LEVEL 1: Why are there so many dice? Do I even need dice for my game?
“God doesn’t play dice with the universe” by Albert Einstein. The reason for the quote is to express how bizarre quantum mechanics is as a theory. While most of the universe is deterministic and measurable, quantum mechanics says there’s a world of tiny particles behind everything that’s governed by total randomness. In extention, dice are bizarre as well.
The dice mechanics, if you are going to have any in you game in the first place, need to reinforce the experience you are going to try to re-create for the player.
Why are we talking about dice so soon in the design process?
“Tabletop role-playing games” are almost by definition associated with dice. Almost all these games use dice or another method to randomly generate numbers/results for a multitude of reasons.
Because of this beginner game designers tend to over-focus on dice and balancing. Rather than thinking about the experience they are trying to recreate, they waste their time thinking about unimportant things. Should they use a 20 or a 6 sided dice? How can they create a unique dice mechanic? How many dice should a player roll at a time? Dice probabilities etc.?
I fell into this trap as well while thinking about the experience I wanted to recreate with my game. I started to think about resolving conflict situations. What is going to determine whether the players are going to win or lose against the horrific monsters? What type of stats am I going to track with the dice etc.?
Dice is an easy answer to these problems. It comes quite naturally based on historical precedent.
Since I fell into this trap I think that it is worth talking about dice now rather than later. Yet, I am not going to discuss dice probabilities, different types of dice and stuff like that here**. Before worrying yourself with that you need to figure out…
Do you even need dice mechanics in the first place?
Of course, I am not saying that a game cannot be built upon a dice mechanic. What I am saying is that starting your game design process with a dice mechanic in mind is risky. It is is like starting with composing the lyrics for a song before the music has been recorded. Possible, but unnecessary hard.
I have another thing to add. If you have done the questionnaire in one of my previous articles then this is a good point to reread your answers to it.
Based on that article we can deduce that a dice mechanic, in the end, is an element of the game. The game only needs elements that will reinforce the experience you are trying to recreate and not hinder it.
Thus you need to ask yourself — how can dice mechanics help you to reinforce that experience?
If the answer is that dice can’t help you, then don’t put dice in your game. Yet, be aware of what that decision means for your game — it is going to be a more skill based game.
If the answer is, yes, then when prototyping it is better to pick a dice mechanics and roll with it for now. You can adjust the dice mechanic as you are designing the game. No need to waste your time on probabilities ust yet.
Remember, indecisiveness is the enemy here, again.
Still, that does not mean that picking dice mechanics is easy. You still need to be able to understand how dice or the lack of them can influence your game. Thus I am going to mention some basic principles to think about when picking a dice mechanic.
It’s all about the experience.
Every game can be categorized on how much it is based on Luck or Player Skill. Most games are going to have some mechanics that are based on both. The question is where on the scale does your game stand? Is it at the far end of the pure luck spectrum like Snakes and Ladders or Monopoly. Maybe, it is a pure skill based game like Chess or Starcraft. Maybe, it is a game that is right in the middle of the scale.
To figure this out you need to know what type of game you are making. A tactical game is going to need little luck mechanics. A casual party game can have many luck bases mechanics. Genre can also inform this. For example, Multiplayer FPS — low luck, high skill.
Of course, nobody is saying that you can’t create or should not create a game that breaks the status quo. Yet, we must consider audience expectations and what are the consequences of breaking the status quo.
Right now only worry about figuring out how much skill and luck does your game need (and do you need dice at all).
What changes if you add dice to your game?
- Players will need to learn a new skill — risk management. You, the designer will need to learn how to balance dice probabilities;
- In a competitive game: Lower skill players will have the chance to beat stronger players. Thue more people are going to be able to play the game, but skilled players might get frustrated;
- Randomness (dice) adds tension to the game since nobody can for sure know who will win until the very end. Yet, players, in general, will lose agency because decisions are less important;
- Dice add replay value to the game, yet, the range of possible dice roll results can be so indifferent that replaying the game might become boring The outcomes are too wild;
- Dice rolls are neutral, thus dice rolls can be used to mitigate responsibility (from a Game Master) for what happens in the game. “It wasn’t your fault, the dice did it.” Yet, the game designer can use dice as a cheap way to add content to the game.
- The only commonly available dice are 6 sided dice. The more dice required, and especially the more types of dice required, the more difficult it is to have all of the dice on hand for play and it is harder for people to calculate probabilities etc.
1. Should your game be more skill based or luck based?
In short, if your game has too much randomness then people are going to say that their actions do not matter.
