Personally, I really enjoy building dice rolls and the conversation surrounding them. There’s so much to be had from a negotiation about how this or that skill, talent, item, weapon, assist, or circumstance might apply…
“Previously On: Mothership,” by Jim Rossignol, from Old Men Running the World
… I was going to post this quote with just the barest wisp of commentary, but then I read this article by Polygon’s Em Friedman on Critical Role’s Season 3 finale:
Actual play can get away with far more than traditional forms and go to weird and wonderful places because “the dice tell the story.” Once you remove that, eliminating evidence of chance through editing or by loss of gameplay friction, the contract changes. Then, you’re back to being judged by expectations from more traditional media. And that’s where we end up as dice rolls begin to dwindle well before the game shifts into epilogue. Notable elements like [spoiler maybe] were literally handwaved, no roll — or even argument — required. And as consequences receded, what has always felt like a complex, breathing world — with light and shade, with “adult” themes that went beyond sex jokes and millennial references — got just a little flatter, just a little more washed out by high-wattage brightness. In a game and show that had imbued player choices with heft, payoff felt thin on the ground — or off in the far horizon.
Both Rossignol and Friedman here place value on the role of chance in steering the story of an RPG… but there’s a bit of a bait-and-switch in Friedman’s argument, maybe, in the conflation of chance and consequences. (Rossignol is arguing something different, I think, in locating the value in the conversation inspired by a dice roll—the depth of consideration about the scene at hand—rather than the quality of the fictional dream.) Friedman’s own comment on the end of Critical Role Season 1 provides the distinction (spoilers):
[Sam Riegel’s] character, Scanlan, casts Counterspell at the highest possible level—no dice roll needed. The villain cannot flee.
The other players at the table rear back in shock, pleased. It’s a home run, a touch-down, a fadeaway from beyond the three-point line. The Dungeon Master looks stunned. So does Sam Riegel, who now slowly folds into himself on the table.
In parallel, so softly the microphones almost don’t pick it up—wouldn’t have picked it up when the show first began streaming—Sam Riegel, still smiling, mutters “I was going to save Vax.”
…
[Liam] O’Brien’s character, Vax, is a dead man walking. In high-level D&D, Vax is a rarity: a character for whom death has real weight. Because of his bargain with the Raven Queen, the Goddess of Death and Fate, Vax will die irrevocably once the world-ending villain is defeated. Riegel’s character, Scanlan, has been saving his highest-level spell in the hopes of changing that fate. But to win their current battle, the last of a years-long campaign, he must sacrifice that ability for the greater good.
Consequences, but no chance. Scanlan learns that he must let the villain go or doom his friend, and makes his choice. It’s an effect of Scanlan’s 100% deterministic spellcasting capacity, not a die roll.
I’m barely acquainted with Critical Role, but this general cluster of themes brings to mind one more anecdote, from the finale of Fantasy High: Freshman Year. The battle against Kalvaxus, the big bad, is going poorly for the Intrepid Heroes, in no small part because their cleric, Kristen, was sidelined early and is unconscious although IIRC stable. At some point in a grim battle, Ally Beardsley (Kristen’s player) asks if they can gain a hit point (and thereby consciousness, and thereby actions, and thereby access to the advanced healing and defensive magic that only Kristen can use) on a natural 20. Brennan allows it, Ally gets it… and the entire battle turns around.
And this is interesting, if it’s interesting, because it only feels a little bit like cheating; whereas if Matt Mercer had allowed Scanlan an extra spell slot for the asking, it would have felt a lot like cheating. You can break the rules, but only if you beat the odds.
I accused Friedman of conflating chance and consequences earlier, and I might be locally right on a technicality, but the relationship is probably closer than I gave it credit for. Whether it’s making the die roll or running out of spell slots, the common factor is submitting to an external judge—not the Dungeon Master, whose motives are as irretrievably compromised as the players’, but one that’s truly impartial.
Which is funny, of course, because the players and DM can and do consistently find ways to end-run around that impartiality. But there’s some magic in that judge’s gavel that makes it all feel real. Which is essentially what Rossignol finds wanting in Mothership:
Actions, rules, and abilities that other games had provided were both a prompt for what to do (by giving you a good chance of pulling it off) and a spice to heat things up by being offbeat, weird, or personal in a way that wasn’t down to fear or guns. In Mothership there’s nothing other than awkwardly applying a save to make a roll anything that isn’t fear, guns, or your limited range of skills. There just weren’t any good avenues for the resolution of those particular struggles.
“Good avenues for the resolution of… particular struggles” is a concept I might mull over for a while.
Currently reading: THE POWER FANTASY vol. 1, by Kieron Gillen & Caspar Wijngaard.