Variant: Dice in RPGs vs. Boardgames
Image via dicelikethunder.com
I’ve been thinking about dice lately. The last Variant post was even about re-rolling the little guys. Over the past week, I was remembering (with some nostalgia) the dice I would roll as part of the many role-playing games I ran or played. There, the dice were often essential to the creation of a good time. But when I sit down for a board game, I usually find that dice impede my enjoyment. So what’s up with the inconsistency?
First, many newer games use dice in new and interesting ways. They are no longer a simple success check, but instead are used as workers (Troyes) or for resource selection (Macao) and are available to all players. So we are going to except those from the discussion and talk about dice as success checks.
A success check creates uncertainty about a course of action. You can add in all the modifiers you want, you can give bonuses to yourself or lower the defense of your target, but in the end a polyhedral will tell you whether your efforts were fruitful or not. That’s great in the RPG setting. In an RPG, the purpose of the game is not only to overcome it’s obstacles, but also to tell a memorable and involved narrative. The best stories are those where the heroes (or player characters) experience failure along the way. Dice are a great way of injecting that failure into the story and forcing players to deal with loss. In my experience, too many players (though not all) would never fail a single check without the aide of the dice and the game would lose tension and become dull. And because the narrative continues from week to week, those failures have time to play out thematically through the rest of the story.
That same characteristic, though, makes them abysmal cubes of hate in a board game. Generally, a board game isn’t so much creating a narrative as trying to pit the players against each other strategically. In that sense, it can be utterly demoralizing to create the superior plan, lull your opponent into a trap, and then have the dice tell you that, despite all odds, your opponent just won. Lame! Especially since the encounter is essentially over without any resulting benefit from having to experience the failure. Put simply, the aim of the typical boardgame is different than the aim of the typical RPG and they shouldn’t be using the same mechanic. Dice are well suited to one, and ill suited to the other.
Of course, there are exceptions. Board games that try to evoke RPG-esque themes, like Arkham Horror or Legend of Drizz’t, are able to keep dice in to good effect. Both games try to create an aura of potential failure consistent with the games that spawned them. Plus they are both cooperative games. With no real opponent, the game needs some element to thrust failure onto the players. Flash Point is another co-op that uses dice to make things difficult for the players.
In the end, dice are a means of injecting uncertainty into the actions of the players. And, while that can be a great thing for narrative driven games – especially RPGs – it is a terrible mechanism for single session strategy games. There is no pay-off for the failure as there can be in an RPG. It’s failure for failure’s sake and often adds little to the game.
Dice can also be used to simulate things out of a player’s control.
For example… I’m not a huge fan of dice-based combat, but despite this, Twilight Imperium is still one of my favorite games. However, that’s because the dice combat in TI makes sense – since you’re playing as the ruler of your entire race, not just the military, you don’t necessarily have explicity control over individual battles. You can make sure your fleet is well built, your technology is as advanced as possible, and you are not caught unawares – but the battle itself is a test of skill between your fleet commander and your opponents. The dice simulate an entire tactical battle quickly, and you just have to hope your people can handle it. At least, that’s how I think of it – and then when you fail horribly you can blame your sad, pathetic officers who dishonored their people.
It helps that combat, while prevalent in TI, is not central to victory. So you can lose major battles but still win overall.
I also think dice-as-a-means-of-success-or-failure works better if you roll multiple dice for more chance of success. In RPGs you generally roll the d20 and win or lose by it. In games like Arkham Horror, you roll multiple d6′s with a consistent, achievable target number with the goal of rolling it on more than one die, depending on the difficulty of the situation and your relevant skills.
I like chucking dice. In war games, dice quite frankly are a matter of convenience, really. The alternatives are complex calculations and cumbersome CRTs. In euro games (say Settlers, Kingsburg, or Stone Age) dice can provide some randomness which creates tension and hones tactical skills and adds some sponteneity – some dice-less euros do this with cards (or drawng things from bags, etc.), instead, but that’s considered okay, which I find ironic. With my kids, dice are actually a nice equalizer – since I’m older with more experience, I’ll typically analyze the game better and have an edge, but nothing is assured when I have to roll dice…and do so consistently poorly!!
We’re just getting into RPGs and I can already see your point about dice-as-narrative aids. It’s fun. And while we like to “get into the story” on our board games, of course it is nothing like with RPGs.
@Jason, I totally agree with you on cards. I think many dice haters are much more OK with cards. But, even then, it depends on the card balance. I ended up playing San Juan so many times that some card combinations were clearly the most powerful. And, since you are assured to go through the deck a few times, at least one player is going to get it. So, those cards felt too “lucky” and ultimately I stopped enjoying it.
But I think cards have some advantages. You don’t typically put all of your strategy into something and then draw a card. Instead, you draw cards, then build strategies around that. So the card isn’t what makes you pass or fail. That may also be why I like dice games like Troyes and Macao. The dice do not create pass/fail moments.