If the game is asking a high level of skill from the player to be able to play then the game is too hard and unfair.
When a player goes into a game, they are expecting to be challenged, but they’re also expecting that if they do play well, they can win. When the game randomly forces them to immediately lose, then they can feel cheated. Despite their best efforts, they were still defeated, not by their own lack of skill, or superior opponent strategy, but by a random dice roll. This, for most players, is infuriating.
New players will generally not feel this sting. They don’t know the game as well, they have fewer expectations of what should happen. Because of that they can enter a game not really expecting to win.
The benefit of adding dice mechanics is that more people can enjoy a luck bases game. You don’t need so much focus and practice to play the game. Yet, if the game`s results are too random then the players might as well have watched the game in the form of a movie because their actions has no meaning, the game was too passive. Too much randomness gets rid of the player`s agency to affect things. In a game player agency is very important.
2. How granual (easy to use) should your game be?
The most important thing in keeping a dice game fun is a quick pace. Rolling dice is fun, but watching other people roll dice tends to be boring, especially after you understand the game well. Two things influecne this:
- Granularity, in short, means how many steps do you need to do to get to a result. Granularity varies from finely-grained (i.e. many small steps)*** to coarse-grained (i.e. a few large steps)****. Finer granularity lets you take into account more subtle factors, but usually, makes gameplay more complicated and slow.
***For example, having to compare many dice roll results, having hundreds of abilities and stats that need to be cross-checked.
****For example, having only one dice to roll, no stats. The player who rolls the highest result on the die wins.
2. Amount of dice. Obviously, more dice, more mathematical operations. Also larger numbers are slower and more difficult to manage. In general, comparison is easier than counting, counting is easier than addition, which is easier than subtraction, which is easier than multiplication, which is easier than division.
If the game has a lot of steps and a lot of dice results to calculate then the game does not become more challenging. All it means is that you will be asking the players to waste more of their time on dice rolls, counting etc. If you only have 4 hours of play time, then spending all the time rolling dice in combat is not that fun. At least not for everyone involved.
3. A lesson in psichology: Framing Effect.
This is bonus principle. A tip on how to present randomness if you are going to have any in your game.
The Framing Effect explores how different phrasings can affect participants’ responses to a choice in a hypothetical situation.
For example, let`s say that there are two situations:
First situation: 600 people are in danger, you are the only one who can try and help them. What do you do?
Action A) You can save 200 people instantly or…
Action B) There is a 33% chance for you to save all 600 people and a 66% possibility of saving no one.
Second situation: 600 people are in danger, you are the only one who can try and help them. What do you do?
Action A) Allow 400 people to die or…
Action B) Take a gamble with a 33% chance that no one is going to die or 66% chance that all 600 people will die.
Which do you choose in situation number one and two? A or B?
What do most people choose? In the first situation, most people are going to choose choice A and in the second situation — B.
Why? Because of the framing. In both situations, the probabilities and results are the same.
Yet, in situation number one, all of the options are framed positively. If faced with two options that are POSITIVE then people will choose the SAFER BET.
If presented with two NEGATIVE options, like in the second example, people are willing to take a GAMBLE.
The way how you state the probabilities in your game can influence what risks the player might choose to partake in.
Conclusion
As you have noticed picking a dice system is not that easy. There is a lot that goes into this decision. Not to mention that we haven’t even touched topics like calculating probabilities and balancing.
Because of this, you should only think about picking a dice mechanic when more or less everything else is in place for your game`s design. When you know for sure what is the experience you are trying to create and whether dice can actually help you to reinforce that experience then you can pick a dice mechanic.
If you know what is the experience you are trying to recreate and you know that dice can help you to accomplish your goal, then my advice is to just pick a dice mechanic based on an educated guess or pick a simple dice mechanic (like a one six-sided-die, the person that rolls highest wins) and roll with it for now. Don’t over think it.
Remember, indecisiveness is the real enemy here not making the wrong decision, again.
In the next article I am going to talk about the dice mechanic that I have chosen for my own game and why. I hope my example is going to help you to think about randomness for your own game and show you how to implement the compass you created from the questionnaire in the LEVEL ZERO article.
** As a side note: Do note that there is a big difference between “Output randomness” that happens after you make a decision (e.g. “I want to hit this enemy, so I’ll have to roll dice to see if I will.”). This type of randomness feels bad for players since it undermines their interaction with the system. “Input randomness” on the other hand happens (way) before decisions are needed to be made. For exmaple, a random map generation. This randomness is ussually fine because it leads to increased variety and promotes strategy (decision-making) over memorization.
