Wednesday, 5 March 2025

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. 

17 comments:

  1. “All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.

    The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.”
    ― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

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    1. Is that narrator reliable?

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    2. To the extent any narrator in Banks can be, yes. It's presented as an in-world axiom and not seriously challenged either declaratively or through events.

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  2. TL;DR:
    Before Gygax:
    "Bang! I shot you" "Nuh uh, you missed me."
    After Gygax:
    "Roll to hit." "I hit AC 5." "OK, roll damage."
    ;)

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  3. I think the key thing to remember when it comes to dice in RPGs is that they're inherited from wargames, where they originally derived from essentially actuarial tables of numbers of casualties in clashes between different types of troops and in various circumstances. That is, the random chance of the dice simulate all those minute circumstances which cannot be accounted for by any functional body of rules, and once the larger circumstances (troop types, cover, and so on) have been accounted for. Of course, you can still say this is outsourcing judgment to chance, but there's a bit more to it than just preventing arguments at the table.

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    1. I think that's still 'arguments at the table'. Without the dice, and lacking a way to properly account for circumstances as you point out, you're in the world of argument about how to properly figure out how many casualties there are (and, once figured out, how many there actually are).

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    2. Sure; I didn't say that aspect was irrelevant. I said there's a bit more to it than *just* that, in the same way that, say, a rule for falling damage that doesn't involve the dice at all and damage is just a geometric procession based on falling distance definitely avoids a type of argument, but also does something *more*. There's something fully-general about the argument motivation, but when we choose one rule over another we don't only do it based on what will most effectively suppress dissent, at least not always. There's a simulatory intent, or a, incentivizing one (as with XP for gold). My point is that the throw of the dice can itself have this kind of simulatory intent, the dice chosen carefully to represent what would be onerous to simulate in detail.

      Or, they can just be based on kinda eyeballing things and accidentally making one weapon superior because you didn't check carefully, as the variable weapon damage in early D&D. That happens too, more than a bit of it, so I see the distinction as valuable. But perhaps you don't.

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    3. No doubt you're right - dice are a more efficient way of reaching a decision than other methods. Although I'm not sure if that is in the end different to the desire to 'avoid argument' - it's just a more efficient way of avoiding argument than very detailed onerous rules! ;)

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  4. I've always approached it as the distinction between chaos and disorder. Chaos is the absence of order or structured limitation (or its weakening to the point that we no longer perceive the structure, so it's invariably relative). Disorder is the loosening of structure while still being partially confined by it. Order has to accommodate and channel disorder; that's where all the interesting challenges lie, where the insights come from, where the fun happens. Much like any exercise, when you organise local forces in a conspiracy to push against the constraints of the larger frame -- "I'm going to use my body to run/swim/jump regardless of what gravity and the surrounding medium is saying I shouldn't." Much like a skin needs to be a protective barrier and a porous exchange medium simultaneously. Everything has to be a little bit broken to play its proper role.

    Or it's like the difference between a rebel and an individualist. A rebel flaunts or opposes authority as a default. An individualist doesn't care if they're conforming 95% of the time; they'll just not conform on those occasions where conforming doesn't make sense.

    Embrace disorder!

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    1. I see what you mean, although to my eye 'disorder' has a necessarily negative connotation (undermining an existing order) whereas chaos is value-neutral.

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  5. Most gambling involves chance. The rules are in place so the house always wins.

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  6. Yes but no. The whole idea of modelling the real (or imaginary) world _requires_ to introduce the element of randomness. Because nobody at the table is a Newton's God or Makswell's demon able to take into account all the elements of a given situation and calculate the correct outcome. Remember that the whole tabletop wargaming as hobby was born from the military training exercises known from 18th century. Eliminating "might makes right" was the furthest thing from their developers ' minds!
    Mike

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  7. For randomness in general in RPGs I think the main purpose it serves is to represent the million tiny factors that determine if an action succeeds or fails that would just bog down an RPG session if they were included.

    However, I find that a lot of RPGs lean too heavily on randomness which can lead to PCs trying to bull through obstacles and count on luck instead of thinking things through.

    Some models for a less/no luck-based game:

    Amber: Amber is famously diceless but I always had a hard time wrapping my head around the system do I'll leave it to others to discuss.

    Resource management: imagine a session of D&D in which you were given 20 d20's, one for each of the twenty possible results, and you'd have to ration them out across the session (exhaustion would set in after they're all used up). I could see it lead to some interesting resource management, what moment should you spend your Nat 20 on? What movements can be safely half-assed? Night's Black Agents does a more limited version of this and it's fun.

    Fog of War: the basic idea here is that IF the players knew everything then everything would be trivial but since they have imperfect knowledge they have to blunder around a lot. In terms of combat this could be like Diplomcy in which all tactics boil down to guessing what the opponent will do and countering them (since all turns are simultaneous). For out of combat situations this could work like a lot of puzzle dungeons in which they're based on players figuring stuff out and once the players have done so the dungeon is trivial.

    Narrow Powers: all of the PCs have very narrow but infallible powers. One PC can ALWAYS detect lies, another NEVER loses their balance, a third is ALWAYS hungry for more food. Gameplay then revolves around figuring out how to leverage these very narrow abilities into success, not relying on randomness.

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    1. I like this kind of experimentation, but I would be more interested if things like this could be retrofitted back into the more traditional RPG gaming style. I still like the immersive sense of playing out a heroic story, and I wouldn't want to gamify interactions to the point that I'm *spending* successes rather than putting more or less effort into something.

      So, for example, instead of having each 1-20 result, what about having 20 d20's to roll? I can roll as many as I wish on any given attempt, but when I'm down to zero, I'm out of d20's for the day? That simulates exhaustion, permits me to up the chances of success whenever I want to push, but leaves the outcome in question, however slightly.

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    2. Bosh's Narrow Powers could easily be retrofitted back into an OSR-type game - as long as the power is not too powerful. In fact, I think it works at least as well if not better in a more narrative style than in a rules-heavy style.

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    3. @User51: yeah the more Night's Black Agents thing doesn't fit with traditional D&D gaming, but I could see something conceptually similar where HPs are more explicitly exhaustion and where doing many things costs HPs (expended effort) and success depends more on HPs spent than dice rolled.

      @Otl67 Oh, VERY much so. In find my favorite OSR spells are my main inspiration for this. A spell does a very specific narrow thing that will either solve a specific problem or it won't and in order to wring more use out of them you have to be creative.

      I just wished that skills in more games worked like spells in OSR D&D, in which each skill does one VERY specific thing. For D&D I HATE HATE HATE the sort of skill system "if this obstacle is notionally related to one of the skills on your character sheet you can just wave you skill modifier in the obstacle's general direction and it goes away." I'd prefer a loooooong-ass list of VERY narrow skills that the PCs have to use their brains in order to figure out how to use effectively.

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