the player about the penalty and move along (if I suspect the player is deliberately “forgetting” a penalty, then I will sometimes ask for a reroll, but that’s pretty uncommon).

But what if all the modifiers are right, no one screwed up, and the roll just should not have failed? Well, first of all, if the failure is going to mess the story up, the player shouldn’t have rolled in the first place, but we’ll ignore that for the moment. Let’s suppose that the character is hardy and used to running long distance in adverse weather, but that the player managed to botch an Athletics roll to keep the character from dropping from exhaustion. The roll wasn’t important, and the rest of the group is not having any trouble. The Storyteller doesn’t wish to slow down the action while the character rests. What then?

About the easiest option is to ignore the roll. The Storyteller just scoffs and says, “Yeah, right,” the character suffers no ill effects, and the game moves on. The problem with this is that later, if another player botches but the Storyteller does wish to see it through, this can appear to be favoritism.

Another option is to apply a penalty to the character but not make him fall over. Maybe the character lags behind and the group reaches their destination later than expected (which can have other effects down the line). Maybe the character gets a cramp and must either spend Willpower (or whatever) to keep going or takes a small amount of damage (this obviously works better in systems where character have a lot of “hit points” than in systems like White Wolf where everybody in the world has only seven health levels).

Probably the worst option in this instance is to actually apply the effects of the botch. Why? Because it slows the game down and it’s not good for the story. It’s giving Lady Ten-Sider a lot more power than she deserves.

For some folks, one of the most frustrating things about RPGs is the reliance on capricious dice for the story. However, the real reliance should be on the Storyteller’s judgment (which shouldn’t be the least capricious, even if it sometimes seems that way). If the Storyteller’s judgment is trustworthy, you should never be afraid to let the dice fall where they may.

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