The Rule of Dice and the Resort to Chaos

'I've sometimes thought,' said the Head Man, 'it might be interesting if we didn't let chance decide the moves but thought them out for ourselves.'

'What an odd game,' said Great House. 'It wouldn't have any rules at all.'

-from The Scorpion God, by W. Golding

The connection between rules and dice is an unusual one.

Think of most of the situations you know which are governed heavily by rules: a sport, say, or a trial, or driving on the roads. What you will notice is that the rules are specifically designed to try to eliminate randomness. We would think there to be something deeply wrong with a trial process whose outcome was decided on the basis of rock, paper, scissors. (Though this would perhaps reduce costs.) And we would think it even worse if, say, drivers determined which side of the road to drive on through a coin toss.

The reason for this is, obviously, that rules are deliberately non-random - randomness and rules are indeed, in a way, opposites. The point about a rule is that you apply it as it is stated. If its effect is random it is not really a rule in any meaningful sense. It lacks the basic things a rule requires in order to possess 'ruliness' - i.e. being clear, being knowable in advance, being non-retrospective, being non-contradictory with other rules, and so forth. To enter the world of randomness is to be governed by chaos. 

Yet some board games and RPGs (#notallboardgamesandRPGs) are different - the rules do not just tolerate randomness but deliberately introduce it. The rules act as the confines within which randomness is controlled and directed. They, if you like, instrumentalise chaos. They tame it for useful purposes.

The reason they do this would seem to be to do with contentiousness and the presence of neutral arbitrators. In a trial, the two parties each make a separate argument as to how the rules should apply to the facts to achieve a particular result; a neutral arbitrator (the judge or jury) makes a determination. In a football match, it's the referee and his assistants who makes rulings on the fly. In the case of driving, there is no contention at all: if you are driving the wrong way, or driving faster than the speed limit, then you are breaking the rules and that is that. 

When it comes to an RPG, however, there is no neutral arbitrator. The DM is not 'objective' vis-a-vis whatever the players says the PCs do. Rather the opposite. When the PCs are fighting a band of orcs, he's the orcs. When they are trying to get past an obstacle, he is the one who placed it there. When they are trying to find secret doors, said secret doors are on his map. RPGs, in such circumstances, often make resort to chaos - in the form of dice - to resolve potentially otherwise irresolvable disputes. There is nobody to just apply 'the rules' and give 'the right' outcome. There is only the God of the small plastic or polyhedrals and what he will say about the matter.

This actually puts RPGs (at least insofar as they use dice) among very strange, unexpected bed fellows. The child's board game is the closest comparator. Think of Snakes and Ladders. Snakes and Ladders needs  dice because it's contentious - who wins, and who loses, being unpredictable in advance (or even during play) and being, more importantly, irresolvable by the participants themselves or a neutral umpire. If Snakes and Ladders did not resort to chaos through dice in order to determine how far the players can move each turn, each game would rapidly devolve into an argument over who gets to travel so far and at what speeds (because how else would it be determined?). And, importantly, this would be governed typically by 'might makes right' or superior abilities in persuasion - i.e. not rules at all - because it is through 'might makes right' and superior abilities in persuasion that people tend to win arguments.  RPGs are a bit like that: the dice help to decide the course of events simply by providing a means through which potential conflict is resolved in advance. If they did not exist there would only be argument and persuasion determining how a particular rule applies in a given circumstance - and that would be tantamount to saying there would be no rules at all. There would be only discussion and debate.

Chaos then, if you like, is a necessary element in the way RPGs work - because it is, almost literally, what makes rules themselves useful within that context.